I still remember that after school, I secretly sneaked into the canteen at the school entrance with my pocket money saved for a week, and was dazzled by the colorful pirated cassettes on the shelf. At that time, a 128-in-1 GBA cassette had "Pocket Monsters", "Fire Emblem" and "Zelda" printed on the cover mixed together. When I opened it, it was all "Tetris" reskin. I stamped my feet in anger, but I couldn't bear to return it. After all, five yuan was a sky-high price for an elementary school student. Looking back now, the rough plastic shell, faded stickers, and occasionally unreadable gold fingers are simply the medals of youth of our generation.
A while ago, a friend recommended a new game called "Dragon Hunter". It was said to be a 3D immortal cultivation idle mobile game. I rejected it at first - it was about immortality? Hang up? This smell is too strong, just like those pirated web game advertisements of the past that said "Dragon Slaying Knife will be given away with a click". But I couldn't help but he kept repeating, saying that in this game, you can conquer the ancient god generals, and you can also get Nezha Ao Bing for the first deposit, and the VIP will give you the Suzaku incarnation. I suddenly remembered the copycat cassette of "Feng Shen Bang" that I played on the GBA when I was a child. It also contains the god generals, but the picture quality is pixel blocks, the sound effects are all electronic music, and the cassette will freeze when I hit Erlang Shen's level. And guess what? There is actually a model of Nezha Ao Bing in "Dragon Hunter". Although the 3D modeling is a hundred times more sophisticated than before, the thrill of collecting the generals is exactly the same as when I was a child and collected the "Seven Calabash Brothers" in pirated cassettes.
Another thing that surprised me about this game was the impact. To be honest, talking about the impact of idle games is usually a joke, but "Dragon Hunter" is known as "3D innovative ultra-realistic impact". I played it with the mentality of giving it a try, and hey, it's really not bad. I switched the mobile phone to the vertical screen hang-up mode, and occasionally manually activated skills. The light and shadow of the sword combined with the vibration feedback made me feel like I was back to the night when I played "Monster Hunter P3" on the PSP. Of course, the style of painting has changed from Japanese armor to fairy robes, but the refreshing feeling of "you can feel the pain of the monster when you cut it with a knife" really makes an experienced player like me shine. Moreover, the game has built-in skill combinations of heroes that can be freely matched, just like the repeated attempts to match team moves on pirated GBA cassettes, but now there is no need to worry about the cassette being out of gear.
Speaking of key points, what impresses me most about this game is its "hang-up" design. What were you most afraid of when playing pirated cassettes as a child? Afraid of losing the archive. A cassette with a dead battery. I played it hard for three days. I turned it on when I got home from school, and the screen went black - oh, start all over again. At that time, I could only grit my teeth and fight hard, comforting myself that "if I fight a few more times, I can remember the BOSS's moves." Nowadays, the mechanism of "Dragon Hunter", which automatically spawns monsters when idle and generates offline profits, could be given to me back in 2005. I would probably be happy doing somersaults on the playground. Of course, it can't really replace the "warmth of holding it in the hand" brought by handheld consoles, but at least it allows a worker like me, who is squeezed by life, to take out my mobile phone during my commute, watch the scene of flying swords cutting through the sky, listen to the BGM of cultivating immortals, close my eyes and imagine that I am still the teenager hiding under the covers secretly playing PSP.
But talking about pirated cassettes, I still have a pirated card of "Fire Emblem: The Sealed Sword" in my collection. The shell is transparent blue, and the sticker has the wrong name printed on it, saying "Fire Emblem: The Sealed Sword". It accompanied me through countless sleepless nights before the high school entrance examination. Although the picture was crude and the Chinese version had typos, the pure joy I felt was strangely similar to the moment I drew a rare god general in "Dragon Hunter". It turns out that no matter how the times change, what we are greedy for has never been the picture quality or gameplay, but the feeling of being able to briefly escape reality and enter another world to mess around.
Finally, I would like to say that if you were once the boy who hunted for pirated cards at the flea market and hid GBASP under the Chinese textbook, you might as well give "Dragon Hunter" a try. It may not give you the feel of the original handheld game, but at least it will allow you to rediscover a little bit of the simple happiness of "gathering together divine generals and hanging up to cultivate immortality" in this impetuous era of mobile games. Youth has not ended, it has just changed its form, lying on your phone, waiting for you to unlock it. 🌙