Would you believe that I used to hate fantasy? The entire genre used to be nothing more than cheesy pixie stories and endless retellings of the same tired premise. (Some Japanese fantasy is still like that:'The Demon King has Risen!') It makes a far cry from the knife-earred, Dovah-slaying, Urukhi beheading fantasy champion that I am today. Nowadays, I can't get enough of the genre, I vacuum it up into my gaping maw like a The great Pit of Carkoon (Okay, I'm confusing references here. but you get the point.) Perhaps you may be wondering," how did you get from A to B? From abject hate to unreserved love?" Huh? You're not asking that? You don't care? Well it's my blog and I'm going to tell you anyway. It all, predictably enough, has to do with gaming.
When I was in secondary school, and still possessed something resembling a social life, my pop culture sphere ran entirely separate of swords and sorcery. (I'm referring to the concept, not series.) However, my time amongst others did run adjacent to the release of a particularly important game in the fantasy genre; a game that I, through much eavesdropping and deduction, came to know as 'Oblivion: The Elder Scrolls'. Everyone was talking about it,(Or specifically the 'Knights of the Nine' expansion, but i didn't realize that until years later.) and all I could do was play 'Mr. out-of-the-loop', which I had grown rather good at during my years at school.
I remember spending entire lunch breaks watching some of these people engage in dialogue with each other without ever seeming to say anything coherent. It was all 'Alyieds' and 'Divines' and all of that jargon. It couldn't be any further from the kinds of gaming experiences that I coveted, such as the ever-popular, GTA. Vice City was my... well, vice, during these years. Why should I care about high fantasy when I can care about making sure the Tommy Vercetti manged t- okay, I was too oblivious to care about that story either, but I loved the 'life-simulator' aspect of GTA games and I didn't have space in my gaming life for anything else. Fast forward 4 or 5 years.
At this new point I was an active reader of a great many gaming trade magazines. I really enjoyed the enthusiast angle of things and some of these articles had exclusives on upcoming titles years in advance. Given how sorry-of-a-state TV gaming shows were, trade magazines were the only in to the world of gaming. One of my personal favourites was 'the Official Xbox Magazine'. (Likely something to do with the fact that I had an Xbox.) Their staff was witty and dry (Being mostly British.) and their content expanded my view on gaming. It was through them that I discovered the definition of 'DLC', what 'vaporware' meant, all about the 'indie market' and even what YouTube was. (More on that later.) They would also be the ones that were ultimately responsible for my fantasy love affair. (That sounded better in my head.)
First, I should establish that I was a huge fan of Fallout. Before TV gaming shows died completely, I saw one show (Which was terrible) that showed off a brief segment of some early gameplay in Fallout 3. I remember watching the player kill a raider and then- steal their clothes! (Literally, that was what did it for me.) I was blown away. Customization in games had always been limited to what small selection of outfits that the developers had slapped together for you; remember 'Vice City' was my favourite game for a while, that game only had 4 or 5 outfits. Upon seeing this my mind opened up to a world where you could play as anyone, and that was my introduction into the concept of Role Playing games (Never underestimate the power of customization options.) Obviously, I ended up playing Fallout 3 religiously. revelling in the broken world, the battered people, and my chaotic place within it all. I loaded up that game so many time that the intro slides were ingrained into my brain. So imagine my excitement when I saw the name I had burnt onto my retinas 'Bethesda' plastered on the front of an OXM magazine with the text: 'New game!'. Such a shame then, that that text was on front of a fantastical roaring viking rather than the post apocalyptic wastelander I was expecting.
