Hey! I'm eligible for "Best Fan Writer" this year, so here's my eligibility post

One of life’s great joys is watching your children play. Through a kitchen window overlooking your backyard, at the beach, exploring a park. There’s great pleasure in observing the unobserved. You see their joy, watch them solve problems, navigate complex social situations, work together, fight, hug, laugh, run. Be free. You become lost in their imagination and for a fleeting moment recapture the wonder of a long-ago childhood. Watching your children play is an opportunity to see the world through excited eyes.

It’s this warm, emotive sense of simplicity and well-being—as though, somewhere deep within your heart, life’s purpose becomes something you can finally grasp. It’s fleeting—like a soot sprite captured between clapped hands, gone the moment you try to examine it, smudged palms the only trace of its existence.

As I struggle to articulate these feelings in a way that doesn’t feel contrived or artificial, the cinematic works of famed Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki call from the back of my mind. Particularly loud are his triumvirate examining these themes with ageless, crystalline clarity: My Neighbour Totoro, Spirited Away, and Ponyo.

But why do I own a TV that most people moved on from 15 years ago? And why have I spent a ton of money designing a family room around it and another vintage display? Whether it’s going back to enjoy Chrono Trigger‘s time traveling goodness or digging into the amazing fan translation scene, it’s all about retro gaming.

While gaming through the 1990s and into the aughts, I focused on the newest games and hardware. Sure, I replayed old favorites, but for the most part my retro collection was relegated to a dusty closet. It wasn’t until Nintendo released the SNES Classic Edition in 2017 that I started taking retro gaming seriously. Though I loved playing through a bunch of my favorite SNES games on my flatscreen, I knew something was missing from the emulated experience. So I went hunting for a solution and fell down a rabbit hole so deep it’d make Alice’s skin crawl.

While gaming is now widely accepted as a popular activity for adults, video games were predominantly marketed towards kids back in the ‘90s — and the writing in major magazines, like Electronic Gaming Monthly and Game Players, reflected that. Several decades later, video games have matured and expanded, their audience rightfully recognized for its diversity along all spectrums. Subsequently, the profession of games writing has come a long way from the days of young men writing wet dream jokes to amuse their audience of predominantly adolescent boys. And Boss Fight Books is a big part of that shifting tide.

Like many Japanese strategy RPGs, Bahamut Lagoon‘s combat-heavy experience is wrapped in a politically-charged story about empire and rebellion, Dragon Squads, a Church of Memories, and a lot of proper nouns. This made it a particularly challenging target for localization by a relatively inexperienced team.

Nevertheless, the Dejap fan translation has remained the go-to ever since, offering English-speaking gamers a chance to play one of the Super Nintendo’s most elusive games. But that wasn’t enough for Near and their pursuit of the “perfect” localization.