My sister rented Secret of Mana from the video store one evening many years ago. She was having trouble with it, but I took it immediately. That's what got me started on RPGs, Zelda notwithstanding.
Years later, when I was in college, I found a very nicely-maintained website dedicated to raising cultural awareness of the SD series in general and Seiken Densetsu III, which at the time was a big (?) in the English-speaking world. The webmaster hosted ROMs not only of this game, but of SoM and, interestingly enough, Chrono Trigger, which she supposed was the best RPG ever made. I downloaded all three games and didn't think about CT again for a long time.
Then one day I decided to give it a go. It was my first experience with a turn-based rather than live-action battle engine, and I couldn't bring myself to play much past the first time traveling event out of the Millennial Fair. I put the game aside once more and didn't think about it for many months.
Then one evening I started it up again on a lark, and played through from beginning to end over the course of a couple of days (and nights) in my dorm room. It was an Experience!
