Cafe Nowhere
Idle Observations about Japanese Pop Fiction
I’ve been in the process of watching Shaft’s anime March Comes In Like A Lion (original run 2016-2018), a slice of life series focusing on a young professional shogi player. It’s exceptionally well-done, and I plan to write about it once I’ve finished it, but it got me thinking about another slice of life anime, Hanasaku Iroha. Hanasaku stands as my personal favorite animated series, and it's an example of a show I tend to like more and more with each subsequent watching. Produced by P.A. Works in 2011, Hanasaku follows a girl named Matsumae Ohana as she moves from her home in Tokyo to live with her grandmother at a traditional hot spring inn, Kissuisou, run by her extended family. It’s a fairly simple premise, and the show moves slowly—at least one person I know has called it boring—but everything about the anime, from the soft coloration to the airy strings to the slow-burning characterization, is absolutely beautiful. A Matter of Perspective Much of what makes Hanasaku special is its (rather large) cast. The anime centers around the lives of the employees of the Kissuisou, which includes three generations of the Shijima family (including Ohana herself, as Shijima is Ohana’s mother’s maiden name). The early episodes primarily center on Ohana as she adapts to life at the Kissuisou and wins the respect of the novelty-averse staff, as well as on the two other part-time employees who are close to Ohana in age. As the show goes on, however, we’re given insights into the lives of every member of the Kissuisou’s staff, and therein lies Hanasaku’s unique charm. Slice of life anime series almost always focus on high-school-aged students (or occasionally junior high or college). This isn’t an inherently bad thing, and there are plenty of anime, novels, and games that focus on this demographic and nonetheless say something broader than the characters’ ages may imply—for examples of this, look to standouts like The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya or Your Lie in April. While Hanasaku’s protagonist, at 16, falls right in the center of the typical Japanese-pop-fiction-hero age, most of the anime’s characters are considerably older, each is at an entirely different stage of life, and their personal growth is every bit as integral to the overall story as Ohana’s. This makes Hanasaku highly interesting in comparison to its contemporaries. Ohana’s emotional journey is engaging enough, but the more memorable episodes by far are the ones that feature the inn’s other employees. Shijima Sui, Ohana’s grandmother and the owner of the Kissuisou, at first appears to be a demanding and crotchety taskmaster who’s stuck in the past, but as the story develops we begin to see Sui from the perspective of the older characters—including Ohana’s mother—and we’re given more context for Sui’s actions. The Kissuisou was an entrepreneurial passion project started when Sui was recently married, and Sui still believes firmly in her initial vision of caring for those who stay at the inn. Through various anecdotes and stories, we come to see why the inn’s employees have such respect for Sui, and we become able to empathize with her deeply as she struggles to keep the inn running in a changing world. And Sui is just one example. Each character has different goals and concerns, which creates variety and keeps the show interesting. The character development is generally gradual and (by anime standards) free of melodrama. There are, to be sure, moments of particular tension and panic, but these tend to arrive and pass quickly, often the result of misplaced rumors or simple misunderstandings. The true dramatic progression in the show happens calmly over long periods of time, and major moments of character growth come not through immediate crises but in moments of self-reflection after relatively mundane events. The focus of Hanasaku Iroha is on the gradual personal growth that comes through everyday life, and on the beautiful moments that happen amidst the mundane. Were the anime to focus solely on Ohana, this would not be nearly as effective (and it could easily fall into “boring” territory). Where Hanasaku succeeds is in the breadth of its cast. Most days at the Kissuisou are fairly similar, with familiar concerns and tensions and dramas appearing again and again—Minko’s unrequited affection for Tohro, her fellow chef; Ohana’s uncle Enishi’s endless attempts to modernize the Kissuisou; neighborhood rumors about the declining popularity of traditional inns—it all becomes part of the landscape, and while some of these issues eventually come to a head, many more of them are never resolved, mirroring the often-trivial long-term anxieties we tend to fixate on. Hanasaku finds its variety in presenting this daily life from multiple perspectives. When something unusual happens, we return to Ohana’s point of view, but many times we see the day-to-day from the perspective of the other employees of the inn, and we are given insight into how they process their lives and the meaning they find in their work. The result of this is an exceptionally rich and layered setting, where the viewer has a deep understanding of the motivations, concerns, and connections of each member of the cast, which then translates to an affection for each of the inn’s employees. The Kissuisou is portrayed as a fundamentally good place, a place a little off the map that those who visit fall in love with and return to again and again. The attitude Sui insists on conveying to her guests is also presented to the viewer, and the result is a calmly uplifting anime that is, ultimately, about the beauty of the mundane and the goodness of people. Traditional, and Also Not On the surface, there is a strong theme of tradition in Hanasaku Iroha. The novelty-seeking Ohana initially arrives at the Kissuisou full of action and idealism, only to be shut down by her overbearing grandmother, but then as time goes on Ohana comes to understand her grandmother’s reasoning and eventually embraces the traditionalism of the inn. The matriarch of the family knows best, and the proud old inn makes people happy and stands against the soulless modern hotels. Even visually the anime is filled with traditional Japanese images, from cherry blossoms to kimono to the inn itself. And yet, Hanasaku Iroha embraces variety and change. Ohana’s entertaining creativity and her appetite for novelty last throughout the entire anime, even as she grows to appreciate the traditional. Where new things are presented as foolish or threatening initially, they are gradually rounded out to become just another part of the world. The most complete romantic relationship in the anime is between Enishi—Sui’s son, and the first in line to own the inn on her death—and an outsider who constantly encourages innovation and change. Aside from this being interesting because of the age of the characters—they are in their 30s, which is quite a bit older than most anime couples—their literal marriage symbolizes the metaphorical marriage of old and new that is at the heart of Hanasaku’s thematic conflicts. While they come into conflict on occasion, ultimately novel and traditional ideas join together—even if uneasily—to create the foundation for the next generation. Change in Hanasaku Iroha happens gradually, as a result of traditional worldviews slowly adapting to new challenges. The characters often grow and develop so slowly that it is difficult to notice it happening. As a result, the most striking moments in Hanasaku are those when change is thrown into the sharpest relief. In the show’s 10th episode, “Slight Fever,” we have the opportunity to step back for the first time to view the Kissuiosou with a bit more objectivity. Ohana is ill and bedridden, and the episode consists almost entirely of the Kissuisou’s staff visiting her throughout the day. Through the things they say, we see both how their attitudes towards Ohana have change and how they have grown through the first half of the show. Similarly, in the final episode, the Kissuisou is finally forced to close down, and a bit of distance reveals just how much the characters have grown during the course of the anime. For all the show’s traditionalism, I think this gradual change and growth is Hanasaku Iroha’s heart. The anime’s title roughly translates to, “The ABCs of Blossoming.” Blossoming is not a static state, but rather a transformation. Each of the characters, from the youngest to the oldest, grows and changes in some way, and that growth and change outlasts even the Kissuisou itself, despite the Kissuisou being a clear representation of the best of the traditional. The anime begins and ends with forward, onward movement, informed by and grateful to the past, but not bound to it. All Good Things… As melancholic as it is, the closing of the Kissuisou is a brilliant way to end the anime. The inn becomes such a positive force throughout the show that its somewhat sudden closure comes as a huge blow, but the forward movement and the growth and change the Kissuisou’s closing necessitates is very much in-keeping with everything Hanasaku is about. While the Kissuisou itself was a good place for its characters to grow and develop, it is not in itself necessary. The characters’ lives will continue on after the inn, and they will find new goals, new concerns, and new meaning in whatever follows.
That Hanasaku’s characters would have to let go of the inn eventually was nearly inevitable, but the inn’s end’s presence in the anime forces the viewer to also let go of the inn. Just as Ohana, Sui, and the rest need to continue on beyond the special place that is the Kissuisou, so too does the viewer. This ending is an encouragement for the viewer to mentally leave the inn, taking its mentality with them, rather than abandoning the attitude of the anime when the last episode ends. In one sense, it is a challenge to the viewer—the regret and disappointment inherent in seeing the Kissuisou close can serve as an impetus to keep its spirit alive in one’s thoughts and actions, just as the anime’s characters aspire to do. This final episode in effect serves as a bridge from the idealized-but-believable everyday life of Hanasaku Iroha to the real everyday life that we face daily. It won’t leave an impression on every viewer, but for some (such as myself) it will be striking. The unique blend of melancholy and optimism is singularly beautiful, and it only grows more so as I think back on it and rewatch it. It’s unlikely that Hanasaku Iroha will ever grow beyond its relative obscurity, but its careful construction and its timelessness establish it as among the strongest works its genre has to offer. When people think of PS1-era RPGs (Final Fantasy VII and the like), among the first things to come to mind is the characteristically brooding heroes. To use a more literary term, we might describe them as Byronic Heroes, burdened by dark and often unclear pasts and characterized by a gruffness that could be described as rude. This trope, while certainly not a new idea, was particularly popular in the late 90's, and its liberal usage is often one of the foremost points of criticism for people looking back on the likes of Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII (especially when trying to argue that Final Fantasy VI or Final Fantasy IX is a stronger game). An interesting Kotaku article recently examined the behavior of Final Fantasy VIII's protagonist in context of how it reflects societal views of masculinity and femininity. It's a good read in general, but one of the more interesting takeaways for me was the observation that Final Fantasy VIII's other characters are remarkably forgiving of the protagonist's rude, isolating behavior. There is a tendency to overlook that as you are playing the game, as the protagonist is the hero of the story and we expect him to grow and develop as a character, eventually overcoming his flaws and becoming a better person--which he does--but that expectation should not necessarily be shared by the other characters within the game. In most games (particularly older games) with similarly brooding heroes, though, the other main characters are infinitely patient, sticking with the hero regardless of what he may do or say. That's not to say these games are bad, of course--it works as a storytelling mechanic and can be quite uplifting in games like Final Fantasy VIII to see fundamentally good people helping a troubled individual through a rough emotional time. Final Fantasy VII, by contrast, gets away with this by having all of its characters be impacted negatively by the dystopian setting and each responding differently; the protagonist's rudeness isn't all that much worse than the veiled bitterness or outright cynicism expressed by much of the rest of the cast. That said, you would expect this sort of negativity to create a great deal of social tension, and that's something RPGs rarely explore. Most such games operate off of the assumption (likely a holdover from tabletop RPGs) that the main characters are stuck journeying together for better or for worse and that no one has the potential to get frustrated and leave. In that context, forgiving behavior makes a bit more sense, but it still comes off as missing a potential layer of nuance. And Then There's Luke With that background in mind, I'd like to turn to Tales of the Abyss, a game released for the Playstation 2 in 2005, well after the period in which Final Fantasy VII and similar games were dominant. I once saw the Tales of series described as the "fast food" of RPGs--accessible and enjoyable, but without much lasting value. (This same comparison also likened the Megami Tensei franchise, of which my fondness is well-documented, to "brussel sprouts" in that they tend to be less outwardly appealing but more valuable in the long-run, which amused me considerably.) I mostly agree with that assessment--the Tales of games are definitely fun, but they aren't games you'll think much about afterwards--with the exception of Tales of the Abyss. Abyss's writing is on a noticeably higher level than its related games, and while there are a number of things about the game that are intriguing, I'd like to focus on its protagonist: Luke fon Fabre. Luke is a young noble in Abyss's world, and he doesn't get out much. Unlike your typical adventure-craving fantasy hero, he also has no desire to see the world. He's deeply cynical, thoroughly self-interested, intensely mistrustful of all except his teacher, fundamentally lazy, and a coward. This is, of course, highly unusual for a fantasy hero, but it echoes the brooding protagonists of the PS1-era RPGs I discussed earlier--and Abyss draws much from those games, including its overall art style, so the similarity is likely intentional if not pointedly so. Due to an unfortunate sequence of events, Luke begins traveling with the game's heroine, a soldier named Tear Grants; his servant, Guy Cecil; and a few other characters. Guy mostly plays the role of the long-suffering infinitely-patient friend, as usual, but Tear and the others do not. They specifically call out Luke's rudeness and poor behavior throughout the early game, refusing to allow it to stand in the way that most RPG characters would. Rather than reform, Luke doubles down on his cynicism and behavior, until about a third of the way through the game, when Luke makes a significant mistake that costs the lives of several thousand people, all of the other characters (including Guy!) finally abandon him. There is no endless forgiveness in hopes of improvement, and the other characters don't automatically assume that Luke is redeemable. They believe what he shows them, and what he shows them is not good. Even Guy's initial patience is born of obligation and personal objectives rather than out of a general good-natured-ness, and I think there's a biting irony in the fact that the only character who behaves as most RPG characters would in placating the protagonist is a hired servant of the hero. After Luke's key mistake, there's actually a section of the game where the other characters continue on their quest without him--and the player follows them, rather than the actual protagonist. This whole sequence, complete with the party's abandoning of Luke, is exceptionally interesting because of how it applies meaningful consequences to the poor behavior characteristic of brooding protagonists. The other characters go off to try to save the world and the protagonist is, essentially, uninvited, kicked out due to his poor choices and foul attitude. And Now the Character Development Means Something After a bit of time spent wandering the world, Tear ends up returning to the place where Luke is staying, and Luke pleads with her to forgive him and to give him a second chance (complete with the symbolic gesture of cutting his long hair, representing a shedding of his past life and worldview). Tear eventually concedes, and Luke rejoins the main characters, albeit under close scrutiny and with a good deal of social distance now placed between him and the others.
