When did you start playing RPGs (if ever)?

[Zevox]

Not sure, but judging by the release dates of the three games that might have been my first RPGs, seems like it was probably the late 90s or the year 2000, which would've made me a pre-teen at the time. Those three games being Quest 64, Ogre Battle 64, and the GBC release of Dragon Quest 1-2 (then known as Dragon Warrior in the US for copyright reasons).

Quest 64 is probably actually the one I played first, since it released two years before the others, but I can't honestly be completely sure about that. It's fairly famously bad, but at the time I liked it - it let me play as a wizard and kill monsters with spells, and could be broken clean in half by focusing on the right elements, so that was fun to me at the time. Heck, I could still play it years later and enjoy it despite its many flaws, just out of nostalgia.

Ogre Battle 64 is a bit of an oddball, but you could call it a tactical RPG of sorts, and I certainly played the hell out of it back then. I enjoyed coming up with different unit compositions and seeing how strong they'd be, especially ones involving the game's various monsters or special classes.

Dragon Quest 1-2 is almost certainly what you'd call my first fully traditional-style RPG(s), though (given that even though Quest 64 is turn-based, it's combat is kind of odd in its own ways). Though I didn't actually replay those as much as Quest or Ogre Battle back at the time, because I also got the GBC remake of Dragon Quest 3 at the same time. I played through them in order, so 1-2 was my first, but 3 was the one that I replayed a number of times, not its predecessors. In fact, while I recall attempting to replay 2 at least once, I don't think I finished, and I'm not sure if I ever replayed 1.

RPGs certainly became one of my most heavily played genres for a while after that, at least when I could get ahold of new ones, which were a bit sparse on the N64 and Gamecube (I did play Tales of Symphonia an awful lot on the latter). It wasn't until the next generation was out that I started getting more than just Nintendo consoles, including picking up a PS2 that was cheap since its successor had come out, so that opened things up quite a bit in options for a while. Over time though, other genres have certainly started taking up more of my gaming time, especially the more I got into fighting games after trying BlazBlue back in 2010, and action games after seeing Dante and Trish in MvC3 made me decide to give Devil May Cry a try. Also hasn't been helped by one of my former favorite RPG developers, Bioware, moving away from what I liked about their games in the past to make more open-world style titles - plus Anthem, which isn't even an RPG, and I quickly wrote off as a game I was totally uninterested in. Still, RPGs remain one of my favorite genres, and my personal favorite games of all time are still RPGs (Persona 3 and 4).