Anno Domini 2015

As much as I avoid referring to the things I write here as reviews (a practice meant to avoid the pressure of ever feeling like this is something I should do in any way remotely professionally, or regularly), I should note that what follows is even less like a professional review than normal.

So.

It’s late September or early October of 1999.  I’m going to a community college, taking Gen Ed courses with the idea of earning some sort of computer sciences degree — networking, I believe — and gradually feeling that the darkness and the numbness that have been waiting in the wings for much of my life to that point (I hate to actually call it depression, lacking an official diagnosis, but I’m not sure what else it could have been) are about to take shape and close in for good and all.  It’s difficult to keep myself invested in anything that anyone else would call important.  Work, school, home life – I’m essentially just trying to stay out of trouble, wherever I am, and maintain some rough sense of tranquility.

It isn’t going so well.

A friend of mine wants to know if I’d like to join him and some other friends in an all-night anime viewing.  He’s being ambitious; we’re going to try getting through all 26 episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion in a single night.  I say sure, why not?  I’ve heard of this series before, it’s supposed to be pretty good, though my actual knowledge of it is limited to the ADV previews that feature on most of their tapes (this was back when VHS was not just a thing but the thing).  Since that was basically just clips of combat between giant robots and incomprehensible monsters, punctuated by explosions and set to "Ode to Joy", that didn't tell me much.  But it sounded interesting, so I said sure why not.

The day comes and we make it about six episodes in before the plan breaks down.  People who were supposed to be there now suddenly can’t make it on time, and we have to stop the festivities to go get them.  And then we get sidetracked along the way.  I’m frustrated because I want to get back to the show, but at the same time, driving around town and goofing off, I’m having what will (in retrospect) turn out to be one of the best times I can remember in my abortive pre-Army college stint.

Skip forward about a month, and I’m house-sitting for my aunt in a house that, some six years or so later, will be my house.  I own six volumes (of thirteen) of Neon Genesis Evangelion, although I can barely afford that kind of expense, and am watching them regularly.  I’ve called in from work for no better reason than because fuck that place.  Watching 80-meter tall berserk robots with children “piloting” them thrash the crap out of equally giant monsters is infinitely more engaging than operating a cash register, and I’ve pretty nearly run out of shits to give.

“What’s wrong with running away from reality if it sucks?” Shinji cries in Japanese.  I think the line’s been translated differently in later releases, but it’s still pretty much the same sentiment.  That sense of confusion and rage and despair and… I don’t know.  Absence?  I almost typed “loss”, but you can’t lose what you never had.  That feeling speaks to me.  

And while even then I knew this wasn’t the best response to the central dilemmas of life and relating to other people, it was in some way heartening to know that someone understood.  Here was a creator – Hideaki Anno, who certainly knows a thing or two about being a painfully shy and underconfident person who is often confused and sometimes terrified by the world around him – talking to all of us through his creation, sharing in the pain of being, saying “I don’t know what the answers are, either, but I know how you hurt, and I hurt too, and together maybe we’ll tough it out.”  Amen, brother.

This is not a cry for pity, or for help.  I’m better now.  Mostly.  (I think).  This is by way of explaining why and how Neon Genesis Evangelion struck in the way and with the strength that it did.

*    *    *

Occasionally in a given medium, you’ll get a work that, more or less by accident, completely revolutionizes everything that comes afterward.  It exerts an almost tidal effect on the flow of the medium, warping everything out of the direction it might otherwise have gone.  With rock music, it’s bands like The Beatles or Nirvana.  In fantasy fiction, it’s The Lord of the Rings.  In anime, it’s Neon Genesis Evangelion.

It was hard for me to pinpoint the exact nature of Evangelion’s impact for a long time.  Even now, I’m not sure if the way I think it impacted the medium is the way everyone else seems to think it did.  But here’s what I think, for what it’s worth:

Most anime had been pretty straightforward prior to this.  The technique of using the trappings of one category of fiction as a framework to examine more broadly applicable social and philosophical issues had not, to my recollection, been done in a big way previously.  Then Gainax came along, an upstart production studio which was run less by business types and more by animators and directors, with this weird giant robot show that spent most of its time exploring its characters and obsessed over its ideas.  After they did it, everybody else started doing it too.  They're still doing it.

Here was a show that started off as a deceptively “hard” sci-fi giant robot show with an unusual amount of attention paid to character development and growth, and an apparent obsession with (and sometimes clumsy application of) Judeo-Christian religious iconography, symbolism and philosophy as part of its overarching metaphor.  It descended into a bitter and often unsettling character drama, where the whole giant robot thing seemed to happen only when it was necessary to twist the knife even further than it already was.  The two – two! – endings constructed for it, which were essentially different ways of saying the same thing, were the result of the creator’s epiphany about the brighter side of life and the world, and largely seemed to stem from his recovery from the bout of depression that informed most of the dilemmas he explored throughout the show.  The first ending, which was the ending of the TV series, came at a time when the production studio was within bare inches of bankruptcy, and could not afford to do much more, from a technical standpoint, than what they did.  What they did was tell the ending of the story (and, incidentally, of the world) from inside the protagonist’s head.  The second ending was shown in a series of movies (collectively titled The End of Evangelion) designed to tell the ending of the story as it affected the world at large.  It is deeply interesting to me how both endings are vastly different in scope and in method of expression, yet equally baffling. 

The show was nearly pulled off the air twice during its original run, was the source of more than one death threat against the director, and was the motivating factor of at least one act of vandalism against the production studio’s property.  It also spawned manga, a few video games, models, toys, apparel, bath salts (I couldn’t make this up)…  The merchandise has been going strong since the show first aired.  It has not stopped at any time since then, and does not look likely to stop at any reasonably predictable point in the future.  Someone has made (and continues to make) a tidy profit, I’m sure.

So what is this whole thing all about?

*    *    *

Our story starts in 2000, when a scientific expedition to Antarctica goes disastrously wrong.  The experiments done result in an explosion of energy so massive it completely melts the polar ice cap.  Sea levels rise, the earth’s axis shifts, and in addition to the global climate change (Japan, for instance, has summer as its only season now), about half the human population perishes in the aftermath of it all.  The world slowly rebuilds itself.  The precise nature of this event is covered up, with the blame being officially cast on a meteorite impact.  The event is dubbed “Second Impact”, with the First Impact being a similar meteorite collision early in Earth’s formation, which caused the moon to split off the main mass of the planet.

Much of the world’s recovery effort is spearheaded by a mysterious internationally operating group called Nerv, which operates under special permission of the UN.  But as poorly understood as they are, Nerv are in turn backed by an even more shadowy organization, called Seele, which seems to have plans of their own beyond the scope of Nerv regarding a Third Impact.

The story proper starts in 2015, with Shinji Ikari, a 15-year-old boy who has been summoned to New Tokyo-3 (yes, there really are two other New Tokyos) by his father, Gendo Ikari.  Ikari the elder turns out to be the commander of Nerv.  Gendo left his son in the care of his teacher several years ago, not long after Yui Ikari, Shinji’s mother and Gendo’s wife, disappeared under strange circumstances during an experiment conducted by Gehirn, an organization which was later disbanded and reformed as Nerv.  With his mother dead and his cold, harsh father distant to a degree best measured in astronomical terms, Shinji quite understandably has trouble getting close to people.

Shinji arrives in New Tokyo-3 just as it is being attacked by an Angel*.  In Eva’s parlance, Angels are massively powerful beings whose forms and modes of existence appear to violate all biological possibility.  Despite their differences in shape, size, capabilities and methods, they are unified by a single goal: the eradication of all human life from the Earth.

At their most effective, conventional weapons, artillery strikes and missile barrages all seem to be a minor nuisance, no sort of real impediment at all.  An N2 mine, the next closest thing to a nuclear weapon, forces it to a temporary halt.  This halt gives Shinji just enough time to be taken to Nerv’s headquarters and discover why his father summoned him: to pilot Evangelion Unit-01 against the Angel.  Despite their robotic appearance, they have some of the same capabilities as their Angel enemies.  Chief among these abilities is the Evangelion’s ability to combat the Angels’ AT Field, a barrier virtually impenetrable to any attack, by generating one of their own.

In the process of fighting and defeating this Angel, Shinji loses control of the Eva Unit-01.  But rather than submit itself to certain destruction at the Angel’s hands, Unit-01 instead goes berserk, savagely annihilating the Angel.  In the process, a portion of its armored helmet comes off and reveals that the Evangelion is not, in fact, a robot.  It is a giant cyborg.  Protected, and harnessed, and restrained by this armored casing is the sort of monster Godzilla must have nightmares about.  For reasons unknown (at least at this point), only Shinji can make Evangelion Unit-01 work.

And there are more Angels to come.

This is interesting stuff all by itself, but Gainax goes one further and uses it as a platform to explore what I tend to think of as “The Dilemma of Being”.  The major characters around Shinji are all, like he himself, broken in some way.  None seem to be completely irredeemable (not even Gendo, not really), but all of them have failed or do fail at some point when it comes to being functional, stable human beings capable of honestly giving and receiving care and affection for others.