Over the course of the game, he grows as a person and eventually redeems himself through unselfish acts, in typical fantasy form, but Luke's initial fall--and especially the fact that it lasts for a large portion of the game--makes his redemption much more impactful. In the case of a game like Final Fantasy VIII, the protagonist never really has to feel the consequences of his actions, which makes his eventual growth nice to see but not particularly weighty. While Squall at the end of Final Fantasy VIII is a better person than Squall at the beginning of Final Fantasy VIII, all of the other characters treat him more or less the same, which somewhat devalues his internal journey. In Tales of the Abyss, by contrast, Luke's choices and behavior have a real impact throughout the entire game, and his character growth ripples out through the world's network of social connections to affect much of what happens over the course of the narrative, at times positively and at times negatively. In a genre of game where protagonists are often similar and somewhat shallow, Luke offers a complex, rich character who is enjoyable not because of his successes but because of how he moves past his significant failures. It's a character arc that's quite rare in video game protagonists, and it makes Abyss stand out as a singularly impactful game. Ronald Knox is a name that pops up with some regularity in Japanese detective fiction. You've probably never heard of the early-20th-century author unless you're an avid mystery fan, and that's to be expected--his books don't exactly feature prominently in popular memory. Knox is mostly known for his "10 Commandments of Detective Fiction," a set of rules penned to assist aspiring authors in what was then an overly saturated genre to avoid writing stories that are either trite or frustratingly unsolvable. The strict text of his rules is somewhat dated now, but the spirit of the rules is alive and well in most mystery fiction--and, of course, more than a few authors have taken his guidelines as a challenge to write satisfying mystery narratives that explicitly break what Knox saw as necessary guiding principles. In light of this (and because I think Knox's Laws are pretty fascinating), I thought I'd go through his laws one by one, analyzing the possible reasoning behind them and in some cases providing examples of ways they've been broken. 1. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow. This first rule--perhaps the cardinal rule of detective fiction--has two key parts to it. The first half of the rule is fairly straightforward and is adhered to consistently and (usually) intentionally. There's sort of an unwritten promise on the part of the author that the criminal in a mystery is not going to come out of nowhere. The culprit will be introduced, or at least referenced, as early as possible, often being among the very first characters introduced. For a masterful example of this, look at Persona 4's Izanami, who is (counting generously) the sixth character to be introduced, preceding the vast majority of the game's significant characters, but who draws little attention to herself and does not appear again until her role is revealed in the game's final arc. The second half of the rule seems rather obvious: of course anyone narrating the story cannot be the culprit, as the reader would see the crime happen and the mystery would be purposeless. Generally speaking, if this half of the rule is violated the work moves from "mystery" to some variant of "crime drama," as with Death Note (or, to provide an older example, Macbeth), which involves an investigation of a serial murder case, but which is not a mystery because the viewer follows the killer's thoughts throughout the whole show. I only know of one example of a true mystery that successfully breaks this portion of the rule--Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony--and that particular instance is crafted with extreme care such that the violation of the rule works well. As a whole, this first law is meant to establish a sense of fairness on the part of the reader. Introducing the culprit early precludes arbitrarily introduced villains and encourages the reader to be skeptical of all characters introduced. Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None would be a lot less satisfying if the killer were not one of the ten major characters introduced at the beginning of the novel, for example. The latter half of the rule just reaffirms a basic assumption readers are likely to hold, as a poorly-written the-narrator-did-it twist could easily leave a reader feeling frustrated or betrayed. 2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course. In Tanigawa Nagaru's The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya, Koizumi Itsuki differentiates the fantasy, science-fiction, and mystery genres by analyzing the way they explain supernatural phenomena, using the example of talking animals. According to Koizumi, in fantasy, animals can speak as a matter of course--no explanation is needed. In science-fiction, there is (usually) a reason given for why animals can speak, whether that's scientific progress or aliens or something similar. In mysteries, though, if an animal seems to be able to speak, there is always some sort of trick to it, such as hidden speaker built into the animal's collar. Revealing rational explanations for seemingly supernatural occurrences is such a staple of detective fiction that Tanigawa used it to define the genre. There is an expectation in detective fiction that everything is based on the world as we know it. This provides an accepted ruleset through which we can view the mysteries with which we are presented, and it allows us to rule out impossible occurrences by relying on our knowledge of what we know to be impossible in the real world. Allowing for the supernatural would make these assumptions unsafe. We could not, for example, immediately accept that a room locked from the inside was locked by one of its inhabitants unless we know that supernatural tools (like teleportation of telekinesis) are impossible. In that respect, this rule could be re-framed as, "common-sense assumptions about the world hold true." There are examples of mysteries that successfully incorporate elements of the supernatural--Takumi Shu's Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is one, as the game's detective is a poltergeist trying to solve the mystery of his own murder--but even in those cases the supernatural elements are usually introduced early, clearly defined, and carefully restricted to their initial rules. The key point of this law is to ensure the mystery's world behaves in predictable ways, which means supernatural forces can be allowable so long as their rules are defined such that they fall within what the reader accepts as "common sense" with regards to the mystery's world. 3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable. This one's pretty self-explanatory, and I don't have any notable exceptions to the rule on-hand. This falls into the category of rules that are intended to avoid clichés and to keep from frustrating the reader, as characters popping out of secret passages left and right could quickly get old. Secret rooms and hidden passages are such an established component of detective fiction we really don't think much of them anymore. 4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end. This is related to the second law. Where the second law says, "Fantasy explanations cannot be used," this one says, "Science-fiction explanations cannot be used." Much of the same analysis applies, although the wording of this rule suggests a bit more of a focus on the resolution of the mystery specifically. This rule is partially designed to avoid lazy deus-ex-machina solutions to puzzles, which would consequently create mysteries that are not solvable by the reader. If the solution to the mystery requires a long scientific explanation, the reader is not going to be able to solve the mystery through the clues provided, and the mystery is unlikely to be satisfying. For a case-in-point example, look at Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma, which sets up an intriguing mystery and then solves it through a mixture of parallel worlds and time travel. The former mechanic is foreshadowed and explained well-enough (mostly in the prior game, Virtue's Last Reward), but physical time travel is explicitly stated to impossible, which makes its surprise usage to solve a major mystery--one that dated back to the game before--singularly irritating, as it violates the "common sense" of the game's world. In this is a lesson that Knox's Laws are still valuable guidelines and should only be violated with careful planning and good reason. 5. No Chinaman must figure in the story. This is the most dated of Knox's laws and it needs a bit of explanation as a result. The intention behind this one is that the culprit should not be an outsider, someone who exists outside of the primary social networks of the characters involved in the crime (as Knox was approaching this from a Western viewpoint and from his perspective Asian characters would be outsiders). This is, in part, to keep the solution to the mystery from being too obvious--the noticeably different character can be a suspect, but never the true culprit. The other reason for this is that the reasonings, motives, and social tensions for crimes are often just as interesting as the strict logistical components of the mystery, and the expectation that the culprit will have a personal stake in the crime both makes the criminal more believable and allows for tension between the story's characters leading up to the final reveal, as suspicions are lobbed back and forth and tempers run hot. Despite the dated wording, this law actually holds up quite well in modern detective fiction. It's pretty uncommon for the culprit to be unrelated to the primary group of people affected by the crime, and even in cases where the culprit is an outsider (such as the final trial in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Justice for All) there are generally extenuating circumstances that place at least some of the responsibility on members of the "in-group." This also makes intuitive sense, as people generally don't commit crimes for no reason, and random thefts and the like don't make for interesting mysteries. 6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right. This is an easy rule to accidentally break, and it's a quick way to lose reader investment in a mystery. It's important that the reader feel like the mystery is both sensible and solvable. The second and fourth rules cover the "sensible" concern, ensuring a mystery adheres to its own rules, but this rule focuses on the "solvable" part. If the detective has a sudden and unexplained insight into an aspect of the crime or the culprit's identity, it leaves the reader feeling somewhat left out, as that usually means no clues leading in that direction were presented and the reader is forced to rely on the detective's judgment. This eliminates the fun of solving a puzzle that comes with reading detective fiction, and makes for a much less enjoyable experience overall. Avoiding things like this also, somewhat paradoxically, makes the detective seem more intelligent and admirable, rather than less so. Being presented with a clear line of reasoning that leads to the detective's conclusions makes those conclusions more believable and also more impressive. The reader's reaction to the detective's reasoning should be "Wow, I totally missed that!" rather than "I never would have got that." It's a slight difference in nuance, but it has a significant effect on the reader's enjoyment of the story. Although I've already acknowledged Death Note is not a mystery and therefore should not be held to Knox's Laws, this is a principle the show's two main characters--particularly the lead detective, L--break with a great deal of regularity, and it contributes to my antipathy towards the show. In Death Note we see the thoughts of both the killer and the detective, and much of the tension and excitement comes from their attempts to outwit each other. This leads to some great moments of gambit chess, but it also makes the player less sensitive to the absurd logical leaps that are sometimes made. L makes several arbitrary guesses and is right almost every single time. The viewer doesn't tend to question these guesses, as the viewer already knows the guesses are right and they seem reasonable as a result, but with a bit of thought L's reasoning rapidly becomes difficult to believe. His unaccountable intuitions make for thrilling individual moments but an unbelievable overarching story, which weakens the work as a whole. To use a tabletop game term, L seems to be metagaming, or operating based off of information his writer knows but his character should not logically have access to. This is something of a cardinal sin in games like Dungeons & Dragons, and it's equally unsatisfying in more traditional fiction. 7. The detective must not himself commit the crime. Another seemingly obvious one, and sometimes redundant in context of the first law. The distinction here comes in stories where the narrator is not the detective, like in Sherlock Holmes, which is generally narrated by Holmes's assistant, Watson. Even if the detective is not the protagonist of the story, it is generally necessary for him to be trustworthy, as he is the one providing clues for the reader and unraveling the mystery itself. If the detective is unreliable, the mystery usually becomes unsolvable and consequently unsatisfying. Even when this rule is broken, it tends to be broken in half-measures, with a detective, but not the detective around whom the story centers, being the culprit (as happens in Ace Attorney on occasion), or with the culprit appearing to be the detective while another character has, in fact, been subtly filling the role (as in Danganronpa V3). If pressed, I would call this the closest to an inviolable rule of all of Knox's Laws. All of the others can be circumnavigated with clever and careful writing--even if it may be exceptionally difficult to do well--but this rule is one that often holds even in works where the author appears to be directly attempting to break it. The reason for this is the flexibility with which "the detective" is defined. The detective is not necessarily an actual detective--he may be a journalist on scene, or just a curious or concerned citizen. The detective need only be the character working actively to uncover the truth of the mystery. In a case where the ostensible detective is in fact the culprit, that character is working to hide the truth rather than to uncover it and consequently is not actually filling the role of the detective. Either another character steps into this role, or you're looking at something more akin to a crime drama or a heist than a mystery. 8. The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader. This is another rule that plays into the importance of a solvable mystery, but there's a little more wiggle room here than the wording implies. At the heart of this rule is the necessity that the reader be provided with enough clues to solve the mystery. The detective can (and often does, assuming he is not the protagonist) conceal clues or information so long as that information is not pivotal to solving the mystery. In this case, though, the reader must be made aware that the detective is concealing something, and that fact may itself be an important clue regarding the overall case. When Knox refers to a "clue" in this rule, I believe he means something slightly broader than the concrete evidence the detective might stumble upon. A footprint without context, for example, is not a clue. A footprint that the reader is informed matches the shape of a known character's shoe, on the other hand, might be. The reader must be provided with all necessary and relevant information, and all such information must be produced as soon as the detective finds it (or at least confirms it to be true). Extraneous clues that might influence the behavior of the detective or tie together loose threads can be safely concealed so long as the reader knows something is hidden and the broad strokes of the case can be solved without the hidden clues. 9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader. This is the longest of the laws, but it's also pretty straightforward. Assuming "the Watson" is the narrator, he is not permitted to hide his reasoning from the reader and his thoughts must be clear and simple enough that the reader can understand them, without being frustratingly slow to catch on to what's happening. This serves two purposes. First, it ensures the reader has time to reason out the mystery before the narrator explains it directly, and second, it prevents the reader from missing out on key deductions or getting lost. The detective is often highly intelligent and poor at expressing himself, so "the Watson" serves as an interpreter of sorts, making the mystery easier to digest. 10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them. The final rule is also concerned with the solvability issue. Twins and doubles are an easy way to, for example, cast suspicion on the wrong character or to allow someone to seemingly be in two places at once. Readers are generally going to assume that if a credible witness sees a character at a specific place and at a specific time, that character cannot have been anywhere else. In order to account for that perfectly reasonable assumption, twins must be introduced before they matter or not at all. He's the Culprit! Grab Him! It's easy to look at the wording of Knox's Laws and think they're too strict or that they're easy to break well (and some of them certainly are), but if you look at bit deeper at the intent behind each guideline, you'll find that most contemporary detective fiction still adheres to these rules pretty closely. A well-crafted violation of these intuitive standards can be really fun--just look at Danganronpa V3 for an example--but more often than not breaking these commandments leaves the reader unsatisfied. Plenty of creative and fun mysteries exist within the framework Knox outlined, and while the exceptions are neat, there's nothing wrong conventional detective fiction.
