About

Marle Alexander – A 90’s JRPG kid at heart.

Do you ever wish you could recapture those timeless moments of playing a great game for the first time? Relive the life-altering seconds when you turned the last page of a masterful story and all you did was sit back and think “wow.”

I recall each of these moments with aching clarity, and it’s one of the reasons I’m inspired to write my own stories. Chrono Trigger came out in August 1995, when summer vacation was the pinnacle of freedom and those school-free days ebbed into one blacktop melting day after another. I went to Toys R Us and handed over all of my hard-earned babysitting money for a copy. I laughed, I cried (mostly from my low blood sugar because I didn’t eat for 30 hours), I was glued to every 32-bit pixel until that little star glided across a view of the planet I saved and Chrono’s melodic theme played in the background. “The End” it read, and I was left immensely satisfied and desperately wanting.

Then Suikoden came out for Playstation in December of 1996. I remember the sun coming up and I was still playing, still enraptured by the world its teen-aged protagonist was unwittingly chosen to save. The music, the themes of war and friendship, duty and love. I was hooked.

Then Xenogears, so steeped in human complexity I can only say I played it, loved it and argued its themes, timelines and history with strangers on online forums with the passionate zeal of a true believer.

What about those books I mentioned? I still cry when I read the bittersweet conversation between Danny and his father at the end of The Chosen. I’m still impressed by the originality of Sabriel’s magic and her role as an Abhorsen in a world that’s distinctly industrial and fantastical. Tolkien is still the King of fantasy.

These loves are fundamental constants. They are a part of me, as necessary as water is to define an ocean. Sand to shape the dunes. Stones to build a mountain. A mother to pass along her genes.

I remember watching my mother read Kafka, Kerouac, Dumas, Cervantes. I would talk to her about The Iliad and Dante’s Inferno so she would read them and we had introspective discussions while cleaning the kitchen. She was kind, spiritual, supportive; the best humanity had to offer.

Then she died. And I died a little too.

In the wake of her death life wasn’t the same. It isn’t the same, and perhaps that’s simply a culmination of loss and growing up; becoming an adult and living in a (kinda crappy) adult world.