FazDude

they added steve already

I'm fully aware I just used this for a Super Mario Smash submission, but everyone needs to see this.

bugs says "you know i had to do it to 'em" in this game. i feel like i should be all /r/fellowkids but at the same time it feels fairly in-character for bugs

aw heck naw they added copy abilities to annalynn

These are some pretty nifty designs. My personal favorite is probably either Bat Annalynn or Mail Annalynn. Cruise says that he'd like to make a game with these designs after the first game, and I really hope that happens, because I think that'd be neat.

Now, note the dates of these tweets. They are not new. I have only discovered them recently. But you know what? That's just an example of one major reason why I love Annalynn so much. Let me ramble for a bit.

When I first get into a new game or something of the like, I'm usually exposed to it by an outside source; A friend, a YouTuber I enjoy, advertising, whatever. This always leads me to research it for myself, and I always end up getting pretty big spoilers as a result. This doesn't really tamper my experience with the game (heck, I knew pretty much everything about Undertale before I got the chance to play it, and I love that game), but it's something that happens a lot, and I always get the feeling that I would have enjoyed it just a bit more if I had gone in blind.

Going in blind was something I was forced to do with Annalynn. I didn't hear about it from a friend or a YouTuber; I just stumbled upon it on Steam during the winter sale, had a few extra bucks to kill, and decided to pick it up. I played it, I beat it, I had fun with it, I recommended it in one of my earliest status posts on SmashBoards and to a few friends. That was the end of that, right?

Well, it was... For a while, anyway. One day after all this, I decided to submit Annalynn to All-Star Strife, but I didn't really have any pictures of her on hand, so I had to go looking for one. This is when I discovered something important; Annalynn didn't magically poof into existence. She'd actually been around for at least five years.

This doesn't seem like much, but this came as a huge shock to me. Up until then, I assumed Annalynn was a fresh new character, so having all of this come to me all at once made me feel something I hadn't really felt with a game in a long, LONG while. I felt like I was discovering something I didn't know about it all on my own.

I think that's one of the reasons why I'm always going on about Annalynn, why she's in my signature, all that stuff. Like I said in my weekly Q&A, Annalynn probably isn't even in my top ten favorite games from a gameplay perspective. It won't be able to overcome the memories I have with other games that I've been playing for much longer. However, it awoke a sense of discovery that I hadn't felt with a game for some time. It reminded me of the importance not just reading and talking about video games, but actually experiencing them blindly and having a blast doing so.

I like Annalynn. I like this game. I like this character (and Cruise Elroy's other OCs are great too). More than all of that, though, I like video games in general, and I have this one to thank for reminding me of the wonder I had experiencing them blindly growing up before I had wider access to the Internet. Annalynn made me feel nostalgic in the best way possible, and I'll never forget it for that.

I dunno why I'm writing this, to be frank. Maybe I'm just bored, maybe I just wanted to gush about this game that much. Whatever the reason, I hope you found something of worth in this word vomit.

tl;dr: annalynn's a pretty ok game i guess