A to Z Challenge Day 7: Gau (the Wild Orphan)

Video games have been an important part of my life, off and on, for the past two and a half decades or so. I had an original Atari, which I was absolutely obsessed with, and I’ve owned every generation of Nintendo console and hand-held aside from the Virtual Boy (because I honestly never knew it existed until years later), the 3DS (because my regular DS works just fine, thanks) and the Wii-U (because screw it, I’m not that big of a sucker). I’ve also, in partnership with my husband, had all four Playstations (plus the Vita), and the first two X-Boxes (the third will probably come along at some point), and we’ve got a Dreamcast squirreled away upstairs somewhere.

There have definitely been times in my life where video games became less important, but I’ve always loved them since I was barely old enough to be able to figure out how to play them, and to this day turn-based RPGs are my favorites. And of that classification, Final Fantasy III (VI in Japan) definitely ranks at the very top of my all-time favorites list. I can not tell you the number of times I have played through this game. I love everything about it from the story, to the characters, to the battle system. To this day I get the random urge to pop in my Gameboy Advanced version and start a whole new game right from the beginning.

I love pretty much all of the characters in this game, but one character I always thought was under-appreciated was Gau. He’s the sweet little orphan boy who was raised by monsters and joins the party simply because they were nice enough to feed him. He’s never been a fan favorite amongst the FFIII characters, but I think that was mostly because of the effort required to make him a force to be reckoned with. You see, whereas the other characters learned their special attacks naturally, Gau had to be fighting in a particular area, and in order to get him to learn new attacks you had to let him leave the party and then keep fighting in random encounters until he showed up again. You might fight ten battles and have him come back and have learned one new attack, out of the 250 attacks that he could learn…and often the one he did learn would be total crap.

But, if you were willing to be a little patient, Gau could become a great addition to your party, one who could do an enormous number of special attacks. Plus, he was just fun to have around. Come on, FFIII fans…speak up! You know he was the cutest thing since kitty-shaped sliced bread!