To speak for the "..."

This piece is my attempt to speak for the unspoken - the silent protagonist. The archetype has been in a rough patch for a while, with countless more to come, no doubt, but there's value in the character. Playing the archetype "straight" in today's climate would likely cause more people to roll their eyes but there is space for subversion.

Dragon Quest V is that sort of wilful experimentation that only comes from years of exploring the same subject matter. The Silent Protagonist is always the hero? Then let's tear them down and force them to watch a chatty NPC replace "their" duties instead. Dragon Quest IV showed shades of this deconstruction with its focus on telling the stories of your comrades before yours, but Chunsoft and Yuji Horii really laid the despair on thick in Dragon Quest V. It's a fantastic game that everyone should play if only to realise that Dragon Quest has been, and always will be, more than "the same old thing".

The cold science of Pokémon

Wow, haven't used this for a while....

Nightmare Mode is back everybody and I was the ickle firsty for the relaunch with this piece on the scientific side of Pokémon Red and Blue.

I still have so much to say about Pokémon, in particular the first generation. This piece was really a jumbled up version of my ongoing Pokémon Red Let's Play with some extra snippets which I'll further elaborate on when I get to them in my everlasting saga of updates.

Pokémon is more important than a series of minor updates. If you dig deep into the designs of these creatures, you'll find all sorts of surprises. I'm sure the story behind Cubone's helmet has been well and truly spoiled for you, but there's really obscure ones like the traditional Japanese story Of a Mirror and a Bell reflected in the design of Bronzor and Bronzong respectively, and the cross-cultural mythology of the giant turtle who holds the world on top of its back. It's wonderful stuff.

In other news, work on my zine (two of them now!) is trudging along. It turns out that one piece is proving far more difficult, and lengthy, to write than expected. I... really have no excuse for how long this is all taking. I am excited to show it all when it's done, though.

As always, the art is done by the lovely Jake Lawrence.

Remixing Samurai Champloo

It's all about the music, you know?

Cowboy Bebop did it first but it wasn't until Samurai Champloo that I realised anachronism could be used for more than just humour. Anachronism grounded Cowboy Bebop in the past whilst flinging the setting far into the future and the opposite was true with Samurai Champloo. Set in Edo Period Japan, Samurai Champloo uses hip hop to update the history of Japan to a modern context.

But what distinguishes Samurai Champloo from Cowboy Bebop's score is Watanabe's efforts to make hip hop affect how the story is told. He briefly flirted with the idea in Jupiter Jazz with Gren's wind-up music box triggering his memories in an inspired metaphor of winding back the clock, but Watanabe really came into his stride with Samurai Champloo. The chopped up samples of hip hop and record scratching lend the story a staccato rhythm both visually and textually. Scenes and episodes are divided by musical cues and emceeing. It's more than Cowboy Bebop's thematic use of jazz to enhance the atmosphere, it's genuine engagement with the text.

And closer examination reveals that hip hop is remarkably suitable for a show set in Edo Period Japan. It was an era of great societal change. The samurai were superseded by businessmen who saw that profiting of their fellow man was better than killing them and an inkling of Western culture had slipped into the borders before the rigid port lockdown for all foreigners. Japan was a melting pot of change and social upheaval. In contrast to Cowboy Bebop's infatuation with the past, Samurai Champloo is concerned with the uncertain future. Much like Spike and Jet before them, Mugen and Jin find themselves penniless and without a consistent job but, instead of languishing in their prior greatness, toss themselves into the future with reckless abandonment.

Samurai Champloo is a show about appropriation. It's about a culture on the cusp of rapid change and figuring out what it can identify with while inviting all the exciting changes of globalisation. It looks to the past only to figure out what it can steal. And hip hop is the great appropriation of our times. It takes the old and makes it new again and by doing so forges a greater appreciation of what has come before us.

But, if there's one thing that the show makes abundantly clear, it's that Mugen and Jin don't belong in this brave new world. As much as the pair seem to adapt to the life of hired swordsmen, the culture around them are no longer interested in killing people. There's baseball to look forward to and an inkling of Japan's rapid technological advancement and its eventual terrible misfortune. When a sample in a hop hop track is so readily absorbed into popular consciousness without even an awareness of where it came from, or even a question as to whether or not it is a sample, society tends to forget what came before. All the jumps, grooves, and scratches of a vinyl are invigorating at the start, but they gradually wear away the original underneath it.

Samurai Champloo is built to show change as inevitable, natural, and even damn cool, but the show trips itself up at the end with a disappointing finale. Mugen and Jin live when they should have died. But then I wonder why I wanted them to die so much and realise that maybe my responsibility as a consumer is just to enjoy the show put in front of me. Maybe Watanabe, the DJ, is the one responsible for preserving and appreciating the culture we've lost. He's the one that mixed the two to begin with. Let him keep his sappy ending. We've got a future ahead of us.

The Giant Steps of Cowboy Bebop

It's all about the music, you know?

It's a pretty exciting opening. The blaring trumpets, the rapid-fire cuts and bursts of colour, the drum fill and then a moment of silence before a groovy bass line kicks in and everyone is ready to go. Cowboy Bebop's score is renowned for good reason but it goes deeper than simply having great tunes. Take the score away from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzimiya and it'll be of a little consequence. Take the score away from Cowboy Bebop and everything changes. The soundtrack of Cowboy Bebop informs every aspect of its storytelling.

