The Japan Studio Scrapbook 13: Tokyo Jungle (2012)

In Tokyo Jungle, you play as one of many animals–though you start out as a cute little abandoned Pomeranian dog–trying to survive in a Tokyo where humans have mysteriously disappeared. The game is an action sort of thing where you move your animal around the city streets and stalk prey (or delicious greens if you play an herbivore) to keep yourself fed while working to impress female animals and reproducing before you drop dead of old age. You carry on as successive generations of animals, trying to get stronger and, secondarily, unravel some of the mysteries surrounding the disappearance of human beings from the city. It’s generally a little ugly but very fun to play and, importantly, very funny as well. I defy anyone not to laugh the first time you make a house cat jump out of the tall grass to try to murder a hippopotamus. While you’re all recovering from your laughing fits, though, there is a little bit of preamble to get out of the way. Unfortunately, little of it is pleasant.

---

In 2020, Sony declined to renew most of the contracts for staff at Japan Studio. News trickled out and eventually we all learned that Sony had finally dissolved Japan Studio while maintaining a rump remnant. A small group of enthusiasts bemoaned this decision, but there was nothing you could do. Sony had just shut down its oldest game development arm, the office that had anchored its console business from the earliest days and defined its creative contribution to the medium of video games. It was also the last gasp for Sony’s own attempts to grow its customer base in its notional homeland of Japan. With PlayStation’s Japanese audience waning ever since 2004 or so and the relocation of Sony’s console gaming division to California in the mid-2010s, Sony already signalled Japan Studio’s corporate, economic irrelevance. And, though it put its name on a handful of great games in its grinding final days–Gravity Rush 2, Bloodborne, the sequel to Oreshika, and the incredible Everybody’s Golf for PlayStation 4–the fire had gone out long before that.

The reality was that Japan Studio as it originally existed had been dead and gone for almost eight years at that point. In order to discipline the studio and make it more useful to Sony’s global software ambitions, PlayStation put an American crony by the name of Allan Becker in charge of the studio sometime around 2011 or 2012. Ruthlessly culling smaller projects, he ended Japan Studio as it was. While the attempt to remake Japan Studio into a hitmaking machine did not quite work, Becker’s corporate-approved, American style approach to management led to the studio producing far fewer and far less interesting games.

Tellingly, two of the bigger games that the studio did end up making in the 2010s were vanity projects dreamt up by engineering genius and (judging from his creative output) boring dullard Mark Cerny. Another, the fantastic but–in terms of gameplay design–safe and trend-following Puppeteer was the brainchild of a British producer named Gavin Moore, another sign that Sony trusted its European and American staff to produce hits while their Japanese studios played second or third string. Those games didn’t even sell that well in the end, which might have been just as well. As PlayStation’s studios in Amsterdam and California put out hits built around sturdy, extremely rote ideas and truckloads of staff and money, there was no more room in Sony for Japan-only games or games that tried to defy industry common sense. Sony, in opposition to Microsoft and Nintendo’s attempt to reach non-hobbyist audiences, threw in its lot with the stock gaming enthusiast. Though capable of being very intelligent, these fans who, like their aging comic book store counterparts, have a deathly fear of getting ripped off, fetishize a sterile and packaged “coolness,” and throw a fit if anything about a product seems too weird or unexpected.

My somewhat harsh caricature aside, I see a few core reasons why Japan Studio eventually got reorganized out of recognition before being dissolved in 2020. These are, in no particular order:

• The decline of the Japanese TV console gaming market in favour of mobile phone games, PC games, and portable systems. Sony took this decline especially hard, slipping from dominating its home country from 1995-2005 or so to fading into near-irrelevance in the face of Nintendo’s renewed power.
• The way the PlayStation 3 struggled for Sony initially and, most importantly, the way that it seemed to recover because of huge, conservative action games like Uncharted. This underscored the importance of high-budget, story-driven, cinematic game projects that could capture players with spectacle. These kinds of projects have only become more dominant and more expensive within Sony ever since.
• The period from 2006-2014, a really depressing low point in the history of video game development creativity that also set the stage for out-of-control budget increases, increasing team sizes, and massive technological demands that drove the homogenization of large-scale game development. Most odiously, this era also became defined by a sickening anti-Japanese strain of talk in gaming circles, stinking with American cultural arrogance and generally ruining so, so many conversations about video games for about a decade.
• Sony’s core electronic business has also been in stasis or decline for decades now, making the PlayStation platform increasingly important to the company and, therefore, not afforded the creative and business liberties it once held.

