Because players are active participants in the outcome of games, many of them feature that player in a heroic role. We could see this as flattery or enticement, for sure. But the huge emphasis on heroism in games has led to that medium becoming a uniquely fertile ground for reflecting on what heroism means and how we relate to it. One popular contrarian sort of game is the villain game. In this broad format, the player is cast as either an implicit villain (arguably the case in something like Shadow of the Colossus) or a more explicit villain as in today’s laboratory subject. For players used to and maybe even bored by do-gooding as a world-saving nice person, it can be funny or refreshing to walk on the dark side for a change.
Within that “villain game” umbrella, one of the nerdier categories of games is the dungeon management game. We can think about 1997’s Bullfrog-developed game Dungeonkeeper, a strategy game all about playing the role of a dark lord in charge of an army of evil minions who, like workers of all stripes, need payment and motivation to do their job. The object of the game is to rid your underworld of meddlesome knights and other paragons of goodness, allowing your evil domain to fester in peace deep beneath civil society. It carries itself with a lot of sarcastic humour and seems like a grand old time for anyone with an inclination for strategy and an impish taste naughtiness.
Like Dungeonkeeper, today’s game, entitled (breathes in) What Did I Do to Deserve This, My Lord? 2 (in Japanese: Yuusha no Kuse ni Namaikida or 2), involves digging up an underground dungeon designed to kill heroes trying to eliminate your evil minions. Typical role-playing game heroes, including sword-wielding soldiers, priests, and sorcerers, show up at your door and you have to give them a distinctly bad time. The way you do that, at its core, is to create a food web that supports an ecosystem of evil beings. Where Dungeonkeeper conceives of pure evil as a business driven by profits, What Did I Do to Deserve This sees it as part of the web of life.
You begin by digging up green-flecked blocks to bring forth the archetypal Japanese RPG minion, the lowly slime. Slimes are not good at attacking, but they carry nutrients from some blocks in the grid that defines your dungeon to other blocks. This eventually concentrates enough nutrients in a soil block to spawn a little bug called an Omnom. One level above that, you can get lizard-men carrying swords. Lizardmen eat Omnoms, and Omnoms eat slimes. If they are full and satisfied enough, they reproduce, which means your army can become somewhat self-sustaining within its own dynamic equilibrium. Of course, none of that happens without constant management and intervention, and the player’s job is really about accelerating and channeling all that devouring and reproducing to practical ends.
Mostly, that means you want to create rooms and corridors that enemies will thrive in while heroes get bewildered and overwhelmed. Whether that means your dungeon is a lengthy set of twisting hallways or a set of complex mazelike chambers is up to what your mission demands and your preferences. Some monsters, like dragons and magic-throwing Liliths, benefit from long straight corridors because of their ranged abilities. Others, like lizard-men and Omnoms, thrive in big swarms and therefore enjoy slightly less linear spaces. In all cases, the game uses a ragged pixel art style that emphasizes squares and blocky chunks on the PlayStation Portable’s (PSP’s) screen. It’s a generally basic but nice-looking game that prioritizes clarity. It’s a good thing, too, since your dungeon gets pretty complicated and harder to read at a glance as you keep playing. On a small screen like the PSP’s, the simpler the better.
Example dungeon section from the game’s old Amazon page
To be frank, I am not good at this game or its predecessor. While I think I grasp the basic theory of how to make a good dungeon, and eventually cleared the first game’s story mode, I’m completely stymied on stage five of this second game. With that said, I think this game’s attempt to model energy transfers in food webs and broader ecosystems is fascinating and mostly successful. Developer Acquire, which is happily still a going concern, produced a game–a series–that really works for its system and is quite funny and entertaining even in localization. Director Haruyuki Ohashi, who had a large role to play in the company’s Way of the Samurai series, worked with a small team to produce this game, and I credit Sony Japan establishing a relationship with Acquire that would later pay off with even more experimental and interesting games like Patchwork Heroes and Rain.
What Did I Do to Deserve This, My Lord? 2 is a pretty simple game, but it’s absorbing. It’s also emblematic of Sony Japan Studio’s role in the company’s PSP strategy. It developed and coordinated tight, focused games with a distinct hook and, in many cases, an experimental style of play or presentation. In this case, the game presents the player with both a puzzle to solve and a tight resource management problem to untangle. Sitting right on the line between puzzle game and real time strategy, its combination of rigid and rewarding rules with your monsters’ ability to wander around and even spontaneously mutate really puts it where great games live: on the border between predictability and surprise. It honours your input but, behind your back, conspires to make your life just a bit harder than you think. Fitting for the game’s themes of villainy, I suppose.
Next time, we’ll be sorting the refuse of civilization in the extremely bedevilling puzzle game Trash Panic.
Of the many beautiful things about Japan Studio’s produced work, perhaps my favourite is their contribution of many vibrant and lively animals into the medium of games. Animal characters are not so uncommon in games, of course, but Japan Studio developed or collaborated on a huge number of games that gave a genuinely rare dignity, fun, or insight to depictions of animals. From the talkative virtual pets of Doko Demo Issho to the colossi and Trico from Shadow of the Colossus and The Last Guardian to the weird space fish from, well, Space Fishermen, they have an unmatched menagerie of lovely creatures.
Let’s hope these animals will get more appreciation from happy players long into the future.
Let’s open today with a pretty big question. How do video games use animals? A number of answers spring to mind. I think of Sonic the Hedgehog and the menagerie of imitators that choked on his dust in the early 1990s mascot craze. Animal-ish game characters from Mappy the mouse to Crash Bandicoot to the cat in Stray have given us cute and charismatic avatars to control. Then there are companion characters. Yoshi the green dinosaur is the archetype, though he’s been followed by Wander’s horse Aggro in Shadow of the Colossus, Epona in The Legend of Zelda series, and a whole herd of other rideable creatures that choke up walking space in online RPGs. Biggest of all is Pokémon and its ilk, where animals are collectible game pieces to be used in battles or other skill-testing engagements.
So far, these are all characters we can control fairly directly–animals as tools for progression.
