I wanted to vouch for my brother, AbroJTM, here... He is my younger brother, and I would like to say that he doesn't give himself enough credit here.

When AbroJTM was 3 (before he could read), my older brother (the oldest of the three of us) received Final Fantasy II (FFIV Easytype) for Christmas. AbroJTM was 3, I was 11, and my older brother was 13 at the time. My older brother and I had been playing quite a bit, and to exposed AbroJTM to the game by putting audiotapes of recorded FFIV music in his room while he slept in his crib/bed (don't remember if he was still in a crib or not). Apparently, the engraining of Final Fantasy into his toddler mind is still influencing him today. From the time we started playing in Christmas until about 6 months later, AbroJTM would say "Final Fancy!" when he wanted to watch us play it, which was all the time... and, of course, my older brother and I had no problem with this. AbroJTM would turn the game on sometimes when he just wanted to listen to the theme and stare at the screen/intro for literally hours at a time. He was hooked before he understood the difference between a boy and a girl.

In any event, my older brother and I came downstairs to our playroom one day to find our barely 3-year-old brother actually *playing* FFIV. He had watched us play so much that he had learned how to load the game up, and he started a new game (remember that he couldn't read, and obviously didn't know the controller THAT well, even though my older brother and I had shown him how hitting the buttons makes stuff on the screen move).

We were initially worried that he had erased a save game or something like that, and were about to get mad, when we actually looked at the screen and saw where he was and what he was doing in the game. He actually progressed from the beginning of the game ALL THE WAY to the END OF THE MIST CAVE before we found him there, playing. Both my older brother and I were astounded to see that AbroJTM could actually get that far just from having watched us play so much. He knew how to find his way around Baron, and even fight his way to the end of the Mist cave. I don't remember if we let him play to see him get to the end of it, or if we took the controller at that point, but wow, it honestly took my breath away to see what he had accomplished.

This is one of my top 5 most vivid memories of my little brother as a toddler/infant, along with when he got his fish who died the night he got it when he was 3(which he named "Stop", because it "stopped"), recalling him with his fire truck he got for Christmas at 2, which he called "Fire Fruck", his digging into his first birthday cake after he initially had no interest in it (our mom put his finger in the icing and then in his mouth, at which point he smiled, and he then dug into it completely, making a mess), and his "poopie face" that he made when taking care of business (also goes along with "karate chop" and "point to your nose", which are other stories in and of themselves).

Ahh, nostalgia. But no, AbroJTM, you didn't start when you were 5, though that is when you began to play the original FF, and you did indeed get to ToF2kYitP. Give yourself more credit, you were well on your way through FFII/IV easytype when you were THREE.

As far as me, I began when I was 4 or 5, can't remember which, playing the original Final Fantasy, as it had just come out and my older brother got it for Christmas. It's been almost 20 years since then. As if that's important, considering the story I just told...

- Rossodio
older brother of AbroJTM