One reason that does not convince me as much is the argument that Japan Studio had gone into a severe creative decline after the release of the PS3. Yes, there was never a big Ape Escape game for PS3 and Sony declined to revive bigger hits like Parappa on the third PlayStation, Japan Studio released a lot of games for the system that closed-minded and ignorant critics and gamers either ignored or dismissed. While most of its higher-profile projects ended up on the PlayStation Portable because of its greater success in Japan, the studio still released Afrika, Aquanauts Holiday: Hidden Memories, Boku no Natsuyasumi 3, Folklore, and Demon’s Souls to retail along with a raft of wonderful smaller games like Trash Panic, Echochrome, The Last Guy, and latecomer Rain. It’s a huge variety of excellent work, and puts the lie to the idea that Japan Studio struggled to release worthwhile games during this time. What it could not do, seemingly, was make anyone outside of Japan take notice.

---

Tokyo Jungle arrived from the mind of one Yohei Kataoka, who had little experience making games before this one. As explained in this article, Kataoka’s developer Crispy’s went through numerous prototypes before nailing a fun concept. Their approach, which built up from the idea of mashing up appealing animal characters and a ghost town setting, grew organically into what became Tokyo Jungle. The core appeal of the game is that its action is punchy and immediate, the violence abrupt, hilarious, and tied into real animal life cycles just enough to mesh well with the game’s area control system. In order to breed, the player has to seize control of waypoints by marking them as their territory. Only then will the game allow the player to choose a female animal in the area with whom to parent a new generation of creatures. Though the player starts as a Pomeranian, you can unlock a huge number of other animals to play with, including kangaroos, dinosaurs, and a robotic dog that seems like a winking reference to Sony’s AIBO.

The “circle of life” plays a key role in the way you progress in Tokyo Jungle

In some ways Tokyo Jungle feels like an unintentional inversion of Afrika. Where that game’s appeal rests on whisking the player through an informative adventure through a simulated African photo safari, Jungle turns the city over to the animals. Bristling with dangers, the streets of the Tokyo jungle play as a kind of satire of the peaceful savanna and wetland landscapes of Afrika. In the latter game, you outfitted your journalist protagonist in premium photography gear and in Tokyo Jungle you can decorate your animal avatar in kitschy junk you find on the streets–remnants of happier times. For humans at least.

Playing a prey animal or smaller predator frequently comes with a downside

Ever since starting this series with the conservation adventure Wonder Trek, I’ve developed a keener appreciation for how many games Japan Studio made that spotlighted animals in unique ways. Whether that meant emphasizing comedy like in Mister Mosquito or Tokyo Jungle or aiming at a sublime reverence as in Aquanauts and Afrika, to me these works stand as the medium’s most insightful body of animal-centred games. We’ve seen animals as companions in this series, we’ve seen them as goals to find, as objects of curiosity, as funny, as intriguing, as violent, as vital, as unique beings.

More generally, I am unsure if any studio has ever contributed as much to the art of games as Sony’s Japan Studio. From 1995 to around 2012 they consistently ignored trends, released daring work, and more than anyone else brought some real dignity to the idea that games are a medium of creative expression. While gaming technology can claim a number of well-known heroes from John Carmack to Yu Suzuki and on and on, very few large institutional forces in video games have put out half as much great creative work as Japan Studio in their entire histories. Sony itself is a desert at this point, Microsoft is going on its own scorched earth rampage shutting down anyone doing interesting things on their dime, and while Nintendo has always embodied a unique sense of fun and tactile pleasure, they are also very conservative–more idiosyncratic than artful, to make a fine distinction. Even independent developers today are often consumed with reproducing nostalgic tingles than pushing for personal expression and serious use of the medium. This is why I miss Japan Studio.

As you learn very quickly in Tokyo Jungle, even a very successful dynastic family of Pomeranians can quickly perish in the jaws of a panther. We’ve lost Japan Studio and, even worse, much of its legacy of great games remains completely unknown to people who only read and speak English. Sony, to be blunt, does not care about its history. So it falls to enthusiasts, journalists, fans, and academics like me to try to put our fingers on the scale. To me, a world where more people have played more of Japan Studio’s games is at least a marginally better one. They also embody the best aspects of cross-cultural communication. As Tokyo Jungle’s creator Kataoka said during a conference talk:

 “I personally feel it’s not necessary for Japanese companies to think about marketing to the West when making games. Creating what you want will eventually introduce new ideas and values to the west.”

And in an age where Japanese media has a more prominent place in the Anglosphere than ever, I think this thought really summarizes the tragedy of Japan Studio’s shortsighted closure.