Some games make caring for or managing a companion animal more of a goal in itself, though. Virtual pet games had a couple of vogue moments, of course, ranging from Tamagotchi to Doko Demo Issho and Nintendogs. At their most “game-y” and interactive, we have Trico in The Last Guardian, the world’s handiest and most patience-testing virtual pet of them all. Other non-player animals include, of course, the legions of wildlife who get slaughtered in hunting games, open-world Wild West sims like Far Cry, Breath of the Wild, and resource-grind action games like Monster Hunter. Zoo Tycoon and other zoo simulations are sort of a softer, kinder mirror-image of those games, where the point is to take care of a stock of wildlife and market them for public amusement and edification.
This is one reason why I find Rhino Studios’ Afrika so wonderful. Like fellow virtual photography game Pokemon Snap, it tasks you with documenting a virtual space. In this game, however, that space is a sort of fictionalized nature reserve in Africa called Manyanga, where digital representations of real African animals live. These include the usual charismatic safari animals ranging from the Big 5 (elephants, leopards, lions, buffalo, and rhinoceros) to hippos, hyraxes, giraffes, and storks. The story situation casts you as either a French journalist or an American zoologist exploring this relatively uncharted region of the continent in pursuit of reports about a mythical giant predator called the Nunda. That kind of mystical or cryptozoological angle issomething Afrika shares with fellow Sony Japan Studio series Aquanaut’s Holiday, though for the most part you set about busily documenting real animals that exhibit a set of realistic behaviours for you to photograph.
Official screenshot of an early event where the player photographs an African wild dog pack hunting impala
In terms of structure, the game relies on a mission system where you receive instructions on your custom PC interface at base camp and then go out into the field with your branded Suzuki jeep and branded Sony camera equipment. There are five big open areas to search through, ranging from a gigantic flat savanna plain to an arid plateau, the shores of a small lake, and a sprawling wetland area. The game has no time limit, so if you mess up a mission by not finding a specific animal or situation you can return after resting back at camp. When you submit a photo, also like in Pokemon Snap, you get graded on your technique and positioning. Because of that, and the fact that you have free movement and nuanced character control, the game becomes a bit of a stealth game with a sort of adventure game structure. You have to get close enough to animals to get a great shot of them without making them run away or, with the bolder animals, making them angry at you. Luckily, the game does not allow any living creature to get hurt (the game has a tie-in with National Geographic, so this is understandable), and the worst that can happen is you get knocked out temporarily.
Aiding you in your tasks, as I mentioned, is the fact that you have pretty precise and considered character control. Afrika is one of the best games I’ve played at simulating what it feels like to move as an ordinary human being. That is, it maps the camera controls to your character’s head pivot, meaning your character is always facing the direction you the player are looking. You can stand or crouch, and can also lean out to take a photo from a secure hideaway like a stand of shrubs or a tree branch. Like the car, it feels very heavy and more naturalistic than your average action game controls. It’s not effortless, but that makes the game more fun rather than less. Though the game has some pretty noticeable performance problems, especially when moving quickly among a lot of animals in your Suzuki, the game conveys a profoundly rooted sense of place with a–compared to today’s games–relatively sparse helping of foliage and landscape geometry. Lighting, especially, is dramatic and even moving when you see the brilliant sunrises and sunsets that frame each day of the game.
The beauty of building a game around a photography mechanic is that it is non-destructive. Although for each playthrough there are events that occur as scripted one-offs, every venture out into the field puts you in contact with animals. Taking interesting photos is important for missions, sure, but it’s also a rewarding activity in and of itself. The best shot I’ve taken in the game so far, in fact, is not one that I ever submitted for a mission. Instead, I put my shot–showing three giraffes standing in ascending order of height–up in my base camp in the included photo frame. Essentially, the game’s missions train you to pay close attention to animals’ behaviour, and that means that you can spend free time watching for specific movements or interactions that appeal to you. There are quite apparent limits to the game’s repertoire of animations and non-player intelligence, but the game nonetheless rewards cultivating a precise eye for your subject in both a content and formal sense.
Elephant entry in the Field Guide, which the player fills up by submitting photos identifying the game’s many animal species
Another thematic thread in Afrika that I appreciate, though others may not, is that despite its invention of a fictional African space to explore, it does not posit some kind of “pure” nature apart from human intervention. Its brand tie-ins with Suzuki and Sony are not just mildly amusing, they are also quite realistic. Documenting Manyanga involves using technical equipment, driving in a loud, clunky automobile, and making lens and camera body purchases that function as upgrades for your ability to take pictures. You are apart from normal urban life, but also connected via the Internet and working jobs to help pay for your expedition. Unlike many ecological games and other media that make technology out to be an eternal or even magical enemy of Nature pure and holy, the game places its setting in an industrial context.
Since its designers no doubt used animal footage and photography as reference to make its animals so convincing, it is also being remarkably honest about its own sources, so to speak. Our knowledge about animals, and our ability to intervene and make animals’ lives better, are always paradoxically enabled by the scientific and technological efforts that sometimes harm those same animals. Rather than reject this tension and make ourselves hypocritical enemies of technology, it’s better to let this paradox inform our actions and thinking about Nature, finding solutions to the problems we’ve created rather than suffocating ourselves in guilt for just being human beings and using technology to make our lives better.
I love that Japan Studio made one of its showcase PlayStation 3 games–2 of them if you count Aquanauts’ Holiday: Hidden Memories–more naturalistic representations of wild spaces rather than tired game conventions. Where so many developers, over and over again, use computing power to render realistic worlds that are impressive but also cold, detached, and generic, Rhino Studios and Sony delivered a technological theme park that tried to make players care about animals as they really are to some extent. Its wonderful sense of place and player control also indicate something subtler about the vision inherent in Afrika: it’s a game that loves people just as much as it loves animals. It loves the process of documentation, study, and discovery that is so necessary to creating a better world, and it does so in a way that is so distinctly at home in the digital game medium: focusing on the links between technology, commercialism, virtual spaces, and human curiosity. Director and producer Katsumoto Tatsukawa and his excellent team should take a bow for bringing this one to life.
Not to mention Wataru Hokoyama for his amazing score
Next time, we’ll look at another game that, in its own much more twisted way, also models ecology: What Did I Do to Deserve This, My Lord? 2. A weird little ant farm indeed.
It feels good to finally write about another game that people in North America and Europe could actually buy and play. Starting with this game, in fact, there will not be another Japan-only game covered in the scrapbook. As mentioned in the last entry, 2005 saw a reorganization of PlayStation’s business operations within Sony (which on a corporate level was simultaneously going through its own reformation). This change seemingly reoriented its game development from regional offices putting out projects tailored for that region to a more integrated operation aimed at producing games with global potential.
