30 Days of Gaming, #11 – Gaming system of choice

Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh.

This one was a no-brainer despite loving many various systems over the years. In fact, I find my experience with console and portable gaming systems to be interesting, if nothing short of a mixed bag. I grew up on neighbor’s NES and then my own SNES (Nintendo fanboy), then saved up my money as a young lad by scooping ice cream, busing tables, and doing clerical work for a PlayStation and PlayStation 2 (Sony fanboy), and then ended up doing a bunch of cartoon commission work (I drew cartoons of all the authors, not the cover art in case you were curious) to get enough money for an Xbox 360 (Microsoft fanboy) when I was in my mid-20s. Along the way I also had a GameBoy, a Nintendo DS, and now a Nintendo 3DS. This is more than just a roll call, as I want it to be clear that I’ve dabbled in multiple videogame pools. Which one reigns supreme? Why, the one with the double screen.

My journey to getting a DS started on a whim; one day, I just decided to go get one, and so off I went, and to demonstrate what happens next I’m posting some comics from the MyLifeComics archive:

Wow, I can’t believe I got this thing like four years ago.

So I picked up a newly minted Nintendo DS Lite, a copy of Mario Kart DS, and an extra charger. I was unaware that the system itself came with a charger in its box so now I have two. Wee. Thanks, mindless Target employee for the tip. Upon arriving home in my teeny tiny studio apartment, I curled up in my comfy chair, flipped the system’s lid open, turned it on, and heard–for the very first time–a sound that would soon provide me with comfort, stability, friendship, and sanity. It went like doo-doou-doooooo. I quickly got the feel for the system thanks to some heated online races in Mario Kart DS, and slowly grew my collection, picking up a range of titles from Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin to Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords to Flash Focus. There is literally a game genre for everyone. But the system wouldn’t hit home for awhile until I discovered its not-so-dirty secret: it loved roleplaying games.

Obviously, I’m a huge fan of RPGs, and over the years the DS has put up an excellent fight against the PlayStation 2 for the trophy of MOST RPGS EVER. Seriously, you can’t flick a stylus at a GameStop shelf without hitting a Nintendo DS RPG these days. And besides RPGs, the system has a slew of gaming experiences you can find nowhere ese: Professor Layton’s puzzles and hidden coins, Picross 3D‘s mind-numbing puzzles, The World Ends With You and its duel-screen action, Scribblenauts with its wordy fun, and so on. Many skeptics believed that the touchscreen was just a gimmick, that it wouldn’t work, but they all turned out to be wrong; it’s fun to touch the screen with the stylus, to control things and move them around, or flick them away.

Gaming on the go is a great idea, and this is literally that. The Nintendo DS Lite is perfect for pockets, with a good battery life and not being too heavy; the same cannot be said about its “upgrade,” the Nintendo 3DS. Ever since I graduated college, I’ve found myself constantly in my car, constantly traveling, constantly being away from all my creature comforts. Packing up the Xbox 360 every time I went down to my parents’ house was always a pain. Thankfully, with the Nintendo DS, I was able to bring a piece of gaming with me wherever I went.

This system of choice is also important to me for another reason. Seeing me play it so much and so often–and with such glee–convinced my mother to get one. I let her try out some of the minigames from the New Super Mario Bros. DS as we flew out to Arizona over the holidays to see my sister, and she fell in love with tapping the screen, especially during the minigame where you had to move colored bob-ombs into specific cages. Arriving in Arizona, we immediately headed out to a nearby Target (again with the Target!) to get her one. About a day later, my sister Bitsy also got one, and here’s the two of them at the zoo, “DSing it up” as I called it:

The Nintendo DS connected me with my sister and mom in a strange, new way, one that I never imagined. With Bitsy, we bonded over Animal Crossing: Wild World, entering each other’s worlds and sending each other gifts; it helped bridge the distance from Arizona to New Jersey, and was a nice thing to constantly keep up on each other over. For my mother, well…it opened up new branches of conversation. She checked Amazon for new games or asked me to keep an eye out for any titles she’d like; her favorites were puzzlers, the hidden objects kind, where the story was forgettable, but finding baseballs and irons and handcuffs in a jungle scene was amazingly addicting; she always wanted me to play the game she just beat, or help her past a tough part of her current one.

