It's a bird! It's a plane! It's...

I'll admit I was skeptical at first about watching the Spider-Man movie back in 2002. I was under the impression that superheroes were for little kids, and I wasn't a little kid--I was 11 years old! Double digits! But my older brother wanted to see it for his birthday, and my parents weren't yet comfortable with leaving me at home alone for a period of time as long as three hours, so they took me with them. I was expecting it to be cheesier than a stuffed crust pizza and a nacho combined, and at that time in my life, I thought cheesy things were for “children” (except in the literal sense of the word “cheesy,” of course). I despised the word “child,” and never permitted anyone to apply it to me. From my point of view, it was a word to describe a single-digit kid who was fully dependent on his parents for everything. I wasn’t like that—I was independent! Well, except for the meals, home, and occasional transportation that my parents provided. But never mind those things.

 To my great surprise, the movie was well-made and able to be taken seriously. And, of course, as an 11-year-old boy, I loved all of the action scenes. Thus began my love for superhero movies. I’ve never read the comic books from which the heroes originated, but to I’ve always loved action movies, and superhero movies are a very special type of action movie, one that appeals to my nonconformist ideals—one man who’s different from everyone else becomes something greater and conquers evil. For a while, though, I felt that Spider-Man was unique among superheroes—all the other superheroes were still for little kids. I watched all three Spider-Man movies and liked them. I never watched any of the X-Men movies. I only watched Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer after it came out on DVD and someone gave it to our family for Christmas one year; I still haven’t seen the first Fantastic Four film because I was unimpressed by the former. I saw Hancock in theaters and thought it was okay, but not spectacular. I once saw the Hulk movie from 2003 on Cable TV, and that was a disappointing waste of my time. After the Spider-Man films, the next series of superhero movies I really loved were the string of interconnected Marvel movies beginning with Iron Man in 2008, including Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger last year, and ultimately leading up to The Avengers this year. What made The Avengers great was that it did a great job of balancing the multiple main characters, using humor, and having a good plot in addition to the awesome action scenes.

Of course, at this point, some superhero movie enthusiasts must be saying: “Hey, wait a minute, what about the recent Batman films? Those were awesome!” Well, I didn’t see Batman Begins or The Dark Knight until last year. I’d told a friend of mine that I hadn’t seen them, and as the most serious Batman fan I know, she was appalled. She held a party at her house just so that I could see them, and I’m glad she did. I was thoroughly impressed by everything from the plot and character development to the soundtrack and visuals. I liked it so much that I ended up going with my friend and several other people to the midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises. I generally like Marvel superheroes more than DC, but Batman is exceptionally cool.

The Greatest Adventure in the History of Basic Cable

I don't have a great memory, but I remember for sure one thing I did on November 1, 2005. Well, maybe two--I probably went to a drug store to buy some candy due to the after-Halloween sales. Three, if you include eating some of said candy. But the candy doesn't matter. I was 14 years old at the time, which meant that children’s shows were no longer cool, cartoons were still enjoyable but embarrassing to be caught watching, and live action TV shows were still boring. Or so I thought. I’d watched some shows casually before, if I was bored, my friends weren’t available to play, and I didn’t feel like playing video games, but I’d never seriously followed one until that day. November 1, 2005 was the day when I saw my first episode of House, M.D., "TB Or Not TB." House’s combination of deep characters, clever and surprising humor, and suspense had me hooked right away.

House became the first show that I watched on a regular basis with my mom and my brother (my dad doesn’t watch much TV, aside from NHL games). The next was Psych, a witty comedy-mystery show starring the brilliant but lazy Shawn Spencer and his uptight, book-smart best friend, Burton “Gus” Guster. Shawn, the son of a cop, has developed incredible observational skills and photographic memory, but lacks the discipline and obedience to be a police officer; instead, he pretends to be a psychic and operates a detective agency with Gus, and is often hired by the police department of Santa Barbara, California to consult on murder cases. My first episode was “Woman Seeking Dead Husband: Smokers Okay, No Pets.” Psych’s episode titles are always fun like that.

For a few years, I only watched House and Psych. In the summer of 2009, we kept seeing commercials for White Collar while we were watching Psych, and it looked moderately interesting, so we decided to watch the pilot, and we all loved it. White Collar became the first show I watched from the very beginning. Soon after White Collar, I got into Castle starting with “Vampire Weekend.” At Christmas that year, my brother received Season 1 of Chuck on DVD, and I ended up watching that and loving it, so I started watching Season 3 when it was broadcast the following month. Later in 2010, I started watching The Good Guys. I thought it was brilliant, and so did my mom and my brother, but apparently we were in the minority—the show was cancelled after only one season. This marked the first time I’d suffered the disappointment of seeing a show I liked get cancelled. I imagined this must have been what it was like for Firefly fans who watched the show when it was first on TV. I don’t remember precisely at what point I got into Lie To Me, but I liked that show, and it was cancelled, too. Chuck came close to being cancelled a number of times over the course of its run, and it ended up lasting five seasons.

