Slight spoilers and huge wall of text. You've been warned.
Stage set: It's 2006. A normal teenage boy (Normal as far as he knows, anyway. Doesn't everyone wear inch-thick glasses, pocket protectors and have massive acne problems because their skin doesn't get enough sun?) is browsing the internet for anime to watch. He's just finished Shigofumi and wants something else that has psycological elements. He pulled up a list, sorted it by genre, closed his eyes, blindfolded his mouse, spun it around a few times and then clicked. A Shingetsutan Tsukihime page came up.
The boy went with Lady Luck's decision and watched the anime. For some strange reason, it was actually one of the better animu I.. Er, he.. One of the better anime he had watched at the time. But it felt like something was missing. Surely someone as impulsive as Arcueid wouldn't just leave someone she really liked. Surely Yumizuka wouldn't just give up on him. Surely a monster such as Chaos couldn't be defeated so easily. So I went scouting for more story. I mean, the boy. A sequel, manga, anything. Something had to be out there.
And something was.
It didn't take long for the boy to discover a visual novel with the same name. But of course, it was in Japanese. A quick search engine query later he had a Mirror Moon translation in his cyberphysical hand. He'd had a bit of experience with visual novels from Ever17, which his friend had loaned him a copy of and he thoroughly enjoyed, and he was more than willing to experience such enjoyment again. Thus did the boy begin to walk the path of rabid fandom.
He played the novel. No, that's inaccurate. He played the hell out of the novel. In fact, he refused to to much else but read and sleep until he'd finished it. Things started to make more sense, and he grew annoyed at the odd ways the anime had strayed away from the original story. However, it was all the more liberating because he had been chained down by the limited length of the anime.
Completely freed from his shackles by the end of the novel, he moved on to a game called Melty Blood. Unfortunately, three endings and a hard drive failure later, the game rests unfinshed in his CD stand, awaiting the reinstallation that is to come.
The boy went through a length of depression after losing his only friend. That is, his only friend.. Other than the one he borrowed the.. Yeah. Anyway, He spent many a day in grief, crying while he hugged the mangled corpse of the old two hundred gigabyte hard drive.
To make an already long story a bit longer and deviate from the point even more, the boy built a whole new PC, replacing the old drive with a bonus of fifty gigabytes for about half the price, and he even met up with a five hundred gigabyte external drive off of a dating service called Newegg. They hit it off well and their relationship is still progressing further and further with each passing day.
That all aside, the boy went around looking for more Type-Moon projects. He discovered Fate/stay, but refused to play it until the translation was complete, so he watched the anime and then resigned himself to lurking endlessly on IRC channels with the small hope he might be able to help somehow. The chance came eventually, but he blew it because he was passed out on the keyboard due to the crash after last night's 'hardcore gaming' session.
When he came to, he mumbled something about needing four more levels and began nursing his waffleface. The call for help had ended and voice insertion progressed as normal. Suddenly a few days later, the patch was completed, and he jumped on it.
He had the game finished in less than a week and was left with nothing to do because a murderous squirrel had chewed through his cable line a few days before and Comcast was taking forever to get someone out to fix it. They proceeded to charge him cable fees for the month he was without internet. He appealed it, of course; he didn't have any service and it was their damn fault for not getting someone out to fix it. But they said it was somehow his fault, and charged him for it anyway.
During this appeal time, he found another game called Battle Moon Wars. He's currently still playing it, albeit slowly since it's so damn long and contains spoilers for Fate/hollow ataraxia, which hasn't been fully translated yet (to my knowledge, anyway. I'm too tired to look into it right now).
A month and a half passed; it was then January of 2009. Ferios--I mean, no, the boy. Actually more of a man by that point. Anyway, the young man had just recieved his Tsukihime disk back from the friend he loaned it to (the same one that had loaned him Ever17, actually). It's more accurate to say that his friend had put it on the young man's desk (or so he claims) when he brought it back because the young man was not in the house when his friend came over. Unfortunately, a psycho cat had other ideas about where CDs should be stored.
The young man came home, lazily shrugging out of his jacket and kicking off his shoes as he went over toward the computer. He heard a snap and froze in place, slowly lifting his foot up from the ground. Horror flooded over him, for he had just stepped on and broken his favorite visual novel of all time.
He quickly browsed over to eBay and snagged a new copy without really stopping to read product details. To his delight, the package that he unknowingly bought was actually the release that contained both the PLUS disk and Kagetsu Tohya in addition to the original game, Tsukibako. He snatched up translations for both and played them in the order written above. In fact, he finished the main story of Kagetsu (and thoroughly rewrote a terrible and largely incorrect walkthrough for it) just last weekend.
If you've read this far, I have to applaud your diligence. As of right now the young man is spending his days honing his skills in Act Cadenza while he gloomily awaits the release of Sacchin's arc that still hasn't made it into any of the fan disks. Sad face. And no, he still hasn't gotten around to reading the manga yet. |