Aha, imagine wanting to post this prior to getting Hagumi’s birthday quote.
July 30th is not only Hagumi’s birthday, but also marks the day I started playing Garupa! Technically not, though. I started playing a few days after the EN release but not for long. I truly started to play this day last year. So yeah, it’s my first anniversary of Garupa!
I’m just gonna be straight. BanG Dream! has changed my life, and made me so much happier than I used to be. This past year has been one of my best years I can recall. Not to say growing up was uneventful or anything, it was just missing something that Bandori made me realise about myself.
Note: Long ramblings of a kid’s past and his issues with fitting in. I don’t know how long it’s gonna be (typing this prior to finishing) but it’s gonna be pretty long. I’m 95% sure all of the information is necessary. Just... be warned.
As I’ve said, my life wasn’t boring or anything. I was the kind of kid who just wanted to have fun, and games were always able to relive me of any kind of boredom. That did mean that I never really developed any interest in anything else. With the friends I was with, no issues came up, since kids (back then, don’t ask me what kids do for fun these days) would mess around to have fun. It helped that we had the same interests.
Fast forward to Autumn 2015. This is following me re-developing an interest in Anime, thanks to my close friend and my brother. But that’s more important later. Following the trend of ‘I don’t get anything but hand-me-downs’ (not that I cared), I got my brother’s PC. Some friends I made in secondary school (and this part would be middle school in other countries, I think) got me to play Terraria with them.
By the way, I love Terraria and it’s one of two games I have 100%. The other being... sigh... Shrek 2. Anything’s bearable with a friend. Even 5-30 FPS.
Come Jan 2016, we joined a friend group with people who I knew from my classes. The games we played were mostly mainstream games over at the west. It was great fun. Being a person who usually plays solo, I was reminded that playing with other people created such a different (and fun) experience. My only initial issue was that they didn’t really like the stuff that I loved, like anime and other games that ‘are for young kids’ or basically all Nintendo stuff. I just dealt with it and carried on playing with them. There were no real issues.
...Except I was wrong. As time went on, I noticed that they started taking more interest in other things, like TV shows and relationships. As someone who only cared about gaming, I didn’t pick up their interests. They would also talk trash about other people and I ain’t about that. Still, I had fun playing with them so I let it all slide. It did mean that when such topics were brought up, I would frequently remain silent, or play along. What this meant was that come Summer of 2017, when my PC broke, I didn’t really have any reason to communicate with them during my down-time. When school started again, I had nothing to add to conversations, at all. The time it took for me to get my current laptop in October 2017 was enough to make me lose interest in most of the games they liked and it showed when we played online again. They changed while I didn’t. So much so that I just gave up trying to fit in. I stopped hanging around them and playing with them, and went back to my old group which, honestly, was a move I probably should have made earlier but what’s done is done.
With this, I (kinda) went back to the person who would usually play by himself and when you’ve touched playing with friends, you’ll want to go back. At the time, I didn’t care about this because I was completely addicted to a new game. What I was worrying about was my ‘old’ friends. I still wanted to be friends with them (we still are, by the way) and I didn’t want them to view me differently. It was around this time, April 2018, that (EN) Garupa was recommended to me on the iOS App Store. I hadn’t properly played a rhythm game in forever and I was horrible at it so I wanted to see how much I’d changed (I was able to reliably play HARD so it was a massive improvement). While the gameplay was fun, due to my super limited storage space and other games (cough, FeH, cough), I deleted soon after A Song Unfinished. I did promise to myself that if I ever had space again, I would give it a try once more.
Fast forward again to July 30th 2018. At this point, I’d been off school for more than a month as my exams had finished in June. Me and my close friend (the same one that helped me re-find my love for anime) did a bunch of stuff together online, but the one important for this story was osu! Playing osu! reminded me that Garupa existed in my purchase history (and that I had storage space again). So, I re-installed it. And this time, something clicked. I don’t know why, maybe it was because I wasn’t stressed out about exams or because I had a lot of time to use, but the gameplay was incredibly fun and I instantly became attached and invested in the characters and the story. It was love at... second sight. But because of my free time, I spent every possible moment I could playing Garupa, reading every story, playing every song (though that was more late August which led to me realising that songs do exist), and learning about the people who portrayed them. The more I saw and the more I learnt, the more I wanted to know. Somehow, as someone who only played games in his free time, I found something special to me that no other franchise could rival. Not just as a game, but as a franchise itself.
And when I started talking about BanG Dream! to my friends, I realised something (after they rejected trying it out but to be fair I didn’t really ask that many people at the time). People like different things, and liking other things is perfectly okay. My old friends can like what they want and if they didn’t like what I liked, tough, we can set differences aside as friends. I’m not about to hide my love for something just because I don’t want others to find out. What I love is who I am, and I’m not going to lie to myself about what I love. I don’t want to be someone who people liked, I want to be myself which had people who liked him. With that, I really went back to my old self, who does whatever he likes to have fun, and I’ve got friends who somehow tolerate me and my everything. I’ve never been happier.
As Hina said before, there’s only one me, and I’m completely fine with that! I’m just a massive goofball who loves this Japanese franchise known as BanG Dream! with all my heart. Here’s to another year!
Wow, that feels good to get that off my chest! Yeah, sorry for having you read all of that. I never really talk about my past at all but it’s not like I want to be secretive, that’s just not who I am. I’m all for people learning more about me. I’m a bit worried that I, as a person, might be a bit uninteresting but, hey, that’s not my problem. I’ve talked for too long. See ya, and thanks for reading!