While this shift ultimately doomed Japan Studio as a more insular and culturally specific (which, in the global media marketplace means: less American) game studio, it also meant that the games Japan Studio did make seemed to have a slightly better shot of making it to market outside of Japan.
To wit: Sony actually published Ape Escape 3 itself in all regions, which it declined to do for Ape Escape 2. While it’s hard to say with certainty why this might be, I feel inclined to speculate. During the period from 1997-2005, Sony developed a high number of games that are coarsely labeled “mascot platformers.” In series like Crash, Spyro,Jak and Daxter, Ratchet and Clank, and Sly Coopner, Sony had American partner studios and later purchase targets Naughty Dog, Insomniac, and Sucker Punch create Sony-owned characters and character-driven action games aimed at boys and young men. I suspect that, amidst the flurry of games from the latter three series that arrived on the PlayStation 2, Ape Escape 2 was seen unfavourably as a Japanese import that competed against Sony USA’s own work. So they offloaded the sequel to the very successful first Ape Escape and let Sony Japan license the game to French company Ubisoft in the US and Europe. Under the new Worldwide Studios initiative, though, Sony wanted to publish its own games on its own terms, leading to their releasing Ape Escape 3 under their own name in 2005.
While Sony USA likely saw Ape Escape as expendable or even competing with their efforts to promote American-made work, in Japan (where the series is known as Saru Gecchu! or, roughly “Monkey Get You!”) Ape Escape was a cultural force of some power. There were multiple animated adaptations for television, the Piposaru monkeys featured in the games because mascots alongside Toro from Doko Demo Issho, and the country received a large number of spinoffs and experimental releases never destined to be translated for non-Japanese territories.
Japanese TV ad for Ape Escape 3 featuring the monkey suit characters seen in a lot of commercials and other media at the time
One notable thing about the original Ape Escape is that it was the first–or near to it–game Japan Studio developed as a distinct and unified software team. As I’ve mentioned many times, its method of working in the early days either had the company working with independent creators and small independent studios (as in PaRappa the Rapper’s NaNaOnSha) or through a subsidiary office called Sugar and Rockets (Jumping Flash, Ghost in the Shell, Yarudora, etc.). It was a company that worked, as so often happens in the Japanese media industry, on individual projects set up with individual stakeholders and teams and merely coordinated and facilitated through the central office. Ape Escape was a big deal for Japan Studio because it established a kind of core base of talent within the studio to produce relatively larger games with more continuity.
A much changed and expanded version of that team, led by returning Ape Escape 2 director and producer Naoto Ohta, delivered probably the best pure action game on the PlayStation 2. It’s a game at the apex of its genre and a highly refined expression of pure video game fun. I mostly love and admire the game for two reasons. The first is the way it balances both simplicity of design and generosity in giving the player options. And the second is its poise, its unerring sense of its own aesthetic identity from its music to its controls.
Excerpt from page 10 of the manual
To address the first point, let’s talk about how you play Ape Escape 3. The game is a set of levels where you go around catching pesky monkeys in a net. Whichever of the two main characters you choose, you accomplish this with the help of a number of Gotcha Gadgets provided by the kindly if somewhat aloof Professor Aki. These gadgets the good professor gives you include a Stun Club for destroying robotic enemies and making monkeys easier to catch, a radar that lets you see where monkeys are hiding, a hula hoop that makes you run faster, a portable helicopter propeller for more vertical mobility, a slingshot, and so on.
What has always made Ape Escape different from other action games is that, unlike in other games that rely on buttons to activate character abilities, almost everything you do except for moving and jumping is done with motions on the right analog stick. So you twirl the propeller to make it work, you move the stick to swing the Stun Club in different directions, etc. New to this game are a number of transformations reminiscent of tokusatsu (special effects action) TV shows or magical girl anime. These use up a green gauge and allow you to wear costumes that grant you abilities like being a ninja or shooting little guns as a cowboy.
Official artwork of girl character Sayaka (or Yumi in North America)in her ninja form
This means that your character is both quite simple to control but you have a huge toybox of options for tackling many scenarios. While levels are often built around using specific items in specific ways, actually catching your simian quarry is a problem with endless solutions. You can go up to a troublesome monkey–who may or may not be shooting at you with an Uzi–and simply thwack it with the Stun Club, catch it in your net, and carry on. Or you could use the Fantasy Knight transformation to protect yourself from bullets and catch it with a magical capture circle. You could also simply dodge and weave around its attacks and catch it without striking it at all.
Ape Escape 3′s intricate but compact levels invite the player to replay them in different styles. There is a time attack mode, naturally, but I also enjoy trying to catch monkeys without using transformations, or only using the slingshot and the net, or trying to stay in one specific transformation for an entire level. You always have tools to carry you through a tough patch with relative ease if you want, or you can stick to a narrower arsenal for the sake of your pride. If you care about such things. This is what I mean when I say the game is comprised of a number of simple actions that add up to a generous serving of options for player-driven creative play.
That idea of inhabiting the characters also plays into my second point about the game’s sense of identity. We’ve talked about the game’s distinct approach to controls. Mapping character actions to analog stick motions is still very novel today, especially because of the widespread standardization for how games handle things like camera and movement controls. But the game’s unique point of view on its own genre extends to things like its look and music as well. While it draws heavily from your typical pulp Japanese pop culture conventions–children’s adventure anime, tokusatsu shows, and so on–it builds a cool new identity around this core of familiar tropes.
Official artwork of male character Satoru (Kei in North America) in his Fantasy Knight getup
This starts with the game’s story. It’s secondary and pretty inessential to most of the game, but it mostly exists to set up the fact that the monkeys you’re trying to capture have taken control of TV stations and are broadcasting very annoying and brainless programs that turn people into mindless addicts so they can take over the world etc. etc. For each stage, you go to a specific show or movie the apes are broadcasting, which allows the designers to build stages that act as pastiches of specific movies or genres. You have a wilderness adventure level, an Arabian Nights-style level, a kung fu movie level, a fairytale castle, and the like.
