So, it's been an open secret for a while that we have been wanting to make some kind of Pokémon fan project for the last while. After only about nine or ten months, though, the characters for the game… well, to put it bluntly, parts of me began to realize that these characters we'd always imagined these sorts of stories about were the only way they'd ever got to exist and, well, to quote my first headmate to make that realization, "a fantasy life is not a life".

This is a song that's meant to play in a really impactful part of the game as I currently envision it, where stuff has gone off the rails in interesting ways, the tension has escalated, there's just been a pretty major mechanical change coupled with character development, and we're clearly rapidly escalating towards the climax. It's a song that, in other words, I would have rather saved for when people would actually be able to play it for themselves.

But who knows if I will ever be able to make that! A full-scale RPG fangame is no easy feat for a solo developer, and now that it led us down a rabbit hole of self-discovery, the story's become so important to who we are that I'm scared of doing it justice. Besides, all I have to show for the past few years — aside from these few songs I mostly made in late 2020 — is a single very basic overworld prototype.

This song was based off a short prototype piece by my friend Emma that had sat unused for a long time; our brain immediately started going places with it when we heard it, so we asked if we could use it for our project.

And then we made this!

The amazing bit she made and I used as a starting point alone kind of makes this the best song I've ever worked on, and three years is an awful long time to sit on your biggest banger without releasing it. So, happy birthday to me — as my present to myself, I'm letting go and just goddamn posting it already!

also on YouTube: https://youtu.be/5U-h1S1flQY