Fan:Digimon Legacies


 * Following this prelude to the story, see Episode Zero of Digimon Legacies ||||

Digimon Legacies

Prologue A Mind Set For Digimon Takato wasn’t mine to control, and I had to accept that little factoid, or suffer for it. The game wasn’t the best I’d ever played, but it also wasn’t a lot more to deal with than I could handle. I couldn’t get it right, lately, and I had to have a different sort of mindset ready to go in order to think about what came next, and it wasn’t my own world I was concerned with; it was the digital world! Okay, so maybe, in a weird way, the digital worlds are my worlds, but I wasn’t about to let them know that, because whenever they looked at me as a gaijin, a foreigner; an alien, something amazing happened. They believed in the extraordinary things I said I could do, and when I did them, it was because I knew I could, and because my friends, called the digimon, were there beside me, giving me their blessing, so to speak, to let me know it was okay for me to change their world in the way I set out to. I was afraid that the last time I played this Gameboy game wouldn’t be enough, but then I remembered that if I wanted to develop one myself, for the digimon I called my friends, I was going to have to do a lot more play testing, to get the money and the knowhow to develop the pieces I needed for my very own digital world.

I liked the way I looked, in this game, and I started to imagine a world where I could change things just as I needed to, and it frustrated me, then, because every time I would test out a piece of my gamesets, I would change it in a way I didn’t like, because I already knew the puzzle pieces to the world, so I didn’t modify them like a virgin playtester would, so I decided; I needed some allies and friends, here in the human world, to help me build this digital world just the way I wanted to.

Henry, Rika and Takato weren’t the only playable characters in the one I was testing out, but I’d lost interest in that series of Digimon a while back, and I decided that I’d abandon the game I was testing out, for a friend of mine, called VaiaCorps., so that I could focus more on my friends that actually wanted something real from me.

It occurred to me that if I gave my understanding of the digital worlds to companies like VaiaCorps., I might be feeding the enemy just what they deserved; a playtester who could break the digicrap mechanics in their engines, that were only designed to make life harder for players like me, without adding anything to the game that would make it more fun: A challenge for the sake of just making the game tougher to get through, wasting a player’s time, was as useless as it got, here in this world, so I made sure to screw up their system with the way I played, so those things didn’t work right anymore.

They weren’t really all that great a company, this VaiaCorps., as I called them, but then I realized something. I didn’t much like the gaming companies, and if I’d chosen one to publish my game, or to get other developers to help me work on it, they’d ruin it, just to make a buck and I don’t like the idea of my games getting ruined, just because someone wants to possess them so badly, because really, I love the part best when it becomes someone else’s game, because they love to play it, and the game changes for him or her so strangely, so wonderfully, that it becomes something else entirely, and I can scarcely recognize it, and I do, and because it’s only a trial copy, they get a whole new set of thrills when they open the plastic wrap on their new digimon adventure.

I’m getting ahead of myself. I actually didn’t want playtesters just yet, I wanted real live players, and plus or minus a through centuries in the digital world, I knew that the engine itself was only just nearing completion, and once it was prepared, the rest of the game would build itself with the organisms chosen to run it.

A digital download would have worked fine, for ordinary purposes, but you don’t get near the same excitement as when a mysterious package comes in the mail, and it’s got a whole new digimon adventure on it, for yours truly, your adventure that is, and mine wasn’t going to be bandied down to the point of having torrent support for the initial release, just because the download was so massive.

I didn’t at all feel bad about what the disk would do to their computers, either, because I knew that once this game hit them, and I’d searched long and hard for these players, digging through their hard drives incognito, finding all the games they liked to play best; even connecting to all their different playing stations set up on their wireless network, and giving their memory cards a good look see. These players I found, they’re the best. The best of the best. I can’t wait until they find the others, when they’re ready for them, but for now, these four are going to get my game in the mail, and they’ve been waiting for it, because I’ve sent them various sample files, each of a completely different game engine, and they’ve torn it up, not knowing just why I was giving them these sorts of games, when really, they were just lobbying themselves to get selected for the play testing sweepstakes I had going up on my forum page.

They did it, though. They found me, and I found them. I’m so excited I can’t even think straight! Did you know, that you should only ever think straight the day you die? You’ll think, I’m gunna die! I’m dying! I’m dead! And then that’s it for you. But if you never even think straight, and you can get high when you want to get high, and get digital when you want to go supplemental, then the whole infinite universe of digital worlds is gunna open up for you, just like mine did, they day I thought I was gunna die, and I was reborn: I became something else entirely.

I’m not gunna tell you my name, just now, because it’s not even a secret to those four you’ll get to know, here, in their bran new digimon adventure! Here we go!