It’s 2007. The PS3 has only been out for a few months, and the backlog - even for me, a 13-year-old - is building up fast. Knowing I was into Pokemon and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy, my parents wou♍ld buy me games that gave them even the slightest whiff of fantasy RPG, and so Enchanted Arms quickly found its way onto my shelf.

Standing out as the odd duck of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:FromSoftware’s catalogue, Enchanted Arms is nothing like its compatriots. It’s no 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Armored Core, it’s no 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dark Souls; it’s a monster-taming JRPG with anime-tastic overtones and the steepest difficulty curve ♏known to man. It follows Atsuma, a young man with, yes, an enchanted arm, and his friends. First, we have Toya, the coolest dude to grace my tiny bedroom TV screen. And then we have Makoto. Oh, Makoto.

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Makoto is an interesting character. To put it bluntly, he’s a raging stereotype, an effete parody of gay men who spends the opening hours pining after Toya like a lovesick puppy. He🌳 serves the healer role, fights with a saxophone, and even cooks heartfelt lunches for the object of his affection. If Enchanted Arms came out today, he would be dismissed as a harmful, negative stereotype, and it would be a fair dismissal. Gay men aren’t all flouncy queens with high voices and a penchant for musicality who lust after their straight friends. Some of us are only one or two of those things.

Enchanted Arms - Makoto talking to Atsuma

For me, though, Makoto was a revelation. I remember thinking that the ‘hints’ being dropped by the game were nothing more than jokes. They couldn’t let someone be gay in a video game, surely? Back then, being gay was a joke to be deployed for laughs, not an identity to embrace. 🦋My exposure to people being gay in media was limited to Frank Pickle’s humourous coming out on The Vicar of Dibley and yet more gross stereotyping in Little Britain - jokes and characters that use homosexuality as a punchline. Makoto was different, though - his attraction to Toya is played for laughs, but his being a man doesn’t seem to come into the equation; he’s just overly affectionate and generally over-the-top.

Don’t get me wrong, Makoto isn’t great representation - but he is representation. FromSoftware made one of its main characters queer and even used that fact in its advertising materials, describing him as ‘openly gay’. No innuendo, no questions, just a statement of fact. It’s just another facet of Makoto’s admittedly shallow personality, but it’s the main thing that stands out to me when I think back to Enchanted Arms. It wasn&rsquo🐠;t a great game, but it struck a chord in young me’s mind.

Representation-wise, we’re in a far better place than we were 16 years ago, but I’ll always be fond of Makoto and the way he lit a spark in me. It’s thanks to him that I started being able to expect or even want to play video games that tell stories about people like me. Sure, it would have happened sooner or later, but you never forget your firstꩵ. Here’s to you, Makoto, you fruity disaster.

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