When you combine the transformation costumes, various monkeys acting out roles within the “shows” the stages represent, and the generally exemplary visual design of the levels, there is a strong sense of childlike wish-fulfillment. You step into the world of a familiar movie or show, taking on various dress-up roles, and messing around with cool gadgets. It’s not a particularly deep or critical sensibility for a piece of media, but as a game it unifies the sensory world you see onscreen extremely well. When you get into a flow in Ape Escape 3, it’s grants a sublime sense of playfulness that I still think is a noble goal to which games can aspire.
As a final grace note, I think it’s important not to neglect Soichi Terada’s pop-electronic music score for the game. It lends a cutting-edge and modern feeling even to levels like the ones inspired by historical Japanese movies. I think it holds a wonderful tension between rhythmic drive and memorable melodies, which is a tricky thing to do. Tracks like “Hide-and-Seek Forest,” which samples the famous Goofy pratfall scream, have grown from being catchy novelties for me to genuinely affecting. It’s such idiosyncratic music from a clearly legitimate producing and composing talent, the kind of music that works as a refreshing change of pace from so many bombastic or overly minimal orchestral scores that have cluttered up games since storage media could hold recorded CD-quality music.
Ape Escape 3 is such a confident and beautifully put-together piece of work. While I would have loved to see a fourth and fifth game come later, that will probably never happen now, and it’s fine for series to end. There’s little this game sets out to do that it doesn’t achieve, and it represents one of the more impressive achievements of which Japan Studio could boast before its closure.
Doko Demo Issho is a lovely virtual pet game that revolves around teaching a set of characters Japanese words and pretending to talk to them. The charm and appeal of this series, which was very popular in Japan in the late 1990s and early 2000s, hinges on the characters’ well-crafted and individual personalities and the fact that they are grounded in a very real world. In fact, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. Japan (SCEI) adopted Toro Inoue, the white cat leading man of the series, as its mascot. Before I go into more depth on that, though, I want to go on a brief tangent talking about the arc of Japan Studio’s history and what games like this 2004 release of the 1999 original Doko Demo Issho means for that history.
When Sony shut down Japan Studio in 2021, English-language reaction tended to fall into two camps. The first, like this elegiac Youtube video, tended to highlight personal feelings of sadness or even bereavement. Indeed, the closing of the development house meant that many future possibilities and hopes dissolved. In some cases, this sadness curdled into a kind of bitterness, and the closure of the studio, along with Sony’s more recent spate of studio closures and layoffs, has people who are not armchair CEO Sony boosters disquieted. In this view, the creative future of a brand that used to put out a variety of products is in doubt as the highest reaches of the gaming business continue to consolidate and homogenize.
The second camp, as in this article, has a vague feeling of “I told you so” contrarianism. This cluster of opinions focuses on the perceived business failures of Japan Studio and its production of relatively less-loved games like Knack (2013, which was in fact a Mark Cerny pet project, but let’s not go there right now). If one values the profit margins generated by a company branch, as Sony Corp. and the Interactive subsidiary clearly do, then this argument makes a lot of sense. I’m not sure, however, what possible use it might be to the fan outside of simply echoing and extending the cynical and narrowminded “logic” that seemingly governs companies like Sony.
Commercial for the original PlayStation and PocketStation version of Doko Demo Issho
I don’t relish spending so long yakking about hasty discourse on the Internet, but I think it’s important to use this blog to offer a slightly longer-term perspective on Japan Studio and its place in gaming history. For the most part, I have done this by just letting their wonderful work speak for itself. But we are getting closer to 2005, which marked a critical shift in Sony’s overall strategy for software development and publishing. That year marked the point where Sony created the so-called “Worldwide Studios” umbrella that created a more unified strategy for its global game development operations. Now, I am an outside observer who can only rely on information that has been publicly discussed. However, I think it’s possible to make fairly accurate if ultimately speculative inferences about how Sony’s business operated before and after that 2005 reorganization.
Before, Sony’s three big umbrella divisions (in Japan, Europe, and the USA) seemingly took care of their own region’s needs and interests first and foremost. This meant that British studios like Psygnosis/Studio Liverpool made games like Wipeout in collaboration with British designers for the European young adult market. In the United States, Sony America oversaw the production of sports game lines, managed collaborators like Naughty Dog, and generally stopped anything interesting from coming out in their region (I kid, sort of). And in Japan, Sony’s home region, game publishing focused on games that would appeal to Japan first and, in most cases, only. If some games made for one region became popular in another (Gran Turismo being the best example, though CrashBandicoot also deserves that recognition) so much the better.
We can kind of see this because there was clearly nothing making one branch or another release games that other branches produced. Sony published a lot of games in America that it had not developed–see how it co-published Final Fantasy VII in North America–and in general showed little-to-no interest in publishing games from the Japanese branch, including games like Doko Demo Issho and the second Ape Escape. In addition, there was a documented and precipitous decline in the Japanese game console market from its late 90s peak. Japan’s contribution to Sony’s bottom line, and therefore the prestige and importance of its division, decreased.
For this and other reasons, therefore, there are far fewer examples of outside publishers bringing Japan Studio’s work to the United States after 2005. Rule of Rose and Afrika are big exceptions, but once the PS3 and PSP replaced the PS2 as the main development platform for Sony Worldwide Studios, Japan Studio’s previously prolific slate of Japan-only games dwindled. With its resources focused on small downloadable games and the handheld PSP, with bigger games like Toro to Morimori, Aquanauts Holiday, Boku no Natsuyasumi 3, and a handful of Ape Escape spinoffs skipping worldwide releases altogether.
This strategic shift, combined with the problems that dogged the PlayStation 3 in its early days, meant that Sony Japan Studio became more and more marginalized within the company. Sony’s strategy increasingly focused on creating games with more global appeal, which meant that projects seemingly had more scrutiny applied to them and would get made only with Worldwide Studios’ OK. One further piece of evidence for this, to me, is that Japan Studio’s collaborations with independent studios and smaller teams more or less evaporated in the very late 2000s with only a few exceptions. By the early 2010s, Sony clamped down on Japan Studio by installing a Western creative head and reorganizing the studio into a traditional Western-style development team aiming to create marquee big games. And ten years later, in 2021, it was all over.
