I can’t help but hear “Aerith’s Theme” from Final Fantasy VII the way I hear “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic. Both are 1997 babies. Both elegize a young, poor, plucky, orphaned savior. Both build to swollen, gushy climaxes.

When your world is ruled by another,
you are forced to perform, to spit,
to jump,
to be cruel when all you want is to be beautiful.

When my mother came to take us to the battered women’s shelter, she brought with her a copy of Zombies Ate My Neighbors for the Sega Genesis. My brother and I sat in the principal’s office. We were pulled out of class around eleven. The principal came to our respective classrooms and ushered us into his office. When we stepped inside, my mom was already there, her eyes looking very old in the clinically bright lighting. I was seven and my brother was five.

It’s a chore parsing whispers, so tiring to listen.
To abandon my ghasts on sea air would be harm;
ceding ash to dry wind, gunpowder to lightning.

That “Terra’s Theme” disappears from the game in the World of Ruin (the game’s second half) does not diminish the importance of her character. In fact, by examining how “Terra’s Theme” and its leitmotifs dominate the World of Balance (the game’s first half) but localize in the WoR, we can see how Terra’s story is, in fact, the story of FFVI. To cast Terra as less than the protagonist is to miss the game’s central themes, narratively and musically.

It’s been miles since

and still, little pink,
you shed amber

glow in my palm,
gurgle-chirp

in your cradle
of nebulous honey.

It sings for me to reenter familiar steps. It calls my right hand

home under my katana’s guard and for my knees to bend as I wait

for the rhythm. It is a pity most never see the end of this dance.

Mega Man 2 is a sonnet. Its fourteen stages are fourteen lines, nicely organized into an initial group of eight (its octave) and a final group of six (its sestet). The first stage of Dr. Wily’s Castle is the game’s volta.

where is your blubber? it is colder here than you
in this nuclear winter untouched by sun, this liminal

territory peopled by animals, inhabited by blondes
and blue-eyes. you don’t see the history of predation:

“Stickerbrush Symphony” interests me mainly as a narrative device. Beautiful as the song is on its own, it works on my heart as part of a story. Or, more aptly, two stories: the story of DKC2 and the story of childhood.

I wanted to pick Pokédex entries that felt resonant, and in most cases, pokémon that I had an emotional attachment to. I didn’t have any criteria that bound me to the first generation—if anything, I wanted to resist the part of the fandom that idealizes the early games/show and dismisses what’s come after.