I guess what really got me started with games are Final Fantasy VII and X. My brother got VII from our cousin and liked it so much he also bought VIII and X. I wouldn't play VIII until much later, but X and VII I played right away and they really hooked little young me back then.

Final Fantasy X would come to play another big role in my life several years later when I revisited the game as a teen. That was when I realized just how much I really loved the game, and for the first time I was actually really moved by the story. From that point on one of the main qualities I was looking for in games was the capibility of forming an emotional attachment to the story and characters. It was something fascinating to me.

FFX would remain my favorite game and the one with the greatest emotional attachment for years to come. However, just two years ago I entered university, and with that met a colleague who got me into anime. And through him I found CLANNAD. I watched the CLANNAD anime, then found out that its source material, in fact, something called a "visual novel". I hadn't had any experience with visual novels up to this point besides the Phoenix Wright series which I didn't even realize were visual novels. But because I liked the CLANNAD anime a lot, I got the visual novel, and over an entire month's time, I read through it.

For a little while I couldn't imagine finding a better story than CLANNAD, but Little Busters smashed that silly thought to pieces and convinced me that no matter how great a story may be, you'll find something even better someday. That was my introduction to Key, and that was when they became the most important storywriters in my life. To this day their stories continue to amaze me, not just because they're tearjerkers, but because they gave me an appreciation for the world I didn't quite have before. Quite bluntly put, I learned to love life through them. And I learned to truly appreciate the efforts of anyone struggling to find happiness not just for themselves but for others as well.

But that's still not it. No, because while reading through Key's works I got into a mognet conversation with Ultima Shadow, one of only very few other visual novel readers around these parts. I'd been reading Higurashi and when I was done, I asked him if I should try Umineko right away or move on to something else, and he kindly convinced me to go for Umineko.

Truth be told, at the time it was primarily (just) an 'awesome story' for me. The storytelling was unlike anything I'd ever seen before, the way the plot and setting were built up, it was all just so intricate and amazing, I loved it. But when I finished it after two weeks of binge reading? My first reaction was "eh, Higurashi was better." A statement I took back no more than one hour later when I looked up Umineko online and found out about a single plot twist I somehow failed to grasp this entire time. Looking back at it now I laugh at myself in that moment, because I couldn't have imagined that the grandeur of what I missed.

It wasn't until months later (!!) that I realized how dense I'd been. What I found (regrettably thanks to the help of the internet instead of on my own) was something I'd never ever expected to find. And all of a sudden my perception of Umineko changed. Massively. Every line, every conflict, every theme presented in Umineko, all of a sudden I looked at them in a different light, you could say I looked at them "with love", and just with that I found another truth in them I didn't see before. Without love, it cannot be seen. Words that through the way Umineko presented them came to be one of my axioms.

I could go more into how Umineko affected me, but sadly that goes into spoiler territory.