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Hmm... I'm not sure exactly but I think it was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. It took months and months and months to finish.
It does hold a special place in my heart. I'm not sure how to describe it at the moment, I might elaborate later.
EDIT: I also want to add that I have never finished a Super Mario Bros. game.
After having given it a little more thought I’m pretty sure the first one I actually finished was
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time, but
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was the first one that really stuck with me.
Turtles in Time was like all sorts of other games I had played before, jumping from one side-scrolling, structured, predictable level to the next. Super Mario games worked the same way, and I had played all of those up to and including
Super Mario World.
Mega Man games were similar too except that in those games you could pick which level you wanted to do next. (I never did finish a Mega Man game either; holy crap were they difficult.)
Zelda was this breath of fresh air, a wide-open world where I had to backtrack and play things over and return to many of the same spots I had been to before to reach my end goal. It wasn’t entirely revolutionary in that respect, it was something role-playing games had been doing for a while but those games seemed, with their turn-based combat and ‘points’ (HP, XP, etc.), much clunkier by comparison.
Zelda was
fluid.
I couldn’t quite appreciate the subtleties of the game at the time, I was too young, but it still affected me. You start the game off completely unarmed and have to sneak into the castle to rescue the princess. Once that’s done you whisk her off to a sanctuary, where you think “Huh, that was easy.†You’re told you have to find the Master Sword, a mythical sword that will allow you to defeat the evil wizard. Okay, fine. You travel across the land and find three pendants which will allow you to wield the sword. After all this onerous, time-consuming adventuring and you finally find the sword you get a telepathic message that the wizard found the princess and is going to send her to the “Dark Worldâ€, a place you are whisked away to briefly on your way to the mountaintop dungeon containing the third pendant.
The Dark World is a gloomy, miserable place where evil rules. It’s a warped, perverted version of your “Light†world. The Light World’s skies are bright; the Dark’s World’s are permanently cloudy. The Light’s water is bright and fresh; the Dark’s is a putrid green. The Light World’s lush green grass is replaced by dead shrubbery in the Dark World. Rocks are replaced with skulls. Etc.
So you run off to the castle to stop the wizard. You get there, you use the Master Sword to break his magic seal on the room he’s keeping the princess captive in, and when you get in there… you’re too late. You arrive just in time to see Zelda transported to the Dark World. She’s gone. You defeat the wizard but it’s a Pyrrhic victory. You lost.
Then you find out you have to save seven maidens (including Zelda) from seven terrible dungeons in the Dark World; not only get Zelda back, but to stop Ganon, the evil ruler of the Dark World, from escaping and conquering your own world. It’s like an entirely different quest, more than twice as long as the first. All in one game.
Defeating Ganon and touching the Triforce was a long, arduous, bittersweet victory. I had never played a video game that left me feeling like that, and arguably I haven’t since.