I had a friend in High School anime club who went by the name Shmee.
@"sabertoothalex"#p105820 nah man, spot on, when you log on to the pc in your dorm he's definitely updating his myspace page, social links were probably inspired by myspace rofl jk XD
My myspace page in middle school had Cave Story music, specifically [this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVzC6WZImGY)
of course these were the years I was growing up in a hick school where I felt like I was the only one who knew about *Metroid*, let alone the Panic/Keita Takahashi Katamari Damacy shirts I was wearing daily. I went from goth micro-phase to full-on katamari mania.
I'm at the library now so here's my FFVII big brother story.
My first time witnessing FFVII was at my cousins house in Indiana, he was playing it on windows PC. He had the buggy which to me looked like a space ship. I just saw the overworld and the battles and thought it was so cool like PokĂ©mon. He also had worms Armageddon on pc. Anyways this planted the seeds of âfinal fantasyâ in my brain at an early age.
The friend I clicked with the most growin up in the middle of nowhere, illegally adopted by republicans, was a kid who had eight brothers and sisters, lived with his mom who was between husbands at the time. HIs biological dad was mormon. This is intrinsically linked to the story lol. I loved going to this kids house, they were "poor" in all the best ways, dirt bike track in a circle around the trampoline in a tiny back yard, like the typical size suburban back yard lol. It felt so unrestricted compared to my extremely controlled, sterile (unhealthy) environment. He and his younger siblings were all super innocent, loved church and their family, had a great outlook and attitude, a great combination of mormon family values and redneck buck wild uninhibited fun.
Anyways he was the second eldest, proceeded by an older brother who was a full 8 or so years older. He was super independant, drank beer and cigarettes in front of us, super sarcastic and edgy. Jet black hair down to his butt. He has a different dad than my buddy. Apparently his dad brought a *gun* in the house when my buddy was a baby.
Lets call my buddy Cloud (he was blonde and very german) and his older brother Sephiroth.
So my buddy always told me stories about Final Fantasy VII, *Xenogears*, Chrono Trigger, and Parasite Eve -- in the fifth grade-- and was telling me all this demonic, satanic ways he's linking it to The Bible, and the Book of Mormon, lol. Like how sephiroth is a fallen angel / demon, and you have to defeat him when he becomes a blasphemous false idol. He drew crazy demonic drawings. He told me about Chrono and Magus in the same way as Cloud and Sephiroth. He told me how Cloud was a clone or something, and he told me about Zack. He also told me about things like Mohanri Moriankemer from the book of mormon in the same way, lol.
So this was just a great time.
The first time I was at his house and saw sephiroth's room in the basement, it was exactly what you'd expect. he had a water bed with 50 spots patched up with black duct tape in the letter X. He had a weird statue that I was fascinated by that I later found out was Basil Wolverton's [Wolverton's Weirdos](https://www.darkhorse.com/Products/18-424/The-Wolverton-Weirdos-2-Sy). Wolverton's Weirdos was the flavor of cloud's drawings during class, lol.
I didn't get to play FFVII at his house. But I did get to have my mind blown by **emulators** for the first time in the 5th grade.
They had a single shared computer. I don't remember if it was Windows XP yet or still windows 2000/me/98. I think the desktop icons were 16bit sprites still.
He showed me his file structure, obviously a sloppy little folder hidden from his 6 younger siblings, full of roms with the emulator. He showed me how to drag the game file onto the console emulator. I couldn't believe it. The first game he showed me was Chrono Trigger, something I'd never seen or heard of outside of his demonic whispers about Magus.
That day I played Chrono Trigger, Harvest Moon, and **E.V.O.** for the first time. A couple years later I would play Mother 1 on emulator in the same house off my own usb flash drive. As we grew up for a few years, we always wanted to hang out at jacob's house because we could stay up all night long playing video games, and lie to my adoptive parents that we did in fact go to church the following day. Anyone who stayed the night at my house found out the hard way that we were all being woke up early and forced to go to church or go home.
So cloud got to play FFVII and probably symphony of the night in his older brothers room. I bought the game from blockbuster gamerush for like twelve bucks used in 7th grade and played through the whole thing when I was going through a custody battle and sent to live at my aunt's house. I played through the whole game with the PS1 sitting vertically (so it was out of sight of my aunt) beside a ~14" black panasonic VCR combo.
It's just really cool this super christian kid also had the freedom to get really into demonic stuff. Before he moved away to Wyming a year before I ran away for good, he died his ear-length hair jet black also, lol. He's now a fricking Minister at his church in wyoming, and married with children.