Talking about the subject matter and the impact of Evangelion is easy.  These things can be measured in more or less objective, entirely factual terms.  The impact is demonstrable.  The facts of the story and ideas are there for anyone to see.  What is harder to gauge is the quality of it.

I raved about it when I first saw it.  I couldn’t get enough.  Twenty-six episodes didn’t seem like enough.  As I progressed through it, my opinion grew, but the ending left me feeling soured.  Evangelion’s ending is a thing of rightly notorious reputation.  Its jarring turn into the bizarre and surreal is certainly proof beyond all doubt that Gainax’s intent for Evangelion was always that it be a character story first and foremost, but it discards any real sense of the story’s resolution for the wider world.

But this much is well known.  People who have only heard the show’s title could probably tell you (however much they’d be pressed for reasons) that the ending is unilaterally despised among series fans.

There are other problems with Evangelion, of course.  The characters are complex, but often find themselves shackled to specific philosophical viewpoints, so that they occasionally descend from being actual characters to being mouthpieces for dialogue that is (at times) turgid and frankly clunky.  I’m generally opposed to the blatant use of characters in this way, and it’s especially jarring for how unnecessary it is.  The exploration of the various personal and interpersonal dilemmas throughout is at times ham-handed to the point of distraction.  It gets the job done, but it’s clear that subtlety isn’t the director’s strongsuit, or at least not on a regular basis.

The movies which were later made to answer fans’ demands to know more of what happened in the world outside the protagonist’s head during the series finale, and also probably to close the tale in a way more satisfying to Gainax themselves, are a dilemma in themselves.  They mirror the TV series’s quality arc, in that they start off engaging, rise to a point of being gripping, tense drama and action, and then founder in a morass of philosophical pondering.  To top it off, the movies were released in a way that seems meant to deliberately confuse potential viewers.  The first movie, titled Death and Rebirth is comprised of two parts.  The first, Death, retells the story of the first 24 episodes of the TV series (essentially the entire thing, barring the last two episodes) in compressed form.  Some footage is reused, but has been retouched.  Some other footage has been altered, changing some scenes in subtle ways to better set up plot elements in the movies.  Some of this footage was later used in a re-mastered and re-cut edition of the TV series (marketed as a box set called the Platinum Edition in the U.S.).  The second half of the movie, Rebirth, takes up the story where the TV series’ 24^th episode leaves off, this time showing us the story from the world beyond Shinji’s psyche.  It ends on a massive cliffhanger and resolves basically nothing.  The job of ending the story falls to the second movie, The End of Evangelion.  This starts off with Rebirth once again, but follows it up with Air, finishing the story once and for all.

So…  Is it worth watching?  I’d say yes, definitely.  While Neon Genesis Evangelion has its ups and downs, it is overall very well done, especially given the budgetary constraints under which Gainax was operating for much of its run.  As an anime fan, it’s practically required viewing for the history lesson alone.  As mentioned above, Evangelion has shaped the face of the medium, and cemented director Hideaki Anno’s career and reputation as an animator and director.  And as easy as it is to point to the never-ending parade of ancillary merchandise, I keep thinking that there wouldn’t be a market for all of this weird stuff (and trust me, some of it is pretty weird) if an overall love for the series didn’t create an equal demand.  Warts and all, the series is highly imaginative, and definitely worth the time.

*    *    *

In recent years, Anno has decided to return to what has become, whether he wanted it to or not, his magnum opus.  His intent is to retell the story of Evangelion through a series of four full-length theatrical movies.  Two of them are available so far: Evangelion 1.0: You Are (Not) Alone and Evangelion 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance.  The third, Evangelion 3.0: You Can (Not) Redo, is due out sometime in November in Japan, and God knows when it will make its way Stateside.  I’ll leave off talking about them for the moment (maybe some other time), except to say that they appear to be the sort of thing Anno might have made the first time around, were he not hobbled by a crippling depression.  They are crazy, often unsettling and sometimes disturbing movies, and I have enjoyed every moment of them so far.  They, also, are worth the time.

*Some of the English terms in Evangelion are oddly chosen.  Angels, in Japanese, are called shito, a word that more directly translates as “Apostle”.  The title itself, Shinseiki Evangelion, translates more accurately as “New Century/Age/Era Evangelion”.  The given translations were, apparently, done as they currently are on the insistence of Gainax.

"I Was Made to Hit In America..."

When I first saw BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad, I was at a local college anime club.  It was run by the sort of elitists for whom English dubbing is indistinguishable from Satan worship.  I only caught a few episodes.  It wasn’t bad, but I wasn’t especially impressed at the time.  This may have had more to do with the environment I watched it in than the show itself.  Under normal circumstances, it probably would have ended then and there.

Some few short years later, I saw a single-volume edition of the whole series on sale at Best Buy and thought, sure, why not.  Twenty dollars seemed like a fair investment.  From there, it migrated to the DVD shelf, where a lot of series have gone and there remained, to be watched when the right time comes around—if the right time comes around.  There are quite a number of series on that shelf which have gone unviewed so far.

Some time after this purchase, I actually did get around to watching the show.  Then my girlfriend (now fiancée, as of this writing) started asking me about it; I seemed so wrapped up in it, and she wanted to know what had me so thoroughly and completely hooked.  So I told her what it was about and what I liked about it.  She seemed interested.  So I offered to watch it with her.  I was about ten episodes or so into the show, but somehow it didn’t seem like that much of a chore to roll it back to episode one and start over.

There are a number of anime and movies and TV shows and books and God knows what else that Katie and I both like.  Most of these things, one of us liked first, and introduced the other person to later (examples: The Once and Future King, Harry Potter, Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, Fullmetal Alchemist, Revolutionary Girl Utena, and several others).  BECK may be the first of these things that we both discovered together.

So what’s this show about, anyway?  We’re five paragraphs in, now; I guess I ought to start actually talking about the object of the writeup, right?

Okay, so:

BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad is a show about a bunch of guys getting together to make rock music.  Not the usual sort of J-Rock you see in the opening and closing themes of so many anime, either, but just regular rock music.  Music that’s about something true, even if the only person who cares (or can make any sort of sense of it) is the person behind the microphone.  Music that makes you want to get up, do something; music that makes you feel kind of bad that you haven’t done anything even remotely as cool with your life yet.

Our main character is Yukio Tanaka, Koyuki to his friends, who starts the show off in his last year of junior high, preparing to enter high school.  He’s lead a pretty simple life up to this point—not sheltered, exactly, but severely lacking in any real challenges to his view of the world.

This changes when Koyuki is on his way home from school one day.  He runs across a group of younger kids harassing a strange-looking dog that appears to be something Victor Frankenstein might have created if he’d started working on animals before proceeding to his more well-known monster.  The dog turns out to belong to Ryusuke Minami, a high-school aged young man who we later find out is the guitarist for a band called Serial Mama.  Ryusuke has actually spent much of his life in the U.S., as his father’s business required him to live there for some time.  Ryusuke is fluent in English, as is his younger sister Maho, who is about Koyuki’s age.

Koyuki, his friend Izumi (a girl he goes to school with, and knows from when they were both much younger), and a few other acquaintances wind up seeing Serial Mama perform at a live show.  This takes place in the sort of club, and in a part of town, that are utterly foreign to the sort of life and experiences Koyuki has had up to this point.  His bewilderment is almost as great as his fascination.

Serial Mama plays music quite different from what Koyuki is accustomed to hearing.  Influenced by Western rock bands, Serial Mama’s sound is more raw and vital than the studio-polished, micro-managed and carefully edited sound of the pop acts Koyuki is accustomed to.  Yet at the same time, it draws him.  The music does more than sound good.  It sparks genuine feelings.

But for Koyuki, it isn’t enough to just enjoy the music.  He feels inside him the need to make music, also.  And so he begins to learn guitar.

There are a lot of things to like about BECK.  One of them is the way that it makes learning music and learning an instrument look like the hard work that it is.  I know this from experience.

My father once played the guitar.  When I was fifteen or sixteen, he decided he wanted to play again.  He dug out his old twelve-string guitar and discovered that keeping it stored in variably damp basements (first my grandfather’s, and then his own) had, as you might expect, not been good for the instrument.  Its fret board was irreparably warped and the thing could not be kept in tune.  He asked me if, should he decide to buy me a guitar for Christmas as well as one for himself, would I learn to play? 

I said yes.

In retrospect, this was perhaps the first very strong sign that I was a person who could love music without having any strong need to make it.  I was infatuated with the idea of being able to play guitar.  Learning required an investment of time and effort that I could not seem to justify.  There was always something to do that I enjoyed more.

Koyuki is someone who does love the idea of making music, though.  He loves it enough to struggle with the guitar, to get angry when he can’t wring the notes he wants out of it, to get frustrated with the ache in his fingers from the strings, and still press on anyway.

He isn’t an instant prodigy. 

As Ryusuke forms a new band (eventually named BECK) and Koyuki joins them for rehearsals, the other band members comment that while he isn’t terrible, he isn’t at the level necessary to really perform with the rest of them.  Ryusuke insists Koyuki be present, however.  Partly it’s because he seems to know that the subconscious pressure of being in the presence of better musicians will put Koyuki’s relentless and self-punishing need to improve into overdrive.  Partly, it’s also because he recognizes that although Koyuki isn’t the greatest guitar player, he can definitely reach the level they need, given practice enough and time.  And, possibly more important than any of these things, he is vital to the chemistry of the group.