As human beings, we develop attachments to many things: people, places, smells, sounds, tastes, everything. It’s inevitable. And it’s not silly for me to feel such a connection to my DS Lite, which has, unfortunately, not gotten as much love over the past few weeks with the 3DS in the limelight. I will return to it, surely. Just writing this makes me feel guilty for such neglect. This mesh of circuit boards and chips and plastic bits and screens and d-pad that hurts my thumb after awhile has always been there for me, and in return I have treated it well. When that charge me red light comes on, I hop to it. I always place it in its carrying case, an early birthday gift for me from my mother, and I would never in a million years trade it in for money or store credit or the answer to the universe and everything else, no matter what. The Nintendo DS is my favorite gaming system, and will remain so for as long as I can make it happen. Please bury me with it.

30 Days of Gaming, #10 – Best gameplay

I’m used to doing the same things over and over again, in true life and in videogames, and this never-ending cycle is a big part of why Grinding Down is called what it is because grinding is the art of repetition. However, and I doubt I’m alone here, I always prefer variety to the same ol’ in the end. Especially in terms of gameplay. Videogames that are simply fetch quest after fetch quest after fetch quest—like the latest DLC from Borderlands—are beyond boring, and I guess I find many FPS titles to be of the same ilk. You just, uh, shoot things. Pew pew pew. Cue credits.

So, the best gameplay is potpourri gameplay. And the best example of this made-up terminology is Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves.

In his third adventure, Sly Cooper and his brainy pal Bentley are trying to open the Cooper Vault on Kaine Island, which is said to hold the entire wealth of the Cooper family. However, Dr. M built a mean lair around the vault as he has gold coins for eyes. Sly will have to recruit a whole gaggle of people to help out with this end-all, be-all robbery, some who are actually old enemies from the Fiendish Five. Each mystery person recruitment arc serves as a level, with it usually beginning on some light reconnaissance before the team whips up a battle plan and then acts upon it. Set in an open hub world, Sly and his friends will do more than just go from place to place; they’ll have to sneak on rooftops, win skyplane races, row boats through sewers, mess with security systems, lure animals and people around using multiple choice answers, climb windmills, successfully parachute to the ground, drive an RC car, shoot darts at incoming rockets, take pictures, steer a van, fire cannons, discover hidden treasures, recover sea-diving equipment, and more.

::deep exhale::

I wasn’t just saying and more to end the sentence sooner than later. There’s still plenty of stuff I haven’t even talked about yet. Like Gold Coins and Loot to spend over Thief Net or how, after you beat the game, there’s a master thief challenge to tackle. Yeah, there’s a lot of different things to do on top of my favorite for the Sly games: exploration. Sly Cooper is nimble and quick, perfect for running around a cityscape either noticed or unnoticed, and there always seems to be something to climb; he definitely gives the Assassin Creed games a run for their climbin’, and the open hub world is just so dang inviting. My personal favorite is chapter five, Dead Men Tell No Tales, heavy on the pirates and ships and booty. Each mission makes use of every place in the hub world, but it was always fun to go explore everything first, and then when it’s time to go back, I’d know what to expect.

For what could easily be summarily dismissed as just another platformer, Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves is all about a little bit of this, and a little bit of that. It’d be hard to get bored with so many strikingly different things to do, even if some are not as fun as others—the RC car’s controls made for frustrating nights. That said, potpourri really is the best kind of gameplay. Go on, take a whiff.

30 Days of Gaming, #9 – Saddest game scene

I’ve been struggling with this topic from the 30 Days of Gaming meme for a bit, and I didn’t want to just cop out and say that, obviously, the saddest moment in gaming for me is when my absolute favorite character unfairly sacrifices himself for the greater good. I already wrote about that. So I had to think, think, think, and all I kept hearing inside my head was a cold, solid thud. Over and over. Thud. It wasn’t inspiration falling down, giving up, calling it quits, ready to rest in eternal darkness; it was Nanami.

Suikoden was all about politics and war. Suikoden II threw a third ingredient into the mix, a healthy dose of friendship. This showed up in the form of the main character and Jowy, as well as the main character and his adopted sister Nanami, a fiesty, good-hearted girl that more than often spoke on his behalf. She’s a worry-wart, caring deeply for everyone she comes in contact with, as well as a highly trained martial artist; later on in the game, when she learns that her brother and Jowy are both commanding opposing armies, she pleads with them not to fight. However, love keeps her around, keeps her by her brother’s side, all the way to the end when, in Rockaxe Castle, she falls trying to protect those she cares about from being ambushed.

Thud.