Cowboy Bebop is not some happy accident. Shinichiro Watanabe understands – really gets – how to use music as something more than cool window dressing. Samurai Champloo was released five years later to critical acclaim and garnered the same gushy reaction to its music, despite being of a completely different musical genre. And, from an outsider's perspective, Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo feel wildly different to each other both in plot and setting. Samurai Champloo takes place in Edo Period Japan and follows the adventures of three travellers in search of the “samurai who smells of sunflowers”, while Cowboy Bebop is set years in the future and focuses on a group of bounty hunters.

With its improvisational and, at times, sombre jazz soundtrack, it's almost natural that Cowboy Bebop tells the tale of a group of “losers” haunted by their pasts, out of cash, and barely scraping together a living. The cast of Cowboy Bebop are really a bunch of musicians themselves, skirting from place to place performing (or in their case catching bounties), living off their meagre winnings until they run dry, and then doing the same thing all over again. There's real romanticism at work here. The impoverished artist, the freedom to be tied to no one, and, of course, the indulgence. To devote yourself to your work entirely and break free from the concerns of reality.

It's all bullshit, naturally. Spike, Jet, and Faye all know this. The Bebop, the crew's ship, is a transformed husk of a fishing boat now flying through space. A literal fish out of water. Spike's blasé dickishness is really hiding his misery over losing Julia, Jet ends up becoming the paternal figure of the group as a result of his failure to protect Alicia, and Faye, behind all the sex and allure, is painfully alone. After the smoke is settled and the haze of the performance is over, all three of them are left wringing their hands in the spotlight.

And what's jazz now except a shadow of its former self? How do you feel about Giant Steps? Fuck that shit, everyone's played it, it's fifty-years old, it sounds like crap, write a new song, and stop playing that god damn song. I don't care if you can fuckin' modulate it and change it up. You can play in seven, you can play in nine? It's boring.

Ultimately, the crew of Cowboy Bebop can't let go of their past no matter how hard they try. Jazz is the music of an era long since past and yet it still clings, lifelessly. Bebop was a flash of brilliance before it quickly fell into its face. A good idea, a great idea. Let's go out into space and catch bounties for a living. Free from the man, man. A romantic life and a lonely one.

In the world of Cowboy Bebop, if you have a past, you have a death wish. A history is a heavy burden. It doesn't lead to bigger and better things, it leads to stagnation and paper-thin “cool”. And it's intoxicating and rotten and miserable and lovely.

Maybe that's what makes jazz so wonderful. It sounds defeatist in its familiarity. It's pleasing to see and hear such characters and music start off so confidently and quickly spiral out of control. Despite all the improvisation, we all come back to crushing repetition.

Let games be as challenging as they need to be

In which Alois defends the value of easy games. Also Boku No Natsuyasumi.

I hate listening to/complaining about difficulty in games. It feels like such a non-issue. A triviality. The people that really get to me though are the ones that argue modern games aren’t any good because they’re easier to complete. What sort of metric is that? I welcome the idea that by making games easier, we’re letting more people experience the medium and even allowing people to finish titles, too.

Because name another medium where some people don’t even see the complete work? Yes, book and movies can be placed aside whenever someone wants to but they require no effort on the viewer to see/read the whole thing. They’re open to be discussed by anyone.

And games need that level of approachability. We don’t have enough people talking about games.

Colonialism under the guise of the dungeon crawl: Etrian Odyssey and the invasion

I talk about a lot of things that make Etrian Odyssey great in this piece but the best thing about the game, what makes it rise above and beyond even the oldest games in the genre, is how it uses the DS screen.

Because dungeon crawls can be awful to the perfectionist. You have to buy graph paper because you’re gonna be drawing a lot of maps, and normal white paper simply won’t cut it. Then you have to buy a bunch of pencils and various fine pens so you don’t smudge or ruin your map. Then you have to annotate it and make sure every event or treasure is marked correctly. It’s a blissful, addictive experience that’ll ruin even the most patient of people.

Etrian Oydssey dedicates the touch screen entirely to your map. It’s an empty grid at the beginning of your adventure but gradually transforms into a perfectly aligned map. It maintains the intoxicating lure of drawing your own map and gets rid of all the awful ink spills and blotches that can ruin everything. It’s wonderful.

Beating up God in Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth

My latest is up at Nightmare Mode :D

So, apparently this game isn’t as well-loved as I thought it was? That’s kind of understandable, actually.

Valkyrie Profile asks a lot of the player. There’s a strict time limit, a complex battle system, and tri-Ace have the gall to trick you into playing the game a very specific way when you actually have a lot of freedom. Valkyrie Profile is a little too clever for its own good. No wonder it didn’t stick with a lot of people.

You need to get in the right frame of mine to play it. Valkyrie Profile is melancholic. You’re not met with congratulations for mastering these systems. You spend the entire game recruiting dead people and watching their last moments on Earth.

And, similar to Majora’s Mask, the narrative is remarkably understated. You don’t recognise just how oppressive the game is until you’ve let it rest a little bit after your first play.

It’s not a happy game, there’s little room for humour. But there’s a sense of cohesiveness here rare in video games. A unified vision. It’s pretty short, too!

We need more short games.

(Thanks, as always, to TimeCowboy for the wonderful art)