Dreaming on

Hello, dear Patrons. I hope you're all well!

I can always tell when something I've been playing has had a profound impact on me in one way or another, because I inevitably start dreaming about it. This has been the case ever since… I think Klax on the Atari Lynx, where I used to fantasise about the female voice that went "ooh!" and "yeah!" whenever you got 4- or 5-block Klaxes, but I've been particularly conscious of it recently.

The most notable examples of this happening in recent memory have been Final Fantasy XIV, where my dreams would largely consist of simply playing out fights I had done a hundred times already — perhaps just my mind reiterating how to do them to ensure I didn't mess them up — and, most recently, Fate/stay night, current Cover Game on MoeGamer.

Since Fate/stay night is a pure visual novel, there's no actual "gameplay" for me to dream about, so instead I find myself imagining the characters, the settings and the things that go on in that world. Interestingly, I tend to find that these dreams aren't simply reliving the plot of the novel that I've explored to date, but rather they consist of me just spending time with the characters, hanging out and having a relatively "normal" existence with them — well, as "normal" a time as you can expect in a world where magic is real and summoned heroic spirits battle to the death over the Holy Grail, of course.

This kind of thing going on in my subconscious is, to me, testament to the game's strong writing and characterisation more than anything. For my subconscious mind to be in a position where it is able to imagine these characters outside their normal narrative contexts and behaving in a consistent manner suggests that their depiction in the game is sufficient to give me a fully rounded picture of who they are, how they behave and what they do.

I've found my mind particularly drawn to Saber in these dreams in preference to the other main heroines Rin Tohsaka and Sakura Matou. This isn't necessarily because Saber is my "favourite" — I like her a lot, particularly her unintentional deadpan humour seen outside of the Fate route — but she has certainly left a strong impact on me, perhaps because she's such a constant presence throughout all routes of the game, not just the one that focuses on her.

This isn't to say I don't like the others, mind you. I'm a particular fan of Rin, since she not only embodies a number of character traits and visual tropes I like, she was actually the originator of some of them. Most notably, she's arguably the origin of the tsundere trope, and her magical skirt/Schrodinger's pantsu/grade-S zettai ryouiki combo is formidable, to say the least. And, of course, there's her defenseless anus, but, well, everyone knows about that by now, I'm sure.

I'm on track to finish Heaven's Feel by the end of this week and get the last of the articles up on the site, then I can relax a bit! Fate/stay night has been a long journey for sure, but one I'm definitely glad I've taken; I can see why it's regarded as such a classic, and I'm now all the more disappointed it's never had an official English release!