In fact, this is part of what I like about BECK in a nutshell.  It slaps the false glamour right out of the rock music scene.  There’s a lot anxiety about success, frustration about a lack of it, a little bit of desperation, and a lot of playing in cramped and sweaty venues to get word-of-mouth publicity.  It takes a side-trip into the business end of things from time to time, showing us BECK’s rivals (a glam band called Belle Ame, formed by one of the other former members of Serial Mama, with whom Ryusuke had a violent split).

Sure, there are parts where things get a bit unlikely, unrealistic, and flat-out improbable.  But however far out there the story gets (and it’s not really that far out there, as these things go), the characters are always real.

That’s one of the other things I really enjoy about BECK.  The events that take place don’t feel managed by the plot; the characters are not being led from Point A to Point B in the narrative, connecting the dots along a rigidly defined path.  They simply do the things that are in their nature to do, and the story follows them accordingly.  It’s the skill of the original manga author (to say nothing of the people behind the anime) that makes these people interesting to watch, and that makes their actions believable.  As such, the comedy of the show relies heavily upon character interaction, rather than slapstick or ridiculous gags that are obviously set up.

For instance (not verbatim):

Koyuki: “Did you hear that?  He said he likes how I sing!”

Maho:  “Yeah, that’s code for ‘your guitar-playing sucks’.”

Characters talk naturally.  There is the real, natural feeling of actual conversation, where many other shows seem to be very obviously reciting dialogue.  As a result, many of the characters can be pretty foul-mouthed.  But that’s to be expected, if the hard-rock culture of Japan is anything like its American equivalent.

And this is where the dub excels beyond all my expectations.

You see, part of the humor of the original Japanese dialogue relies on the fact that some characters speak only Japanese, some speak only English, and some (Ryusuke and his sister Maho, for instance) are bilingual.  There aren’t a lot of anime that do this extensively; in fact the only other one I can think of was the short movie Blood: the Last Vampire, and in that show Manga Entertainment basically just left it as-is.  It seemed like the logical approach this time around, too, and when I first started watching it on my own, I watched it subtitled.  When Katie started watching it, though, it was a different story.  She has trouble making out the subtitles from time to time.  Sitting on the couch across the living room from the TV, subtitles aren’t really practical, unless the dub is Utena-level bad.

What Funimation did was rewrite parts of the dialogue so that the characters’ bewildered reactions all still make sense in context, while still adhering to the basic feeling of the scene.  For instance, the dialogue excerpted above is one of the rewrites.  The line in the original Japanese version is somewhat different, but the tone of it is similar (Koyuki makes an ecstatic remark about how Eddie Lee praised him, Maho says something dismissive and deflating; humor ensues).

But still, it all comes back to the feeling of realness this story has.  It would be fatally easy for BECK to be an anime about the glamour of the rock world, how it would be everyone’s dream come true to perform, cut a demo CD, sign with a major record label, tour in America, etc. — all while expounding on The Power of Rock.  To an extent, BECK does this, but BECK’s creators know that it isn’t the music itself.  It’s the process of making it, of learning to make it, of devoting yourself to something bigger than you are, that does it.

I know I mentioned before how the story felt like a natural progression of the characters’ actions, and not led by a plot.  Yet at the same time, it has one of the best climaxes I’ve seen in an anime in a long time.  It doesn’t feel like it as you’re watching the rest of the show, but as you watch the ending, you find yourself realizing that the whole show really was building up to this point, this one moment, and you realize how much change has occurred because the Koyuki we met in the first episode would not be capable of doing the things he does at the end. And so in its way, the show is about The Power of Rock.  Or rather, it is about the redemptive, transformative power of music to change us and make us better.

I can’t really put it any better than this: BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad is one of the best shows I’ve seen in recent years, and the ending is one of my favorite moments in all of anime. 

"You May Dream..."

I was never a huge fan of romantic comedies in anime, but in some form or another I’d had cause to stumble across a number of them.  It could hardly be helped; when I was getting into anime, two of the big, big classics were Tenchi Muyo! (go on, pick a continuity, it hardly matters) and Ranma ½.  The former is perhaps the progenitor of the harem comedy, and the latter is a confusion of so many criss-crossing lines of affection that it makes the Gordian Knot look about as complex as the bow you tie in your shoelaces.

Most romance comedies operate according to a fairly narrow formula.  Usually there is a Boy, and he is in love with a Girl.  Typically, the Girl is completely unaware of this even if she is close to the Boy.  However, she may be unaware that he even exists, or she may merely tolerate him.  The Boy is often a useless, hapless geek; his personality isn’t so much illustrated for us as it is sketched in broad strokes.  He’s usually well-meaning but clueless and largely ineffectual.  He has a habit of saying and doing the wrong thing.  He will be idealistic, to the point of being painfully naïve in some cases.  He will, in short, be a generically “good” person, but one lacking in all real interest. 

This is deliberate.  However generally positive it is, his personality will remain bland, utterly devoid of any sharply specific traits.  His interests or hobbies, if any, will be something that the intended audience can relate to, but will rarely (if ever) become points of real interest to the story at hand.  His appearance follows in this trend.  The reason for this is quite cynical, really, and it is the exact same reason that so many heroes of role-playing games (of note: Link, Crono and Adol, just to name a few) have no distinct dialogue.  The Boy is meant to be a stand-in for the audience, and anything specific to his personality will only (in theory) detract from the audience’s ability to put themselves in his position and live out his experiences vicariously.

The Girl, by contrast, is also often very moderate in her personality.  She is attractive, but modestly so; a girl-next-door type.  She is strong-willed, but not usually temperamental (with the notable exception of ire directed at the Boy, explained below).  She often has some prior connection to the Boy; “childhood friend” is a popular one.  If (inexplicably) there are multiple contenders for our hapless hero’s affections, then the one, true heroine of the lot will be the “Goldilocks” of them all.  Neither too much older or too much younger than the Boy (so as to avoid accusations of predation on one side of the equation or the other), not too forward in her advances (we don’t want the story to end in episode five, after all), not too wild in her personality (just wouldn’t be appropriate, and would mess with the delicate idealism of our Boy), or too shy (we don’t want the Boy to become more useless and socially awkward, now do we?).  No, the Girl is the one out of all of these who is just right.

The one consistent trait most of these heroines share is a sort of bizarre antagonism, a tendency to willfully misinterpret every single one of the Boy’s actions in such a way as to be detrimental to any possible budding romance until near the end of the show.  In this way she serves as both the ultimate goal of the Boy, and the source (either by direct action or by circumstance) of pretty much all real conflict in the story.

I got tired of this formula after a while.  It’s not so bad in shows that are about something else, and have a romance plot going on as well as whatever else is happening in the narrative foreground.  But the structure of most of these romance comedies is so rigidly formulaic that you really do only have to see one to see them all.  There are exceptions, of course, but they only serve to emphasize the truth of the rule.  And the structure of their plot is also distressingly routine.

The show opens with the Boy falling in love with the Girl in the first episode.  Much of the middle is spent watching the Boy confront his various insecurities and personal obstacles, with the final episodes focusing on a tighter narrative arc, which usually involves the Boy preparing to confront the Girl with his feelings.  “Happily Ever After” is almost a foregone conclusion.

It isn't as if I watch a lot of these shows, but I was pretty much done with them for a while.  Thankfully, there are exceptions.

In the winter of late 1999 or early 2000, I was busy struggling through college, not as much because I found it difficult, but more because I found it difficult to care.  “Ennui”, I think they call it.  I was doing a lot of Not Studying; I think that if I could have majored in Not Studying, I would have.  I'd have made the Dean’s List, no problem.

I had found a group of friends who were into a lot of the same things I was – video games, Magic: the Gathering, manga and anime – and they provided an all-too-convenient outlet for my burgeoning slackerism.  Honestly, I probably would have found another outlet if not for this group of friends (at least one of whom I still maintain contact with).  What they mainly enabled me to do is more successfully enjoy myself while busily avoiding the responsibilities of college life.

In those days, most of us were still buying our anime (and most other videos) on VHS.  DVDs were available, but scary and newfangled (and expensive).  This was also before always-on broadband connections were the norm; dial-up was the rule, not the exception.  So fansubs of anime were also available only on VHS.  What you did was, you found a group (usually by way of the slow and clunky late-90s internet) that was fansubbing anime, sent them blank tapes and a list of requests, and probably they sent them back to you.  Eventually.  And what you got was a copy of a copy, so the video quality was shot all to hell.

These were dark and troubled times.

One of my friends had recently acquired the first few volumes of a series that was just making its way through the fansub community, called Kareshi Kanojo no Jijyou, and known as KareKano for short.  Or, for anime heathens like myself who still think mainly in English, His and Her Circumstances.  I was asked if I would like to go over to his house late one evening and watch it.  I said why not.