You can hear the horrible noise at 1:30 of this video:

And the part that makes it so sad is just how sudden it happens. Nanami skillfully deflects every arrow but one, and then she’s down for the count. No stagger, no moment of shock–just a body giving away. There isn’t even time to comprehend what happened because Gorudo and his men shout “BOSS BATTLE!” and away you go, desperate to get back to your big sister, to try and save her. Which doesn’t happen.

It really doesn’t take long in Suikoden II to forgot that the main character and Nanami are not related to each other. Some of her last words touch on this, how she was so happy to have a family. To even be Jowy’s friend.

Just like with Gremio, Nanami can be saved. However, it’s a little more complicated than simply collecting all 108 Stars of Destiny so I’ve never seen it accomplished. And never will. Nanami has always–and will always–end with a spiritless thud.

30 Days of Gaming, #8 – Best soundtrack

To be completely honest, I usually don’t listen to a lot of videogame music unless I’m hearing it as I play the game. For me, there’s plenty of other things to listen to–currently digging Freelance Whales and lots of Connie Francis and Regina Spektor–and if I was to generalize, I’d say that a good portion of videogame tunes are unlistenable when they stand alone.

That said, I simply adore the soundtrack from Chrono Cross, the 2000 follow-up to Chrono Trigger. Composed by Yasunori Mitsuda, the official soundtrack features 67 tracks spanned across three CDs, hitting about three hours of music in total. That’s a whole lot more tunes than some games get. A few tracks subtly recall themes from Chrono Trigger, but it’s the new stuff formed for Chrono Cross that really make it unique, memorable. I’ve found it’s wonderful background music for drawing and writing, ranging from up-tempo town songs to battle music to somber undertones.

My personal favorite is titled “Reminiscence ~ Sentiments which Cannot be Erased,” a haunting piece of piano and echoes. Please listen to it as you continue on with today’s post:

One of the hardest things to write about is music. I know this for a fact; as a journalist for my college paper and alternative zine, I covered concerts and new album releases. These ranged from holiday choir specials to the latest Butch Walker CD to seeing a bunch of bands play live at summer festivals. At times, it was a grueling task. Describing how music is heard, understood, taken to heart–it’s a complex process, and it can be very hard to not seem overenthusiastic or fanboyish or simply in love with pretty sounds. Plus, how can I, someone who can’t sing, really critique those that can? So, yeah…writing about music has its tricks. It can also lead to pretty lazy sentences like, “The drums were totally kicking!” Not that I did that, ever, but the temptation to play it slack was always there. Music is meant to be heard, not read.

For this post, it’s best if I just link you to some of the finer moments from Chrono Cross‘ soundtrack:

“Dream of the Shore Bordering (Another World)”

“Leaving the Body”

“Garden of the Gods”

Enjoy!

30 Days of Gaming, #7 – Favorite game couple

Mario and Princess Peach, Sonic and Amy, Solid Snake and Meryl Silverburgh, Cloud Strife and Aeris Gainsborough, Mr. Pac-Man and Mrs. Pac-Man. These are some of the most famous gaming couples. Many are borderline platonic; others are not.

It’s unclear to me, and maybe most of the Internet, if my favorite gaming couple loves one another romantically, or if their friendship, their dependence on each other is what rings truer in their hearts. Certainly there’s some past adventures they do not speak of, some tension and flirting. Hard not to charm it up when one half of this equation is the suave, cocky Balthier, and the other is the super old, but super vivacious viera warrior Fran. Together, they try to rule the skies.

First, some Final Fantasy XII backstory. Balthier is a young sky pirate and the pilot of the airship Strahl. His copilot is seemingly the complete opposite, an otherworldly viera—that means rabbit-like—woman named Fran that is extremely sensitive to Mist magic, as well as a truly seductive lisp. They depend on each other, and they depend even more on their ability to take from anyone what they want, and it’s this blatant thievery that gets them mixed up with Vaan and Ashe during the chaos of a rebel assault on the palace.

And so they are a team, a couple. Pilot and copilot. Voice and reason. Hume and viera. It’s never openly said that they love each other, that their feelings drop deep, but the subtle looks they share speak volumes:

You meet them as one entity, and you’ll never see them as anything else but together. There is no Fran without Balthier, and the other way around. When out grinding for bazaar items and experience points, you’re allowed to use a three-person team. This usually meant Vaan and two others: Ashe, Basch, Balthier, and Fran. Sorry, Penelo. Battling monsters and using gambits isn’t for kids. Anyways, I never separated the combo, and they worked well with each other, both offering ranged attacks and strong Quickenings. However, come the end of the game, I had to rely on Basch the Tank for most of my boss slaying. Still, these two characters remain my favorite gaming couple for what they don’t say and are only closely followed in the franchise by Zidane and Garnet from Final Fantasy IX.

