Life After Magic Taught Willa Rowe That She Is a Bad Friend | Winter Spectacular 2023
It has been three years since I last talked to my best friend.
This probably means I shouldn't refer to her as my best friend. But it's hard to break old habits, and I've been missing her quite a lot lately. I don't even know if I have a right to miss her; I'm the one who ended our friendship.
I describe the 2023 visual novel Life After Magic as "Sailor Moon and the other Sailor Scouts all grown up with the worst case of gifted kid burnout you've ever seen."
It's also a game about relationships. About friendships ending and whether or not they can be stitched back together. And it’s all done so masterfully, that it has me reminiscing about my own.
The protagonist of Life After Magic is Akiko, our Sailor Moon stand-in. After saving the world with her fellow Sentinels of Justice, Akiko's life has taken a turn for the worse. She’s a high school drop-out in a dead-end job, and her love life is “dead on arrival,” as she puts it. She also hasn't talked to most of the other Sentinels in years.
When her magic goes on the fritz, Akiko is forced to reconnect with her former friends. Embarrassingly, she doesn’t even know how to take the first step; She no longer has any of their phone numbers.
Abby's number was always at the top of my contact list due to its alphabetical order, and at the top of my message history due to how often we talked. That doesn't even include all the things we would send each other on Instagram.
Even at the height of the pandemic, we kept in constant contact and when New York did begin opening up we made it a point to see each other in person. Right before Thanksgiving, she told me that she already had a Christmas present for me.
That was the last time we would see each other in person. I never got that Christmas present.
Instead, the next handful of months turned into fewer messages and too many hangouts that fell through because something always came up. She had a bad habit of flaking and being late, and I had a bad habit of holding a grudge. Eventually, we stopped talking altogether.
When Akiko does reunite with the Sentinels of Justice, nobody is comfortable around each other. Some have kept in contact while others have fallen out on worse terms. One member, ARA, has gone on to become a popular idol after revealing her identity as a Sentinel - something that upsets a number of the other members. Akiko is also shocked to find that another member, KJ, has come out as non-binary. Akiko wonders to herself if reconnecting with the Sentinels will somehow make everybody's relationships with each other even worse. She wants to know, and I find myself wondering as well, if that’s even possible.
The flood of information about how the other Sentinels have grown, changed, or held grudges over the past seven years is enough to render Akiko nearly speechless. She doesn't know how to talk to any of these people anymore, these strangers that she used to call her closest friends.
With their magic acting up in unexpected ways, the Sentinels decide they need to check up on one another every so often. Akiko won't be getting another chance to run away from her friends and their collective past.
This also turns into Life After Magic's central gameplay loop. Every day Akiko gets to hang out with two former Sentinels of her choice. Akiko can take these meetings as an opportunity to learn more about what has gone on in the years since she last talked to her friends and attempt to build back something that resembles a friendship.
Akiko laments early on that the Sentinels can't return to their old hideout as it has been destroyed, just another part of the past that she can't fix.
There used to be a bar in the East Village called Angel's Share. Abby introduced it to me and it quickly became one of our favorite places to hang out. We'd spend hours downing cocktails as we talked about the big and little issues in our lives. Angel's Share closed in March 2022. I will never again see the bar stools we would push together to hear our conversation over the other patrons, or the corner table by the window where we often sat overlooking the streets below.
Angel's Share isn't the only bar we went to, and there are plenty of other bars, restaurants, and cafes that still leave me with a pit in my stomach as I pass them. Bits and pieces of our relationship are scattered across the city. They all feel familiar but not the same as they were with her. I think about the bar I came out to her as trans in. She was the first person in my life I told. She hugged me and said she loved me. I haven't gone to that bar since.
Life After Magic appears to turn Akiko's task of checking in on old friends into a simplistic dating sim, with the player choosing certain dialogue responses to endear Akiko to her old friends once more. While romance is an option with any of the Sentinels, Life After Magic uses this familiar mechanic to represent something beyond just getting a date - it's about the work needed from both parties to rebuild a friendship.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Life After Magic is that Akiko isn’t a perfect person. In many ways, the rifts between her and the other sentinels are caused by her struggles in no longer being the most important person in the room; the leader of a superhero group that saved the world. She's jealous of the success of ARA, annoyed at KJ’s self-assurance, and frustrated that Miranda has a career she’s passionate about instead of a dead-end job like Akiko.
And then, Akiko does it. She mends these lost relationships, and Akiko saves the world again, still with her closest friends at her side, exactly like they were before.
Except the beauty of Life After Magic is that this isn't an episode of Sailor Moon, and the power of friendship can only go so far. This event may have brought the Sentinels back into each other's lives, but once the dust settles Akiko sees they are still too changed to return to the relationship they all had before. This story isn't about forgiving and forgetting, but about growth, building something new from the ashes of those past friendships. It may not be as strong yet, but it is something more honest.
Since finishing Life After Magic, I realized I have been mourning my friendship with Abby for as long as it has been over. I never truly confronted how I felt about it.
Now if I were 14-year-old Usagi Tsukino, this is where I would say that after having a heart-to-heart with Tuxedo Mask, I reached out to Abby and we have begun to rebuild.
But I can't lie. Akiko wouldn’t want me to.
I am still too afraid to take that first step and reach out to Abby. Despite everything I have told myself since the friendship ended, it was my fault.
The end of Abby and my relationship was slow. But I made it final. One day in early 2021, after too many cancelled hangouts or messages left unreplied, I deleted her number and blocked her on social media.
A couple of weeks later I received a message request on Instagram from Abby. She didn’t understand why I was ignoring her or what had happened to us.
I was angry that she didn't understand that she had slowly stopped talking to me like we had for years. I was jealous because I felt like she was replacing me with new friends. A million little grievances built up in my mind. So instead of letting things peter out with no real conclusion, I made things final.
I regret that.
I regret it with every click of dialogue. I regret it as Akiko travels to coffee shops and parks with this mile-long distance between the girl she knew and the woman she is now. I miss our afternoon tea, late-night cocktails, and drunken dollar pizza. I miss the barstools and corner tables of Angel's Share.
Angel's Share reopened this year in a new space. I went one night and found myself sad that this place no longer held any memories of Abby and me. It left me wondering if Abby has also mourned Angel's Share's closing and had come to the reopening with feelings similar to mine.
Like Akiko, I'm worried reconnecting would just make things worse by opening up old wounds. I often think that maybe I could make things right if I just happened to bump into her on the street one day. However, unlike Life After Magic, no apocalyptic event will force us to reunite. But that doesn’t mean that a piece of my world hasn’t ended.
So I think three years is long enough to go without talking to my best friend. I know it’s scary, but I can’t let my fear hold me back before it’s too late. We won’t be the same people we were, and it won’t be the same as it was. It will be something different, hopefully something stronger, and maybe with that, there will be - just a spark - of magic.
I just don't have her number anymore.