In any case, it's interesting to break down these conventions, going beyond the "what" and examining the "why." Knox's works may not have had the staying power of the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie, but he clearly had a pretty good understanding of what makes mysteries work, and his thoughts still influence today's authors of detective fiction. Due to the fortuitous confluence of a long weekend and a lull in classwork, I had a bit of extra time to spend playing a game this weekend. Rather than continuing my playthroughs of my two current projects (Fate/Extra CCC and Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, both of which I've played half of once before, before being forced to restart due to lost save data), I decided to grab my Japanese copy of Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth. Atlus has started releasing trailers for its sequel, Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth, and I wanted to see if the original holds up as well as I remember. The short answer is yes, it does. While PQ does a lot right (and a few things wrong), playing through the second of the game's five dungeons got me thinking about RPG dungeons in general, and what elements make them engaging and fun to play through. There are, of course, myriad relevant components of dungeon design, but in this post I'll be breaking down a few of the most important ones: theming, aesthetics, navigation, and puzzles. Not Another Random Cave The best--or, at least, most memorable--dungeons tend to be the ones with strong underlying concepts. Strong theming can, in fact, make up for the other three components if the dungeon is closely tied into the game's overarching story. A good dungeon concept underscores the entire dungeon, informing everything from its visual presentation to its battles to its puzzles, and it keeps the player interested and curious not only throughout the dungeon itself but also through the game as a whole. Games with conceptually relevant dungeons can leave the player excited to see each new environment, which makes the game seem to move faster, potentially covering pacing issues that may arise from moments of weak gameplay or poor writing. Persona Q's dungeons are representations of the anxieties and emotional anguish of a girl who died young due to a terminal illness. Each starts off under the guise of a joke, but as the player progresses it gradually becomes clear that the dungeon's concept is dead serious, with what seems at first to be quirky humor reading instead as black comedy. Moreover, the contents of each dungeon are everyday things warped by the perspective of a terrified child, which is foreshadowed in the game's first dungeon, "You in Wonderland." This first dungeon draws from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a story that also features innocuous things (such as flowers and playing cards) transformed into terrifying, exaggerated forms by a child's imagination. The second, third, and fourth dungeons apply the Carroll influence to the life of a child living in the present day. The second dungeon is modeled after a cafe and has a romance theme. It ends in a chapel--but the chapel is prepared for a funeral, not a wedding. The third dungeon starts as a cheap haunted house built in a school classroom and then transitions to a similarly haunted but much more threatening hospital, with the dungeon's final location being an operating room presumably familiar to the deceased girl. The fourth dungeon is modeled after a traditional Japanese festival, and it seems to be loosely based on the Bon Festival, in which the spirits of the deceased are believed to return to visit their families. Setting aside the first dungeon, which provides the context for the remaining four, and the final dungeon, which resolves the game's plot, Persona Q's dungeons all have strong thematic ties to the game's overall premise, representing different aspects of fear of death. The second dungeon plays on the fear of dying young without accomplishing major life goals (such as marriage), the third is built around the more immediate fear of disease and death, and the fourth is centered on the concept of the afterlife. It isn't until the end of the fourth dungeon that their significance is explained to the player, but the dungeons are built around this concept regardless, and even if the player does not catch on to their significance, it is fairly clear even early on that the dungeon design is significant, and curiosity with regards to that significance helps to keep the player engaged throughout. In many RPGs--especially fantasy RPGs--dungeons tend to lack a fundamental conceptual or thematic basis. The player may be sent into a dangerous cavern system in order to capture a criminal or slay a monster, but the cave itself is not significant, which makes the hour or two or three exploring the cave feel like filler--a mere gameplay convention with no significant reason behind it. Gameplay-driven games (like the recent Octopath Traveler) can sometimes get away with this, but that doesn't mean they should. Integrating storytelling elements throughout dungeons can go a long way towards holding player interest and making the game's world feel more cohesive and believable. Rivers in the Desert Aesthetically appealing dungeons tend to be much more enjoyable to play through. Games are fundamentally a visual medium, and visually striking dungeons can be highly engaging. For an example of this, look up a few screenshots of Final Fantasy XIII's "Lake Bresha." The environment's concept is that a floating structure crashed into the surface of a lake, and the disturbed water immediately crystallized. This results in a stilled environment consisting of chaotic, towering waves all frozen in place. The waves are all faintly translucent, adding unique lighting effects to the overall image. It's an absolutely gorgeous environment, and the visuals are incentive enough to keep the player moving. Music is another way to strengthen a dungeon, particularly when the dungeon's music blends well with the dungeon's concept and creates a sense of motion. "Price," the background theme for Persona 5's third dungeon, fits this description well. The piece has a cocky attitude that matches perfectly the tone of the game at that stage. By the third dungeon, the Phantom Thieves of Hearts have successfully pulled off two heists, and they go in to the third one intentionally, knowing from the outset that their target is a villain and confident in their ability to reform him through their actions. Price's groovy base line and its driving melody build the characters' swagger into the tone of the dungeon as a whole, pushing the player through the stylized bank heist. Lost Woods Dungeon navigation is an important facet of maintaining player interest and engagement. Nothing is more frustrating than getting turned around for the umpteenth time, having to trek back and forth through a dungeon searching for that one door or switch you've overlooked. There are a few different approaches to mitigating this, and some combination of them can do a lot to ease player frustration. Maps are perhaps the most obvious answer. If your dungeon's layout is not intuitive, an easy-to-understand map is absolutely crucial. It's also important that the map be visible while moving, as forcing the player to pause the game to open a map every few steps drastically hurts the pacing of exploration (even if it may be more realistic that way). Etrian Odyssey provides a clever solution for this (which Persona Q steals). The Etrian Odyssey games allow players to draw their own maps, covering the DS's or 3DS's lower screen with graph paper and a toolbox of useful symbols (like doors and treasure chests). This map is slightly context-sensitive--it shows the player's location, for example, and the treasure chest icon changes depending on whether the chest has been opened--but the player is mostly free to notate the map as he or she likes, meaning the map should, in theory, always make sense to the person playing the game. The labyrinthine dungeons become much easier to navigate as a result, as there is a detailed map always available and in the course of manually mapping the dungeon the player builds an understanding of the layout of the dungeons. Another helpful design choice that can make dungeons easier to navigate is incorporating easy ways to return to previously-visited areas. Some games use checkpoint systems, allowing players to instantly jump to previously-visited locations, but personally I'm more fond of the inclusion of shortcuts. The simplest form of these shortcuts is doors that can only be unlocked from one side. Shortcut-based dungeons tend to be structured around a central hub area, and as the player progresses, the dungeon periodically wraps back towards that area, at which point the player can unlock another door that gives quick access to the next section of the dungeon. This sort of layout doesn't make sense for every dungeon or every game, but it can offer a real sense of progress, letting the player know they've completed a significant stage of the dungeon and also answering a question set up at the very beginning of the dungeon--specifically, "what's behind that door?" A final advantage of this setup is that it makes intuitive sense. Fast travel, while generally a positive thing, asks for a bit of suspension of disbelief on the part of the player, in that the characters are (usually) not literally teleporting to the designated location, but rather are traveling off-screen without the player's input. A shortcut-based design, by contrast, eliminates the need for this compromise, removing one more point in which the players might be brought out of the game's immersion. Some games handle dungeon navigation by just presenting their dungeons in a linear fashion, moving clearly from one room to the next with little need for exploration. There's a bit of a stigma against this (partially because it's a newer phenomenon), but if the dungeons themselves are thematically and aesthetically strong it can still work well. Persona 5 is an excellent example of this. With a few exceptions, the game's dungeons progress linearly from large set-piece to large set-piece. This works in Persona 5 because the game is heavily narrative-focused, and the dungeons are integrated directly into this. Where in Persona 3 and Persona 4, the dungeon-crawling segments are a break from the text-heavy visual novel that makes up the bulk of the game, Persona 5's dungeons are just chapters of the story presented in a richer way. Each of the set-pieces builds upon the concept and themes of the dungeon, and they generally need to be experienced sequentially in order to make sense. The value of these dungeons is not in the exploration but rather the narrative, so a linear structure is the most natural solution. Every Puzzle Has an Answer There is somewhat of an established repertoire for RPG dungeon puzzles. You have the "step on every tile once" puzzle, the "find and defeat this enemy to get the key" puzzle, the "slide helplessly across the ice" puzzle, the endless stream of block puzzles, and so on. Unfortunately, these "puzzles" are rarely very puzzling, and they often blend poorly with the dungeon as a whole. Suspension of disbelief leads us to accept that the boulders lying in this random cave just happen to be placed perfectly so as to create a block puzzle with exactly one solution, but if you step back to think about it, it comes across as kind of lazy--an attempt to break up the monotony of an uninspired dungeon we've been through hundreds of times before. (Pokemon is the prime offender here). Strong dungeons--and games with strong dungeon design--will incorporate their puzzles into the overall concept of the dungeon. Etrian Odyssey and Persona Q do this through FOEs, powerful enemies that appear on the field (as opposed to being random encounters), and which have fixed patterns of movement, forcing the player to learn and manipulate their patterns in order to get past. While this is, essentially, a variant of the classic block puzzles, it is integrated much more effectively into the game as a whole, and it also gives a sense of stakes that most in-dungeon puzzles do not. Add to this the fact that smart map design means some of these puzzles are surprisingly tricky to solve and you have an effective puzzle mechanic that carries throughout the games. The most entertaining puzzle dungeons, though, tend to be those where the entire dungeon is built around one central puzzle. These sorts of dungeons offer an entertaining break from the typical "go from point A to point B" dungeons, and they make progress much more meaningful and satisfying. Persona 5's sixth dungeon--my favorite in the game, and among my favorite dungeons in any RPG--is a spectacular example of this. The dungeon is modeled after a casino, and upon entering the dungeon, the players are given a card containing a certain number of casino credits. In order to progress, the players need increasing numbers of credits, but each of the games in the casino is (of course) rigged against the player. Dungeon progress, then, consists of figuring out how the house is cheating on each game and then twisting the system such that the Phantom Thieves of Hearts are able to win. The players' number of credits increases exponentially as the player moves from game to game, until you finally have enough to reach the dungeon's end. This sort of setup ensures that all of the dungeon's puzzles play into both the larger puzzle and into the dungeon's concept, creating a unified and highly entertaining overall experience. It's a masterful example of dungeon design. Quality over Quantity While many of the classic turn-based RPGs from twenty to thirty years ago are remembered fondly--for good reason--dungeon design is an often-overlooked way in which games have improved considerably in the past twenty years. This is especially clear playing Octopath Traveler, with its retro-inspired dungeons that are heavy on polish and light on substance. There is certainly an appeal to games that offer a lot of territory to explore (and there are certainly plenty of modern games that have that same quantity-over-quality philosophy), but I much prefer games like Etrian Odyssey that have fewer environments, but in which every dungeon is carefully- and purposefully-constructed.
