That moment

I've been lifting weights for 5.50 years now and are now 220 lbs. solid muscle. Obviously my life has changed entirely.

But what was that one thing that led me to actually stick with lifting weights? Oddly enough it was my favorite video game series - Dragon Quest. You see, Dragon Quest 7 came out for the PSOne and while the graphics are sup-par to say the very least and the music is merely alright, I absolutely loved it.

By this point, there hadn't been a new Dragon Quest game in the U.S. since Dragon Quest 4 for the NES. Basically this game was so different from back in the NES that I almost couldn't believe it is part of the same video game series. This game had puns galore, while still having the spelling errors and odd translations that made the series so endearing to me in the first place. The long and short of the game is that the only landmass in the entire world is a small island with no monsters. After nearly an hour of exposition, the hero and a couple of his friends head out to play in the abandoned shrine and wind up in the past. As they complete the scenario this landmass returns to the present. After restoring the world, you learn that God and the demon Orgodemir had an epic battle that sealed off everything in the world but the little island you started out on and now it's time for you to fight Orgodemir himself. Obviously there's a little more to the story and I have to say that while there are parts that drag on way too long I found myself completely enthralled. There's some hilarity like a teammate who's an old man who once fought alongside God, and then going on to fight God after you beat the game. The game has a cool town building scenario where you send people to your new town and the final transformation of the town is highly dependent on what types of people you have residing there - i.e. more merchants turns the town into a huge bazaar with awesome weapons and armor for sale. And the game has a really cool class system in which changing vocations only alters your character's stats rather than making you go through class specific weapons and armor and the like. So there's a lot to do is what I'm saying.

Even better is that you can play the game one handed. The right analog stick and the triangle button are all you really need. I used to play the game over breakfast, lunch, and dinner. My first run through the game turned out to be about 200 hours long. Those were 200 satisfying hours. So me being me, I played through it a few more times clocking in at about 150 hours each time. On my fourth time starting out, I realized I dumped a whole hell of a lot of my life into not only this game, but video games in general. I stopped and started cutting back on video games and finally getting into weight lifting for real.

It's funny to think that the very first RPG I ever played was Dragon Quest and it started my life long love of RPGs, and that the 7th one in the series was the one that made me realize I have got to start doing something with my life.