Since we liked The Good Guys so much, we decided to start watching Burn Notice since it was made by the same people. It’s a bit short on humor compared to the other shows we watch, but we like smart characters, and the cast of Burn Notice is brilliant. The latest show I’ve gotten into was Doctor Who, which has replaced Firefly as my favorite TV show of all time and Star Wars as my favorite sci-fi series. At some point I’ll probably write a post devoted entirely to Doctor Who, but not today.

Big Hair Game

I got a GameCube for Christmas in 2003 along with a few different games. My parents actually messed up a bit on Christmas morning—they wanted me to open any and all non-GameCube-related presents first, then the system, and then the games; however, they’d forgotten which presents had what wrapping paper, so they ended up having me open Luigi’s Mansion before anything else related to the GameCube. I knew immediately that they wouldn’t have bought the game without buying the system, and I was ecstatic. I’d been wanting one ever since it first came out over two years earlier. That was something my parents were always intentional about—they never bought new technology right when it came out so that my brother and I would learn to be patient and be grateful for what we had.

However, I after the initial excitement of getting a new system wore off, it was really a bit disappointing. There really weren’t that many good games for it, and I still played my Nintendo 64 and occasionally my Sega Genesis even though I had it. But then my brother discovered Tales of Symphonia via Nintendo Power, and everything changed. Tales of Symphonia was a more traditional role-playing game than Fire Emblem, with quests and side-quests as well as free roaming capabilities rather than a strict progression from one chapter to the next. It focused on a central cast of nine characters. Lloyd Irving, the main hero, was very book-dumb but possessed very good instincts. Genis Sage was a half-elf boy genius and Lloyd’s best friend. Colette Brunel was a dumb blonde, a close friend of Lloyd, and the Chosen One for the regeneration of the world of Sylvarant. Kratos Aurion was [SPOILERS] Lloyd’s father and a 4,000-year-old angel. Professor Raine Sage was Genis’s half-elf older sister and served as a sort of mother figure for the entire party. Sheena Fujibayashi, a glamorous female ninja and summoner, was originally sent over from the world of Tethe’alla to assassinate Colette, but her compassionate nature prevented her from completing her mission. Presea Combatir was [SPOILERS] a 28-year-old woman who was the subject of a 16-year experiment that stopped her aging process and subdued her emotions. Zelos Wilder was the womanizing Chosen One of Tethe’alla who hid his true intelligence, cynicism, and self-loathing beneath layers of false carefree attitude and artificial self-absorbedness. Regal Bryant was [SPOILERS] the president of a large company as well as a remorseful prisoner who was forced to kill the woman he loved, Presea’s younger sister, after an experiment turned her into a monster.

Tales of Symphonia was the first game since Jet Force Gemini for the Nintendo 64 in which my brother and I could cooperate in the main part of the game, so we did. The first time we played through the game, I was content to let him roam around the over-world, towns, and dungeons, and only have to worry about the battles for my part. However, after the first time, I don’t think my brother and I ever played through the whole thing together again. After the first time, I wanted to be Player 1. My brother never wanted to be Player 2 for me, so I was on my own. I ended up liking it so much that I didn’t mind playing by myself. I’ve played through the whole game over and over, at least 15 times all the way through.

At various points while I was playing through it, my dad walked by and commented on it, calling it “Big Hair Game” because six of the nine main characters and many of the non-player characters have remarkable styles and/or colors of hair. He seemed vaguely interested, so one time I asked him if he’d like to play it, and he said yes. I guided him through it, and he has since played through it at least twice with minimal assistance. After my dad played through it, my mom decided she wanted to play, too, and I guided her all the way through it. This makes Tales of Symphonia the only serious video game (Mario Party, Mario Tennis, Mario Kart, and the multiplayer mode of Donkey Kong 64 don’t count) to be played by my parents. Now we all call it "Big Hair Game," and we occasionally make references to it at home.

