The musical tempo was so tight it was suffocating. The results screen after the battle was clean and brisk, then immediately cut back to the exploration view without the slightest dragging of mud and water.
"This—this isn't even in the same dimension as the RPGs from before." Kenta muttered to himself, feeling as if all the games he had played over the past decade-plus had been for nothing.
Naoki watched from the side without even daring to blink, afraid he would miss a single frame. "How is this a game—this is practically controlling a Hollywood blockbuster!"
As the story progressed, all kinds of high-standard, high-quality CGI cutscenes were woven through it perfectly.
The explosion of the Mako Reactor, the flames soaring into the sky, the subtle changes in the characters' facial expressions.
This was no longer a game that relied on staring at a few mosaic little people and a shriveled dialogue box at the bottom of the screen to fill in the picture with imagination.
This was, in the truest sense, a movie you could play!
On this snowy weekend, all across Japan, there were countless players just like Kenta and Naoki.
They locked themselves in their rooms, forgot to eat, forgot to sleep, and even going to the bathroom became the most extravagant waste of time.
They were utterly immersed in that vast world carefully woven by Square and escorted by Sega's domineering technology, prostrating themselves in worship before the arrival of a new era.
Monday, December 16.
Inside the Tokyo subway's morning rush-hour cars, as always, it was packed with expressionless office workers and drowsy students.
But if one looked closely, they would notice that today's air was filled with a strange sense of excitement.
Kenta leaned against the cold glass of the train door, his head