It’s a weird feeling playing Final Fantasy 1, knowing this game is as old as I am (37 years). And the feeling was even stronger because I was playing it while walking through the streets of my hometown, Gdańsk, Poland—a place I don’t live in anymore—on a tiny Miyoo Mini, a handheld that literally fits in the palm of my hand.

Even after all these years, it’s still a great game! The pixel art hasn’t aged a bit (though to be fair, I’m playing the GBA version with refreshed visuals, not the original NES release). The battles are engaging. The magic system is cool—each tier of magic has four spells, but your mage can only learn three of them, so you always have to make choices. The world is interesting. Exploring it feels rewarding, especially when you pick up bits of lore from NPCs, slowly piecing together the bigger picture.

Back in the day, whenever I played something really good, I kept a journal—a mix of a game diary, a quote collection, and a catalog of interesting places/characters/items I came across. I loved doing it, but back then, my notes were mostly words. A lot of words. Writing everything down took ages, and finding something later was just as time-consuming.

Recently, I got back into my ‘game diary’ habit, but now I mostly rely on scribbled waterproof fineliner sketches, with watercolor washes to add color and clarity. These doodles take way less time than writing everything out, and I can instantly understand them at a glance.

PS: In future posts I’ll share a few more pages from game diary—I barely got started on this walk.