Obtaining the Fire Emblem

Before long, my brother discovered another game through Nintendo Power magazine: Fire Emblem. It was made by Intelligent Systems, the same company that made Advance Wars. Its gameplay is also very similar to that of Advance Wars, although there are some key differences. First of all, the plot is more serious and the character development is deeper. These are the primary reasons why I keep playing and replaying it and the other games in the Fire Emblem series to this day. Secondly, unlike Advance Wars, it doesn’t have a modern setting—Fire Emblem takes place in a fantasy world with knights, kings, nobles, magic, and dragons. One thing about the Fire Emblem games that makes each new one refreshing, though, is that they don’t stick with the same world or the same characters in game after game; they usually make two games for each world and its associated cast. Third, the commander of each army takes part in the battle as a unit in his or her own right in Fire Emblem. In fact, all allied units and a few enemy units are unique characters themselves. If you lose a unit, it dies and cannot be resurrected by any means, so keeping your units alive is much more important in Fire Emblem than in Advance Wars. Units have different classes—for example, Mages cast nature-related spells with ice, wind, fire, and lightning and tend to be fairly well-rounded while Knights wield lances and tend to be slow but heavily resistant to physical attacks. Units can change class once; the change gives stat bonuses and usually allows the character to wield a new type of weapon. Additionally, units grow stronger as they battle in the fashion of a typical role-playing game with experience points and level-ups. The maximum level for every character of every class is 20. It’s possible to change classes starting at level 10, but it’s usually beneficial to reach level 20 in a character’s original class before changing classes because if he changes classes early and reaches level 20 in a promoted class before the end of the game, he ceases to improve where he still would have been able to improve further if he’d waited and gained more levels in his original class.

Like Advance Wars and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance before it, Fire Emblem was a game I could not share with my brother, so we each had our own copy. And like Advance Wars, I found a forum online centered around Fire Emblem. It was called Fire Emblem Fusion. Since there were no COs in Fire Emblem, I just called myself “Kyle” this time. Continuing the pattern I established on AWB, I typed my messages in orange all the time. On Fire Emblem Fusion’s welcome board, I introduced myself as “the orange man.” However, it turned out that Fire Emblem Fusion already had an orange man. His username was “SwordsAreShiney,” erroneously spelled with an “e” between the “n” and the “y” of “Shiney,” but strangely, that didn’t bother me. In real life he was a Canadian guy a year or two older than me. He and I developed an instantaneous but short-lived rivalry that suddenly reversed itself into a close friendship based on the color orange, and thus orange became my favorite color in general rather than just my favorite Advance Wars color. SwordsAreShiney, or SAS for short, led me to a different Fire Emblem forum, Fire Emblem Planet.

When I joined Fire Emblem Planet or FEP, much like when I joined AWB, it was just starting. SAS was a Global Moderator on FEP, so I had a friend in power from the beginning. Once for my birthday, he made the entire forum bright orange and kept it that way for most of the day despite heavy backlash from most users. In a reversal of the events of AWB, my brother joined after I did. Some of the people from AWB, mostly people I’d been friends with, joined FEP as well.

Through FEP, I learned that the Fire Emblem I’d played was actually the seventh game in the series although it’d been the first to be translated into languages other than Japanese. The sixth game in the series was a chronological sequel to the seventh, and it centered around Roy, who remains one of my favorite characters from Super Smash Brothers Melee. So I got myself a copy of the sixth game and started playing it. Some things about it were very difficult because I couldn’t read any Japanese at the time, and I still can’t read most of it because the Japanese use their own alphabets, called hiragana and katakana, more than they use Chinese characters which they call kanji. I can’t even read all of the kanji that they do use because although I do study Chinese, reading isn’t my strong point. Still, the game mechanics of Fire Emblem 6 were mostly the same as those of Fire Emblem 7, so I managed to get through it. At some point after I started playing Fire Emblem 6, I became aware of translation patches for the game that were being distributed on the Internet and got one of those, too, which immensely increased my enjoyment of the game because like Fire Emblem 7, it had a compelling plot and deep character development. Later, I played the eighth Fire Emblem game before it was officially translated, and I liked it quite a bit. However, when the translations were finished and the eighth game started to be sold in stores, I found that I’d liked it better in Japanese—it seemed like they didn’t even try to make the characters realistic and likeable, and I’m pretty sure the story and setting were thrown together in an afternoon by the laziest guy on staff at Intelligent Systems. Some members on FEP didn’t care about these things, though, because there were a few differences in game mechanics that people liked. However, the people at Intelligent Systems were apparently intelligent enough to realize that Fire Emblem 8 wasn’t as good as the other games in the series, so they never made another game with the world and characters of the eighth game. Fire Emblem 9, which featured an all-new world with its own characters, also came out while I was still active on FEP. I never got the ninth game in Japanese, but fortunately, it was a return to the previous level of quality in story and character development, so the English version was just fine. The star of Fire Emblem 9, Ike, replaced Roy as one of the playable characters in the next Super Smash Brothers game, Brawl, and I don’t mind that.