But as I logged into that first game, with the tumbling sound of six-sided dice dancing on my digitized character sheet, with the moonlit soundtrack coursing its way through the woods, with the taughtly-written character development details ... I was already being struck with a sense of nostalgia for a computer roleplaying game when I had no basis for nostalgia and computer roleplaying games. It made no sense.

That wouldn't have sealed the deal though. Not a misplaced sense of pseudo-nostalgia. I could have turned back at that moment and eventually convinced myself that I'd been completely unmoved. It might've taken a week, but I'd later describe my experience as "nonplussed." But then the story startled me from the very beginning. Not only did it open up with an overbaked amnesia cliche (something I'd railed against only one week prior), but I was being whirlpooled into this overused you-wake-up-and-have-no-idea-who-you-are convention, already sucked in beyond the event horizon. Somehow (!), I was falling for it. And it was from nothing less than the cleanly-penned authorial tone of the text. It sure wasn't the graphics luring me in. And it sure wasn't the off-handed turn-based movement scheme. But there was something about the writing...​