I only got to watch four or five episodes, but it left a strong enough impression on me that, some few years later when The Right Stuf International decided to bring the series over to the U.S., I snapped up the DVDs as soon as I could.  Having watched the whole series from start to finish a couple of times now, I feel like I have a better perspective on what makes it so good.

You see, the people behind His and Her Circumstances know something about relationships that the people who write most of the romantic comedy nonsense in anime either don’t know or won’t admit.  The people behind His and Her Circumstances know that as much effort as it takes to screw up your courage and tell the one you love how you feel, it takes even more courage, patience, effort and strength to make a relationship work.

Most series have the main characters falling in love at the end of the story.  There is an unspoken assumption that from here on out, it’s all wine and roses, perfect and idyllic.  His and Hers doesn’t think much of this idea, and it doesn’t think much of the formula, either.  It shows us how an actual relationship between real people works, and how two people who are committed to each other get along over time.  It shows how people change and grow.  It knows that saying “I love you,” that choosing to commit to someone isn’t the last, climactic choice you make in a relationship.  His and Hers knows this is bullshit, in point of fact; it knows that this is the first choice you make in a long, long series of choices, many of which are subtle and unrecognizable as such until you’ve already made your decision.

What His and Her Circumstances knows, in short, is that there is far more that can trouble a person in a relationship than can trouble a person who is merely trying to be in a relationship, and that logically, far, far more comedy can be wrung out of the former situation than the latter.

So we start off first with our heroine (because this is a shoujo series rather than shounen), Yukino Miyazawa.  She is just entering high school (in Japan, this makes her about the same age as an American high school sophomore), and is focused on doing her best and taking the number one spot on all the exams.  She wants to do everything in her power to be popular and well-liked, and she is well on her way to doing exactly that.  She's smart, kind, talented in her studies, in sports and (at least nominally) in the arts.  She pays attention in class, and all her teachers admire her.

She’s also a total fraud.

You see, the problem with Miyazawa is that she wants the attention and the praise purely because it feels good.  At home she’s pretty much a slob.  She exercises to stay in shape, but otherwise lounges around in sweats all the time and does basically nothing but study in order to get outstanding grades on homework and tests.  She is practically a stranger to her own family, and in a typical middle-class Japanese home, that is hard to do.

Part of what she’s been studying so hard for is the chance to debut in her high school with the number one spot, top score overall in the entrance exams, and she is confident she has it in the bag, too, right up until she looks at the grades and sees that, no, someone else has done that.

His name is Soichiro Arima.  Like Miyazawa, he is well-liked by everyone, intelligent, and excels athletically as well.  Unlike Miyazawa, he seems to be completely genuine and sincere about who he is.  His realness begins to make her feel self-conscious and insecure about the tremendous façade she has erected around her own life.  And so begins her desperate, obsessive mission to crush him in the exams, to prove that she is better than he is, and to erase the insult of coming in second place in the entrance exams.

If this sounds a little crazy, understand that:

1. This is all taking place in the Japanese school system, and

2. This is the sort of shoujo comedy anime where and sanity is neither required nor particularly encouraged.

Now, the thing about Arima is that he has some secrets also.  He has pressures acting on him, and when he uncovers (quite by accident) Yukino’s great charade, it occurs to him that she would be devastated if he revealed this secret.  The possibility of blackmail crosses his mind…

These are just the first couple of episodes, mind you.

From here the story careens this way and that, introducing new characters who have an effect on Miyazawa and Arima’s relationship, but also taking time to explore the newer characters as well, uncover their own quirks and habits and conflicts.

What I like most about the show is the characters themselves.  They feel like real people; not necessarily people you would actually know (though never having gone to school in Japan, maybe these people are more realistic than I think?), but they behave like real people might if you put them in this situation.  They aren’t here to feed you some tired tripe about how you have to face your feelings, how you absolutely have to tell the person you’re in love with how you feel, etc., etc.  Or rather, it does these things, but in a way that feels real.  You wonder what might happen if things don’t turn out well, and you feel at times as if this is a real possibility.  The main characters don’t always act in admirable ways.  While they rarely do anything really bad, there are often times when you feel the urge to smack your forehead and ask aloud why would anyone ever say or do what the character just did?  (Of course, the answer is that audience perspective, like hindsight, is 20/20.)  At times, I felt nervous or embarrassed on behalf of the characters.  While I don't like feeling that way, to me, it's also a mark of good storytelling, that I can be made to care about characters so much that even though they don't exist, I feel bad for them in a very real way.

His and Hers was animated by Studio Gainax, the same people who, not long prior to this, had wrought havoc upon the world with Neon Genesis Evangelion.  It is difficult to imagine a pair of works more utterly divorced, thematically, than these two.  Their budget for His and Hers was laughably small.  Amazingly, they managed to turn this into a strength, making use of a number of inventive visual techniques and sight gags to express the emotional highs and lows (not to mention the emotional whiplash) of the characters.  At least half of one episode features paper cutouts of the characters; whether this was done purely for its own artistic merits, or as a cost-saving measure, I’m honestly not sure.

In the end, I think the only things I feel like I can really complain about with this series is the way it ends.  Rather, I should say the way it fails to end.  It seems to come to sort of an ellipsis, though I suppose this was always going to be the way it had to be.  The manga His and Her Circumstances was based on is one of those long-running shoujo series that would be almost impossible to consistently keep in animation.  Especially with a studio like Gainax, who certainly would have quit at some point to do something else weird, experimental and absolutely bananas.  Still, they could have done better than they did.  Part of the problem is that the director, Hideaki Anno, either quit or was bumped off the project toward the end, and a different director took over (the cause was artistic differences with the original manga author, I believe).  It isn’t that the new director was bad, really, so much as they (I don’t even recall this person’s name; this is how little impact they made) didn’t have the sense of direction and focus that Anno did.  The result is that the last few episodes have a sort of limp and listless feel, and then the show just kind of rolls to a gentle halt.

It’s not common that I get into something this overtly shoujo.  I think the only other anime I’ve really cared for that went this deeply into the shoujo category was Revolutionary Girl Utena.  And that show was so thick with meaning and turgid with symbolism that I can’t help myself; I love it completely and without reservation, and never mind all the pink, and the roses, and the fruity cars, and shirtless posturing by pretty men.

Long story short: Go watch His and Her Circumstances.  You'll thank me later.

Because timeliness is for chumps

I recently finished playing Mass Effect 3 and have been playing Kid Icarus: Uprising (which is pretty excellent) off and on for the last week or so.

So let's talk about Metroid instead.

When I first played this game, probably somewhere around 1990, I hated it. It was New Year's Eve, and my parents were visiting friends they knew through my father's amateur pool team (I think). These friends had a son, but I don't recall what he was doing at the time. Eventually, I got plopped down in front of the Nintendo, and there were only four games there to play: Super Mario Bros. (which I had played to death by this point and no longer had any practical interest in), Ninja Gaiden II and Wizards and Warriors (both of which were kicking my ass so much they ceased to be fun), and Metroid (which was goddamned inscrutable at the time). Now, I didn't really hate Metroid on its own merits (or perceived lack thereof) so much as I did because the game seemed to hate me pretty thoroughly. Hating it right on back seemed like the only reasonable response.

Hate or not, though, I was intrigued. I liked the dark, lonely atmosphere of the game, the weird and never-explained visuals of monsters seeming to flow out of the stone, the odd bits of sculpture and statues made and left by God-knows-who. The feeling of isolation and abandonment, the mounting danger, all of it hinting at a mystery that will never really even be addressed, let alone solved... How could I not love that?

Part of this effect is achieved by the graphics. The visuals of the original Metroid are very minimalist. Aside from the foreground, the enemies and the player character Samus Aran, there is nothing else but the darkness of the empty screen, reinforcing the subterranean nature of the environment. The enemies (aside from bosses) aren't even enemies in the typical sense. They're just the natural wildlife for the most part. Usually they only respond to you because they see you as a threat, something armed and dangerous and in their territory, and many of them don't even do anything to acknowledge you. So it's just you, and the creatures, and the long, labyrinthine dark. And the ambiance, which is cribbed pretty explicitly from Aliens (they named one of the series major villains Ridley for God's sake!).

The story begins and ends, for the most part, in the manual. The time is somewhere in the unspecified future. The Galactic Federation has discovered, on planet SR388, a life form they have named metroid. Metroids can be kept in suspended animation more or less indefinitely, but when awake they take the form of what appears to be a large airborne jellyfish-like creature, with talons instead of tentacles, and they are capable of draining the life essence out of organic creatures. This last attribute makes them especially intriguing to the Space Pirates. Led by the Mother Brain (an actual brain, of sorts, in a jar), the Space Pirates steal metroid samples and flee to their base on the planet Zebes. There, they plan to breed an army of the creatures. Attempts to stop the Space Pirates in force having failed, the Galactic Federation sends in a lone agent, the cyborg bounty hunter Samus Aran. Clad from head to toe in a high-tech armored suit, the true identity and origin of this mysterious bounty hunter is completely unknown. However, Samus has a record of succeeding against incredible odds, making her the perfect agent to infiltrate Zebes, eliminate the metroid threat, and stop the Space Pirates at all costs.

