ReCollection :: The Origin of Memoria, my Animal Crossing town name

Advrik art by AWD : https://vgen.co/awd

Before delving into the rest of the events that transpired today in Memoria, I first want to go over a little bit of history of where the Memoria name originates from and why, all of a sudden, I decided to up and retire my launch day town of Brickhedge with its rich history and (now) strong ties to the story I'm currently writing.

So to begin, Memoria began its life in the Nintendo 3DS iteration of Animal Crossing, otherwise known as New Leaf. It had been a new lease on life for the franchise after the previous Wii title, City Folk, stagnated with the fanbase (I personally loved it, but whatever). During the lead-up to the game's release, I took to my now-defunct Tumblr blog, which had been solely dedicated to my Animal Crossing ramblings, throwing out possible names for my town in the forthcoming title. 

Eventually, I settled on something that resonated with my personality and my interests, and that was short enough to fit in any one of the game's allotted character total for a town name.

After much pondering in the following days, I did finally settle on something that, as previously mentioned, was perfectly in line with the Me.

Thus, Memoria was born. Lifted directly from the final dungeon of Final Fantasy IX, my favorite game in that particular series and one of my favorite games of all time, period. Memoria was the game's final dungeon, and it only existed as a result of the cumulation of the thoughts and memories of every living being that had ever lived. A concept that I loved and had felt that, given the amount of time and personalization that goes into an Animal Crossing game, it would be the perfect fit for my New Leaf town. But not just New Leaf, but for the name of every town I create in every future (or past) Animal Crossing game to come.

Much like Oldhill became the go-to name for my farms in farming sims, Memoria was poised to be the name I'd use for Animal Crossing going forward. No more wracking my brain to come up with something new and fresh for each new game. Simply, Memoria.

But New Horizons was hit with an unexpected new(and much welcomed) addition to the game's already growing list of changes that benefitted the player: Increased town name character limit! That's right, for the first time ever, we weren't limited to eight characters and could go wild. So I took the plunge and used a town name that I had come up with for a story around that time, but failed to get it off the ground until this past spring. Brickhedge had become my March 20, 2020 launch day town name, bucking the trend of a go-to name before it even started.

But that all changed yesterday. With the pandemic and other unpleasant events having happened leading up to and during the life of New Horizons, the town had been left with an unsettling blemish that, for the first time ever, caused me to stop playing a current Animal Crossing game. Now granted, I had put a good 1600+ hours into it and had played it for two years straight by that point, but I've found myself unable to return to Brickhedge now. A ghost hangs over that town that, thankfully, hasn't followed the name to Last Tail where it's used as the central storytelling location.

So there it is, the history of Memoria! A name that would go on to appear as a town at the center of a seperate series of stories that is currently in the middle of a massive overhaul/remake that can be read in its defunct state on my old Booksie account!