The Best Time Is Watching Someone Else Play Torneko Beside You

　Torneko's Mystery Dungeon suddenly gets released for streaming. Right away, I sit beside a friend and watch them play Torneko. There’s hardly any time more blessed than this. I could live like this forever. I’ve written about it a few times in essays, but one of my favorite things in elementary school was skipping school and sitting next to my mother while she played Torneko's Mystery Dungeon 2 all day, strategy guide in hand, taking on the 99-floor dungeon together. It made me so happy that she was completely absorbed in the game from morning till night. Because of those memories, I find it calming, more than anything, to watch someone else work their way through a Mystery Dungeon game.

　My mother—and I—mainly played 2, so this is my first time seeing the original. I had no idea the system was that you had to carry the item you picked up from the very bottom all the way back to the entrance. It’s not enough just to reach the target floor; the dungeon only ends when you make it back out, and that strange realism really surprised me. Also, the number of dungeons is incredibly pared down, which gives it a nice austerity. The extremely simple design feels plain and cool.

　Even so, the rate at which fullness drops in the first game is intense. It really makes you realize how many things were adjusted in 2 to make it easier to play. My real favorite is 2, so if they kept this up and remastered that one too, I’d be absolutely thrilled.

　No matter how perfect your equipment is, darkness waits just one step ahead. It’s the kind of explosive tension where you have to keep tapping every stone bridge before crossing. And the best possible feeling is being nearby, watching all that tension unfold while I myself stay perfectly relaxed.

　Daytime. I wake up at an hour when there’s no way I could still make it to school, and my mother, without saying a word, is already engrossed in the TV, diving into dungeon after dungeon. I pore over the strategy guide with its shiny silver cover and explain, “There’s this kind of monster on this floor...” and so on, while we slowly, slowly go through trial and error until not Torneko’s fullness but our own hits 0%.

　Sometimes we’d get danced around by Sluggernaut, sometimes chased by a Gargoyle shopkeeper... We kept repeating it, over and over, no matter how many times we died. At every turn we’d celebrate or despair, get worked up beside each other or not, and above all else in life, I loved watching that chubby old man endlessly go up and down the stairs.