30 Days of Gaming, #6 – Most annoying character

Hmm…something about this feels familiar. Oh, right. That’s because last November, I wrote up a little post about my top five most annoying videogame sidekicks, focusing in on the sidekicky aspect of the business. I mean, adventuring into the unknown is one thing, but doing it with a chatty brat is another. Sure, any of those could easily get smashed into bits by today’s 30 Days of Gaming topic train, but I decided to think some more and found a few other contenders. And we’re going with Tom Nook, simply for his sheer audacity to never, ever change.

Tom Nook is a raccoon tanuki that runs a shop called Nook’s Cranny in your town in all versions of Animal Crossing. He starts out as a nice fella, giving you a home to live in. One small caveat though: you’ll have to pay him for it, and he’s okay with payments over time, so long as you eventually pay it off. Once you do, he’ll expand your house, opening up more rooms to decorate…so long as you keep paying him, too. That’s fine. That’s kind of how it works in real life, minus the talking raccoon, I think.

Where he gets truly annoying is in his shop. You enter Nook’s Cranny (clean thoughts, dear readers!), and he welcomes you, and gives you a list of options. You do your things, peruse his wares, and leave, but not before he can get the last word in: “Thank you! Do come again! I look forward to seeing you!” You can never just enter and leave uninhibited, like countless RPGs that let you waltz into that potions shop, knock over some bottles, and leave before anyone notices. No, not at Nook’s Cranny. Not in Nook’s book. He will greet you, he will part with you. He never breaks form. He’s like that Obama smile video. He’s like braindead. He’s like…overtly annoying.

And then he follows you around the store, like a used cars salesman, like a true furniture pusher, like an ex-lover with a vengeance. You can run rings around his desk of player tools, but he’ll catch up to you eventually. Unfortunately, the only way to determine what some of the wallpapers/carpets are is to ask him, and you have to then mash the buttons until you can get him to stop.

You want more? Evidently, after you’ve fully upgraded his shop to Nookington’s, Tom will randomly ask you some questions, and the wrong answers will result in him downgrading the store back to its original format. All that shopping…for nothing.

I’m pretty excited about all the possibilities that Animal Crossing 3DS could hit on the head, but if Tom Nook is around, well, I’m gonna be several hundred thousand bells short of excitement.

30 Days of Gaming, #5 – Character you feel most like

This is gonna be a tough one, Grinding Down readers.

Mass Effect‘s Joker, real name Jeff Moreau, suffers from brittle bone disease, which is more scientifically called osteogenesis imperfecta. It’s the sort of disease that steers your life, causing extreme brittleness in the bones. Ultimately, Joker was born with severe fractures to his legs, and, as an adult now, he can barely walk. That didn’t stop him from excelling at flight school though and becoming a pilot. The Normandy‘s bridge is his home, his heart.

I don’t suffer from osteogenesis imperfecta. I do, however, have a bad left knee prone to popping out of place, and I walked on my tippy-toes for the longest time as a young child, but other than that, Joker and I are far from physically alike. Save for the beard. We both have sexy beards. I’m not gonna be a beardhole and claim that mine is the better. You can make that call yourself. But yeah, we’re total beard buds.

So, Joker and I are not alike physically. Wherein our sameness sits is in how we interact with people. Seth Green voices Joker, and 97.6% of Green’s acting work has been in comedy. He’s got a funny voice, a funny way of replying, good snark, all that. It’s natural then that Joker is, like Firefly‘s Wash, a funny pilot, often cracking jokes and commenting light-heartedly about Commander Shepard’s actions outside of the spaceship. He’s both comic relief and a rock that keeps everybody soaring safely through the galaxy. Depending on how you play Mass Effect, that’s all he could be, too. Paul Shepard, however, was a good guy, an everyman, and took the time to talk to Joker, to listen to the sad story of his upbringing, to understand where the bitterness lining his jokes came from. And he kept coming back after every mission, to include him, to hear his thoughts…to make sure he was doing a-okay.