My disappointment drove me away from the several page spread on the new game and into all the other articles. Articles I read two or three time over. (Hey, I only said that I had something resembling a life.) Eventually I was out of reading material, but I still had several pages in the middle. And so I sucked up my pride and read the article on the upcoming fantasy game for the new year: Skyrim. And since then I cannot readily recall a moment that I performed a more drastic 180. This game seemed to be everything I was looking out of my new favourite genre, it had a huge in-depth world, strange new lore and an inspired levelling system.The more I read, the more I started to see Fallout as kids-stuff, this was the real reality escapism I was craving. Visually the game looked stunning, and I'm not talking fidelity I mean from an artistic direction; the focus on the vast icy tundras truly captured the mood of an arctic expanse. I felt the chilliness of the game through the pages. I feel head-over-heels for Skyrim the moment I read that article, and I needed to know literally everything about the game.
Luckily the article came with a helpful timeline which helped me know what I could turn to in order to track the history of the franchise. (And also helped me clear up that Oblivion: The Elder Scrolls misconception.) I also found a site online by some incredibly eager fan who covered every little bit of news that ever dropped for the game. Through this I learnt about all the races, the setting, the combat and the monsters. Everything new I learnt just built me up even more. One day there was a news drop that werewolves would be in the game, my fan site then went on to talk about Wearbears in 'Morrowind: Bloodmoon' which led to me searching this up for myself on YouTube. That was the first time I ever went to YouTube in order to search for something specific, but it wouldn't be the last. You see, the wait for Skyrim blew into a frenzy when E3 rolled around and we all got our first glimpse at the actual, honest-to-goodness gameplay.
I was blown out of the water. The game looked and played better than I could have imagined from looking at those screenshots over and over again. Somehow it didn't matter that this was fantasy anymore, the power fantasy was all I cared about. They showed the protagonist summon lighting to knock a dragon out of the sky, it doesn't get any cooler than that! The moment we saw the reveal date in that final trailer, I literally marked my calendar, this was a game that I just couldn't play soon enough.
Although, like any gaming addict, I just couldn't stand it. Days turned into weeks turned into months and we were still an age away for 11/11/11. Waiting wasn't doing it anymore. In the past I used to bide my time by playing similar games or playing through the entire franchise up until then like I did with every new Assassins Creed game. (What the heck was wrong with me?) But as I have explained, I had no 'similar' game, this would be my first fantasy. So i needed to get one. And to do that I used an old tool that had helped in the past. I returned to YouTube, but this time I was armed with knowledge I had received from another edition of OXM; something called a 'Let's Play'. One of issues detailed a how-to guide for making a 'Let's Play' and I decided to see if anyone had done so on YouTube; perhaps on any of the previous Elder Scrolls games. Obviously, I didn't come away empty handed. There were thousands of hours worth of online content and I had enough free time to consume it all. I'll always remember that summer alongside those six weeks wherein I watched every episode of Kim Possible back-to-back. (That actually happened and I'm not ashamed.)
It wasn't until I had bought Morrowind and Oblivion and pre-ordered Skyrim (One of only 3 preorders I have ever done.) that I looked at myself and realized what I had become. Suddenly I was an RPG addict who had 3 of the biggest fantasy games in my collection, I was a fantasy fan. This may seem like a benign revelation to you, but to me it was a huge paradigm shift. This was a great many years before I discovered my penchant for storytelling, but I always had a solid grasp of the things I liked and the things I didn't; and I always liked to have a logical reason for the things I didn't like. (So un-hipster of me, I know.) High fantasy had forever been the realm of shoddy storytelling for me, forgettable characters, paint-by-number plot and unrelatable circumstances. It wasn't until I gave it a try that I realized how wrong I was.
A good fantasy isn't divorced from the 'real world'. Like any great piece of fiction, a good fantasy serves as a microcosm of the world we live in the greater struggles of man. When you strip all the trappings of the modern day, you are left with a human laid bare. All of the greed and selfishness is laid amongst the generosity and kindness and they seem to become one and the same. It may sound like I'm talking in circles, but I find this is what happens whenever I become resonant with something so special to me. One day I will sit down, compose myself and detail exactly why fantasy storytelling is so important to me, but until that day comes all I can offer is this recommendation. If you see nothing you recognize in fantasy and find that is your barrier to connect, stop looking for something to relate to and see if you find something to aspire to instead.
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