my first game crush(es) (SOGO week!)

Starting on the 12th and ending through the 16th, it's Speak Out with Your Geek Out week! Which means that there will be a post every day! Which means that, for the entire week, we'll be covering the general gaming pizazz: favorite non-casual/more hardcore titles, reasons why we geek out over games, whether or not games adapt well to other media environments, and so forth and so forth. All that Noriko Matsueda jazz. Tuesday's flavor of the day: I wanna know what love is.

Few topics get people talking faster and reliving their innocent years than words like “crush” and “first love.” Am I the only one who’s ever crushed on a fictional game character? As I’m compiling this list, it occurs to me just how few “real” (as in non-casual) games I’ve actually played over the years since I decided I was a bona-fide gamer. You know, the big titles that grace the covers of Game Informer. Am I still a legit gamer if all I have is a Nintendo Wii and borrowed access to a friend's DS? But that's a topic for another day. I present to you now all the celebrity crushes and true love lessons I ever learned from playing games. (Don't try to figure out my orientation/gender from this little exercise. It'll only mess you up.)

The Girls

 

GlaDOS, Portal. Oh you sexy, sexy you. When a humanistic AI happens to lose its morality core, suddenly it sounds very... er, interesting. Given that her soothing Victoria-Macintosh vocals are already starting to groove happily in my temporal lobes—then the morality core has to blow up and she completely loses her perfection stains and appears to attempt to seduce me with a cherry-colored lipstick tone, the kind you find in the James Bond flicks. But it's not gonna work on me, missy. Sexy.
 

Yuna, Final Fantasy X & X-2. I’m not even sure why this particular noted Summoner made it on my list. She's one of the most criticized female protagonists in all games, not just the never-ending FF drama: first for her pity-party self-sacrificial image in Tidus's debut, then for her Barbie-inspired go-getter attitude and a-little-too-much-Rikku-influence in her skimpier attire in X-2. So that leaves me with the shallow reasoning that I like her because she shoots guns while doing flips while wearing a half-skirt that's not really a skirt but more like a flowing cape for your waist.

 

Thanks Youtube channel person!

Quorra, TRON Evolution: Battle Grids. Okay, so maybe I just like Olivia Wilde, period, and was looking for a way to fit her in on this list. But unlike some of the other games I've mentioned, I do actually own this title, and when it's three o'clock in the morning and you're trying to fight off school stress and a horrendous earache, she will get inside your head and convince you that she’s your player-character’s official unofficial escort. And that the stilted conversation is some kind of on-going pick-up line. Which either happens when I'm missing too many House M.D. re-runs, or I really need to find different games that will feed off my inevitable "shipping" habits.

 

The Guys
 

Rufus Shinra, Final Fantasy VII & related spin-offs. My introduction to the Final Fantasy games came about through its infamous Advent Children flick, but it was all I needed to decide that President Rufus Shinra was quite possibly the one for me. He's cold-hearted, lonely, owns lots of money and a cool panther, and of course acts like the "dark hero" the way that all the fanfiction and fansites and fangirls will write about him. I'll spare you the details of my obsession, but let's just say it was very... odd. It happened at a time when I had just decided that video games were awesome, and that particular summer was extremely anti-social for me. So yeah....

 

Genesis Rhapsodos, Final Fantasy VII Crisis Core. Absolute English nerd. Thusly, we were made for each other. Because of him I memorized the entire Loveless poem (the version with his interpretation included). Let me pull it out of my brain here for a moment. Searching... searching... file not found. Well, I did memorize it at one point, and it’s very pretty. Just like his face. Oh, and did I mention that he really knows how to fight with class? Seriously, watch the video link.

Joshua Kiryu, The World Ends with You. Can I just say this guy is a total beast? He's more or less a combination of the other people above: Quorra's aloof coolness with GlaDOS's witty sarcasm dry as a desert and Shinra's position of absolute power. Except that Josh doesn't need guards, or even brains (although he has the latter, to be sure). He can rule, build and destroy the entire Shibuya district with a cellphone. And even though he ends up getting the bad guy treatment at the end, he doesn't even die. He keeps you guessing at his ambiguous orientation while cracking some pretty sweet misanthropic jokes—without being depressing about it a la the game's main PC Neku Sakuraba. Everyone knows the sidekicks always manage to come off cooler than the lead hero, and Josh is no exception to that.

Not an actual TWEWY screenshot.

Sho Minamimoto, The World Ends with You. Again, the nerdy type shows up, but this time he’s in the math category. Every other sentence he utters contains a mathematical double entendre, pun, or just a real, honest exclamation ("3.14159..." ad infinitum). His idea of art is creating garbage collection piles to make a statement about the absurdity of life, an appropriate idea for a game that revolves around dead people getting second chances to hit the start button again. He's also an incredibly annoying mid-game boss to put up with, but it's a small price to pay for getting a character with an engaging personality and personal hobby outside of the typical big bad evil scheming political villain. All in all, he adds some much-needed, lighthearted jock humor to a pretty grim story.
 

Atrus, Myst. Okay, so maybe he’s not per se physically attractive the way everyone else is on here. But something about his face makes me think of Ewan McGregor. And at any rate, he's one pretty smart guy, and he's a writer like me. Nerdy too. I sense a theme.






So there you have it: 90% of my entire love life so far. How geeky does yours look like?


Next time: Games are going to war.