I can be sarcastic; I can make nearly anyone laugh; I can bottle everything up and do my job–because it’s my job–and resent things I have absolutely no control over, and I can dance around topics with the swiftest feet this side of the Atlantic Ocean. We both wield humor as armor and wear it well, fully, careful to show no gaps. Unfortunately, we don’t need to wear it all the time, but lack the strength to undress ourselves, to show our companions and comrades who we are, to sit quiet and still, in the buff, brittle and scared, ripe for the reaping. With his weakened legs, he can only go so far; with my damaged heart, so can I.

30 Days of Gaming, #4 – Your guilty pleasure game

Hands down, this would have to be Pokemon HeartGold and Pokemon White. I openly admit that this game series is very addicting, with so many pocket monsters to collect and raise, as well as tons of extra goodies to waste time on while slowly grinding your team to perfection. The throwback graphics hit home, and I dig that there’s a crazy amount of stats buried beneath every Pokemon, even with I myself don’t pay attention to such minutia. However, as a twenty-seven-year-old, recently married man, I can’t help but feel like, at times, I’m playing a kid’s game. Or something seriously twisted. Also, stuff like this doesn’t help:

So yeah, it’s a guilty pleasure. Always will be, especially as I continue to age. And I’ll keep playing, sure, but only when nobody’s looking.

30 Days of Gaming, #3 – A game that is underrated

This was a tough one to narrow down, and I’ll let slip the tidbit that I almost went with Chrono Cross for today’s 30 Days of Gaming topic. Like, it was a coin toss, only I didn’t have a coin handy and decided to go with the game that had the most lovable gargoyle ever. In that regards, Primal won through and through.

But what is Primal, you might understandably ask?

Other than a game I consider very underrated and overlooked, it’s the story of love, demons, and alternate planes. Jennifer Tate is dating Lewis, a tribal tattooed lead singer for a lame metal band, and everything is going peachy until a tall, shadowy man shows up at the Nexus nightclub one evening when Lewis and his mates are jammin’ and jivin’. Suddenly, the shadowy man reveals itself to be a freaky-deaky demon, attacks, and leaves both of them unconscious in an alley. Jen is moved to a hospital room where she is in a coma and given a fifty/fifty shot of making it. As she sleeps, a gargoyle named Scree slips into her room and separates her spirit from her body, claiming that he was sent to find her and needs her assistance. Together, they will travel to an alternate plane known as Oblivion to restore balance.

Yeah…it’s a crazy whacky opening, but at least it gets everything in place to get truly videogamey. I can’t help but imagine Joss Whedon approving of it though.

Primal is divided into roughly three aspects: exploration, combat, and puzzles. Naturally, the weakest of these three is combat, and one can’t, unfortunately, simply get by with button-mashing. It can be very frustrating, especially since combat is solely Jen’s responsibility; Scree turns into a statue when danger shows up. Jen can take on different demonic forms–Ferai, Undine, Wraith, and Djinn–and each have their ups and downs, but none really make anything easier. Once all enemies on screen are killed, Scree softens and is able to heal Jen’s wounds. 

Both characters can be controlled, and using Scree to hold a torch and scout ahead always comforted me because I knew nothing could hurt him. Search away, little stone buddy!

Like I mentioned though, the joy to be found in Primal sits not in fighting werewolves, but exploring the otherworldly planes, solving puzzles, and talking. Yes, there’s some great chatter here. Scree is voiced by Andreas Katsulas and Jen by Hudson Leick, and together, the two make one enthralling team. Scree is 99% seriously serious, and Jen plays the role of a sarcastic goth perfectly, bouncing off each other. She’d fit fine in a snooty book club consisting of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Morrigan from Dragon Age: Origins.

I’ve read that some consider Primal to be the British Ico. I don’t really get that comparison. Instead, I like to think of it as Tomb Raider With a Twist. You play as a strong, intelligent, well-capable woman searching for mysterious artifacts and trying to keep evil at bay. Sure, Jen does it for love, and Lara Croft does it because, well, it’s her job, but the two titles seem very similar to me. However, Primal‘s world and its characters are must more imagined, and I’d rather climb walls as a gargoyle than climb walls as an archaeologist. Oooooh snap!

So, yeah. That’s my pick–2003’s underrated Primal. Eight years later, it’s still an excellent, engrossing adventure. If you can find a used copy, grab it.