Doko Demo Issho characters left to right: Sora, Toro, Kuro, Jun, Ricky, Pierre, R. Suzuki
That unpleasantness out of the way, Doko Demo Issho got its start in 1999 as a game designed to work with the Japan-only PocketStation. This was a little accessory for the PlayStation that could interact with disc games on the main machine but also worked as a little Tamagotchi-style pocket game system when you left the house. The little black-and-white PocketStation let you use your virtual pet character in little minigames and earn rewards that you could use back in the main game. So what was that main game?
In effect, for both the 1999 version and the 2004 one under consideration here, Doko Demo Issho (translated roughly as “Together Everywhere”) is a “talking game” where you use a text interface to teach words to little white cat Toro Inoue and a number of other characters including Jun the pop-culture loving rabbit, the athletic frog Ricky, the sophisticated half-French dog Pierre Yamamoto, and a robot named R. Suzuki. Once you’ve taught words to your character, you engage in conversations about various topics with them. The vocabulary system is remarkably contextually complete, all things considered. Let’s say you teach Toro the word “actuary.” You can tell him that it’s a job that people do, that it can be done by either women or men, and that you don’t feel particularly strongly about it. Those little tags inform how and when that word comes up in conversation with the character. Often you teach characters words in response to prompts. Toro might ask you what your favourite food is or a cute way to greet people you know. And you can either be honest and teach the character properly or mess with them and tell them that a bathroom is a celebrity actor and singer.
I generally try to treat honestly with Toro, though, because he’s just a white cat with a lot of curiosity and a desire to become more human! It would feel bad to lead him wrong just for a laugh. Though, because my Japanese is still quite imperfect, I might be unqualified to teach him the language. All of that teaching and talking happens in the main room where Toro lives. You can give him gifts, and the space of the room gradually fills up with little rewards.
In this 2004 version, which came out on the handheld PlayStation Portable, you no longer need an accessory to engage in other activities beyond conversing. Those rewards I just mentioned often come from interacting with other characters when you leave the room and go to other locations around the town.
Because so much of the focus is on just visiting your virtual friend and teaching them or leading them on gentle little adventures to the store or a school, Doko Demo Issho is not a game built around challenge or friction. Rather, you’re just building up a little relationship with a digital buddy. Because the characters have distinct personalities, there’s even reason to try it out a number of times, especially since the game does have a certain progression structure built in. Every day that you visit and do something, the character makes a little page in a picture book diary that you can look back on even after you’ve moved onto another character.
As mentioned at the beginning of this entry, Toro Inoue became PlayStation’s Japanese mascot. He got several games, many of which are also quite good. There was even a DVD released to tie into the series (right), which I would like to watch at some point. Like every major Japanese character, Sony put out a lot of licensed merchandise including plushes, stationery, and the like. He was a genuine icon of the PlayStation in its home territory. Obviously, though, the fact that the games revolve so heavily around words, contextual interactions, and Japanese architecture, culture, and sensibilities made it a difficult undertaking for localization. It never came out anywhere else, though Toro did make an appearance in a fighting game, of all things, on the PlayStation 3 called PlayStation All-Star Battle Royale.
Playing so many of the Doko Demo Issho games makes me think that, like so many of Sony’s early games, this would be a lot easier to sell to North Americans now than when it came out. Lifestyle games, more relaxing games, and cute games have much larger markets now. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like Sony has much or any interest in the character anymore. Developer BeXide is thankfully still around and still sells some merch for Toro and other characters on their website, but have unfortunately subsided into making sludgy phone games. A sad state of affairs to be sure.
And, ultimately, Doko Demo Issho games of all stripes work more as interactive lifestyle accessories than traditional games. To be honest, though, there is a lot of room in my heart for games like that. The pleasure of interacting with a character in a game can go far beyond controlling what they do, and it’s a lot of fun to play “as yourself” in a game with a character as your companion. In fact, it’s something I would love to see more games do. There’s a beautiful middle ground there between traditional play and roleplay that Doko Demo Issho facilitates very well. And above all else, Doko Demo Issho on PSP makes me feel good. I don’t think of it as a shallow “replacement” for a real friend or even just as a virtual pet game. Rather, it engages my joy of playing with words, and beyond its aesthetic merits is also a great way to build my Japanese vocabulary. It’s sad that it’s a profoundly inaccessible game for anyone who doesn’t read Japanese, but I’d love for it to get more attention as a genuinely good game all the same.
As I dig through old articles, magazine scans, and other gaming primary sources for my Japan Studio Scrapbook series, I run into all kinds of stuff that can’t fit into those articles. So I’ll be putting out very very quick little pieces once in awhile to just show off that stuff. For this one, I wanted to highlight the art of good game package design. Manuals, CD-ROM inserts, and cover art have brought out the best in many illustrators, and I think it’s always good to step back and give these creative workers credit for making us a little happier.
Now, box art listicles are really common. There are probably way too many of them already. Most of them, though, don’t even both crediting designers, and that information is rarely that hard to find.
Games that are more obscure to Anglos, like Astronoka there on the left, do take a little digging. I found that the game’s art director at Enix, who was probably responsible for at least approving the cover art, was Naoki Ohishi. Databases like Mobygames don’t include this game despite its beautiful art and, judging from Japanese Youtube video views, relative popularity.
For most games, though, that’s just not a good excuse. Let’s take some other great art from the same time as Astronoka to illustrate what I mean.
For instance, you can do a simple search to figure out that Hiromi Kadowaki created the beautifully sentimental cover design for Doko Demo Issho. Eichi Abe, meanwhile, handled the beautifully moody work for the political adventure game Aconcagua. Enix’s adventure game Nanatsu no Shima Kaze Monogatari is a bit harder to nail down, but we at least know that the artwork comes from the hands of Naoki Oishi. It’s easy to give credit with a little effort.
On a quite different wavelength, another Enix product, Mystic Ark, makes great use of the pulp fantasy art of illustrator Akihiro Yamada on their cover. Despite its hackneyed fantasy subject matter, it has a very strong personality because of that design. Nintendo, meanwhile, which is much more tight-lipped about the artists and designers who work on their packaging (though I wish they wouldn’t), put in a really lovely effort for the divisive N64 platformer Yoshi’s Story. It shares the stitched-together look of the main game, but with a much finer execution.
Finally, I want to show everybody the great art for Bokura no Kazoku, the urban child-raising simulator that’s connected to the well-loved Boku no Natsuyasumi games. Hironori Komiya, Takuya Izumi, and Ayako Mori coordinated this art, which uses Mineko Ueda’s art in a lovely composition that is both beautiful and highly communicative. Look out for some more of these as my scrapbook features keep going.