Few game series are as visually distinct as Danganronpa. The games are perhaps best-known (especially among those who have yet to play the games) for Komatsuzaki Rui's distinctive character designs--you can pretty much always identify Danganronpa's characters as hailing from the series even if you aren't familiar with the individual character, provided you are generally aware of the series. These character designs, coupled with the diorama-esque set pieces that carry through the four games, promise a quirky uniqueness that the series as a whole delivers on in spades. While even the earlier games are engaging to play through, the most recent entry, 2017's Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, adds to this formula a carefully-written cast and a level of thematic strength that leaves it as among the best visual novels in recent memory. Danganronpa at a Glance Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, and Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony share a relatively straightforward premise: 16 individuals are trapped in an isolated environment and told that the only way to escape is to get away with murder--if one of the individuals kills another and is not identified as the culprit, all the others die and the one goes free. The three games are fairly consistent in structure, cycling through "daily life" and "deadly life" sections. The "daily life" sections of the game advance the overall plot--providing most of the character development and hinting at the answers to the larger overarching mystery that is the death game itself--and then the "deadly life" sections feature the investigations of the inevitable murders, followed by trials in which the surviving characters attempt to identify the killer. Once discovered, the culprit is executed by the game's administrator, and the cycle continues. The investigation and legal drama segments draw heavily on the older Ace Attorney visual novel series, and Danganronpa's gameplay is often described as "Ace Attorney but faster." The logic puzzles are generally simpler than the older series', but they make up for it by applying time limits and light skill-oriented mini-games--instead of just presenting a piece of contradictory evidence, for example, you may have to first brush away irrelevant side comments in order to clear a path for your piece of evidence to make contact with the offending testimony. The series's title, Danganronpa, roughly translates to "bullet objection," and all of the games' logic puzzles are stylized in ways that are meant to evoke shooting games. Everything in Danganronpa, from the art to the world to the gameplay, is heavily stylized, which serves the dual purposes of making the game not nearly as dark and disturbing as it might otherwise be (there's a macabre humor to a cardboard cutout of a person surrounded in pink paint that a more realistic portrayal of a corpse would certainly lack) and also at times making it difficult for the player to determine what is actually happening within the game and what is nothing more than symbolic representation. This brings me to another important point--the games love misleading the player, and they train the player to expect to be misled. For example, there are several scenes throughout the three games in which the administrator of the death game breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the audience. We learn late in the first game that the character is not, in fact, breaking the fourth wall at all, but rather speaking to an in-universe audience, meaning the fourth-wall-breaking was itself foreshadowing. However, this information comes from the game's antagonist--who, it has been well established, is not credible--so even this "reveal" is suspect. The original Danganronpa, in fact, never establishes whether the answers it provides to the overarching mystery are true or false, as they all come from the antagonist, and the antagonist claims that every other character's memories are wrong. This tests the player's suspension of disbelief, but it does so intentionally. The antagonist's explanation provides a plausible justification for the events of the game, but they also fly in the face of conventional logic. To a player conditioned to the standard rules of detective fiction (or psychological horror), we expect the "answers" provided at the end of the game to be true, and so we accept them in spite of their absurdity. That said, in this case, the answers come from the least reliable character in the game and are incredibly outlandish--they essentially take the game's genre from "mystery" to "dystopia"--so a good deal of doubt remains in the players' minds. And, of course, the credits start rolling seconds before the protagonist is able to verify the truth of the antagonist's claims, leaving the sequel to elaborate. To provide another example of Danganronpa's tendency to mislead, I would like to draw attention to the names of two characters: the protagonist of the first game and the de facto prosecutor figure in the second game. The first game's protagonist is named Makoto Naegi, and the character from the second game is named Nagito Komaeda. Rearrange the letters in the second, and you get, "Makoto Naegi Da" (with the "Da" being the short form of the copula in Japanese, meaning, roughly, "I am" or "This is"). I picked up on this immediately when I first played the game. I then noticed that the characters have the same core idiosyncrasies--exceptionally good luck, and an obsession with hope--and that they are voiced by the same person. I was positive there was a connection. The two characters are entirely unrelated. Their similarities are never addressed. Not once. All of this flies in the face of conventional mystery writing. Mysteries remain unsolved, seeming clues are completely irrelevant, sci-fi elements pop up with little warning in the later games--if you're familiar with Knox's Laws, Danganronpa violates every one at one time or another--and in the first two games, it usually works. At the very least, it makes them unique, unpredictable, and a lot of fun. The third game, Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls, is not a visual novel--opting instead of a puzzle adventure structure reminiscent of Portal--and takes the series into full dystopia territory (without losing the games' trademark art style). Despite its odd title, it's a thematically rich offering, albeit somewhat less unconventional than its predecessors. The animated series Danganronpa 3 closes out the story arc established in the first game, leaving Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony to reboot the series, free to be as weird and experimental as the other games without the baggage of existing characters and an established world. ...Supposedly. Living in Lazy Parallel World (A slight warning--there will be significant spoilers for Danganronpa V3 from this point forward) So with that context, I picked up a copy of Danganronpa V3 while in Japan about a year ago expecting more of the same: an experimental mystery that breaks some rules well and others not so well, that's fun to read but not a particularly lasting experience. I got way more than I bargained for. V3 is a much slower game than its predecessors, and in a good way. The older games set up their premises and introduce their characters very quickly--I distinctly remember playing the original game and being overwhelmed by needing to keep track of fifteen characters right off the bat, most of whom were only given a sentence or two of introduction before the plot kicked into gear. This meant that (especially in the original, but also in Danganronpa 2 to a degree) most of characters were as flat as their cardboard-cut-out character models. They were more caricatures or concepts than characters, and while a few got more personality as the game progressed--mostly the ones in the prosecutor, defense attorney, and detective roles--the majority never moved beyond the exaggerated cliches they were meant to embody. This is likely by design, as characters die very quickly in Danganronpa, and their general lack of personalities makes it so the character deaths don't weigh on the player much. There are a few surprising deaths in the first two games, but for the most part the deaths serve only to advance the plot, and dead characters are rarely mentioned again. This also likely made the game easier to write, managing a large cast by only fleshing out the core five-ish. V3, on the other hand, allows for a lot of time before and between its murder mysteries, to the point that the fourth-wall-breaking segments poke fun at how much longer the game's intro is that that of the prior games. The game uses this additional length to ensure all sixteen of its characters are fully-formed personalities. Even the first to die is referenced again and again throughout the game, as he is one of the more charismatic characters before his death and he is directly connected to the larger mystery. V3 ends with the smallest surviving cast in the series, and unlike in the other games, every character death hurts. Unlike in the earlier games, every murder is committed out of a mistaken belief on the killer's part that the death is necessary for the greater good (and in two cases with the consent of the victim). These are not one-note characters with simple motivations, but fully-formed individuals with complex values and desires, and as each murder mystery unravels we learn not only who did it and how but also why the person came to believe such a thing was necessary. Most of the killers in the earlier games are just bad people driven by selfish motives, and the antagonist who links the first four games is a bland evil-for-the-sake-of-evil villain (although she's relatively well executed and pretty terrifying at times), but all of V3's killers and victims are sympathetic, and even the overarching antagonist believes that what she is doing is good for society. The result of this is that the player becomes much more invested in what's happening. The murders are not just puzzles to be solved but also social and narrative problems, which makes the investigations and trials far more interesting than in the earlier games (not that the first two were bad by any means). The additional time given also means the overall plot is far more engaging and cohesive than in the earlier installments, with multiple layers of mystery, scheming, and foreshadowing that make the overarching mystery just as interesting and satisfying as the smaller mysteries, something which the earlier games did not accomplish. Particularly noteworthy is the role of the prosecutor-figure and anti-hero Ouma Kokichi, who spends much of the game concocting an elaborate plot in an attempt bring the death game to a halt and then to force the administrator of the game to violate his own rules, thereby delegitimizing the game. He does this by gradually framing himself as the mastermind behind the game at large, and unraveling his scheming and behavior provides much of the motion for the story until the protagonist solves Ouma's case (inadvertently foiling Ouma's plan to undermine the death game) and the game enters its final act. The game also, of course, breaks the rules of detective fiction in surprising ways, the most dramatic of which happens relatively early in the game. The game is in first-person, narrated by the "defense attorney" figure... mostly. The game's intro and most of its first case are actually narrated by a different character, whom the player assumes is the protagonist, and she's assisted by a character who seems to fill the "detective" role. Towards the climax of the first trial, though, the player is forced to identify the true culprit behind the first case. The clues are lined up for the player leading up to this, and it becomes painfully clear who the killer is. The player is required to point out the "protagonist," whose thoughts the player has been following. As soon as the player does this, the perspective shifts to the "detective" character, who becomes the narrator for much of the rest of the game. He explains how the original narrator committed the crime, which is all the more painful because the player saw it happen and was reading her thoughts the entire time. The entire opening case of the game is written so cleverly that the player does not realize what the narrator was doing until it is pointed out later. The game takes Knox's Seventh Law--"The detective must not himself commit the crime"--and shatters it in stride, in one of the most impressively executed twists I've seen in detective fiction. While all of this is fun, and the moral twisting of the murder motives grants the game a richness its predecessors lack, the real meat of the game comes in its final chapter. Starting from about halfway through the game, the characters start to find references to the events of the older Danganronpa games--which is surprising to the player, as V3 is ostensibly a reboot, unrelated to the older material. This comes up in the final trial, in which the major characters use the clues they've found so far to paint a post-apocalyptic explanation of the larger mystery--the characters were sent away from Earth on a space ship to colonize another planet, but the antagonist manipulated their memories and set up this death game, causing a representation of humanity's hope to tear itself apart from the inside. ...Except, it turns out that that's all a lie. The original Danganronpa tested suspension of disbelief with a similarly silly explanation, but V3 pushes back against that, as the heroes insist that that is impossible and start mounting evidence as to why. In what becomes the final key twist in the game, we learn that all of the foreshadowing, all of the hints, and all of the world-building were lies, planted by the antagonist to make the apocalyptic story seem real. In truth, the world outside is perfectly fine. It's utopian, even--we're told that the world outside has solved all of society's problems, and everyone is completely happy. It's the opposite of the dystopian world the player had come to expect. Here's where things get interesting. It turns out the the "V" in "V3" is actually a roman numeral V. This is the fifty-third "Danganronpa game." We are told that far in the future, after the world solved all of its problems, people grew bored due to the lack of stress and stakes, so one company turned to a little-known game series called Danganronpa for inspiration. The company decided to make use of memory-manipulation technology to create a real death game with the same premise of Danganronpa. They adjust the memories of willing volunteers so that they believe themselves to be part of that world, and then they air the ensuing death game to the world at large. It is enormously popular, and has continued until the time in which V3 is set. This comes as a pretty severe blow to V3's cast. They are told that they were all normal people before this, but that all of their memories--even their personalities and hobbies and talents--are fabricated. What they think of as their "selves" are in fact fictional characters, written over their minds in order to encourage them to kill each other. This was, in fact, foreshadowed right at the beginning of the game, and on several occasions throughout it, but it's such a radical shift of thinking that it would be difficult to anticipate. This completely invalidates any potential "good reason" the killers had for their deeds. All of their deeply held convictions, their duties to people outside of the death game, were entirely false. It means everything that happened in the game up until that point was meaningless. Every death was pointless. The characters who had so much more depth than in earlier games were fictionalizations, not real people at all. But, Wait, Isn't That Obvious? With this key twist, Danganronpa V3 creates the symbol that is at the heart of its thematic argument. Saying point-blank that the characters are fictional and that nothing that happened was real or meaningful seems heartless, or even cruel, but from an outside perspective, it has been obviously true from the beginning. This game is a work of fiction. In any completely fictional work, the characters are not real. What they think, feel, and experience is not real. Their suffering and joy are meaningless. During V3 there is a display that is always present that shows the title of the song that's currently playing. One of the most common ones is "Beautiful Lie." Fiction, the game contends, is one big beautiful lie. It's easy to grow attached to characters and to want to see them succeed and feel disappointed when they don't, but isn't that silly? None of it's real, after all. Why is it that we can empathize with people who truly don't exist? That is, essentially, the argument V3's antagonist makes. As the characters' thoughts and beliefs are fiction, imprinted on their minds in advance, they have no value. The original people who became the main characters entered into the death game fully understanding what that would entail and with no qualms about the process. They were the "real" people, and the people they have become are false and therefore irrelevant. The death game itself is an attempt to build an isolated, fictional world--once it ends, it becomes meaningless, having no impact on the otherwise-utopian world outside. The response of the protagonists forms the crux of V3's thematic contention: fiction can influence real people and is therefore meaningful even if it has no grounding in reality. They argue that even if they are not "real," their lives and suffering matter because of the impact they have on other people, and that as a result fiction is valuable. Moreover, the writing of fiction should be approached carefully and intentionally, with an awareness of how people will react emotionally to what you are writing, as that, at least, is very real. It's a pretty poignant argument, and a surprising one coming from a series historically so grim and pulpy as Danganronpa. It also adds another layer to the morally-involved murders earlier in the game: the murderers felt as if they needed to kill their victims, even though it hurt themselves and those around them, The revelation that the victims were fictional does not make the murders less horrific but rather more, as the justification for the crimes was entirely unreal. This seems, to me, to echo writing that exposes its characters to cruelty without reason. It says that just as harming a real person is wrong, writing a fictional character such that they suffer excessively can be wrong, as it can cause very real emotional pain to the reader, and the circumstances that "necessitate" such suffering are ultimately fictional--a lie. Nuance is obviously needed here--fiction would be horribly boring (not to mention unrealistic) if nothing bad ever happened to anyone--but the implication reminds me of something similar Kawahara Reki, the author of Sword Art Online, once wrote. I don't have the exact paragraph on-hand, sadly--it was in the afterword of Sword Art Online Volume 7, I believe--but it amounted to cautioning against writing suffering unnecessarily. His argument was, essentially, that negativity is generally a bad thing and should be approached carefully, and that an author should think hard about whether it is absolutely necessary before writing death and hardship. Trial END When Danganronpa V3 ends, the few surviving characters are completely victorious, to a degree not seen in any of the earlier games. They identified the true culprit, reached the truth behind their imprisonment, collapsed the entire "stage" on which the death game took place, and--most importantly--caused the beginning of a shift of public opinion, persuading the people watching (through a platform that functions suspiciously like the streaming service Twitch, right down to a gimmick that calls to mind the amusing fad "Twitch Plays Pokemon") that the death game that is "Danganronpa" is bad and should not be supported. Despite being "fictional," the surviving characters are able to influence the people outside of their fictional world in a positive way.