And now I will just keep refreshing the Internet, praying that one day it will spoil me all about that forthcoming Primal HD remake…

30 Days of Gaming, #2 – Your favorite character

I grew up in a small, New Jersey town known as Smithville, which is historic, quaint, and brimming with flesh-biting bugs in the summer. It’s the sort of place many know not, and I’m okay with that…mine forever more, as they say. I lived on a street that “ended” with two cul-de-sacs, and it was the kind of place where families raised their kids together at the same time, meaning I grew up with my neighbors’ kids at pretty much the same pace. We were all right around the same age, same grades, same what-have-yous. We hung out after school and on weekends, we went to planned BBQ parties, we fought with each other and made up, and had to deal with bullying and betrayal and boring bus stops in the morning. And through all of this was our parents, watching over, making amends, playing host to sleepovers and carpools, and one parent stands out to me especially in terms of today’s 30 Days of Gaming post: Mrs. B.

Mrs. B and her family lived directly across the street from my house. My family and hers were very close, as well as strangely similar in terms of kids; she had two daughters and a son, same as my mom and dad, and we were all pretty much four years apart too. We were destined to interact with each other. Anyways, Mrs. B worked the nights at the KayBee Toys in our local mall, and her son mentioned to me one day that she was able to get some great deals on the latest PlayStation games thanks to her employee discount. I believe he got Frogger 3D and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater that year for Christmas. Luckily, I was able to work out a deal between my mother and Mrs. B to obtain a copy of Suikoden, a game coming out shortly before Final Fantasy VII that impressed me greatly from a preview article in some long-lost gaming magazine. As a youngling, I didn’t purchase many games so the ones i bought had to matter. I don’t remember where I got the cash from, but I do remember handing it over to Mrs. B with boyish excitement. And then I waited, and waited, and waited, and finally the game came back to me with a nice little note, too.

Suikoden is a game I can talk about for many paragraphs, but we’re not here to talk about the game itself. Instead, a single character from it still lives in my head, falling down countless times, truly living up to his Star of Destiny, churning my stomach into knots. Yup, my favorite character is Gremio:

Servant to the McDohl family after one of Barbarossa Rugner’s Six Great Generals, Teo McDohl, saved his life, Gremio helped raise the general’s son Tir. He ended up playing both the role of a servant and a parent since Tir’s father was constantly away and his mother died some time after giving birth. He becomes a permanent party member for much of the beginning of the game as Tir escapes pursuit and begins to build his own rebellion army. At one point, Tir and company rescue a famous doctor from the prison operated by Milich Oppenheimer, another one of Barbarossa’s Six Great Generals. Before escaping, Milich traps everyone in a room and releases flesh-eating spores, which threaten to consume the entire party. Gremio is able to open the door, granting everyone freedom, but then locks himself in the room, afraid to let the spores get out. Here are his final words to Tir:

“Young Master, can you hear me? I’m sorry I can’t protect you any more … But now that you’ve grown up, you no longer need my protection. Young Master…You make me proud. I wish Master Teo could see you now. Young Master. I think it’s time to say goodbye. I can’t see anymore. Young Master. I’m proud of you. Promise me you’ll always follow your heart. That is my first, and final…request…”

In battle, if Tir’s health falls too low, Gremio will actually protect him from further damage by using his own body as a shield. Outside of battle, all the way to the end, he continued to protect his young master, no matter what the cost. It’s no wonder why Gremio is the Tenei Star (Heroic Star). What’s really sickening is that Milich can be recruited after all this to join Tir’s fight in the Gate Rune Wars.

Aerith’s death in Final Fantasy VII did not affect me as much as Gremio’s did. Both were surprising, sure, but his more so. It did not feel like a “great character death” sort of moment, just another prisoner rescue mission. I even remember loading him up with the best items before getting ready to leave the prison, only to not have lost just him, but everything he was carrying. Tir already loses his father early on in the game, and then shortly after he loses the man he called both father and friend. Suikoden is all about tragic losses actually.

I didn’t find out that Gremio could be resurrected before the final battle for many months. To do so, you simply have to recruit all 107 other Stars of Destiny, which, at the time when there was little Internet access and only magazine features to go off of, was very difficult. But I did it, and seeing him and Tir reunite just as the emotional cup overflowed really cemented his potency in my mind. It only made defeating Barbarossa all the more sweet.

Gremio is the sort of character easy to bond with. He’s caring, careful, and stubborn where it counts. He also makes a mean special stew. Thanks, Mrs. B, for letting me get to know him, if only for a little while.