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.
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.
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 