I have a difficult relationship with emulation. I am very much for it in terms of accessibility and so on but I rarely engage in playing emulated games myself these days. For sure, as a young teen at the turn of the millennium emulation was a massive gateway into experiencing the likes of Chrono Trigger, Dragon Quests, Earthbound, and my dearly beloved Final Fantasy 5 in English - and that experience, without doubt, shaped some of my present day tastes.
However that experience also made one other thing evident. When I’m presented with a vast array of games to play I experience terrible choice-paralysis and spend so much time deciding what to play that I never actually decide to play a game and end up doing something else instead. As such I only really engage in emulation if I want to try something specific that I’m umming and aahing about, or if I want to play something that’s obscenely expensive.
I like the tangible experience of inserting cartridges or discs with original / FPGA hardware, inconveniences and all. I have a modest collection of games for each of the systems that I have and those will last be such a long time. If I added regular emulation to that I’d never have the time to get through the games that I have physical copies of.
Tl;dr: emulation rules but for my own sanity prefer original hardware.