The most impressive thing to me, I think, is how Danganronpa V3 tears itself down--literally, narratively, and thematically--and still remains entirely satisfying and perfectly cohesive. The "none of it was real" twist does not invalidate the careful writing, plotting, and characterization specifically because the whole point of the game's deconstruction is that the events of the game matter in spite of being built on lies. Everything from Ouma's well-intentioned scheming to the bitterly ironic murders remains significant and valuable even though it all falls apart in the end, and (helpfully) the plot is consistent on both its "fictional" and "real" levels, which keeps the latter from feeling like a deus ex machina solution to an unsolvable mystery. I would have trouble naming another game that does this as well. Amusingly enough, the structure of the end of the game is also largely consistent with standard detective fiction. The illusions and falsehoods fall apart, the truth comes to light, and the culprit is outed, so the stunning ending to a bizarre game is surprisingly easy to accept. It also helps that the "false" mystery is solved before it is revealed to be untrue, which avoids the potential dissatisfaction of the red herrings and fake evidence coming to naught. Experimentation in a Danganronpa game is not at all surprising, but it is still an impressively brave move to make the fourth game in your series a deconstruction of the original three. I know people for whom V3 was a step too far, though the complaints you might expect--that it wasn't believable, or that the ending felt like it came out of nowhere--are surprisingly uncommon. Even among those who feel that V3 pushes too far, there seems to be an appreciation--or at least an awareness--of how well-crafted the game is. Two years ago I never would have expected a Danganronpa game to be in contention with Nasu Kinoko's Fate/Stay Night for the title of being my favorite visual novel, but Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony strikes all the right notes. A memorable-if-weird score and a fabulous art style pair with writing that's as slick and fun as it thematically rich and intellectually fascinating. A "know-the-rules-so-you-can-break-'em" mentality is risky and certainly doesn't always work, but the bizarre, experimental, absurdist-but-not V3 takes that philosophy and runs with it. It's pretty phenomenal. In the past ten years or so, Sega has (in the U.S., at least) become more-or-less synonymous with the Sonic the Hedgehog series. The recent resurgence in popularity of Yakuza aside, many of Sega's excellent older IPs have sadly been left to languish in obscurity. This is unfortunate, as many of Sega's older (and now more obscure) games are surprisingly original and strong offerings even in comparison to games released fifteen to twenty years later. The Dreamcast era in particular, lasting roughly from 1999 until 2003, saw several extraordinary works that were every bit as ahead of their time as the system on which they were released. The Dreamcast may have been an ill-fated system commercially--it was the last of Sega's consoles, and it sold relatively poorly--but it featured an extraordinary lineup of games and arguably represents Sega's pinnacle as a software developer. From the cult classic Shenmue (which, amazingly, is now getting a rerelease and a sequel), to the niche-but-well-received RPG Skies of Arcadia, to the bizarrely exhilarating musical-theatre-inspired Space Channel 5, the Dreamcast was home to several of the best games of its generation, representing a level of consistent quality and a willingness to take risks that Sega has not been able to replicate since. One game, in particular, is a borderline-necessary experience for anyone interested in games: Jet Set Radio. Let's Look at the Funk Jet Set Radio released for the Dreamcast in 2000, and the game was meant as a celebration and affectionate parody of the youth culture of the time. Its sense of style carries through every aspect of the game, from its music, to its art style, to its skating-and-graffiti gameplay. It is a game that has a strongly-defined concept and adheres to that concept throughout. There is no question as to what Jet Set Radio is about, and there are no excesses in its storytelling and mechanics. The game follows a group of skaters known as the GGs as they spread their graffiti throughout the already-colorful streets of Tokyo, first combating rival skate-gangs while running from overly-violent police, and then painting over propaganda from the corporate-government hybrid that is the amorphous Rokkaku group. For all its countercultural overtones, the game is tongue-in-cheek throughout, with melodramatic antagonists and characters that are more concepts and designs than true people. Jet Set Radio does not espouse the anti-establishment rebelliousness its heroes represent so much as paint that rebelliousness as an important facet of the vibrancy of Tokyo and New York at the turn of the millennium. Celebration is truly the right word here. Jet Set Radio is an exceptionally bright and colorful game, and it captures the attitude of Tokyo better than any game except possibly Square Enix's The World Ends With You and Atlus's Persona 5. It's also not insignificant that even Jet Set Radio's antagonists can be recruited as playable characters and become members of the GGs--the rival gangs and the CEO of the Rokkaku eventually give in and join JSR's heroes in skating around and celebrating the energy of their city and the value of free expression. The game has very little text, limited to brief scenes between stages outlining broad plot developments, but even in a short game that consists mostly of gameplay, Jet Set Radio conveys strong themes and paints an overwhelmingly optimistic picture of its time. Impressively, even in its brief duration, Jet Set Radio's plot is able to operate on two distinct (but entirely complete) levels. The literal is as I outlined above: the story of the GGs fighting against those who would suppress their voices. The story as a whole, though, is delivered largely through the voice of a radio host named Professor K. The playable levels operate on time limits, which fit two or three complete songs, after which the level ends and Professor K explains what happened to the GGs during that time. In this way, the story can be taken as a true radio program, with the DJ telling story during breaks between songs. The game's title tells us as much: this is Jet Set Radio. None of what's happening, with its exaggeration and broad-strokes melodrama is real--it's all a story told on a funky-but-niche radio station. In this way, too, Jet Set Radio is a celebration of the world that created it. While the GGs antics are not realistic, Professor K and his broadcast is something that very well could have existed at the end of the '90s. To add to this, about half of Jet Set Radio's music was actually not written for the game, but rather licensed from various indie artists and bands. In other words, some of the music that played during the stages was music that could, in fact, have been played on alternative radio stations at the time. The "frame" for JSR's story serves as a thread of realism linking the semi-fantasy of the game's main plot to the word that it was designed to celebrate. The game's simplicity is deceptive and creates a surprisingly complex short story that is both concealed enough to encourage deeper thought and clear enough to leave a strong impression on any player. Extra Sugar, Extra Salt! Extra Oil, MSG! Jet Set Radio is vibrant and larger-than-life in every aspect of its design, and nowhere is that more true than in its art style. The game is important from a historical standpoint if for no other reason than for being the origin of cel-shading, a graphical style that gives computer-generated 3D models the impression of being hand-drawn. JSR's cel-shaded art style gives it its distinctive pop, and the art style has since been copied and used in many games and animated shows and movies since. Were it not for Jet Set Radio, we wouldn't have the distinctive look that characterizes 2003's The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, and we wouldn't have the gorgeous art that fills the more recent The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Cel-shading has proven to be exceptionally flexible as well--although most cel-shaded games opt for JSR's bright and colorful approach, there are also games like Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne that apply cel-shading to a muted color palatte to create an almost surrealist aesthetic. Cel-shading also tends to rely more on color than on shape for its aesthetic, which means many games from the early era of 3D that adopted Jet Set Radio's graphical style hold up much better than their cousins that reached for realism--just compare The Wind Waker to its predecessor, Majora's Mask, which was released a scant two-and-a-half years before. While Majora's Mask also has memorable characters and strong art direction, The Wind Waker almost looks right at home next to games released in 2018, while Majora's Mask looks... dated, to put it lightly. Jet Set Radio's stylized, exaggerated, and cel-shaded Tokyo may not look much like the city its modeled after, but the feel of it is exactly right. A direct recreation of Tokyo's streets will fall out of date, but Jet Set Radio's encapsulation of the attitude and the energy of the city is recognizable even walking through the streets of the Tokyo almost twenty years later. Even smaller details, like the characters dancing if left standing in place for long enough, keep the feel of the city's energy and life going throughout the game as a whole. So Now Let Us Listen to the Music and Identify the Beats No discussion of Jet Set Radio would be complete without addressing its music. Most of the more memorable music was written by a composer named Naganuma Hideki, whose "calling card," if you will, is inserting samples of spoken word into funk-inspired music. The lyrics for the music in Jet Set Radio are largely meaningless, and intentionally so: remember that this is in part a loving parody of the pop culture of the time in which the game was developed. Naganuma's point, I believe, is that the lyrics for popular music at the time--and, arguably, in general--are not nearly as important as everything else that's conveyed by the music itself. You don't need to understand what's meant by someone saying you should "Float like a bulldozer trying to catch a butterfly" so long as the pace and the context of the music express the right feeling--in this case, of adventuring stylishly through the nighttime streets of a fascinating city. Similarly, "Like It Like This Like That" conveys an appreciation of positivity and makes pessimism seem silly, not through overtly meaningful lyrics, but by pairing seeming nonsense with intentional music and a specific context. The way Naganuma's music functions is entirely keeping with JSR's method of storytelling and world-building--it conveys a feeling, a tone, an emotion, and while everything builds towards that tone, it does it in abstract, avant-garde ways. Therein lies the brilliance of Naganuma's work on JSR (and its semi-sequel, Jet Set Radio Future): the music uses meaninglessness to create meaning, creating something that is modeled off of something traditional while also parodying itself, and then surpassing that parody to become something avant-garde and unique. Like JSR as a whole, it operates on multiple levels, all while being unabashedly fun. That said, some of the "nonsense" lyrics are a bit too pointed to be unintentional. The main theme of JSR, for example, is a song called "Let Mom Sleep." Mixed throughout the song's three minutes of funk are the phrases "Let's look at the funk" and "Would you stop playing with that radio of yours? I'm trying to get to sleep." These sections are followed by the (always complete) phrase "This is most disturbing." The latter phrase is a pun: the radio is disturbing to the person who is trying to sleep, but the person trying to stifle the playing of music is disturbing on a more existential level. As with everything in Jet Set Radio, this is not an accident: this is a game that is, at least on the surface, about standing up for free expression, so of course someone trying to stop the music would be disturbing. "Let's look at the funk" is also an interesting phrase. It's not, "Let's listen to the funk" or something similar--it specifically uses the word look, implying an examination rather than a passive acceptance. Even in its opening theme, Jet Set Radio is self-aware: the game is a look into the world that it represents, not a straight representation of that world itself. The game is somewhat more cerebral than it first appears, yet a player who chooses to simply enjoy the "funk" instead of "looking" at it more closely will not be left unsatisfied. Oldies, but the Goodies It's somewhat of a shame that Sega hasn't chosen to revisit its unique Dreamcast-era games (though the new Shenmue title is promising), but beyond that, what games like Jet Set Radio demonstrate is the value of experimentation. Truly new titles coming from established companies is somewhat of a rarity these days, and although Nintendo has begun to once more demonstrate a bit of willingness to experiment--creating games like Splatoon and Arms--it's rare to see developers of Sega's size committing to unusual and experimental games like Jet Set Radio. There's nothing inherently wrong with producing more games in established series, and existing franchises can absolutely produce masterful games, but there's something to be said for truly new works that are free to respond to and reflect the time in which they are created, unbound by the decades-long history many of the major gaming franchises hold. 15th and 20th and 25th anniversaries of major series feel like they happen more and more often, and while that reflects well on the importance and staying power of those series, it also demonstrates that we need new franchises to form that can themselves grow and represent the next twenty years.
