I do believe that this is the first Princess Bride reference to grace the pages of Fancy That. Let us savor the moment, for its like do not come often.

I have, as of late, been making an effort to appreciate the classics in several different varieties of media. Neon Genesis Evangelion for anime, Ye Olde Bible for literature, Trigun for manga...and so on and so forth. I can't really say much about my efforts musicwise, because just about any song that predates the Nineties is off-limits to my aesthetic sensibilities. Classical music may as well be antediluvian to me, something so remote and alien that it seems to predate God's first great Oops My Bad moment in Christian theological history.

For my gaming efforts, though, I have recently procured a two-disc set for the original PlayStation containing Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy IV, two of the video games that helped shape the Japanese console RPG into what it is today--complex characters, layered stories, dynamic combat, these games had it all. My first order of business is, of course, Chrono Trigger, which I have been dying to play ever since I learned of its existence in my youth. There is some indescribable allure to it, with its 16-bit graphics and MIDI orchestrations and time travel blended with an evident enthusiasm only slightly tarnished by age.

There are those that seem to believe that the great days of gaming are past, that their heyday began and ended with the 8- and 16-bit processors of yore, but something about that sort of assertion makes my intellect recoil. What is there precisely about Chrono Trigger that necessarily makes it superior to Final Fantasy VII, or to Tales of Symphonia (both excellent games in their own right and with their own levels of technological development)? Age? The fact that some gamers approach sprite-based games with the reverence of a curator in the Louvre while treating modern fully-realized three-dimensional gamespaces like so much worthless pop art?

Both are counterintuitive. If age and sprite-based characters are all you need to become "classic", then we should by all means consider Custer's Revenge a work of art instead of the steaming pile of bullshit, pixels, and Indian rape that it really is. The worth of a game really ought to be defined by its content and the way it handles the playing experience.

I'm not saying that Chrono Trigger isn't a brilliant game. It is. As are some more recent productions--like, say, Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones. I think that video gaming is beginning to suffer (prematurely) from the same difficulties that plague literature and film--a lot of people seem to think that the best of the best have been produced already, even though contemporary efforts require even more artifice and effort to elicit the exact same effect.

I guess what I am saying is that, while the 2D games of yore tug at our heartstrings with memories of youth whiled away in front of a phosphorescent box controlling beings from another world, they aren't the be-all and end-all. They have their flaws, many of which have been corrected with more recent iterations of their respective franchises. I can appreciate the artistry of a game like Chrono Trigger just as I would appreciate the artistry of a game like Two Thrones: with a pleasant smile on my face and a metaphorical glass of merlot in my hand, moving among the murmuring crowds with a patience wrought of experience with the mercurial medium, awaiting what happens next with rapt attention.

And, occasionally, an itchy trigger finger.