While it's common knowledge now, in the first game it came as a major surprise to learn that Samus is a woman. Subsequent games have made this known up front, but the manual for the original game was at some pains to conceal this, avoiding pronouns in many places, and explicitly referring to Samus as “he” in certain places.

The rest of the story, such as it is, is reflected in the events of the game itself. While this is true with most any game you play today, there is usually a sharp disconnect between narrative and gameplay, to the extent that the two elements, though both part of the game overall, are almost completely unrelated to one another. The gameplay sections are mostly how we get from one plot development to the next, and the narrative bits (most often presented in the form of cutscenes) mostly have very little impact on the gameplay, aside from telling us why and how we are going from one place to the next. Metroid, especially later in the series, was exceptionally skilled at welding narrative and gameplay together so that the two are effectively the same. The use of atmosphere and subtle contextual clues combine to inform your sense of the situation. The game hints at what is happening, or what may have happened, and allows you to make the conclusions for yourself. The way it lays out its challenges and heightens the tension (and provides catharsis) in various moments is a narrative mechanism all its own, and is unique to the medium of video gaming.

And while there is a considerable body of lore surrounding Samus, the Space Pirates, the technologically advanced race of bird-like Chozo who gifted Samus with her power suit, the Galactic Federation and other entitites within the story, very, very little of that was in place for this first game in the series. Even with all of this lore, though, the true strength of Metroid both as a game and as a larger franchise has never primarily been in its story, but rather in its atmosphere and its gameplay. Very little of what passes for plot is handled through traditional, passively experienced narrative. The way the story unfolds is subtle because you are creating it as you go, in a way few games allow. Metroid as a series (in particular, Super Metroid, which is probably the best example of just about everything the series stands for and has to offer) is likely the most comprehensive example of that tired-but-true storytelling axiom “show, don't tell” that you will ever experience.

This subtlety extends to the ways in which the game instructs you on how to play, also. Where most side-scrolling platform jumping games in Metroid's day had you moving in a single direction – usually left to right, but always very obvious regardless – Metroid gave you its whole game world to explore right from the start. It even tried to teach this early on; attempts to go running off to the right, per the norm for these sorts of games, were quickly stymied by way of a narrow tunnel inaccessible to the player at first. The solution required backtracking to the left, beyond the initial point of entry, to find an item that would allow you to navigate the tunnel. This was meant to also indicate that such back-and-forth exploration would be the norm for the rest of the game.

Sadly, on that evening which is now more than two thirds of my life ago, I just didn't get it. The concept of such an aggressively non-linear game simply did not sink in. The world was divided into different themed areas, and damned if I was going to go to one area before I had properly cleared the previous one. It got so bad that, when I finally was given a copy of the game, I had to use a now well-known cheat code to start the game off with either most or all of the upgrades available so I could explore the game's world and reverse-engineer a path from start to finish. It didn't click just how much backtracking was necessary.

It's not that Metroid was hostile to new players. It was a rather pioneering game, in all honesty, and the methods at its disposal for teaching you how to think in order to succeed were a bit oblique. In fairness, this is by necessity. The technology was (mercifully) not available to give players the sort of in-depth tutorials games today are prone to. There may be an element of overall unevenness to the game design purely because of its newness, not just as a franchise but as a concept. When you are the first person ever to do a thing, you rarely ever do it well. The sequels to Metroid refined its principles and its formula, however – Super Metroid, the third game in the series, is a virtuoso piece of entertainment any way you look at it; I literally cannot think of a way the game might be improved – but the first installment was a diamond in the rough. It was an amazing concept for its time, but what it did, effectively, was throw you into the deep end of a pool and say to you: “Swim, or drown!”

Friends, I did not swim. I did not swim.

Of course, the other problem I had with the original Metroid was the lack of a map. This, coupled with how copy-and-paste the environments can get, led to a lot of confusion on my part until I had a better feel for the game world. The trouble I had figuring out where I was at any given moment was only compounded by the trouble I had figuring out which of the virtually identical vertical shafts I had used to get there in the first place. I don't know, maybe I just have poor spatial awareness.

All of these problems were most of the reason I was so excited when Metroid: Zero Mission was announced for release in American back in February of 2004. Normally, I'm somewhat leery of remakes. The more I like the original game, the leerier I get about the remake. It's simple really: I like the original product for specific reasons, and a remake is going to feel obligated to change something about the game. The more I like a game, the more things in that game I like, the greater the probability that things I like are things that will be changed, etc.

With Metroid, I liked the original material in spite of what felt like some serious flaws in the original product. That the stated goal of Zero Mission seemed to be to make a version of the original Metroid that was more like the incomparable Super Metroid* (itself a refined take on the concepts present in the original and the oft-forgotten Metroid II) pretty much voided my concerns right up front.

I was not disappointed. Zero Mission stays faithful to the overall feel and layout of the original Metroid, while adding many of the newer styles of upgrades and abilities presented in later games in order to modernize it in more than just the graphical sense. New mini-bosses have been added, and the look of the game has been heavily upgraded. Yet there is still that feel of minimalism to the backgrounds. Said backgrounds are more detailed, of course, than anything seen in the original, but there is as much implied as shown in most of them. The exception, of course, is those sections which take place outdoors (there are added outdoor environments in this version of the game, now). In addition, there was a surprisingly extensive epilogue section taking place after the point at which the original game ended.

Interestingly, there was a Gameboy Advance cartridge available around this same time that was simply a port of the original Metroid. No fancy bells and whistles, just regular, 8-bit vintage Metroid, sold as a standalone cartridge. Then there was Metroid: Zero Mission, which also included the original game on the cartridge as a bonus. There was nothing required to unlock the original, no special hoops to jump through; it was right there in the options menu. Somehow, inexplicably, the port of the original Metroid outsold Zero Mission (which, again, included the original Metroid as a bonus).

But as with most remakes, Zero Mission was not a unanimous favorite within its fanbase. Some disliked the epilogue, either because they took issue with the switch in gameplay (going from an action-adventure platforming game to a stealth game), or because it screwed with canonical elements of the story as established in the sequels. And I can understand these gripes, even if I personally was quite satisfied.

Another part of the dissatisfaction with Zero Mission is the absence of sequence-breaking.

Now, sequence-breaking in the original Metroid – that is, performing tasks and completing challenges out of the order the game's creators intended (implied based on the most “logical” sequence of upgrade acquisition) – was performed either by cleverly exploiting game physics to access parts of the game the player was not meant to reach at that time or in that way, or cleverly exploiting glitches and game bugs to access parts of the game that the player was never meant to reach, period. Later games featured sequence-breaking as well, but usually this was more a result of the former type of exploitation; the latter type tended to be ruled out by superior programming and coding, and the comparative absence of bugs and glitches associated with it.

Zero Mission largely does away with this sequence-breaking, as have many of the latter-day games in the series (the first, most aggressive and most loudly decried offender in this category probably being Metroid Fusion on the Gameboy Advance). There are a few places where it's possible, but it feels a lot more strongly telegraphed to the player, or else far more minor in nature. Of course, Zero Mission takes a page out of its precursor Metroid Fusion's book by including guides that appear on your map to tell you where your next goal is located. Thankfully, the guides can be turned off, though the map of course remains.

All told, Metroid is probably one of my favorite franchises. I rarely manage to finish the games I buy, but I have made my way through all but Metroid II (never played it, though I am very much looking forward to the fan remake), Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime II: Echoes (largely unfinished due to simple lack of time as much as anything else), Metroid Prime: Hunters (because seriously, that game is a fucking abomination) and Metroid Prime Pinball (because, uh... I'm not a huge pinball fan, I suppose). If that doesn't speak for the quality of these games, I don't know what does.

*In case it isn't clear by now, I like Super Metroid more than just a bit. This probably has something to do with the minor fact that Super Metroid is absolutely awesome by any objective measurement you care to apply.

Cause and Effect

For many years, I stayed well away from Western-developed role-playing games. I grew up with the Nintendo and then later the PlayStation. Most, if not all, of my favorite video games first saw the light of day in Japan. When I got interested in role-playing games, it was titles like Final Fantasy VII, Lunar: Silver Star Story and Lunar 2: Eternal Blue, Breath of Fire and many more that drew me in. These games formed my idea of what it meant to play an RPG. They were tightly controlled games, with a very definite idea of where the story was going, and an equally definite idea of how you were going to get there and who you were going to get there with. There was no deviating from the plot. There might be excursions here and there, little side-quests to help you level up, find extra loot, maybe flesh out a hidden plot point or two, that sort of thing. But in the end, you were going to face the enemy a certain way, and there was no real choice in the matter. Any time something resembling a choice was presented, it was patently false. You hade two choices: You can say “Yes” and go save the princess, or you can say “No” and be told why you’re a terrible person before being presented with the “choice” once more.

I’m not saying this was right or wrong. It is simply what I was used to. I was so used to it, in fact, that it became part of what kept me away from Western RPGs. I was used to that linearity, that completely scripted narrative. Without the usual succession of kings and queens and helpful old men in caves telling me where to go next and who to kill once I arrived, I felt sure I’d be lost.

Then Mass Effect came along.