Much of the truly new game design currently resides in the indie domain, and that's fine--there are plenty of great indie games out there--but larger companies should not be afraid to experiment. They are, if anything, better positioned than indie developers to produce new and interesting work, as indie developers are often compelled by technological or financial constraints to draw heavily on older styles of game design. If a Sega or a Square Enix or a Capcom were to devote its resources and talent to creating something truly new rather than something inspired by or tethered to its earlier work, we might again be treated to games like Jet Set Radio. Earlier this summer I watched an anime called Magical Girl Raising Project (魔法少女育成計画), mostly because I'm fond of the studio, Lerche, that produced it. Magical Girl Raising Project is an adaptation of a novel series by Endou Asari, an author I had previously never heard of and who as far as I can find has not published anything else. (The author is, in fact, so obscure as to not even have a Wikipedia page in either English or Japanese). The "magical girl" anime sub-genre after which Endou's work is named tends to be aimed at elementary- or junior-high-aged girls and focuses on characters of the same demographic gaining magical powers and fighting your standard supervillain-type figures. It's not a genre I'm especially familiar with beyond the various tropes and cliches that are often parodied (in anime such as Mahou Shoujo Ore or Carnival Phantasm) or deconstructed (in anime such as Puella Magi Madoka Magica or Fate/Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya), but it's a popular enough genre that it would be hard to spend a significant amount of time around Japanese popular culture without running into it on occasion. The sheer popularity of older magical girl anime such as Sailor Moon is hard to miss, and Urobuchi Gen's brilliant deconstruction of the genre in Madoka (which also happens to be a modern retelling of Faust) has given magical girl anime a good deal of exposure beyond its typical market. I went into Magical Girl Raising Project expecting a deconstructive work in the vein of Madoka--partially due to a set of superficial similarities to the detective fiction/death game/dystopian horror hybrid that is Danganronpa--but I was surprised to find that for all its darkness and gore, Endou's work is, at its core, a traditional magical girl anime. The anime's opening monologue--which is also repeated in the final episode--features the protagonist reflecting on how she loves magical girl stories, but how as she got older her friends grew out of them and she had fewer and fewer people to talk with about the genre of entertainment she enjoyed. This monologue is quickly forgotten as the show goes on, but it contains the entire conceit of the show: this is a magical girl anime for an older audience, and the show delivers on that promise perfectly. ...Unfortunately, that comes at the expense of some really intriguing potential. I Don't Want to Call This a Danganronpa Rip-Off, But... The premise of Magical Girl Raising Project is that there is a popular magical-girl-themed phone game, and some of its players are selected to become real-life magical girls in order to help people. The protagonist is, of course, selected, and she then spends her time helping cats out of trees and walking elderly people across the street, all while earning a sort of vague virtual currency in the process. A little while later, we learn that sixteen people have been selected to become magical girls, but the administrator of the system informs the magical girls that his superiors have decided there are too many magical girls in the area, and that their number needs to be halved. Whichever one has the least virtual currency at the end of each week will lose the ability to be a magical girl, until only eight are remaining. At the end of the first week, one of the characters loses, and it is revealed (unsurprisingly) that losing the granted powers results in death. In typical death game fashion, this rapidly spirals into characters murdering each other, either directly or by manipulating the rules of the game. Anyone who has played the Danganronpa games is likely to notice a few eerie similarities. The number of participants in the death game--sixteen--is the same. The fact that one of the sixteen participants controls the administrator and in fact created the game is the same. Even the designs of the administrators of the two death games are almost identical, with their bodies split down the middle by a line that divides them into a black half and a white half, with one red eye and one black eye. The administrator, who is referred to as Fav, has much more in common with Danganronpa's Monokuma than with Madoka's antagonist, Kyubey. The similarities between Magical Girl Raising Project and Danganronpa are so pronounced that they almost have to be intentional, but after finishing the anime I honestly don't know what that parallel is meant to convey. An intentionally-used allusion to another work can be quite effective, but Magical Girl Raising Project's is not. Thematic Aimlessness My issue with the Danganronpa parallels extends throughout the whole show. There are several aspects of Magical Girl Raising Project that seem like they could have some deeper significance, but none of them are explored in any meaningful way. Take, for example, the diverse backgrounds of the anime's characters. One particularly interesting component of the death game is that anyone can become a magical girl regardless of age or gender, and when they transform into their magical girl outfits (in typical magical girl transformation montage fashion), their physical appearances change as well, such that they look like a 14-ish-year-old girl regardless of who they may actually be. The anime uses this flexibility quite a bit in order to introduce a cast with a surprising degree of variety for an anime of this genre--you have an alcoholic older woman going through a divorce, a young wife about to have a child, and so on. Frustratingly, this variety is not utilized much at all. We get hints here and there at how each character's background influences his or her behavior, but it's often only a brief vignette before a character is killed off. The most irritating example of this is Magicaloid 44. She's initially portrayed as a manipulative antagonist figure, but about halfway through the show we're given tantalizing hint of the reasons behind her behavior--we learn that she's a homeless teenage girl, and that she ran away from a toxic home environment--but then she's promptly, ignominiously killed off right as she starts to grow into a meaningful and interesting character. The only character who gets a significant level of attention is the protagonist, Snow White, but she's also the only character who perfectly fits the magical girl stereotype, which means she's easily the least intriguing member of the cast. Magical Girl Raising Project has plenty of interesting characters, but their backgrounds end up being largely irrelevant. Few of the characters receive any sort of resolution to their story arcs, which is normal for death game stories but is unsettling here because because what we do see of their characters is interesting enough to leave the viewer wanting more. Had Magical Girl Raising Project left its non-central characters flat--like the early Danganronpa games do--then the wasted potential wouldn't be nearly as bothersome. On the other hand, Danganronpa V3 does an excellent job of ensuring most of its characters have meaningful character arcs and providing necessary resolution for the more-developed characters who die early, though it is a long game and Magical Girl Raising Project would struggle to accomplish the same thing in its twelve episodes even if it tried. Magical Girl Raising Project has the beginnings of strong character stories, but not the endings, which leaves an unsatisfying taste in the viewer's mouth with each death. The anime has the same problem with its thematic ideas. The shapeshifting magical girls concept seems to be a stand-in for avatars and usernames in online games and chat fora, especially considering the characters use their phones to catalyze the transformation and they actually do have an online chat forum they use to communicate. I kept expecting this parallel to be referenced--or at least used in some pointed or thematically-interesting way--but it never was. As with the diverse backgrounds of the show's characters, symbolic ideas such as this are largely underutilized. There's no social commentary, and little in the way of genre deconstruction. There's a lot of potential for that, and there are plenty of interesting ideas, but it all adds up to a whole lot of nothing. But Does it Matter? As a intellectually or artistically interesting deconstruction of the magical girl genre, Magical Girl Raising Project fails on all counts. The catch, though, is that the anime was never trying to be that. As the anime tells us at the beginning and reminds us at the end, Magical Girl Raising Project is nothing more than a magical girl story that can appeal to an older audience. On that count, at least, it's completely successful--while the plot may not be especially cohesive, it is quick and engaging, and it also hits the typical magical girl notes, complete with a relatively happy ending where the antagonist is defeated and the heroine continues to help people long afterwards. It is strictly meant to entertain, and it has a clear concept of the demographic it is appealing to and what it wants to accomplish. Magical Girl Raising Project sets a low goal for itself, but it certainly does hit that goal, which results in the odd impression that the anime is simultaneously completely successful and highly disappointing. It could have been a lot more, but it didn't want to be, and so it wasn't.
In some respects the anime's limited aspirations help to set it apart from Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Urobuchi's deconstruction of the magical girl genre is a tough act to follow, but Magical Girl Raising Project isn't really competing. Perhaps it's unfair to criticize Magical Girl Raising Project for weaknesses that fall outside of the anime's goal--and it was fun to watch--but the hints of potential make it tough to accept the anime's insistence that it's just meant to entertain. Inherent in pretty much any storytelling medium is the possibility that the audience will miss something--a cleverly-hidden detail, a hint of foreshadowing, a layered symbol, et cetera. Such details can at times be more impressive or interesting for their unobtrusiveness. There's a tongue-in-cheek term I like that's associated with this idea: fridge brilliance, or, the types of details you'll pick up on well after the fact, perhaps suddenly surfacing in your mind as you stare idly into your refrigerator late at night. There's nothing more fun than realizing weeks later that that one seemingly innocuous line was actually a clever moment of foreshadowing for that one dramatic twist. While hidden details can be present in the written word, they're easier to hide in more involved media, such as theatre and film. If you go to see a well-directed play or movie, it's pretty likely that the actors' blocking--where they stand and when they move and so on--has significance that goes beyond the surface level. The antagonist might, for example, consistently move across the stage in the opposite direction as the rest of the cast, or put him or herself physically and metaphorically above the hero. Similar levels of detail can pop up in everything from set design to lighting, in various degrees of subtlety. The question, then, is whether the audience picks up on any of this. Any work with that sort of detail is richer for it, but if no one who watches or reads the work notices, does it matter? Does that become a failure on the part of the director or writer? Or is it a failure on the part of the audience to engage critically with the material? And then we have video games, which add yet another layer of complexity to the question. Most games (setting aside oddities like kinetic visual novels) offer some degree of player choice, and respond to the actions the player takes. This means that most players will not experience everything a game has to offer. A book is meant to be read cover-to-cover, and a film is meant to be watched beginning-to-end, but games are usually designed under the assumption that the player will not see everything within the game. A particularly engaged player may make an effort to find every hidden detail or secret path within a game, but most will play a game until the credits roll and then be done, ignoring any optional paths or secrets they may have missed along the way. This is a fundamental difference from older storytelling media and it raises several fascinating questions when we start to look at games critically like we might approach a novel or film. Is it the player's responsibility to seek out all meaningful content within a game? If a player can complete a game without seeing some crucial piece of content, does that reflect poorly on the game? Is the player's resulting impression of the game less valid than that of a player who did experience that crucial piece of content? The questions go on and on, and there's no easy answer to any of them, but in order to tackle this idea I'd like to draw attention to one director who has grappled with this issue head-on in several of his works. Katsura Hashino's Approach to Subtlety I went over who Katsura Hashino is (and part of why I like his work) last week, so I'll keep this brief: Hashino is a video game director who works for Atlus. He's best known for his work on Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne and the more recent Persona games. Hashino is a particularly good avenue for tackling these questions for a few reasons. First, his games are--or, at least, are clearly trying to be--serious artistic works. It wouldn't be a Hashino game without a strong grounding in philosophy, multiple allusions to classic literature, and layers upon layers of symbolism and thematic meaning, so if our goal is to examine the artistic consequences of missable content in games, Hashino's games are a solid place to start. Second--and more importantly--Hashino's games are full of missable content. In the past ten years or so, there's been a trend--particularly in Western games--towards open-ended games where things can be completed in any order and nothing can be permanently missed. Persona 3, Persona 4, and Persona 5 take the opposite philosophy to an extreme, with a calendar-based storytelling structure that is set up such that the player will miss significant portions of what the games offer. It is literally impossible to see everything in those games in the course of a single playthrough. Hashino's older games handle this with ease. For all its minimalism and "soullessness," Nocturne is a surprisingly approachable game. While most players are not going to see all of its endings or catch on to all of its symbolism, the overall experience is cohesive and complete even without all of the details. The minimalism, in a sense, asks the player to fill in the gaps and unanswered questions, which means even if a detail or a stretch of the game is missed, the work still feels complete and the experience is not much weaker. The best comparison might be to an impressionist painting--while there may not be an abundance of fine details, the general shape and color evokes the impression of the complete work, so even if it isn't examined closely the viewer is left with a clear understanding of the overall image. Many games take this sort of approach (though rarely so effectively as Nocturne), presenting a cohesive enough overall experience that the player can fill in the gaps he or she might miss. Any detail the player experiences builds towards the same unified impression of the work, and in the course of a playthrough the player experiences enough of the game to have a reasonable understanding of the game as a whole despite not having actually played the game in its entirety. Persona 3 takes the opposite approach, as it is a game full of detail and life. In a typical playthrough, the player will miss a great deal of what the game has to offer, but this works well for two key reasons. First, Persona 3 is crystal-clear with regards to its thematic goals. The game is strongly an anti-suicide work, and it touches on concepts such as depression, drug addiction, and self-harm in ways that ensure the symbolism cannot be missed. All of the issues the game tackles are approached through layered symbols and extended metaphors--to the extent that many of these core issues are never referred to by name--but they're exceptionally hard to miss. Some would say that the game is a bit too heavy-handed with its symbolism, but it's certainly no Catherine in that regard (I'll get to that later), and many of the game's symbolic moments tread the line between literal and symbolic in ways the open up fascinating layers of potential meaning. It works quite well in practice. The second reason allowing players to miss things works in Persona 3, though, is that missing things is itself a major component of the game's theme of valuing life. The game opens with the protagonist signing a contract stating that he agrees to take responsibility for his usage of time, and the player is told multiple times throughout the course of the game that your time is limited and that you have to appreciate the time you have. By limiting the time the player has to experience everything the game has to offer, Persona 3 fosters in the player an awareness that life is short and time is valuable in an experiential way that is more profound than anything achievable through words alone. Hashino's games are consistently willing to make sacrifices for the strength of the overall concept, and this is one of them--the player won't see everything in the game, but that very fact strengthens the overall experience in a way that outweighs anything the player would miss. It's really brilliant. Lost to the Fog And then we have Persona 4. Like its predecessor, Persona 4 is full of missable content, and the existence of that missable content is directly relevant to the game's overarching themes. Persona 4 is primarily about the concept of truth, and about not being content with appealing stories that may satisfy our personal biases. The game contends that we need to actively work towards identifying what is true and what isn't in order to make sense of our worlds and lead satisfying and productive lives. Within that context, being able to miss significant portions of the game is perfectly natural. The game even has