One thing that made me excited to write this series of Scrapbook articles is that it gave me the chance to really think through why video games move me. Many games have gotten strong emotional responses out of me. Freestyling in the PaRappa games, when the guard rails the game normally uses fall away and you just jam with your controller, is thrilling. Flying in NiGHTS, the perfect jokes in Sam and Max Hit the Road, nailing a tricky set of turns in Outrun 2, or cracking a fiendish puzzle in Riven have all had profound effects on me. It’s a little tricky, though, to talk about these moments the way I would about seeing a Rothko in a museum or watching a great film. Games just have an air of triviality to them, especially when you are talking about something as elemental as pinball. Though it’s not a problem that games share a lot in common with toys, it does mean that we don’t always have a great language for talking about the feelings and realizations that we have while playing them.
Pinball tables are a kind of electromechanical predecessor to video games, acquiring a dingy reputation because of their close association with gambling. These tables are still around today, and I enjoy playing on them once in awhile, but I’ve never been very good at them nor inclined to play them much. Coin-op games in general rub my generally frugal nature the wrong way, and I could just spend my coins on arcade video games instead. That said, pinball video games have had a strong place in my life for some time. The old one-table pinball demo that came with Windows, for example (3D Pinball Space Cadet) had solitaire firmly beaten as a timewaster when I used my parents’ computer, for example. That said, it wasn’t until I found Flipnic that I really understood the appeal of pinball in my bones (and wrist tendons).
This is how Flipnic begins!
Pinball tables are intense sensory experiences, but they tend toward being very loud and brash. When they’re all lined up in a row, I suppose this helps individual tables grab your attention, and a table has to be pretty loud so the player gets audio feedback in a noisy arcade. That said, they’ve never quite agreed with my sensitive ears. Flipnic quiets down the whole affair and makes its pinball, I suppose, more introspective. It’s still a fairly tough game that relies on reflexes and skill training just like the real thing, but it layers on some adventure elements in the form of tasks you have to complete. For example, in the first stage, you have to navigate from board to board until you find one where butterflies land on bumpers when you hit them. Once you have butterflies on all the bumpers, the stage goes through a transition, which freezes the central waterfall area and allows you to climb it and reach the door out of the level and onto the boss stage.
Every stage of the game takes its name from some discipline of human knowledge–Biology, Metallic (which I suppose is supposed to be “metallurgy”), Geometry, Optics, and, for boss stages, Theology–and the overall feeling of the game is relatively easygoing and serene. The strange movies that play on key events add a great deal to the game’s feel and the sense of discovery you get by clearing mission objectives. Doing so can be tricky, so the soft psychedelia of the game can smooth over moments of failure or the sense of being stuck when you can’t figure out how to complete a stage for a time.
The game’s references to things like biology, geometry, evolution, and the like are not really intellectual in the sense of an academic text. It’s not a game that’s studying or examining these topics, but rather using them as the basis for purely formal and aesthetic ends. This is ultimately successful because the game feels great to play and allows you to really “feel out” these themes through play. Playing on the Optics stage, for example, the player travels around and around a stage lined with lines of light and colour, its movies using lighting elements like fireworks to heighten this focus on the purely visual. Meanwhile, the initial Biology stage decorates its stages in flowing water, animals, and rain forest landscapes. All of the stages stand out strongly in that way, and though not all of them are of equal quality, they all have unique approaches to pinball gameplay and sensation alike.
Playing this game with the lights off and headphones plugged into the television, it’s very possible to lose all sense of connection to the world beyond the game. It’s a world of logical actions and reactions, punctuated by surreal transitions and gambling machine-type feedback shorn of its shrill volume. A ton of credit goes to programmer Tetsuya Kimura, who is credited with designing the ball physics and stage interactions. Combined with the art team led by art director Koji Hasegawa, he made it possible for players like me to have such a “fantastic time.” And, in a twist from the usual way games from this list were treated, Capcom ended up picking up this game and releasing it in a nice package in North America, with Ubisoft picking it up in Europe. That still signals the fact that Sony America had seemingly less and less confidence in releasing anything other than franchise stuff from the Japanese branch, but at least it came out here in some way.
Next time, we’ll take a long look at one of the cutest games of all time, the inimitable Doko Demo Issho. Probably the apex of the pet raising game, though we’ll keep from going over our skis just yet.
In retrospect, we can see 2002 as a minor turning point in the history of Sony’s Japan Studio. While it always developed games with Japanese players in mind first and foremost, the late 1990s and even 2000-2001 saw a fair number of its games come out beyond their home country. Now, Sony America had declined to actually publish or market most of the PS2 releases beyond franchise games like Everybody’s Golf 3 and PaRappa 2, which left publishers like Atlus (Tsugunai: Atonement), Eidos (Mad Maestro!), and even Activision (Sky Odyssey) to localize them instead. Still, 2002 was a year that saw Japan Studio release 17 games, of which only three got a Sony America publication and one (the wonderful Dual Hearts) which got a release through Atlus. That stranded 13 games in Japan while the American side of Sony focused on pushing sports games and homegrown works like Twisted Metal Black, The Mark of Kri, and Ratchet and Clank.
You can understand why most of these Japan-only games stayed at home. While I think Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 is one of the best and most beautiful games ever made, and would have loved to have local versions of maniacal cartoon gameslike Poinie’s Poin and Space Fishermen to show people, these would have been dicey propositions given the tastes of early 2000s American game players. And, even more sadly, North American urban infrastructure is far too clunky and awful for train driving games like The Keihinkyuukou: Train Simulator Real to catch on on this side of the ocean. But it does bother me just a little bit that Otostaz never came out over here.
Space FishermenPoinie’s PoinYoake no MarikoThe Keihinkyuukou: Train Simulator RealBoku no Natsuyasumi 2
Otostaz is an action puzzle game, the same genre as games like Tetris, Lumines, and Puyo Puyo. It has a few key differences, however, that make it feel quite different from those games. For one, although it shares with all three of those other games the act of dropping pieces onto a board in a strategic way, the field you work with is more like a map than a jar that keeps filling up. The game consists of six rows of squares that move like a conveyor belt past the player. As each column moves to the left edge of the screen, it disappears, making way for another column on the righthand side. You have control of Saw, one of two paper cutout characters that star in the game, who carries one of three types of pieces, which can be dropped on any square currently visible on the screen.
