And he's a man.

This is a horrifying thought. Let's make it happen.

Ahah. That's fun. But you didn't learn about ww2 before that? Also it's always super interesting seeing ww2 from a Japanese perspective.

Gaping donut hole.

So I guess in a lot of ways, growing up in a single parent household, with not a lot of money and no one around who really understood me, these games helped prepare me for the world as much as anything or anyone else did. If that's not art, I don't know what is. 8/8

make sense of a world where nothing else could. Even though games, especially rpgs, were an escape for me, they taught me to read, they taught me about hope, sacrifice, and what it means to be true to yourself and your friends. About integrity. 7/8

became the hero. These little, silent background choices gave these games so much weight, invisible weight. I don't know if the developers realized how far reaching their work would be, but in a lot of ways, these tiny, thoughtful choices helped me 6/8

It reminds me a lot of why Ocarina of Time hit me so hard as a little neurodivergent kid. How could I not relate to the strange kid that nobody understood and everyone made fun of? He wasn't one of the Kokiri, despite living amongst them. Yet it was HE who broke free and 5/8

It doesn't seem to matter. It. Just. Is. The reason we often saw silent protagonists was so that the player had a way to imprint onto the character without giving them a voice. What a fucking profound choice, then, to give these characters a home life that isn't idyllic. 4/8

the single mom of JRPG protagonist is kind of a common trope. There are some with happy, whole families, but often, it's a plucky upstart from a broken home in some way. What I always appreciated was that it's almost NEVER explored as part of the protagonist's backstory. 3/8