Gaia and I go way back, all the way to the 90s when the only types of games that I ever considered playing contained the letters “R”, “P” and “G” in them. Back in the day when the rivers ran clear, the sky was the shade of blue that only man intended, and I thought that there was nothing wrong that any kind of Role Playing Game could ever do, or say.

This game was released in the long drought between Final Fantasy 2 (4) and Final Fantasy 3 (6). The drought was clearly enough to force me into buying pretty much anything that would even remind me of the glory days when people cared what they put into a game. When I purchased Gaia, I told myself it would have to be that game until I found some way to make time go by faster so I could get the next installment of another Final Fantasy game. Little did I know when I picked it up that it would be one of the only games that I have ever played in my life that would make me physically ill while playing. That is pure fact, too, when I went to go through and play the game for a second time my body became pale and generally ill looking at the very thought of spending anymore resources doing anything in that game and I would almost vomit. When I walked away from the game I would become fine again until I thought about making another attempt.

Not only was the game bad enough to reduce me to some kind of strange geek-based illness, but it also had a magically effect of burning areas of my brain out of my head so I forgot vast portions of the game. While doing research for this very article I sat down and read more than one summary the game. Amazingly, I think I have found the threshold of terrible that my brain can reach. Clearly the guy with the stretchy arms from “Master of the Flying Guillotine” is not on that list, nor is his owl (who appears in countless scenes but is only ever used once before being forgotten) or the guy who has pennies in his legs for some reason. Overboard with Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell isn’t on that list. To make this paragraph seem like it is going to be a lot shorter then I would like to make it I will just go ahead and say that Illusion of Gaia is finally the realm of terrible where my body cannot handle it anymore and finally begins to try to kill itself on a cellular level, starting with my brain cells and quickly making an attempt at my soul.

While playing the game has the same effect on your brain as smoking a pack of cigarettes all at once, drinking a bottle of vodka, and free-basing meth, all at the same time, it is important to note that there is a large fan following for this game, mainly of them are crying that the company make a sequel to it (which would rank somewhere between making some kind of zombie Hitler with baby cannon’s for arms and bringing my Grandmother to the bar so she could see me drunk in the world of bad ideas). This just goes to show that there is an entire world of people out there who are willing to take much mental abuse then I ever could, and they do it for entertainment. Then again there are people in the world who think that they are really the reincarnation of Solid Snake.

Halfway through what would be called “useful research” I decided that I really didn’t care to know that much about this game. Sure, I had forgotten that there is a city that is entirely based on rafts that you play Russian roulette on, sure I forgot that you walk all the way through the Great Wall of China, but I didn’t want to remember any of these things. If I really wanted to relive the pain that this game had caused me I would find my copy and play through it again (after note while I am rereading this: I am getting strange headaches just because of this article. I am pretty sure that the game itself is out to get me).

I decided to turn the research to something more practical, namely seeing if the things that I remembered about the game took place during this game, or it was just something I made up . Seeing as how there are more than three dungeons and two towns I would probably lean more towards the side of “I remembered nothing”. It seemed that my brain kept enough of the information to keep itself alive. There are a bunch of kids who want to go on an adventure, they do, you fight the end boss in as a puddle of black jell-o. They sounded so much exciting when I didn’t remember why you were doing all of these things.