The first time I played it was at a friend’s house on the Xbox 360. I wasn’t really sure what I was playing at first. It looked interesting – the technology was sleek and sharp-looking, and the environment of the opening area was intriguingly natural – but then, it was bound to look interesting. This was also one of the first current-generation console games I’d seen up close and personal. There seemed to be RPG elements to the game, but this was hardly new, or interesting. I’d been seeing “RPG Elements!” or something similar as a bullet-point in box copy for years at this point. It was becoming difficult to find a game that didn’t have some form of character progression system in place. As ubiquitous as RPG elements were, you might as well also say “Has graphics!” or “Includes sounds!” to help differentiate one game from others.

When I finally got a decent gaming-capable desktop PC some years later, I was browsing Steam when the game came up on sale for $19.99. And I thought, why not? If my PC can run Crysis, it can probably run pretty much anything, up to a certain point. So I bought the game and downloaded it, went with a generic male Shepard with the default face (not wanting to deal with the character creation system very much), and clicked through the part where I was supposed to select my Shepard’s background and skillset before I realized quite what I was doing.

Then I was in the game, and it didn’t matter.

There’s a lot I could probably say about the gameplay, but that’s pretty well been taken care of by this point, I think. The mechanics of Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 have been dissected in detail, to varying degrees of finesse, by people who have made it their professional business to opine about video games far longer than I ever considered doing it. Suffice it to say that much running around and shooting things from cover is done, in between bouts of talking to people to gather information about what’s happening and how one might proceed.

I will take a moment to point out that BioWare, Mass Effect’s makers, have done something unusual these days in making Mass Effect 2 such a different game, mechanically speaking, than its predecessor. Oh, the two are pretty similar, but Mass Effect 2 ditches a lot of the party member customization options. It lets you control which skills your non-Shepard party members develop, but it lets them determine their weapons and equipment for themselves. Shepard’s own equipment, particularly his armor, is now altered on a modular basis instead of swapping out whole suits.

What this ensures, basically, is that all the juggling of numbers and tweaking of statistics is where it always was meant to be: in the background.

Part of what I love about Mass Effect is that it feels so fresh and different coming from my background. Most of my idea of what constitutes a role-playing game came from my experience with console RPGs originally developed in Japan. My whole idea of what gameplay implied revolved around concepts like turn-based (or quasi-turn-based) battles which occurred by way of random encounters; grinding for experience, money, rare drops or all three; and of course the ever-present dominion of linearity.

The other part of what I love about Mass Effect is that it is more truly a role-playing game than any other I’ve played, in the critical sense that it lets you truly play a role. Shepard is who you want him or her to be. Every interaction with other characters and with the story involves choices. Most games seem to want to impress you with their story. Mass Effect aims to give you a scenario, and let you impress yourself with how you handle it. I don't know about most people, but this kind of escapism is why I got into role-playing games in the first place.

Sure, some choices are minor, amounting to a simple difference in dialogue options. Some decisions are major. Do you let a once-extinct but recently revived species – one which brought the galaxy to its knees millennia ago – live, or do you allow them to be destroyed? Do you sacrifice the heads of government so you can focus on the primary antagonist in the short term, or do you divert attention and manpower to saving them in order to make sure there is some stable government in the long term when the conflict is ended? Be careful how you choose; the decisions made in the first Mass Effect will be carried over into the second, and those made in the second will be carried into the third.

The decisions aren’t always easy, and are rarely, if ever, black and white. Most choices in games that actually let you choose are rarely this well handled. Most games give you two choices, usually quite binary in nature. The spectrum ranges from saintly good to Snidely-Whiplash-moustache-twirlingly evil.

Mass Effect does away with the good and evil paradigm altogether, and characterizes its choices instead in terms of Paragon and Renegade. Paragon choices usually break down into actions that are either diplomatic and willing to compromise in order to satisfy all parties where talk is concerned, or options which are traditionally heroic (no one gets left behind, we’re doing what’s right even if it’s the far more difficult thing to do, etc.) in terms of actions and deeds. Renegade choices generally are more “the ends justify the means” types in their overall outlook and justification. A Renegade Shepard has no problem threatening a criminal during interrogation, and pummeling said criminal into paste should the need arise.

The games usually are very clear about which choices are Paragon and Renegade. What they are deliberately vague on is whether one choice is more “right” than another. Usually, when a choice is presented, there are good reasons (or what certainly appear to be good reasons, given what you know at that moment) for any of the options presented. Assuming you make the choices based on what you as a player feel is right, as opposed to what you think the game wants you to choose, you will probably wind up leaning toward one of the extremes of Paragon and Renegade, but probably also with some decisions made in the other direction as well.

Recently, I started a new playthrough of Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2. I knew the third installment was coming soon, and I wanted to have the events of the previous games relatively fresh in my mind. I also wanted to make a more unique Shepard than the one I’d made the first time around, and handle some decisions differently in both games. I decided to do this probably no more than a year (likely even less) from when I originally finished Mass Effect 2. It’s rare for me to do this for any game, particularly in the RPG genre, where games run into the dozens of hours just as a regular thing.

On a final note, I would like to mention the writing in Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2. I’ve experienced precious little video game writing that is this good, and this good on this consistent a basis. Sure, the Portal games have good writing, but there are only a few characters in those two games combined (GLaDOS, Wheatley and Cave Johnson are pretty much it). And while I certainly don’t want to belittle that work, to have such good writing (and high-quality voice work!) in a series of games with perhaps hundreds of characters both major and minor, in situations where you are, through the protagonist, directing the dialogue on the fly, and are in the presence of several different possible combinations of party members who have to react to your words believably…that takes skill.

It helps, too, that the characters are both believable, interesting, and humorous. Particularly valuable is the humor. I don’t normally require a huge amount of comedy in my games, but when you consider that you are going to be into this game for possibly a couple dozen hours or more, especially when the situation the game presents is pretty damned grim, the ability and the opportunity to laugh here and there is greatly appreciated.

I’ve even considered buying some of the tie-in novels for this series. Never seriously, or for long, but that the thought has crossed my mind at all should tell you something about how much I like these games.

The Fair Unknown

The problem (well, a problem) with Final Fantasy VII is that being its hero, Cloud Strife, is kind of a raw deal. Let’s take a look at all the wonderful things that happen when you’re Cloud:

You grow up alienated from your peers, set off to make something of yourself by joining an elite military organization (the one to which your hero, your idol, belongs) only to be denied, and consigned to be one of the faceless rank and file. You make a cool friend in this military elite, a sort of role model, but your whole life goes sideways once more when you’re sent on a mission to your hometown with your cool friend and your hero. You’re too embarrassed to show your face after having failed in your one grand ambition, afraid even to go to your own mother’s house or confront your childhood friend because of it, and then over the period of a few days your hero completely loses his shit. He burns down your hometown, kills your family and severely injures your childhood friend (at least she gets better). He beats your cool friend nearly to death, and does quite a number on you, too, but you manage to put him out of commission for a while. Your reward for this is to be put in a coma for four or five years while a mad scientist runs experiments on you and your cool friend. Then, when the two of you break out (really, when your cool friend breaks out and drags you along with him because you’re catatonic), your cool friend gets killed protecting you and with his dying breath asks you to live on for him.

So you do.

You become a mercenary like he planned to be, use the sword he used, unwittingly fall in love with the girl he fell in love with, and wind up building an entire false reality for yourself. In this false reality, your memories are no longer trustworthy. Without quite realizing it, you revise your memories so that you see yourself doing all the things your cool elite military friend did because now you are the badass, and you forget all about him. Then you inadvertently help fulfill the dark designs of your old hero (you know, the psychotic one who burned down your hometown and killed your mother? Yeah, he’s back), who has determined to erase all life from the face of the planet. Then you get to watch as he kills the woman you (and your cool friend) loved, and are eventually made to confront the humiliating truth that the story of your life as you have thus far presented it to everyone you know is a lie. Your misery is made complete when the scientist who ran the experiments on you tells you that the experiment was a failure (and by extension, so are you).

And in your mind, a certainty begins to emerge: you are clearly the world’s whipping boy.

All of which helps to make Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII so refreshing. In it, you play Cloud’s friend from his days as a Shin-Ra military grunt: Zack Fair. And Zack enjoys his life. He likes being in SOLDIER, the organization that (as it turns out) Cloud could only dream of joining in reality. Zack is kind and upbeat and kind of cool. He’s big on proving his honor and being a hero, but he’s also still pretty in touch with reality, which makes him a rarity among role-playing game heroes in general. He’s what you’d get if the sort of plucky young heroes who populate a lot of RPGs ever grew up and had some sense knocked into them without having all the idealism knocked out.

Crisis Core also benefits from taking place at a point in time some years before the events of Final Fantasy VII proper occur, so the world doesn’t seem to be in quite such a dire position at this point. Shin-Ra doesn’t seem to be quite so evil, and Sephiroth seems – shockingly! – to be a relatively well-balanced person.

Speaking of Sephiroth…

I always wondered about this “being a hero” business he gets credited with in the backstory of Final Fantasy VII. Cloud looks up to him, and when he’s explaining the backstory in the village of Kalm, just after the party escapes Midgar, he mentions that Sephiroth was sort of his role model. The world at large, and Cloud in particular, apparently saw him as some kind of hero at the time. Which is funny, because, however much we know we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, one look is all it takes in this case. Something about Sephiroth just screams psychotic, unrepentant, nihilistic destroyer of worlds.

