I had a very lucky turn of events in my childhood because one day I randomly met my neighbor who was around my age. It was cool how we met because I was driving me RC truck in the street and he came out with his RC car as well. We almost immediately become great pals and as it turns out we had a lot of the same interests. One of them was gaming.
The difference between him and I was not our love for games but instead the affluence of our families and how willing they were to buy us whatever the hell we wanted. For this guy, he was an only child and was more than a little bit spoiled. Basically he got whatever games he wanted all the time whereas I had to work for my own money doing paper routes, mowing grass, and later getting a rather disgusting job at a seafood restaurant washing dishes for $4 an hour.
While it took me a lot longer to accumulate a game since I had to work for it and carefully ponder my choices about what I was going to buy, he basically got everything including rather ridiculously overpriced accessories for gaming systems. If it weren't for him, I likely would have never played this game that I can still hear the soundtrack in my mind to this day.
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The PC-Engine or as it was known in North America the "Turbografx-16" was a system that almost nobody bought and it was completely overshadowed by the Sega Genesis and later the Super Nintendo. It never gained much traction in the United States but I had a real fondness for it because the games were pretty fantastic especially from an audio point of view.
When the TG-16 CD attachment was released, it was WAAAAY out of my price range at around $300, but for my neighbor across the street, he ended up getting it almost immediately upon release.
You need to keep in mind that in the early 90's the internet didn't really exist so I am not really even certain how we found out about Y's since it wasn't a franchise that many Americans were really aware of. While it was extremely popular in Japan, the US market just hadn't taken an interest in it.
The Turbografx wasn't terribly "gifted" as far as graphics were concerned and the CD attachment didn't actually do much to enhance the graphics of the games but rather served as a way to have incredible sound during games. The audio in Y's is just fantastic and was nothing like anything the other systems, including the base TG-16 was even close to capable of.
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The graphics were nothing to get excited about and honestly, neither was the combat system as you simply ran into enemies from a certain angle in order to hurt them. Sometimes it didn't really make any sense as to why one tactic would hurt the enemy and others would hurt you. It didn't really matter because the audio and the voice acting (which was something no other home games had at this point) was just out of this world.
This is simply the intro to the game. I want you to try to put yourselves into the shoes of someone in the late 80's / early 90's. We didn't expect any voices, let alone voice acting that was better than most of the films that had existed up to that point. The graphics look disappointing these days but honestly, the TG-16 was not a powerful system and it only had 2 buttons in the age when all systems were clamoring to have as many buttons as possible on their controllers. I think this was a big part of the reason why NEC was a very distant 3rd place contender in the console wars.
Spoiler alert, the above is the final boss but I don't think anyone was really going to go back and play this game for the first time anyway. The intense metal music that takes place during the battle really made the game so much more fun and this is just one example of how great music can really make a game that otherwise looks very 8-bit into a wonderful experience.
There have been remakes of this game over the years but nothing can really compare to the shock and awe that we experienced back in the day when this first dropped.
I would ask if anyone else got to play this when it came out May of 1990 but I know that two things are working against me: You'd have to be the correct age for this to be the case and you'd also have to be one of the couple of thousand people that actually bought the damn thing. Or you'd have to be Japanese :)