Best of luck to all of you.

The main song from Gravity Rush 2 to send you off with beautiful music

The Japan Studio Scrapbook 12: Trash Panic (2008)

Sony USA advertised Trash Panic for its Earth Day 2009 marketing, which is all I needed to know to be interested in it. I’m also, happily enough, obsessed with block-style action puzzle games–Tetris, Panel de Pon, Puyo Puyo, Cleopatra, all welcome. Trash Panic is, in a sentence, one of those Tetris-derived games that implements complex physics simulations and uses irregularly shaped pieces. Namely, trash.

Trash is, sadly, often the operative word these days when talking about digital-only video games. By that, I mean games that are released on digital stores–either on console or on personal computer systems–without any disc release. These games are usually cheaper both on the development and consumer side, released directly to consumers while skipping all the logistical costs of manufacturing and tangible transportation. Stores like the PlayStation Network today have forsaken any kind of quality standards, so you end up seeing a ton of creative refuse choking up the stores and making it difficult to find anything specific, much less anything of high quality.

Back in the late 2000s, however, the idea of a digital-only storefront for smaller games had a real shine to it. Before the deluge of jetsam came washing in, console-based digital stores and platforms like Steam felt less harried and disorganized than the electronics section at the local big-box store or game boutique. Some of the pleasures of this early time were purely tied to novelty, of course. Still, in the days where iTunes still felt a little new, the idea of getting full games legitimately downloaded onto a console with a hard drive hooked up to my family television excited me.

Japan Studio, long more comfortable operating in tandem with collaborators and small teams of independents than with big factory-scale productions, thrived in filling these new digital storefronts with great games. One aspect of Sony Japan’s game operations that I haven’t discussed much to this point is the Game Yarouze! project. Roughly translated to mean “let’s make games,” Game Yarouze! was a creative audition program similar to music industry talent scouting or similar efforts conducted by other Japanese companies like Enix. Started in 1995, Game Yarouze! involved contestants submitting game ideas and proving some development acumen. Sony would then finance the project, paying for cost of living and providing a small support staff to complete the eventual game. This is a rather unorthodox way of doing things in the United States–though Valve’s tendency to co-opt and hire people who create unofficial game modifications bears some resemblance to it–but it has resulted in some profound successes. These included the masterful puzzle game XI (In English, Devil Dice) and the previously covered Doko Demo Issho series. Sony Japan made itself, therefore, a kind of independent game development hub, leveraging the low manufacturing costs of CD-ROM technology and their experience with collaborative development to turn out polished, focused, yet highly creative software.

During the beginning years of the PlayStation 3, however, Sony Japan rebranded Game Yarouze! as PlayStation C.A.M.P! (Creator Audition Mash up Project!).

I’m unsure of how the internal workings of the contest might have changed with this rebrand–if they changed at all–but for our purposes today the most important thing is that Trash Panic resulted from a C.A.M.P! submission by a developer named Taro Matsuda. Matsuda’s idea, which was considered part of PlayStation Japan’s attempt to break up what they called the “common sense” (link in Japanese) of stale console games, was in many ways completely genius. It would use the technology of the PlayStation 3 in ways that were rather unusual back then and even more strange now, all for a game that is fiendishly hard and slyly funny at the same time.

Before we commit too hard to sweeping thematic statements, though, let’s clarify what you do in Trash Panic. I mentioned its similarity to Tetris, and one look at it confirms this.

On the left, we see the playing space. You have a blue trash bin in the centre, a conveyor belt of magnets carrying pieces of trash to the bin on the right, a description of the current piece of trash and its characteristics on the bottom right, a Tetris-style holding space for pieces you want to save on the left, a stoplight measuring player’s remaining chances still further left, and gauges for the temperature, oxygen levels, and score on the bottom left. If you know how Tetris works, most of the game’s workings should be relatively intuitive to guess. Pieces of trash come, one after another with some warning, and you use the controller to rotate and drop the trash into the garbage can in such a way that it doesn’t spill or cause the trash can to overflow. If a piece falls outside the trash bin, you lose one of the green lights on the stoplight on the left, and you can do that twice before you fail and have to restart. Each level involves handling far more trash than the bin can handle, however, so the player can use a button to make pieces fall quickly and shatter, thus making room for more and more garbage to pile on top of it.

