Many of those moments are contained within the Shigematsu short stories. These dreams add so much more depth and emotional resonance to the main storyline even if, like me, you're so stone-hearted that you fail to cry while reading any of them. It would be interesting, in fact, to know which came first: the stories or the story. Did Shigematsu's stories inspire the main narrative thrust? Or was he asked to write them to fill in the gaps? Either way, they add another dimension to the storytelling, so while an amnesiac hero might have done before, the emotional richness of the story is fairly unparalleled by any other JRPG. Certainly, no other game has managed to capture such a breathtakingly elegiac tone, or created such a compelling account of the immortal longing for mortality.