A shot from the demo of the game, which shows how the player can drop pieces to build structures for points
The three pieces are brown land squares, blue bodies of water, and trees. When you place a water piece and a tree piece so that they both touch the same square, a little red house pops up on that square. When two houses touch the same square, that square spawns a larger house, and so on and so on until you have skyscrapers popping out of the landscape. Unlike Tetris and its lookalikes, the goals is not to clear the screen of objects and keep the field as clean as possible. Rather, your goal is to fill the screen with buildings with careful placement of just those three pieces I described earlier. The real fun of the game comes when you figure out how to use trees and land squares to hit already-filled squares on the field, which flips the pieces on the board and creates new configurations of pieces. It’s much easier to grasp in motion than in words or still shots, so here is a good video showing off advanced-level play:
I am nowhere near this good at the game!
Once you build your skills and reflexes by playing Otostaz, the game becomes a blur of flipping tiles and deliciously ear-pleasing sound effects. The bombastic pop big-band soundtrack lends the whole thing a bustling feeling, perfectly complementing the game’s theme of urban development and renewal. It’s a game of constant upheaval that rewards lightning-quick decisions and precise inputs. If you took SimCity and turned it into a pure action puzzle game, it might look something like this, huge skyscrapers and all.
Many of the game’s modes are pure score attacks, but thankfully for people like me there are also more contemplative puzzle modes that test your mastery of the game’s rules. Much like a game I’m going to talk about much later in this series, Trash Panic, I would consider this a fairly difficult puzzler. Playing it well requires quick thinking and a strong grasp of precise spatial relations, which can be very tricky as you move from beginner status to a more practiced intermediate player. I’ll admit to putting in a few dozen hours to the game without being able to beat the game’s single player tour mode all the way.
If you have the means, though, I would completely recommend sinking some time into Otostaz and getting your head around its intricacies. I find it immensely rewarding to refine my abilities and perception of how the game works, looking up advanced strategies and the game’s generous hint system to improve. What makes this game really sing, though, is its somewhat eccentric but lively presentation. The paper cutout look is highly readable but still stylish, and the whole game has a bounce to it, an electric sense of movement that most puzzle games fail to replicate. Even something as cool and slick as Lumines feels almost austere compared to Otostaz. Developer BrainBox and Japan Studio deserve credit for putting out one of the best puzzle games I’ve ever played here, and I’m always confused (not to say puzzled) at the scarcity of full boxed puzzle games in North America. Games like Kurukuru Kururin, Panel de Pon, and even Puyo Puyo skipped our shores entirely or received mildly obnoxious brand tie-ins when they came to our region for the first time, and I’m assuming the same train of thought led to Sony skipping Otostaz for a release outside Japan.
Regardless of where it ended up releasing, this is a wonderful game for all puzzle fans. It’s even completely translated into English! That’s right, there is an English mode built into the game despite the fact that it never came out anywhere English is a dominant language. I would say this feature might be a vestigial sign of a potential European or North American release plan, but it’s hard to say. Poinie’s Poin also has a full English translation, albeit one so bizarre that it would seem impossible to release in any native English territory.
Overall, Otostaz is a very fine puzzle game. Its looks, play, and various modes push your intellect in different ways and reward you with great sights and sounds. And though I’ve said it’s not the most approachable puzzle game, its visual and aural appeal should greatly sweeten the new player difficulty curve. Try to play this if you can.
Next time, we’re going to give the pop-surrealist pinball masterpiece Flipnic a spin. Few games offer more pure haptic pleasure, so I’m sure we’ll have a great time talking about it.
Much like American superhero comics, video games have a profound problem with cultural narrowness. Because video games are connected to computer technology, which for decades (though not forever!) has been a highly masculine world, most of the people working in the world of video games have been men with a certain set of geeky interests. That these creators have cultivated an audience that looks a lot like them is, perhaps, not surprising. I often joke that all the people who make video games have seen exactly five movies: Star Wars, Alien, Blade Runner, Indiana Jones, and Saving Private Ryan. Most games are fantasy or science-fiction works and the only modern-set games that have any regular presence in the market are military shooters or crime simulators. The sheer amount of repetition of boilerplate setting and world designs gets numbing fast.
Part of the reason for this is that the beautiful arrangement of talent that produced PaRappa the Rapper has never been institutionalized in any way. This pioneering hip-hop themed rhythm game emerged from the minds of a musician, Masaya Matsuura; a commercial designer and fine artist, Rodney A. Greenblat; a conceptual artist and editor, Gabin Ito; and a Japanese and English-speaking lyricist, Ryu Watabe. Of course, a team of programmers and engineers and production staff shepherded the project into existence, but it’s sadly quite rare to see so many people with broader cultural interests making the key decisions on a game’s design. Game companies have always had little interest in working with people from any other creative field, which has seemingly had a chilling and isolating effect on creativity within the industry as a whole. Even most independent creators nowadays produce games that come from a pretty narrow band of creative perspectives even as the demographic breadth of those creators increases.
With all that said, I’ve decided to make the fifth scrapbook entry about PaRappa the Rapper 2 from 2001. Much less successful than either the first game or the series rock-and-roll spinoff Um Jammer Lammy, the game got middling reviews in America and marked the end of this series as an ongoing thing at Sony. There have been rereleases since then, along with a steady stream of merchandise connected to the characters, but here is where it stops as far as original games are concerned. This is a shame because PaRappa and its sequel are precious works that show how control, character, and writing can interact in ways we hardly ever see.
Like the first game PaRappa the Rapper 2 is a story-driven game that sees its protagonist, rapping dog and fashionable young adult PaRappa, learning how to grow up and solve problems with the help of various friends and teachers. These teachers represent most of the eight stages of the game, which are completed by pushing specific buttons in time to the game’s songs and their rhythms. These songs all involve rapping call-and-response, with the scenarios being represented ranging from absurd (a ghost chef teaching PaRappa how to cook burgers) to just bizarre (getting a lesson from an ant guru while being repeatedly shrunk and enlarged by a shrink ray).