several false endings prompted by poor player choices, and one of them even plays the full credits sequence, complete with an ending montage and a satisfying-sounding credits theme. I know at least one person who stumbled into one of these false endings, thought it was real, and never played the final quarter or so of the game. In a meta sense, this is really cool. This is a game that contends that the truth is difficult to find and that people can be easily deceived and satisfied with appealing lies, and the game's false endings essentially demonstrate the truth of this assertion. The rationale on the part of the developers is likely something to the effect of, "If you've been paying attention to what we've been saying all along, to what this game is about instead of just what's happening, you'll know to push through to the true ending." It's a bold move, and part of me really likes it. But. What about the players who don't see the end of the game? What about the players who are left with a lackluster ending and unanswered questions? By Persona 4's logic, the fault lies with those who did not push through to the game's end... sort of. The problem with this is that while not searching for truth amplifies misinformation, it does not create misinformation. In Persona 4, the misinformation and rumors that cause problems for the cast stem largely from the game's antagonists. If the game's false endings are a metaphor for the themes of the game, wouldn't that make the game itself the enemy of the players? The concept of allowing the players to miss a significant portion of the game is neat, but at the point people actually do miss important content, some of the blame lies with the developers. As I said, Hashino's games are willing to make sacrifices for concept, and while those sacrifices are always appealing on an intellectual level, I have to wonder: Is a creative decision that comes across as brilliant to those who catch it worthwhile if it hinders the experience for the vast majority who don't? It's a tough question, and it leads those of us creating works like this to think about who we're writing for. Persona 4 is filled with cool artistic choices that won't mean anything to the average player, though. Last week's post was all about vague literary parallels few people who play the game are going to pick up on, and the way the game treats its themes and concepts is so subtle and nuanced most of it is easy to miss. Most of the characters are pigeonholed into particular roles or tropes by society, and their character development and personal growth revolves around them reconciling the way they view themselves with the way the people around them expect them to behave. Unfortunately, this often leads the game's players to write the characters off as the very same stereotypes the characters are attempting to stave off, which is equal parts ironic and disappointing. As much as I'd like to say "You're missing the point!" and criticize those who misread the game, some of the responsibility falls upon Hashino and his team for not being clear enough. Again, we have the same question: Is an artistically interesting choice truly strong if most of the audience doesn't understand it? Let's Not Do That Today To be clear, Persona 4 was a hugely successful game, and it was received well. That said--if you'll pardon some speculation on my part--I think Hashino is aware that a sizable chunk of the player base didn't understand the purpose behind certain aspects of the game. As evidence of this, his next work Catherine, swung drastically the other way. Catherine is a bizarre block puzzle game with two connected story threads: a man having an affair with a strange woman, and a rash of men suffering nightmares night after night before eventually dying in their sleep. It's not an especially long game--it was originally meant as sort of a tech demo for Persona 5's engine--but it's an interesting experience with a modest fan base. That said, there is one moment towards the end of the narrative that makes me think quite a bit less of the game as a whole. The game is presented as a frame story, and after the conclusion of the story within the frame, the player is brought out of the frame by the narrator. The narrator then explains, explicitly and in detail, what the game's core themes and symbols mean. It feels almost like a tutorial, and it comes across as quite arrogant, as if the developers assumed that the players would not understand what the game meant and felt the need to explain it outright, just in case. With the context of Persona 4, though, this starts to be understandable. If Hashino saw that many of the people who played Persona 4 did not understand what it was trying to convey, he may have wanted to ensure the same did not happen with Catherine, and the odd end-game fourth-wall-breaking exposition starts to make sense. It's an extreme antithesis of Persona 4. Where Persona 4 allowed players to miss things--and, in fact, was structured such that a player not thinking critically was likely to miss core components of the game--Catherine spells out its major themes and symbols such that no player can possibly miss them. Personally, I prefer Persona 4's approach, but both, I think, are flawed. Ideally you have the best of both worlds (as in Persona 3), where the audience is allowed to interpret the work but given enough guidance so as not to miss crucial points. Persona 5 takes a more nuanced approach than Catherine does, with the help of the character Morgana. Morgana accompanies the protagonist throughout most of the game, and he has a tendency--particularly early in the game--to point out symbolic or thematically-significant details to the protagonist, in a way that leans on the fourth wall just a bit. It can be a bit grating at times (Yes, Morgana, I understand that this teacher's lecture about Jungian psychology is symbolically significant in a game that's literally named after a concept from Jungian psychology), but it's a lot better than the way Catherine handles it, and it could serve as a slight nudge to get other players thinking. Having an in-universe character draw attention to the sorts of things that would normally be more hidden could help to train Hashino's audience to identify the sorts of things he likes to hide in his games, and it turns picking apart Hashino's symbolism into a sort of miniature game in its own right (on top of providing reassurance that yes, it's all intentional). It's not as organic as it could be, but it's probably a better approach than throwing players into the metaphorical deep end and allowing them to sink or swim. The raft that is Morgana may be a bit of a nuisance to experience swimmers, but to new people it might be valuable. Without Love, It Cannot Be Seen There's a mystery-themed visual novel called Umineko no Naku Koro Ni (which, sadly I have not played) that's known partially for the line, "Without love, it cannot be seen." The phrase is in reference to detective fiction, and it means, essentially, that in order for a mystery to be solvable, there has to be a bond of mutual respect between the reader and the writer. The writer promises a solvable mystery in which the world adheres to its own rules and the general rules of detective fiction are not violated without strong buildup and/or good reason, and in exchange the reader accepts the world as the writer presents it, suspends his or her disbelief, and works to solve the mystery. Without that bond, the truth of the mystery cannot be found.
I think this concept applies to hidden meaning in art as well. An audience member or reader has a responsibility to meet the work wherever it is and to make a good faith effort to understand what the work is saying. Someone who goes into a game or play or book expecting something in particular, and who is unwilling to accept anything but that expectation, is almost certainly going to miss whatever the work's creator might be hiding, and that responsibility does not lie with the creator. If a good-faith audience member is unable to discern what a work is supposed to mean, though, I think that speaks to a weakness of the work. Even if--as in Persona 4's case--there is a great deal of value below the surface, if a work's intended audience misses core elements of the work, then the work itself is at least somewhat flawed. It's a complicated issue, though, and there are plenty of other possible takes. I love reading things that make me think, things where I can find hidden meaning long after my initial read, but something that doesn't appeal on the surface level and that doesn't make its lower layers visible is going to have a hard time finding an audience. It's a challenge to balance, to be sure. If you were to ask me which figure in the game design industry I most admire, I would--without hesitation--answer Katsura Hashino. Hashino is a game designer at Atlus, a mid-sized company known primarily for making highly conceptual JRPGs. Atlus is one of the most consistently strong game design companies currently active, and although there are many great creative minds working for the company, much of Atlus's recent success stems from Hashino's work. Hashino is best known for directing 2003's minimalist, cell-shaded JRPG Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, along with the three most recent entries in the Persona series. His current project is a game inspired by traditional fantasy novels (as well as tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons), moving away from his past focus on Science Fiction and Urban Fantasy. There are many things about Hashino's games that make them excellent offerings, but one common thread that tends to appeal to me is his tendency to draw from classic literature, modeling aspects of his games off of more traditional storytelling media. 2016's Persona 5 (which, incidentally, is what I consider to be the best overall game I've played), makes its literary influences crystal-clear: each main character is directly associated with a character from classic fiction (via the "persona" concept that gives the series its title), with figures ranging from the title character of Bizet's opera Carmen to the heroic monkey king Sun Wukong from the classical Chinese novel Journey to the West. The game as a whole is modeled after picaresque fiction--particularly French picaresque fiction--and the protagonist, who is associated with the gentleman thief, Arsène Lupin, lives in the attic of a cafe named after the Maurice Leblanc, the author who created the original Arsène. Persona 5's usage of classic lit is simultaneously straightforward and clever, both using an established literary tradition as a strong foundation for a thoroughly modern story, and also playing on certain expectations in order to surprise players familiar with the literature on which the game is based. I could go on and on about the topic, but I'll save that for another day--instead, I'd like to point out some of the less-obvious ways Persona 4 does much the same thing. Unlike in Persona 5, it's quite easy to miss many of Persona 4's literary inspirations. There are a few points that are rather obvious--Hashino has said that the game's mystery elements are meant to call to mind the works of Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and it shows--but Persona 4 is full of less straightforward parallels and references to classic lit. Some of these are clearly intentional--Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is mentioned by name, and there are a few characters whose names are taken directly from the novel--but others are less direct. Even if you write these parallels off as coincidence, they're interesting to think about, and Hashino's well-documented usage of classic lit elsewhere (paired with a scene I'll bring up later) lead me to believe most, if not all, of this is entirely on-purpose. This Sounds Kinda Familiar Persona 4 has several striking parallels to William Shakespeare's Hamlet. The game opens with the protagonist forced to leave his home and school in the city to live with his uncle in a small town. Shortly after arriving, he learns of a recent murder under strange circumstances, hears a rumor from a friend about visions of the deceased appearing to people in town late at night, and goes to investigate. Although the rumor is not exactly correct, the protagonist does indeed have a supernatural experience as promised and that experience leads him to investigate the strange state of his new home. Sound familiar? Hamlet's opening is almost identical. Main guy leaves his school to live with his uncle in a relatively secluded location? Check. Someone's been killed? Check. Potential ghost sighting? Check. There are differences, sure--the victim in Persona 4 has no direct connection to the protagonist, for example--but parallels keep popping up as the game goes on. One of my personal favorite examples is the character Kinshiro Morooka, an obnoxious and aggressive schoolteacher who tends to earn the derision of those around him, including his students. He's treated much like a fool, although (if you can get past his colorful language) much of his advice is actually quite valuable in the context of the game's story, and some of the things he warns against, such as illicit romantic relationships, are exactly what get certain characters into trouble. In true Shakespearean fashion, the fool is the wise man--it's just that nobody likes him enough to listen to him. Morooka suffers a violent death at the hands of someone other than the main antagonist about halfway through the game, and although he is quickly replaced by a new character who fills roughly the same role (albeit with less personality), his death marks a notable shift as the game starts to unravel some of its mysteries and build towards its climax. Morooka finds a perfect counterpart in Hamlet's Polonius. Polonius is an advisor to the king--a teacher, in a sense--who offers good advice in a bad way, and the play's characters tend to ignore his advice, largely to their detriment. He is killed halfway through the play, his death sparks a sequence of elevated tension and action, and he's replaced in function as assistant to Claudius by another, less memorable character (Osric) shortly after. Speaking of Polonius, the lyrics of one of Persona 4's main musical themes, "Reach Out to the Truth," are strangely reminiscent of Polonius's famous "To thine own self be true" monologue. Although the language itself is drastically different, both consist mostly of advice that relates to the themes of their respective works. Polonius gives Laertes such advice as "Give thy thoughts no tounge, / Nor any unproportion'd thought his act," which foreshadows Laertes's impulsiveness in attacking Hamlet later in the play, while "Reach Out to the Truth" includes lines such as "Do not waste your time," which is major theme in all three of Hashino's Persona games. The "To thine own self be true" line is also directly applicable to Persona 4, as one of the game's major concepts is the suffering caused by denying or repressing aspects of one's self. Persona 4's department store Junes (pronounced June-ess) mirror's the role of Norway in Hamlet. Both Norway and Junes serve as distractions--or, perhaps, scapegoats--from the true problems of the stories. In Hamlet, Fortinbras's impending invasion of Denmark is mentioned early in the play and is a recurring concern, drawing attention away from the corruption within Denmark itself. In Persona 4, much of the population of the small town of Inaba is concerned about the recent arrival of the chain department store Junes, as its size and convenience has been gradually wearing down old family businesses, drawing attention away from the two actual problems within the town: a serial murderer, and a populace with a tendency to believe what they would like to be true instead of what is actually true. (As a side note, Persona 4's treatment of the theme of truth feels strangely prophetic 10 years later in light of the issues we've had with fake news and the like in the past two years). To add to the Norway-Junes comparison, Persona 4 uses some language to refer to Junes that is odd for a department store but fitting for a country. Yosuke, the son of the store's manager, is on occasion referred to as "The Prince of Junes," which creates a curious link to Fortinbras (although the similarities between the characters largely end there). Moreover, towards the end of the game a particularly change-resistant older man claims that "Inaba is being invaded by the country of Junes!" While this reads initially as an amusing symptom of the mass hysteria taking over the town (due to a combination of bad weather and circulating rumors), it also calls to mind the end of Hamlet, when Norway does, in fact, invade Denmark. It could be a coincidence, but the wording is odd enough that reading it as a nod to Hamlet strikes me as the most sensible interpretation. Scarlet and Gold Hamlet is, of course, not the only classic literary work to influence Persona 4. The game also has some symbolic similarities to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne's novel centers around a woman found guilty of adultery in a small town and forced to stand on a scaffold in front of the people and then to wear a letter A sewn to her clothes in order to publicly shame her. The woman chooses to wear the letter proudly, opting for a striking gold-embroidered, scarlet letter A. Persona 4 borrows this general concept and some of its symbolism, with a slight twist--the modern-day scaffold is a television. The game's major premise is that looking into a turned-off television at midnight while it's raining shows whoever has currently captured the interest of the townspeople. This supernatural program (called "the Midnight Channel") seems to reveal whatever negative aspects of a person's personality he or she might want to conceal--although we ultimately learn that the channel only reflects what the viewer wants to see, not what is actually true. The Midnight Channel, like The Scarlet Letter's scaffold, is a public forum for displaying perceived moral wrongs to the small town as a whole, and the program's color scheme is scarlet and gold, just like Hawthorne's letter. If that isn't enough to convince you Persona 4 borrows intentionally from The Scarlet Letter, the first person displayed on the Midnight Channel is a woman accused of an adulterous relationship with a resident of the town. Again, it could be coincidence, but the parallels are a bit too clear to write off. The Play's the Thing Hamlet and The Scarlet Letter aren't the only classic works Persona 4 parallels, but this post is plenty long already and the point is mostly made. I'll end this with one last moment from the game that leads me to believe this is all done intentionally: the play.
