While I'd played games like Dig-Dug and Galaga before, the first really big game I got my hands on was Kingdom Hearts. My parents bought it for me for Christmas when I was around ten years old and boy did I have no idea what I was getting into. It was just a Disney game, right? It had goofy and Donald Duck on the cover, so there was no [i]way[/i] I wasn't going to breeze through this.

But it kicked my ass.

Boy howdy did Kingdom Hearts kick my little ten year old ass.

I spent an awful amount of time just running around the starter island because I couldn't get a handle on the controls, and the game never exactly told me where to go and what to do; so I mostly just talked to the few NPC characters around and failed at jumping up to things. Combat was super tricky even on the easiest difficulty, and I ended up dying...a lot. I had to get my older sister to 'help' (read: do it for me) whenever I came across a moderately strong boss.

But man, no matter how bad at it I was, I loved it. I loved every grueling second of trying to beat that game. Little me thought it had the greatest story ever written since Peter Pan, and it's what really got me interested in fantasy stories. Not to mention the fact that it kickstarted the (other) hobby that's pretty well defined my life since I was a wee lad. I can't imagine having another game be my first.