I think I was 11 when I got my first trading card, 12 the first time I borrowed Pokemon Blue, and 13 when I actually bought Blue, Red, and Pokemon Stadium. I think 12 or 13 is when I also first saw an episode of Pokemon and decided I didn't want to do that again before going back to the game.
My favorite part about the games is how fast you can beat them. Roughly 3-4 hours on a speed run, plus there's a 3x speed function (thanks to Dodrio tower and/or cheats) that lets you speed that up further to about 90 minutes counting the time spend bumping into things from going too fast and course correcting. The speed in which you can actually beat the game is a lot of the reason my first Let's Play in years after I took down my Chrono Trigger videos was Pokemon Red since I knew I could knock it out in under a dozen videos at 10 minutes each.
Factors of speed are the main reasons that even though there are better games, Pokemon games and Final Fantasy IV are some of the game's I've played through the most. I could always play another for an hour or two and keep coming back every day for two or three weeks to beat it, but sometimes, I'd just rather sit down and beat a game in one go. From start to finish recording Red (which I'll admit was rather uninspired, unemotional, and I had to be rather quiet while people were sleeping) took all of about two hours to play and record before I started the 6 hour process of uploading the videos.
Final Fantasy VII definitely makes my top 5 for the Final Fantasy series and I do rank it above Pokemon, but I'm more interested in the rivalry, as per the actual theme of the contest. For that reason, I was actually supporting Squall vs. Seifer, but I was still quite happy to see (feels like I'm talking about the roosterteeth show) Red vs Blue. With Squall and Seifer, it wasn't really a focal point of the game and took a backseat to the plot, but the rivalry was one that was perfectly understandable and tried not to overplay itself. It was presented as a couple of teenagers that grew up together in a position of rivalry that had to adapt that into something a bit more serious in the real world.
For Cloud and Sephiroth, there was depth and similarly it was also convoluted and padded with so much extra that the rivalry itself also tended to take a backseat (though at any point in the game, the characters would still proclaim their goal to beat Sephiroth) in the actual game. It's later that the rivalry was overplayed in other media like the movie or the Kingdom Hearts/Dissidia games. At this point, it seems more like Sephiroth only exists to troll Cloud for no other reason than because people expect it. There are exceptions, but it seems out of character for Sephiroth based on his own character development.
There may not have been so much depth in the RvB (still feels like the web show) rivalry, but the Pokemon rivalries in general are something that are expected and looked at by the character as a sort of road sign to determine how far along you are in the story. Realistically, I probably don't see it beating Cloud vs Sephiroth (in spite of it already having done so) in a realistic competition based on rivalries alone, but it's definitely an important one to anyone who plays the Pokemon series whether that rival is Blue or one of the others in the game series.
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Soft kitty, warm kitty, little ball of fur
Happy kitty, sleepy kitty, purr purr purr