FF1

Final Fantasy 1 has a dear place in my heart. I actually owned an NES, but not a SNES, so Final Fantasy had a huge gap in my life prior to playing VII on my cousin's console and finally owning a piece when I bought the PS Final Fantasies after owning a PS2. I played 2-6 on emulator, completely not supporting Squaresoft's fine works, leaving a huge dent in art of society!
Back to Final Fantasy, what really got me into the franchise was this advertisement poster for a bunch of NES games. It came with a Nintendo game that I don't remember. Maybe it was the box for the Nintendo even. But anyway, I was just blown away by the graphics for the Fighter, who still hasn't had a modern Final Fantasy equivalent. (Chrono from Chrono Trigger may count!) The Black Mage was cool too. I don't think anybody knew what the Thief was for except for running.
It came with a walkthrough getting up to the airship.
I never got anywhere close to that thanks to my bullshitting of how to save the game in Square's completely convoluted manner of doing so.
It was my first instance of enjoying Final Fantasy music, and I enjoyed it so!
The bestiary had great design, albeit it would improve to be less pixelated over time.
The ineffectives became sort of this early hipsterish skill for me. It annoyed some, but I enjoyed the challenge of memorizing hps to recall how many hits it took to take out each enemy. This was before your sense materias screwing all that skill up. I remembered the exact amounts and was proud of that fact. (My pride is gone now though, alas!)
I got upset at the Dawn of Souls version for the run function and everything else that makes the game super broken without trying. The constant leveling up with part of the challenge of the game, a sense of patience, a sense of creativity from limitations, a sense of respect earned from playing such a different game in the US.
I dunno how great the plot twist was, but at least they friggin had one. It didn't annoy me nearly as much as Heavy Rain's.
So yeah. Great times with that game that I took like an entire generation to beat.