Though some would say that later rhythm games extended and improved on these games and made them in a sense obsolete, I would strongly disagree. For one, I love that the way to get the best scores in PaRappa games is to ignore the button prompts and just play your own improvisations in rhythm. The results are frequently hilarious but as I played this game I frequently lost myself in the music trying to find a good set of phrases for a high score. It encourage creativity rather than rote perfection, in other words.
For that matter, the vast majority of rhythm games are essentially tests of how well you can perform licensed tracks, with the player’s reward being a more or less uninterrupted playback of a song the game borrowed from someone else. The songs of PaRappa 2 belong entirely to the game’s own world, and your own best work is going to sound different from another player’s. That sense of play and creation, which games like Electroplankton would later evoke, makes these games continually relevant even if they are a little harder to grasp than games like Guitar Hero. And this might just be me, but I’d rather use the power of music to defeat an organization bent on changing all the world’s food into noodles than pretending I’m Aerosmith.
While the actual rhymes in the game were outdated by a lot even back in 2001, the overall sincerity and fun of the music shines through its rather simple rapping. It’s pure pop energy, but with a playful sense of surrealism that sets it apart from the rather drab and repetitive worlds of both pop music and video games. I think if we all love video games, we should demand this kind of creativity and originality as a standard rather than a special treat we get once every few years or less. Life is so much bigger and more fascinating than endless genre iterations, as fun as those might be.
That Sony Japan could enlist and use this kind of varied talent is a credit to their good sense and openness to new ideas around this time. We can now understand the PaRappa series’ “weirdness” in two different ways. It’s great that the game itself is “weird,” in that it reflects a unique vision of the world and of the possibilities of the medium. But it’s also a bad thing, because this kind of game being “weird” rather than the norm means we have a long way to go before games achieve their full potential as creative expression.
Next time, I want to look at a much more obscure piece of work, one of the best puzzle games of all time–Otostaz.
2000 saw the release of Sony’s newest and to this day most successful game machine, the PlayStation 2. Japan Studio launched a flurry of games in its first year, including the Shibuya-kei fireworks game Fantavision, interactive drama Scandal, the paint program Bikkuri Mouse, and well-remembered role-player Dark Cloud. 2001 saw Sony release yet another slate of eclectic productions that cast a wide net of subject matter and tone. In this year, at the heart of Japan Studio’s most productive and creative period working on home console games, the company released one of its great masterpieces, Rimo Cocoron (Rimokokoron).
Developed by a small team headed by director and planner Tomohiro Hasekura (who worked on a number of Sony’s music games like Fluid, the two PaRappa sequels, and Vib-Ripple), the game uses the PS2 to render strikingly clear vector graphics done by illustrator Kenichi Nakane. For those who might not know, vector images are a way of rendering pictures on a computer that are resolution independent. That is, they look just as clear no matter how far out or in you zoom. This is essential for Rimo Cocoron because its subject isn’t a single character’s adventure or an intimate drama but rather the unfolding business of an entire town of people. The player, working as a kind of omniscient observer/meddler (the official name for the genre of the game is “chokkai game” or “meddling game”), has to help people get what they want (or not) by intervening in the lives of 200 recurring characters across 6 increasingly huge stages.
From left to right, a man stands outside a hair salon wondering what style to get, two mother chat, and a young boy demands his mother buy him a gashapon capsule toy.The player can, for example, find a number of different styles to tell the salon patron to get.
These stages, which begin in an ordinary Japanese home as a family enjoys nabe (hot pot) and end up in a big amusement park called SuperLand, are teeming with people going about their day. The player’s goals are both to help people and to cause enough chaos and slapstick nonsense to eventually collapse the status quo of each stage. For example, the stage with the family eating hot pot can end with the entire meal going up in flames. In order to affect people’s lives, the player points and clicks with the controller, using the R1 button to capture one part of the stage and using the button again to plant that idea into the mind of a person or animal who might be interested in that thing. For instance, a cat might be hungry for fish. You can find a fish in the stage, capture it, and then plant the thought into the cat’s mind, causing it to rush for the fish market and carry off some of the prize catch.
Though there is often a linear set of things the player must do to clear each stage, the game offers no hints other than the thoughts of the characters themselves, their behaviour, and their dialogue with other characters. So the player can only advance through the game through careful observation, investigation, and experimentation. It has a toylike quality, where you tinker with what’s possible and, once the stage’s timer runs out, you can reflect on what you did and try other actions. The result is often wildly funny and offers a slightly satirical but still positive view of everyday modern Japanese life.
It’s hard to capture how great this game is without using video, so please watch if you wish
The best part of playing Rimo Cocoron is the sheer intricacy and care put into every level. This is where the game’s use of vector technology is so impressive. In the shopping district stage, for instance, you can zoom in so far that you can see a tiny earring lost on the ground and so far out that you can observe the entire stage buzzing like an ant farm. It gives the player a huge range of vision and a variety of ways of observing the results of your actions. Everything runs seamlessly, and the effect of the game is still impressive twenty-three years after its release. Other PlayStation 2 games certainly used more graphical effects and staged more convincing “real” spaces in 3D, but few of them still look as flawless and complex as this game.
Beyond crowing about its technical achievements and fun play works, though, I wanted to highlight the reason I chose this game to follow my discussion of The Book of Watermarks. That is, I think both that Shakespearan adventure game and this “meddling game” show the two poles of human experience that games almost always avoid: the sublime qualities of literary culture and the bustle of everyday life. For all its comic exaggeration, Rimo Cocoron presents a world that is recognizable to the player as grounded in normal reality. It dramatizes and pokes fun at human hypocrisy, desires, and foibles in a way that feels so natural and fresh decades after it first came out. It’s sad how rare that really is even in our current world where independent creators put out so many more games than in the past. It’s profound and joyful at the same time, which is a rare combination in any medium, much less in a medium as (often) thematically narrow as video games.
Overall, this is one of the most fun and vital games ever released. It’s unfortunate that it’s quite difficult to enjoy without some knowledge of Japanese language and cultural context, but the fact remains that it’s a real diamond in Sony Japan Studio’s record. It’s a reminder of how much games can achieve when they focus attention on finding the playful side of live as we live it rather than only on escapist fantasies.
Next time, we’ll be looking at the noodle-infested musical world of PaRappa the Rapper 2, which will also give me a chance to talk about one of my favourite artists and what artist-driven game production can really achieve.
Evvycology 