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.
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.
Evvycology 