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an archer, you needed to become comfortable with playing like a girl. I fell in love with Grand Chase and its strong female fighters.
Grand Chase spread like wildfire in my housing complex. The exclusive group of boy gamers talked all about Grand Chase, all the time. Despite their aversion to all things vaguely girly, the group conceded that Grand Chase was good. The game featured beautiful artwork, and had a‘ cutesy’ style to it that contrasted with the heavy plotline. The game was played on an online server with other players within the North American region. The boys in the group would all meet up online to fight against each other, but I still wasn’ t invited. It wasn’ t until a few months later, when I had levelled up my characters and established myself in the community, that I was allowed to play with them. I surpassed Nathan, and he was impressed. He told the other boys, and they all suddenly became fixated on beating me. One of the veterans of Grand Chase in the group decided to challenge my characters in player versus player. He played as a level 5 character, yet he defeated my level 30 character over and over again. It was infuriating, and it made me feel like I just couldn’ t be good enough to be a gamer.
I spent most of my time after that focusing on
player versus player fights, and refining my gaming tactics to fight real players. I switched characters to Arme, the mage, and began winning matches more frequently with her. I stopped playing as often in dungeons, so I did not level up as quickly, but my skills allowed me defeat players who were higher levels and who paid to get stronger faster. I fell in love with the Grand Chase community, and kept playing to interact with fellow players from all around North America. I learned a lot about United States culture through playing Grand Chase, and it was there that I found out that the‘ Super Bowl’ wasn’ t salad. Players would gather in the player versus player( PvP) chat rooms, and we would discuss game strategies, which characters were too powerful, and who recently got banned for cheating. We especially loved talking to the game moderators, Grand Chase’ s staff who would enter the game to interact with players.
The players made Grand Chase into our own experience. We would create our own games within PvP. My favorite game was Warlock Tennis, a game where the Armes would create a tennis match by shooting flaming fireballs( the tennis balls), and preventing the opposing balls from hitting them by deploying reflective magical shields with precise timing. The game had the potential for player innovation and
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