Sooooo much love for Final Fantasy IV

I am going to go fangirl on you in a second here, and I don't care how irrational or retarded I sound:

I LOVE FINAL FANTASY IV AND EVERYONE ELSE SHOULD TOO.

*sigh*

I just beat this game for the millionth time tonight.  I've played it in just about every iteration possible for a North American:

-SNES
-PSX
-GBA
-DS, imported and American (This is the one I just beat again)
-Random ROMs

I think the only way I have not purchased this game is on WiiWare, but the fact of the matter is my Wii has limited hard drive space and it is the most hated of my consoles.  It's only redeeming factor in my eyes is Final Fantasy IV:  The After Years, which I surprisingly have not beaten the hell out of yet.  I started it immediately after the first installment came out, but pretty soon I realized that this was a game I could not tolerate in chunks:  I needed the freedom to plow through it at my leisure without constant fear of that "To Be Continued..." screen popping up at the most suspenseful time.  So I told myself I would wait until all of them were out as of September 2009.  But after the last one came out, some stuff happened that put me off video games for a good, long while.  So I am quite aware that it's been a whole year now.  That's why I decided to play Final Fantasy IV again.  Not that I didn't already have the story and just about every line of dialogue memorized, but it felt appropriate to play again before working on the sequel.

So next up on deck is FFIV:  TAY, but I've been told I am not allowed to play it unless my fiance is around to watch.  Despite the fact that he claims he hates Final Fantasy IV and that it's one of the worst games ever, he still wants to see how things go for our celebrated heroes seventeen years later.  Funny.

It's hard for me to explain to people (both the total strangers I bother with this shit and people I know) why I love this game so much.  I mean, yeah, every gamer has a game or a franchise that they stand behind and think is the best, but usually it's just something like "Halo rulz my bitches!" or "I love sniping in Modern Warfare!, the head shots ROCK BRAAAAA!"  (Just an FYI I have no idea if you can do sniping in Modern Warfare, the most I have seen of it is a  guy who downed like six burgers while playing the same multi-player scenario over and over because he was trying to get some random trophy and he thought it was very entertaining for myself and my boyfriend at the time, now finance, to watch him in all his gluttonous glory, even though some guy kept pwning him over and over again.  If I had had a seizure right there on the couch and started flailing about helplessly I'm sure the most he would have done was give me a high-five.)

Anyway...

FFIV deserves an entire other post dedicated to why it is great and I need to think about every little detail carefully, so this will be continued then.

The crystal sheds its light silently...