FriYAY— August 25th, 2017
This weekend’s game: Secret of Mana!

The year was 1989. I’d moved to a small farm town after having lived in “The Big City” since birth. Skyscrapers, pigeons at the park, loud fire engines…all were ushered into the past, as I found myself starting anew at a new school surrounded by corn fields as far as the eye could see.
This was my new life. The school placed me into a program called GATE for gifted kids, children too advanced for the everyday curricula who found it boring. I didn’t think this was cool at the time and it didn’t earn me any new friends. Most days I ate my sandwiches alone, or climbed atop the playground’s watchtower to see how far those endless fields stretched.
One day, another new girl came to the school. I glanced from the watchtower and saw her hanging upside-down from the monkey bars, arms folded, with her blond hair dangling in the breeze. I’d heard this new girl was brilliant at math, and took her for a fellow tomboy as soon as I saw her.
“Hey!” I called.
“Yeah?”
“The other kids say you’re weird!” I blurted out, unexpectedly.
“I know you are, but what am I?” she responded.
A couple of seconds passed as we stared at each other, confused. Suddenly, I just burst into laughter.
“The other kids say I’m weird too! Do you want to be my friend?”
She eyed me warily and smirked, then came down off of the monkey bars.
We went up into the watchtower together and counted the hawks in the sky, made up tales about the scarecrow actually being a ghost. And we found that later, we both had GATE class, because she also had placed at an advanced level.
Suddenly the two weird girls, branded heretics for abandoning plastic Barbies for dinosaurs, robots, and Game Boys formed a fast alliance.
It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.
Denise and I hurtled through the 90’s with our Trapper Keepers, our Gushers, slurping Hi-Cs and pretending to be Ninja Turtles. After school, we’d do our math homework and watch Star Trek: The Next Generation or play Nintendo games.
Fast forward to 1993: the year Dini (my nickname for Denise) got Secret of Mana for the Super Nintendo.
I was at her house and we had finished our homework.
“There are these cool things called RPGs that my friend told me about,” she said, not knowing she would start my lifelong addiction.
“What’s an RPG?”
“You go on adventures with swords and magic, stuff like that. There’s a lot of reading. I think you’ll like it. Wanna try? It’s two players.”
Dini popped the cartridge in and I took the second controller. Somehow I ended up as the pink-haired Sprite doing battle magic (Eventually I figured out healing was not my forte). We had so much fun fighting enemies, solving puzzles, and riding around on a giant cat-like dragon named Flammie.
We went on to play other RPGs (mostly Final Fantasy) and read Robert Jordan novels. In general, we were born to be nerds. As time goes on, through thick and thin, no matter what parts of the country we move to, we somehow come back together again to discuss our adventures, and it’s almost like no time has passed at all.
In fact, it felt a little familiar when I got a buzz on my phone and saw a text from Dini about Secret of Mana’s upcoming re-release on PS4.
And, just like the old days, we’re definitely doing multiplayer.
