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Dedicated to The Adelaide Poet, my oldest friend and one of the true loves of my life.
As I sit here and listen to the Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete Original Soundtrack, I am reminded of my best childhood friend and our first experience playing RPGs. While this was more than fifteen years ago, I am often reminded of how we played video games, and how we created our own alternative stories and worlds for characters when we didn't understand what was going on within the plot. Being around eight years old, we believed that the characters we experienced in RPGs were like our close friends, and it was up to us to help them save the world.
The imagination is the best tool in the world for any child. My childhood friend, Shayla and I would often imagine ourselves in our video games, and we would find ourselves creating new and exciting adventures alongside our favourite heroes and heroines. There was no such thing as consequences, routine, or responsibility back then – it was simply me, my friend, our favourite game characters, and our imaginations.
When we were young, we played many RPGs together. For every game we'd pick our favourite characters and we would imagine what their lives might have been like outside the confines of the game world. When we played Star Ocean: The Second Story, we would participate in the Private Actions and take them completely out of context with Shayla yelling out "Push the beds together!" every time Celine and Claude were together. Regardless of the pairings, she believed that all the characters should love each other and be friends forever, even if they were arch-rivals. Like her, I saw the characters as people just like me, full of spirit and determination and looking for a way to change the world, even if it was small steps at a time.
While playing other games such as Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete, each of us would select our "video game boyfriends". Hers was Kyle, mine was Nash, and as we said this to one another, we'd laugh and joke about how we didn't approve of Jessica and Mia trying to take our "boyfriends". Smiling, we believed that we were students in the Magic School of Vane, and that we too, were participating in our own adventures alongside the Lunar cast as we made our way to fight the evils in their world.
Whenever I got a new game, my mother always bought me the strategy guide to go with it, except that I never used them as guides and just looked at their character artwork. Sometimes, at recess, Shayla and I would sit outside on the grass – she'd be sketching in her notebook while I would be blabbering on about a new story idea I had. We would make comics that starred our favourite characters, and when we got a new game, we began to mix new friends with our old favourites. You could say we made some great, if completely impossible crossover pairings. Although we knew it wasn't possible for our favourite characters to meet outside their respective games, we often dreamed that one day it could be a possibility.
Now that she's getting married, and I'm a university graduate, we often don't have time to visit these worlds anymore. There is no more visits to Blue Star. No exploring of the Hoffman Ruins to find buried treasure. No more being able to participate at the Lacour Tournament of Arms and hoping to score first prize against Dias. We have traded our childhoods for office work, dental visits, wedding gowns, and weekly columns. Yet neither of us has truly forgotten those worlds and characters that have brought us closer together. Upon seeing her again we sat in her basement as my boyfriend and her fiancée rocked out on plastic guitars, smiling as we saw flickers of our childhood within the men we love, as we reminisced for awhile about what it would be like now to revisit the worlds of childhood's past.
As I continue to listen to this soundtrack once more, I think of her and realize: I want to visit them again, even if it's just one more time... and I want to take her with me.
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