Author's Note: Kingdom Hearts and Grand Theft Auto are property of Square Enix and Rockstar Games respectively, I own nothing.
This one's going out to all the 2000's Kids...
Sora's House
October 25, 2005 AD
Long ago, in a small town far far away...
It was the best of times, and it was the worst of times. It was in the Year of Our Lord, 2005. This was way back when in the bygone glory days of the Sony Playstation 2 and the anime fandom boom.
This was the heyday of awesome video games like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and the height of anime shows like Naruto, InuYasha, Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Samurai Champloo, and the first anime version of Fullmetal Alchemist (which was way better than Brotherhood or the manga in my opinion)
The internet was finally becoming part of mainstream life, but social media hadn't really become a thing yet unless you counted stuff like MySpace and even that wasn't fully ingrained into our everyday culture like with today's social media. It was a simpler and better time, or at least it sure as hell seemed that way.
But enough reminiscing, we've seen the preview. Now it's time for the feature...
Here's a little story that I have got to tell about three bad brothers you all know so well, it started way back in history with Cloud Strife, Sora, Roxas, and me, their friend Kairi.
My other good friend Riku and I lived in the same neighborhood as the Strife brothers when we were kids back then in the glory days of old. Cloud was fourteen while the rest of us were twelve at the time.
The five of us loved to hang out, play video games, stay up way too late and watch a whole bunch of exciting awesome anime shows on Toonami and Adult Swim, come up with ideas for fan fiction stories, and also play cool card games like Yu-Gi-Oh! and role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and World of Darkness.
We even did online role-playing games on the different forums out there on the internet. In fact, Cloud even got to run a small little internet forum for us out of his bedroom at the Strife household. It was a simple free forum template site by today's standards, but it was cool and Cloud was really good with computers for his age. It was basically a place where the five of us along with any other friends of ours we knew from school and elsewhere could hang out and talk long-distance or play in our online role-playing game campaigns.
This is the story of that very same forum and the first major online Role-Play we played in over on there.
Like I had said before, this was way back in the heyday of the Sony Playstation 2 and the classic Grand Theft Auto games, part of the old continuity that is now officially known as the "3D Era" by the official publishers of GTA, the esteemed company known as Rockstar Games.
Our favorite games were Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Grand Theft Auto III. We also all really wanted to play what was at the time the newest game in the franchise, Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories. Sadly, it was only on the PSP handheld system at the time and none of us owned a PSP. We had to wait until GTA: Liberty City Stories was ported to the PS2 a few months later in June 2006.
Anyway, I remember that we would often come up with our own ideas for characters and story concepts for the Grand Theft Auto games way back when.
I don't know when the idea had hit us and in all honesty, I am genuinely surprised none of us came up with the idea much sooner than we did now that I look back on it. But if I remember correctly, Sora had come up with an idea for a Grand Theft Auto-based role-playing campaign and was talking about it at school with his twin brother Roxas and of course, me and Riku. We all liked the idea of a tabletop campaign based on our favorite video game, and the idea of a Grand Theft Auto game where you could create your own character from scratch and anything could happen was something that really appealed to us and resonated with all of us at the time. Of course, Cloud Strife would be our Game Master since he was the oldest of us and knew all the cool rules for the various games we played back then.
It was probably about a day or two later that I was finally able to get together with Cloud, Sora, Roxas, and Riku to plan out the great Grand Theft Auto role-playing game we had in our heads. However, there was a bit of an unforeseen problem that had emerged. All of us were still in school and Summer Break was a long time away. However, Cloud had a solution to our problems right out of the gate.
"Guys, I have an idea for how we can play the game and not have to worry about finding free time for all of us to play. We play this game over an online discussion board. I created a simple forum as a side project using one of those free forum template sites and I want to test it out. We can role-play in the forum as the characters we create for this game. You just make forum posts and story posts as your character, and I can handle being the Game Master. That way we can take all the time we need to play this campaign. We will be role-playing at our own pace."
"Cool, what kind of system are we using for the rules and which city will we be role-playing in?" asked Riku.
"Well, I decided we will use the simple lightweight rules found in Big Eyes Small Mouth. I know the game is designed for anime campaigns, but you can use it for any genre or setting you want. I will be using an online dice roller for the gameplay. As for the campaign map, we will be setting this Role-Play in San Andreas."
"Awesome, Cloud. Let us know when the site is ready and we can start playing." I replied.
Soon, we were all excited to start this expansive and imaginative online forum-based Grand Theft Auto Role-Play. This was going to be an awesome Autumn and in the long run, it would be a part of my childhood that I shall never forget.