Crisis Core gives us a much-appreciated look at him before the insanity set in, though, and what we see is someone who could actually have been a decent guy if he was left well enough alone. But part of what Crisis Core does is widen our gaze on this era of the Shin-Ra Electric Power Company, and we see that Sephiroth isn’t the only superhuman badass on the company’s payroll. In fact, there are two others.

One is Genesis, who looks a whole lot like Sephiroth, except his coat (and overall color scheme) is red instead of black, and he wears a shirt under his coat. He carries a straight, double-edged sword, and his face is modeled after the Japanese rock star and actor Gackt. He feels like the sort of Mary-Sue character who inhabits online role-play forums, and he’s just about as annoying, what with his constantly quoting from the in-universe play Loveless. He’d probably be insufferable if he had a greater presence in the game.

Genesis is also something of a monomaniac, with the overarching obsession of proving himself greater than Sephiroth. In this, he serves to make Sephiroth himself (even the 100% pure, distilled villain Sephiroth of Final Fantasy VII proper) seem calm and well-balanced in comparison. For those reading who thought Sephiroth was overwrought and overplayed as a villain (both in the setting of Final Fantasy VII and related media, such as Kingdom Hearts), I ask you to look at Genesis and take note: it could have been so much worse.

The second of these superhuman characters is Angeal, who is kind and good-natured, even-tempered and humble. He is the peacemaker of the three, the one who strives for harmony, and also manages to be kind of a tree-hugger. How this man manages to live with himself, being a member of Shin-Ra and all, confuses me to no end. In terms of appearance, he looks a lot like Zack (and therefore, to an extent, a lot like Cloud). Or rather, since Zack is his protégé and Cloud has based himself more or less completely on Zack, it might be more accurate to say that they both resemble him, but more on this later. In any case, it is partly Angeal who instills in Zack a sense of honor and a need to do whatever is right, despite the costs.

Sephiroth comes across somewhere in the middle of these two extremes, as someone who is troubled at times by the mysteries in his past which he cannot or will not face (yet), but who is capable of real warmth and likability. And you have to like the silver-haired villain if for no other reason than that he finds such an eloquent, almost poetic, way to tell Genesis, late in the game, to fuck off and die.

As for the game proper, it covers a period of time between Shin-Ra’s ascendance (having recently conquered the nation of Wutai) and the beginning of their truly serious troubles with the terrorist organization AVALANCHE which occupy the beginning of Final Fantasy VII proper. This is a period that sees the fading of the heroic pantheon of SOLDIER, who seem to have little purpose now that the major wars and conflicts have been fought, and the dredging up of a plethora of dirty little secrets Shin-Ra would prefer to leave forgotten. As the danger and the violence spiral further and further out of control, Zack finds himself sent hither, thither and yon trying to exert some basic form of damage control. As he tries to find and capture those responsible, it begins to feel like the world he knows and has been trained to protect is crumbling around him. And yet, he keeps his head squarely on his shoulders, keeps his upbeat attitude, and in general behaves like the only sane man in a world going rapidly insane.

Unlike the main game, Crisis Core is a more action-oriented game. It still has the trappings of an RPG, but they support and underpin a game that is largely a frantic scramble carried out in real time. You still have random encounters, but they occur in the same space you explore the game in. There's still a sort of “beat” to the fighting, though, which still allows it to retain a very, very vague sense of having turns. Increasing experience levels are determined by part of the Digital Mind Wave, which also determines when Zack will perform a limit break. The leveling-up seems random, but that may be a consequence of the DMW resembling a doubled set of slot machine wheels (one controlling increases in Zack’s level and the level of his material, and the other controlling which attacks or techniques he uses in battle). Level increases happen with relative regularity, and it seems like they’re either not actually randomly determined, or else the randomness is mitigated by other unseen mechanics.

The DMW also serves another purpose: it serves to tell us what thoughts are going through Zack’s mind as he repeatedly throws himself into dangerous situations. This becomes clear in the game’s final encounter, though it’s fairly apparent beforehand, in the way that new events and characters are added to it as you progress.

As you might imagine, Crisis Core expands generously on the original material. This is of course unavoidable. The story of Zack as presented in Final Fantasy VII is brief – you could barely even make it a short story, if you were to write it in prose. Certainly it doesn’t justify a game all to itself without expansion.

Part of this expanding comes in the form of missions, which you can take on at any time throughout the game (and never mind how illogical or nonsensical it would be to be able to do so at whatever time you choose to accept them). I don’t much care for the missions. Most of them are unimaginative, simply re-using areas previously visited in the game, with simple goals that usually amount to nothing more complex than “kill the boss of this area” or “find this item”. I know they’re there to add replayability, or to add to the portability of the game, but they’re boring and repetitive and the fact of the matter is that I’d rather not have them at all, length of the game be damned. I know they’re present to add to the length of the game, but length is not the same as quality. If I had my choice, I’d prefer not to be presented with material that I don’t actually enjoy in any real sense, but feel obligated to try completing anyway thanks to the persistent obsessive-compulsive tendencies ingrained in me through years of RPG-playing. I’ll play a short game, gladly, as long as every bit of it is actually good.

Thankfully, the second way Square Enix chose to expand the game was through simply adding characters and events to the story that were not mentioned the first time around. This is the sort of thing that would normally worry me; it’s rare that tampering with the history of an established story works out well. Often, this process can open up as many plot holes (if not more) as it attempts to close, but in this case it actually works, and for reasons that make sense.

It helps to remember that the person explaining most of this background in the original Final Fantasy VII is Cloud. And Cloud, as I mentioned above, is not the most reliable of narrators. He gives us the events from his perspective, but even when you account for his depressing tendency to alter his own memories so that he did all the things Zack was responsible for, there's a lot that gets left out. This is because he wasn’t there for many of the pivotal events which Zack witnessed.

So the story we thought we knew changes somewhat, now that we see it through Zack’s eyes. When Cloud related these events to us, for instance, we were led to believe Sephiroth deduced on his own that he was not in fact human, but the result of a fantastically unethical series of experiments designed to create a superhuman warrior based on alien DNA. In Crisis Core, Genesis appears before Sephiroth to deliver this crushing revelation. Of course, Genesis and Angeal were both in a position to know, by the end. Genesis has embraced the inherent monstrosity of his nature. Angeal fought it, as does Sephiroth for a time.

And this revision of the continuity merges pretty seamlessly with the original tale. The events of Crisis Core are depicted differently here than they are in the main body of Final Fantasy VII not because the scenario writers are lazy or incompetent, but because Cloud, who related these events the first time around, wasn’t there to tell us for sure how Sephiroth found out about his origins. He wasn’t inside the Mako reactor at Nibelheim when the horrible truth came crashing down. In fact, for most of the revelatory moments of Crisis Core’s story, he was absent. He told us what he knew, and filled in the blanks as best he could. There is no reason to believe he ever even crossed paths with Genesis or Angeal, so of course he would be oblivious to the impact they had on Zack’s life, and therefore his as well.

Obviously this was not entirely by design. I’m comfortably certain nobody at Square Enix thought, way back in 1997 when they were still Squaresoft, that they could leave these plot hooks in place on purpose to craft a sequel ten years later. But they capitalized on the natural gaps in the backstory in an impressively skillful way.

But perhaps one of the greatest things that sticks out in my mind about Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII is that it is a tragedy. This is rare in video games. Embedded in the very nature of anything that we call a game is the drive to win. This has been true since the very first video games were created; it has only been with the rise of the notion of games being a form of narrative that a non-victorious “victory” could even be considered, and very few games do it even now.

Of course, we know that Crisis Core is a tragedy going in. If you’re playing Crisis Core, the odds are good that you’ve played Final Fantasy VII. And if that’s the case, you know how all of this has to play out in the end. It’s a little heartbreaking to see Zack make friends, goof around, have fun and fall in love. You start rooting for him because, damn it, he’s just a likable person.

It’s even more heartbreaking watching him get in over his head.

And he is in over his head, make no mistake; that's part of the tragedy. There’s no question that he’s strong, determined and highly skilled. But pitted against the likes of Sephiroth, well… Let’s just say that – as Final Fantasy VII fans know full well – Sephiroth wasn’t beaten in Zack’s era by main strength, but because he underestimated the rage and determination of a regular rank and file fighter he had every reason to believe was out of commission.

In the end, what surprises me about Crisis Core is how I find myself reacting to it. I know the story of Final Fantasy VII fairly well. I know what happens to Zack, and I know that although Square Enix is happy to add as many events as you can think of to the story to flesh it out, they can’t really change the ending. And yet I keep finding myself wishing, as the game heads into its final chapters, as Sephiroth descends into madness and as Zack and Cloud make their final journey to Midgar, that events would play out in a different way.

And that is a mark of good storytelling.