Persona 4 has two characters named Kou and Daisuke, school friends of the protagonist who are largely interchangeable (mirroring Hamlet's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern). At one point in the game, the main characters' school holds a festival. As part of this festival, Kou's class puts on a play, which, according to Daisuke, is titled Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. It's just a single line in passing and it's likely meant as a joke, but it also strikes me as poking fun at Persona 4 as a whole. With its literary influences taken from multiple unrelated works, Persona 4 is, in a sense, just as much of a mish-mash as the hypothetical Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. Just as there is a play within Hamlet that is a symbol for Hamlet itself, there is a play within Persona 4 that is, again, a symbol for Persona 4. Moreover, that one line is apparently considered significant enough that the play made a brief appearance in the game's animated adaptation, complete with a unique musical cue with the same title as the fictional play. There are, of course, any number of possible explanations for all these parallels and call-outs, but I think they're all intended to further the game's thematic ideas. Persona 4 (and its superior remake, Persona 4 Golden), is a long game--probably 80-120 hours depending on reading speed--so it certainly isn't lacking for time spent exploring its concepts and ideas in detail, but using works such as The Scarlet Letter (for public enforcement of and attitudes toward morality) and Hamlet (for truth) as thematic springboards allows Persona 4 to move more quickly into unique and specialized aspects of its thematic realms. For example, the game does not need to establish a baseline exploration of public opinion, judgment, and shaming in a small town because Nathanial Hawthorne already has, so the game can take The Scarlet Letter's interpretation of that theme and then move into the more specific concept of how preconceptions and expectations color public reaction to scandals. Building on the shoulders of giants (to borrow an idiom) lends weight to Persona 4's attempt to qualify as "serious" lit in the vein of the classics it emulates, and--beyond that--the usage of classic literature allows Persona 4 to reach a more nuanced (if less universal) take on thematic ideas that have been around for ages. Persona 4 takes concepts of truth and public opinion as they have been examined for hundreds of years and applies them to problems in our present-day society, resulting in an exceptionally strong work that is at the same time highly enjoyable. Sword Art Online is a series that tends to get kind of a bad rap (in the U.S., at least). This is due, in large part, to a weak animated adaptation that loses much of what make the original novels so strong--namely, Kawahara Reki's fabulous narration. While I could expound upon why I think SAO's criticisms are largely unwarranted, this week's post is a little more focused: I plan to delve into the significance of verticality and artificiality as symbols and thematic ideas within the Sword Art Online novels, in the context of an article written by author Michael Lucken regarding the same concepts in Miyazaki Hayao's Spirited Away. But First, Some Context Sword Art Online, for the unfamiliar, is a novel series written by Kawahara Reki. The first volume was published in 2009, and the series is still ongoing, with 20 novels and several side works published so far. (If this seems like an absurd number, it is--Kawahara releases a novel about every two months, with about two or three per year being SAO.) The basic premise of the series is that in the year 2022 true sensory-replacement virtual reality becomes available on a commercial scale, and each story arc explores this concept from a different perspective, such as gaming, health care, and military applications. The first two volumes of Sword Art Online involve the (admittedly somewhat cliched) concept of characters trapped in a virtual environment in which the death of the characters' avatars results in the deaths of their actual bodies. The virtual setting itself is known as Aincrad, and it consists of 100 floors stacked on top of each other and connected by a series of towers about 100 meters tall. The floors themselves are massive--the smallest is 3 kilometers in diameter and the largest 10 kilometers in diameter--and have natural-looking geography and occasionally cities and towns. Spirited Away is an animated film directed by Miyazaki Hayao and produced by Studio Ghibli. The film centers around a young girl named Chihiro, who is trapped in and forced to work for a bathhouse that serves as a hotel and spa for spirits--monsters, ghosts, and the like--to visit in order to relax and refresh themselves. Much like Aincrad, the bathhouse is a highly vertical structure, with multiple massive floors stacked on top of each other and with many passages up and down. In "Miyazaki Hayao's Spirited Away, or, the Adventure of the Obliques," Lucken interprets the bathhouse as representative of modern metropolises: artificial, closed spaces, isolated from the natural world, and defined by fairly strict hierarchical structures. This is contrasted with horizontals, representing the natural, original state of things, and then reconciled with the presence of obliques, essentially symbolizing the desire for the freedom of the the natural horizontal state giving way to the necessity of having some form of man-made, structured society. Lucken goes into much more detail than I'm planning to, and there's more to it than that summary, but that's the gist of his argument. If you like Spirited Away, it's worth giving the article a read, though--it may give you something to think about the next time you watch it. The similarities between the symbolism of the two works is clear: SAO's characters are trapped within an artificial, vertical structure, and the only apparent escapes are through death (which, as with Spirited Away, is often associated with the lowest reaches of the tower) or by reaching the top of the tower, something which seems to be impossible and in fact never happens within the novels. Spirited Away, similarly, involves characters trapped in an artificial, vertical structure, and Lucken's analysis of the symbolism of Sprited Away's bathhouse can likely be applied to SAO's Aincrad, as well. Defending the Vertical One of the major themes throughout SAO (and even Kawahara's other writing) is the realness of virtual spaces and connections. SAO's protagonist, Kirigaya "Kirito" Kazuto, is well-informed regarding the technology that powers Aincrad and the virtual spaces he visits in later novels, and he often comments on the theoretical limitations of these spaces--particularly the social limitations of the artificial-intelligence-backed "Non-Player Characters." Even armed with the knowledge that what he is experiencing is artificial, Kirito asserts that time spent within these vertical, artificial spaces has as much value as time spent in the relatively horizontal real world; in other words, the artificiality of the vertical environment does not mean the vertical is inherently bad--only different. The artificiality of the vertical is more extreme in SAO than in Spirited Away, as SAO's Aincrad literally does not exist. It is the ultimate artificial structure, and yet Kawahara seems to assert (unlike Miyazaki) that such places still have value, and that true, meaningful relationships can be formed even within those spaces. Kirito's friendships with many of the other characters--especially SAO's heroine, Asuna--continue on even after Aincrad collapses at the end of the first novel, whereas when Chihiro finally leaves the bathhouse at the end of Spirited Away, it is with the implication that she will never again see the people she met within that vertical space. Even the characters sitting atop the vertical societies behave differently: In Spirited Away, Yubaba, the owner of the bathhouse, largely stays at the top of her tower and fully asserts her superiority, while SAO's Kayaba Akihiko, Aincrad's creator and the rightful inhabitant of its top floor, actively engages with the people on the lower floors, saying at the end of the novel that simply watching from above would be far too boring. With the third volume of Sword Art Online, Kawahara moved away from Aincrad, but he has returned to that setting relatively recently with Sword Art Online Progressive, a new project bridging a two year time jump early in the first volume of SAO. Kawahara has described Sword Art Online Progressive as something like a passion project, and his excitement for the series shows in the novels--they represent what I believe to be his strongest writing by a fair margin. The return to Aincrad causes Kawahara to once again address this concept of the vertical and the horizontal. Particularly noteworthy is the mention in these novels that Aincrad's floors were formerly one surface, and that long ago that surface was cut into pieces and stacked into a tower. If the vertical structure that is Aincrad is indeed symbolic of society, then this implies that vertical society is simply a reorganization of the horizontal, which would in turn imply that the world of the vertical is not fundamentally different from the world of the horizontal. Kawahara's frequent descriptions of the "natural" landscapes that make up Aincrad's floors support this interpretation as well--the beauty of the horizontal is still present, just arranged differently. Compare this with Miyazaki's bathhouse, which is physically and metaphorically separated from nature and which struggles to imitate older styles of architecture. Dangerous though Aincrad may be, it has much of the beauty of the natural, horizontal world, along with some unique charm possible only because of its vertical construction. Kawahara's interpretation of the vertical world is on many counts not nearly as pessimistic as Miyazaki's. There is an issue with this, however--namely that the history of Kawahara's Aincrad is entirely false, even within the context of the novels themselves. Aincrad was a virtual space created by humans for humans, and its "history" is simply a story coded in to the space by its creators. A more pessimistic reading would take Aincrad to be a flawed attempt to justify the vertical, rewriting its history in a way that everyone knows to be false and yet accepts, much like in George Orwell's 1984. The vertical is a world of lies, and SAO's Aincrad is a literal castle on a cloud (as the tower is floating in the air), and it steals the lives and livelihoods of those trapped within it. This contrast--the positives and negatives of the vertical--provides much of the tension throughout Sword Art Online. In a particularly pointed sequence in the first volume of Progressive, Asuna comes to the conclusion that the world she is experiencing--the world in which she is trapped--is fundamentally false, and as such her life is not worth protecting or living. It is Kirito who finds her and gradually brings her to decide that the reality or unreality of her world--or, alternatively, the artificiality of the vertical world in which she has no choice but to live--does not impact her subjective experience of her world and therefore should not invalidate what personal meaning it may hold. As a result of this, SAO does not need Spirited Away's obliques to balance between the horizontal and the vertical, as the two are not fundamentally different things so long as one is able to recognize their underlying connection. Positivity is a Good Thing Part of why I love Kawahara's writing so much is he's an overwhelmingly positive, optimistic author. His novels have very real stakes and bad things happen, but the vast majority of his characters are fundamentally good, relatively normal people doing their best to help others and make their world a better place as they go about their lives--which is pretty rare, especially in science-fiction. His novels examine potential consequences of the technological advancements he proposes, but unlike Orwellian dystopias, they also spend a considerable amount of time examining the positives that result from these advancements. It's an overall optimistic view of the future--and the present--that stands out as fairly unique for the genre and makes Sword Art Online an enjoyable read.
If Spirited Away can be read as fantasy with a sociopolitical focus, Sword Art Online can be read in much the same light. Boiled down to its simplest form, SAO--through broad use of symbolism--asserts that while our society and its structure are certainly flawed, the world we have built for ourselves is usually a good place to be, or at least no worse than it would be without our societal structures. Regardless of whether you agree with Kawahara's take on society, SAO's carefully-constructed symbolic layers go a long way towards making its worldview feel plausible. I would call it highly successful on that front. |
Isaiah Hastings
A Japanese Lit major and aspiring game designer with a passion for storytelling and music composition Archives
August 2019
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