RIP Akira Toriyama
It was the summer of 1996. A younger version of myself waltzed into a rip-off blockbuster, one of those family owned joints that often gets conflated with Hollywood Video, and was struck by the cover artwork of one game in particular. Chrono Trigger. It drew me in like a siren's song. It just looked so cool. I had experience with Earthbound, Super Mario RPG and Final Fantasy III at this point so I wasn't unfamiliar with the Japanese role playing game genre, but that isn't what brought me to the dance. It was the art.
Chrono Trigger would go on to become a major part of my personality as a youth. There was about a week straight where I would go around talking to nobody in particular using old English, like my favorite character Frog did. Thank you Ted Woolsey for that. CT would go on to form the basis for a lot of my video game opinions.
I remember getting Chrono Trigger for Christmas randomly in 1997. It had yet to become the holy grail of eBay, it was just a random gift from my uncle who knew how to use the Internet. I spent so long just glancing at the instruction manual and thinking the characters looked so cool. It's one thing to see a little pixel version of Lucca convince Crono that hopping into a teleporter is a good idea, it's another thing to see a fully illustrated version of the same character.
Don't even get me started on how I felt watching those anime cutscenes that came with the PS1 version for the first time. I consider Earthbound to be my favorite game ever, but Chrono Trigger is really what started my JRPG fix. Would I have gotten as deep into JRPGs as I did without Chrono Trigger? Would I be writing this right now? One of the first things I talked to my wife about was the Final Fantasy franchise, specifically my cat named Quistis. Would I have even grabbed that appreciation for Final Fantasy VIII without having been exposed to Chrono Trigger?
Fast forward to 1999. I had just moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado as a sixth grader. I had no friends. I didn't know anybody. It felt like the world had aged up around me. Everybody was using swears and talking about mature topics and I felt so out of the loop. In our temporary hotel housing I vividly remember turning the channel to Cartoon Network and stopping because the art style interested me. It looked kind of like that game I played back in 1996. Dragon Ball Z.
I can see it now. Vegeta was fighting against Recoome while Gohan and Krillin looked on exhausted. Things were looking bleak but some guy named Goku was on the horizon. I had no idea who any of these characters were but I knew they reminded me of something I loved with all my heart. From that point, Dragon Ball would go on to be something I absolutely cherished. Just like Chrono Trigger, it would help define my taste for years to come.
I remember being in high school wearing ridiculous looking Dragon Ball shirts because I thought the sleeves were really cool, I remember going to Toys R Us and seeing a damn near immobile Vegeta action figure that lacked his Saiyan-saga armor and I was so excited to bring it home. I remember hopping on limewire and downloading fansubs of Dragonball Z movies where the subtitles had characters swearing up a storm just because they could. How would I know any better? I didn't speak Japanese! I even downloaded all of Dragon Ball GT because I wanted to see where this wacky thing would go.
That specific anime would define a wide portion of my Internet life. I would post on the Funimation forums talking about whatever episode of the dub was most recent. It was there that I made a lot of my first Internet friends, including girlfriends. It was that forum that led me to create my own little Internet forum called Lindblum, a place that I still remember fondly to this day. I didn't have a lot of friends. I was an Airforce brat who moved around all the time, so it was hard for me to chat with people who knew each other for their entire lives. Lindblum was where I socialized and grew up as a person. Where I learned how to socialize and talk to people from all walks of life.
Writing on forums is what got me into writing in general. I was a lazy kid in school. I didn't care about anything except for video games. Writing was the exception to that, it was the only thing I considered myself actually decent at. I didn't understand math but I understood how to communicate what I felt to others. I work in journalism to this very day because of that fascination with writing. I have this dinky little blog I maintain because of that. Thanks to Internet forums. Thanks to Dragon Ball Z. Thanks to Chrono Trigger. Thanks to Akira Toriyama.
Toriyama, indirectly, helped shape me as an individual. A guy thousands of miles away from me who I had never met before, who didn't know my name, who didn't know I existed, had a hand in helping to shape the person I am today. The world can be a beautiful place sometimes.
RIP Akira Toriyama. Thanks for everything.