As mentioned above, however, the pieces are all modelled on real-life objects with advanced physics simulations. It’s easy to smash small and light lightbulbs, for example, but exercise weights and kitchen knives are not so simple. Everything has relatively realistic material properties, and learning the properties and interactions of each object is the key to victory. Rather than just making rows and clearing abstract blocks, you have to know, for example, that the microwave you threw in the garbage one move ago can act as a sort of anvil. You can drop pencils, teacups, wooden guitars, and mops onto it so they shatter before they ever hit the bottom of the bin. Eventually, though, the microwave will itself break and fall to pieces, leaving you with more space but without a way to shatter less durable objects. This system means that seemingly flat and mundane objects like sponges and futon mattresses, which are floppy and impossible to shatter, become incredibly vexing. They not only take up space without breaking up, they also cushion the bin and make it harder to break incoming objects.

These physics interactions get even more complex, however–and here is where the oxygen and temperature metres come into play. The game features simulations not just of hard and soft objects but also fluids and fire. When your bin is getting overfilled, the game will sometimes drop some rolls of toilet paper and a lit match into your hands. Since each object has its own burning point, you need to use kindling like paper or oil to start up a fire, at which point you can let the entire bin burn and even accelerate it by closing the lid of the bin, which increases the internal temperature. It also, however, eats up the oxygen inside, and when it reaches zero the fire will abruptly burn itself out. This means that managing the lid of the garbage can is also a tactical consideration. Closing it just long enough to get a conflagration going and then opening it so that it consumes the more durable trash slowly rather than burning out prematurely is important to success. Because there is no time pressure in Trash Panic, you can dramatically slow the game down to let a fire take care of your work for you. It can even spark explosives like dynamite or large bombs the game gives you, which blow huge holes in the trash pile clogging up your bin. These are a godsend.

Or rather, they are if you don’t mind producing a lot of harmful pollution.

As this video shows, it is possible to be great at this game, though I cannot muster it myself.

That’s right! The game’s Earth Day marketing was no coincidence, nor are the game’s themes about waste management entirely superficial. The main goal of the game is to escape each level without dropping three objects out of the trash bin. This means that you have to keep the bin tidy and manageable and, especially in the diabolical later stages, use fire or other means to break down accumulated waste. At the end of each stage, if you win, the game counts your carbon dioxide output and other wasteful acts like dumping fluids out of the bin (which doesn’t count against your chances on the stoplight) or using bombs and fire. At the end, you get labeled ECO or EGO depending on how well you protect the environment while wisely handling your trash bin. Fire is, after all, only one option, and every stage is beatable while keeping its use to a minimum or even zero. That said, the game, far from easy to complete in the first place, becomes almost agonizing when you refrain from using fire and explosives. Without the ability to burn trash, you have to use careful organization and precise planning. The game gives you very little help, though it’s not entirely without mercy.

One final weapon presents itself to the player: the decomposition ball. In later stages, some objects–toilets, and the like–are full of water. You can fill the bin with water, and if you are locked into a fire-based strategy these can be a huge pain because water protects lower levels of the bin from flames. However, if you can pour in enough water, you can immerse the decomposition ball item, which consumes water while growing tendrils of purple material that eat away at any trash that it touches, especially metal. Getting two such balls in the water at the same time creates an even more powerful feedback loop. That said, though these devices are useful and contribute to ECO points rather than EGO points as fire does, they are hard to use because they don’t work except when they have water to drink up and are, infuriatingly, neutralized by petroleum.

With all that said, the game’s themes play out visually, in terms of gameplay, and in the feeling of frustration and heartache you feel as a player trying to both take care of mountains of trash while not creating more pollution. The best trick of all, however, is that the game’s levels move upward in terms of scale, much like fellow Japanese clutter-management game Katamari Damacy. You go from managing an office trash can to vast-scale industrial wastelands. The game thus connects personal habits to social and technological structures, and it avoids directly moralizing about the issues of waste and pollution while allowing players to draw accurate inferences about the role that waste plays in industrial capitalist society from workplace tracing all the way back to production and extraction of resources.

Luckily, you can still play Trash Panic for a low cost if you have a PlayStation 3. It’s a real gem of the late 2000s, one of the worst eras for creative games anyone can remember, dominated as it was by ash-choked military shooters and inane sci-fi trash. What it shows is that, even at this late date and as it was–knowingly or not–staring down at its own incoming demise, Japan Studio could yet produce a wonder or two.

The Japan Studio Scrapbook 11: What Did I Do to Deserve This, My Lord? 2 (2008)

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.

Scraps 2: the Animals of Sony Japan

How many of these animals can you name?

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.

Japan Studio Scrapbook 9: Ape Escape 3 (2005)

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.

Japan Studio Scrapbook 4: Rimo Cocoron (2001)

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.