I met one of my best friends from high school because of our mutual love for Fire Emblem games. We met in school and I just happened to see him playing Fire Emblem (FE 7) on his game boy advance. After talking to him about the game and some of the other Fire Emblem titles I realized that he like the games for the same reason that I did, its story and characterization. Other people become obsessed with the “numbers game” because at its heart much of the gameplay resides around luck and numbers and a little bit of strategy. There is, however, so much more to the games like the character growth seen in Ross (Fire Emblem 8) and how he changes throughout the story. Even though Fire Emblem games are one player my friend and I jointly made the strategic decisions while we both enjoyed the story of some of the Japanese only previous game titles that were fan translated online.

Now that I am in college and can no longer see my friend we can’t jointly play Fire Emblem games anymore. But that doesn’t stop us from using games to hang out. Now that the new Monster Hunter game is out we can skype each other and start playing online. More importantly Monster Hunter is a game series that encourages cooperation when people team up to bring down huge monsters. Monster Hunter does shove some people away from each other though since if someone is really bad online then no one will want to play with them.

Patrick Anderson and I also bonded over a game when we played Super Smash Bros for Wii U in a teams tournament in Billings and won the whole thing. That’s not to say we weren’t friends before the tournament but after we won we enjoyed a great car ride home talking about our exploits and planning on teaming up again in for future tournaments.

In games there are certain characters that just need to have a team mate and some that should never interact with someone unless they are in super smash bros (Metroid). In game characters that need a teammate are surprisingly hard to think of. I don’t even picture Mario working with Luigi or riding a Yoshi, I picture him running through a level with or without help from one of his friends. One character I picture with someone else is Yoshi however, due to the Yoshi’s Island games. I don’t picture Yoshi with grown up Mario, just baby Mario, and that is only because the duo was so ingrained into my brain as a kid struggling to beat Yoshi’s Island for hours and hours.

Finally, I did have a brief period of MMOs and I was always the support class when playing with my friends. I didn’t do much damage and I feel like the game was more fun for my friends but they loved it when I played since I wouldn’t let any of them die and they got the always important buff. Being the support class meant I was never kicked out of a party with random players since there were so few support class players to begin with and I wasn’t that bad at it.