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The Prologue

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Would you pick a sword or a hammer? Maybe a bow or a staff? Would you side with good or focus on chaos? Maybe you would just stick to yourself and remain neutral. The choice is yours when it comes to the life of your alter ego in the biggest online game of the year. With everything being left up to you, your destiny is literally up to you.

. . .

The paragraph on the back of the box made Oriole shake her head. To her it sounded like every other online role-play game. Character creation, quests, side-choosing; she had seen it all before. Even without liking the type of games, she probably could still list ten other games with the same premise. Still, she continued to hold the game box in front of her.

"Kingdom Hearts Debut," she read aloud.

Kingdom Hearts was a new series of games between the animation mogul, Disney, and a Japanese gaming company, Square. The idea behind them was an entire universe that held all the worlds of Disney. Classics like Cinderella and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to the newer ones like Tarzan and Atlantis, many movies were included in the game. The games would target many Disney fans, dangling their favourite characters in front of them and tempting them to try the game. Kingdom Hearts Debut was the first of many planned to come. Or at least that was what Oriole had heard.

The game had just come out, like only a couple days ago. Still it was already blowing up everywhere. Copies were apparently selling like hotcakes. The premise of creating your own character and interacting with your favourite Disney characters was quite attractive to many. The game was a mmorpg – massively multiplayer online role-play game – thus promising a lot of customization and interaction. Though this was something Oriole did not find all too eye-catching.

Oriole never particularly liked mmorpgs. It was the whole feeling of being forced to interact with other people just to play a game with no true storyline. She felt like it was pointless unless you wanted to be social. If you were a social person, mmorpgs were the games for you. Other than that, they weren't all too fun. Oriole was the type of person not to sit in the middle of a group and join in the discussion. She would much rather be held up in her room and playing her PS2, ripping people's spines out, or watching movies. She even liked Disney, but the game was not really pulling her in.

She continued to read the back of the box, hoping that something would catch her eye. She wanted to like the game so badly. It was about Disney, something she had grown up on like many other people. She wanted to like a game involving Disney characters, but it was getting hard with this.

"Man, this character customization really goes deep," she mumbled.

That was one of the many problems she read about with mmorpgs these days. They weren't as detailed as people wanted them to be. She may not play them, but she read the magazines. She knew how limited they were when it came to customization. Most of the times it was just a base character of either gender and you could merely change their hair and skin colour; sometimes even their eye colour. The rest would be the same as everyone else; face, clothing, body shape, height, all of it. This game, Debut, had more options than she would have imagined. From what the box said, the game supposedly allowed the player to create everything from head to two. From hair colour to length to style… From eye colour and shape to skin tone… From height to weight to body shape… All that and some more, and that was only physical. Apparently the game also allowed you to customize and upgrading clothing and armor for your character, along with weapons and accessories. The pictures they showed made Oriole almost gasp.

"The graphics are amazing," she said.

Oriole was obviously big into games, so graphics were important to her. A good game can become great with good enough graphics. The same can go for the opposite however; a good game can become horrible with some bad graphics. This game however took it a step further. Their graphics were unlike anything Oriole had seen before. The details were amazing. She scanned over the pictures they had layering the bottom back of the box.

"Six classes…"

She continued to read a bit as she gawked at the pictures.

Apparently there were six classes in the game; sword-wielders, hammer-wielders, bow-wielders, circle-wielders, staff-wielders, and wand-wielders. They sounded completely made up, probably because they were. Oriole had expected a little more cliché-ness when it came to the classes, just like every mmorpg game did. But it looked like Disney and Square took another route and went with the ridiculous sounding classes.

The six classes were split into three groups. The melee classes were the sword-wielders and the hammer-wielders. The sword-wielders fought with swords, while the hammer-wielders found with hammers. Sword-wielders seemed the most basic of the classes, while the hammer-wielders looked more like the berserkers. Then there were the ranged classes; the bow-wielders and the circle-wielders. Bow-wielders found with bow and arrows. Circle-wielders were a bit more interesting, fighting with Indian throwing weapons, Chakrams, which were circular bladed weapons. The last group was the magic using classes; the staff-wielders and the wand-wielders. They each fought with magic using their namesake, with staff-wielders using black-based attack magic and wand-wielders using white-based healing magic.

"This is complicated," Oriole commented under her breath.

There would probably be more details in the booklet inside, but from the box Oriole was starting to get a headache how confusing it all was. Six classes, each with their own stats… This was never anything Oriole had ever had to concern herself with.

She went to put the box back on the shelf in front of her when something caught her eye.

"Can you discover the secret behind the Heartless and the reason why they occupy the universe of Kingdom Hearts?" she read.

A storyline! It was a faint one, barely there compared to regular games, but it was an attempt at a storyline. She hated mmorpgs for the exact reason of them not having a storyline nor attempting to even have one. Yet here was one, or at least she hoped.

She gripped the box, flipping it around to look at the front. The main np-characters faces stared at her from the cover. Apparently their names were Sora, Kiari, and Riku. Either way they were smiling at Oriole, calling for her to join them online.

"Should I really?" she asked.

. . .

Out of the mist, floating on velvet blue. Carried away to a place where dreams come true.

So Kingdom Hearts Debut won the vote and here is the prologue. This is a SYOC set in an AU. Set in the "real world" in the fictional town of Perdu, the year is 2002 and the first Kingdom Hearts game has come out. Instead of it being Kingdom Hearts for the PS2, it is a computer mmorpg called Kingdom Hearts Debut. With strangely amazing graphics and a great interactive-face, this game is one of dreams. Still there is something about it...

The quote at the end is from Tokyo DisneySea's song, "Imagination".

SYOC is closed!