The Time Ys Now

This is how I heard of Ys:

In the summer of 1998, between my junior and senior year in high school, I became interested in console emulation. Someone had loaded a then-popular NES emulator called Nesticle onto the school’s network, along with a ROM of Contra, and either hid it skillfully enough that the faculty could not find and delete it, or else was very persistent about reinstalling it if it did manage to get deleted. It wasn’t long after this that I had a version of Nesticle on my parents' computer, running all sorts of Nintendo games I’d never had the means to own.

At some point, it occurred to me to wonder about the possibility of other console systems being emulated. It turns out that the console systems that hadn’t been emulated (or in the process of being created) comprised a pretty short list, even in those days. So I started looking for games for the TurboGrafx-16, because I owned the system, but had come by it secondhand, and had very, very few genuinely decent games for it. I’m not sure why I was so interested in it, to be honest. The only possible explanation I can come up with today is that it interested me to see what a system would be like, what sorts of games it would have, when its makers weren’t involved in the increasingly desperate pissing contest between Nintendo and Sega that had dominated the 16-bit era. Also, my friend Josh was willing to sell it to me, along with five games, for about forty dollars. This was a deal I was not prepared to turn down.

So anyway, I was behind the computer late one night (my usual habit in those days was to be up until the small hours of the morning playing games or looking things up on the internet, so it was probably at least one o’clock in the morning, and very likely much later) looking for sites that might host downloadable TurboGrafx-16 ROMs. And I kept hearing mention of this game called Ys, or maybe Y’s; nobody seemed to be able to spell it consistently. The general opinion seemed to be that Ys and its sequel were the sorts of games that justified owning the system.

I couldn’t find download links for any of the Ys games, and it puzzled me until I learned why: the games being referred to specifically were for the TurboDuo, a CD-based add-on system for the TurboGrafx-16. Prior to this, I hadn’t been aware such a thing existed. At the time, the idea of downloading a CD’s worth of data was laughable. This was AOL dial-up, five hours per month (after which hourly charges kicked in), in an era when five hours seemed entirely sufficient for a person’s internet needs.

I know, I know — I’m old. Kids, lawn, etc.

But I was hooked, anyway. The idea of owning Ys, in some form, any form, had infected me somehow. The sheer elusiveness of the thing made it desirable. My curiosity made me want to learn more. The more I learned, the more I wanted it. Ys became my holy grail. (A couple of years later, Panzer Dragoon Saga would do this to me also).

Fun facts about Ys that I learned during this weird obsessive phase include:

1. Ys I and Ys II were originally computer games, released on a fairly popular Japanese PC (I don’t remember which model).

2. The soundtrack to the original games was composed by Yuzo Koshiro, possibly one of the first game music composers to reach any real level of fame and recognition as such.

3. The TurboDuo games I had originally read about were simply the first widespread release of the games in the U.S. (a PC version of the first game had been released Stateside, but does not seem to have done well).

4. Ys I and Ys II are almost always presented together. Whenever a new version of the first is announced, the second is guaranteed to follow.

5. The games feature an odd control scheme in which there is no attack button.

6. Ys I and Ys II may be the most remade and ported games in the history of the video gaming. Go on, see for yourself.

7. The games have basically nothing in common with the legendary lost city which shares the name.

8. The music for the games is also pretty great. I discovered this for myself when I bought a CD titled The Very Best of Ys at the local comic book store, back when they carried anime and video game soundtracks, anime and manga.

9. There was pretty much no other incentive to go to said comic book store.

A few years after this (somewhere around the summer of 2003), there were rumors of the PS2 version (itself an adaptation of the late-90s Ys I & II Eternal PC remakes) being brought to the U.S. I remember this distinctly, because I had downloaded the trailer, and was watching it obsessively on my first laptop before said laptop broke down utterly due to a relatively minor issue (the hard drive was physically broken).

A couple of years after I left the Army, I eventually managed to procure copies of the PC versions, Ys I & II Complete. Then I just had to wait for the English translation patch for Ys II to be completed (since the games are originally in Japanese, and this particular version never saw an official release in the U.S.

As unnecessary as it probably sounds to talk about all of that, it’s an integral part of my experience with these games. For the longest time, Ys was not a game to me. It was an experience, an idea. I listened to the music, I watched the anime that was based on it, I soaked up as much media as I could, but the game itself, the core object upon which all of these other things were founded, was absent. And so every time I sit down to play the game now, there’s a little bit of that allure of the unattainable still left. When you spend so long wanting a thing, even if that want is not overpowering, finally having that thing becomes an odd experience. There is a part of you that has difficulty processing the fact of that ownership, and is paranoid that the object may vanish.

So, what are these Ys games like?

Well, superficially, Ys resembles The Legend of Zelda. But where any given Zelda is about half action game and half adventure game, Ys is half action game, half role-playing game. The Legend of Zelda typically has you seeking out tools which serve the purposes of either allowing you to more thoroughly navigate the game’s world, allowing you more varied combat options, or both. You are presented with puzzles, which require the intelligent application of your tools to solve – this is the adventure game element, which lends a layer of depth to the otherwise fairly mundane walking-around-and-killing-enemies sort of game you’d have without it.

Ys is more like an RPG. The “obstacles” are strong enemies in maze-like dungeons, and the usual solution to these problems is to gain experience points and level up enough to meet the challenge. There are periodically items to be obtained, but rather than tools, these items are most often simply plot coupons, single-use items designed to allow passage through specific barriers. The game may slightly expand your skill set, but overall, what is asked of you as a player is mainly to become more competent with that skill set, and to become stronger.

This is not a bad thing. It is, though, something that makes Ys different from The Legend of Zelda, which it is often compared to.

Our hero is the wandering youth Adol Christin. Adol is an adventurer, traveling the world to see new and interesting things. Ys I deals with his journey in the land of Esteria, which was once the site of an ancient but advanced and enlightened civilization, called Ys. But the ancient land of Ys is no more; it is nothing but a legend in Esteria. Where it once stood there is now only a crater, and at the rim of that crater stands the Shrine of Solomon and Darm Tower, the latter of which is said to be the abode of myriad demonic creatures.

Esteria is surrounded by a storm barrier through which no ships have been known to pass, but Adol is a determined sort, and figures he can make it through. And, though he does encounter the storm barrier, and his ship is wrecked, he manages despite the odds to wash ashore, half-drowned but alive. From here he explores the land, and finds that Esteria seems to be on the edge of collapse, with monsters roaming the countryside at will, and most people scared to leave their settlements. Cities and towns are heavily fortified or protected by magic, and the monsters responsible for the danger seem to be continuously pouring out of Darm Tower. And so Adol makes his way there to face the unknown evil that has cast its shadow across the land.

By itself, Ys I would be disappointing. It’s good, but short. Now, I like short games – I felt that Ico was just right in terms of length, as the older I get, and the more responsibilities I have, the more I appreciate a game that can give me a quality experience without demanding too much of my ever-shrinking free time. But Ys I can be beaten in five hours, possibly less. There are only three towns (the earlier versions only had two), and three dungeons. To be fair, the final dungeon is Darm Tower, and it quite literally takes up the latter half of the game. But still, the game is tremendously short. This may be part of why Ys I and Ys II are almost always presented as a set.

See, Ys II picks up literally moments after Ys I ends. After a climactic final battle at the top of Darm Tower, Adol is sent flying through the sky, to land in the ancient land of Ys, which has been floating through the sky for centuries. There, he must find the source of the evil that menaces both Ys and the world below, and try to set right the wrongs of the distant past.

Ys II is a much longer and more varied game, and expands Adol’s skill set to include a handful of magic spells, though some of these are of limited usefulness.

I sometimes wonder if Ys I and Ys II weren’t originally designed to be one game, then cut at some point in development. The early Playstation RPGs Arc the Lad and Arc the Lad II experienced something similar to this. Supposedly, the original Arc the Lad was meant to be a launch title for the Playstation, but the proposed design for the game was far too ambitious to be completed in time. Rather than compromise, the development team simply placed an end on the game at a certain point, and continued making the rest of it as a sequel. Ys I and Ys II feel much the same, considering the two essentially tell a single story between them.

Now, I can’t deny that this two-part story is somewhat simple, even cliché at points. But it’s just deep enough to feel appropriately urgent, and not much time is spent expositing to the player. There’s just enough background to make the world feel real and interesting, enough story to make you want to keep going, and not so much of either that they really interfere with the flow of the game.

There are some curious design choices present, though. And these seem to remain constant not just in the various remakes of Ys I and Ys II, but also in the wider series.

Perhaps the most famous of these is the lack of an attack button. While not all of the entries in the series have this “feature” – in fact, only Ys I, Ys II and both versions of Ys IV do – it has become one of the more memorable aspects of the first two games. Instead of pressing a button to attack, Adol simply rams into enemies. The key is how this ramming is carried out. A direct collision harms Adol just as much as it harms the enemy, if not more, and it’s easy to get yourself killed in a hurry if you’re not paying attention. The proper ramming technique is to collide with your enemies in an off-center fashion. This deals plenty of damage to them, while Adol takes none. The easiest way to achieve this is by using diagonal maneuvers, though early versions of the games only allowed for four-directional movements.

At first, this combat system seems irredeemably stupid. Even when I was obsessing over the games, I worried that this was going to be a deal-breaker. But no – it works. Once I got the hang of it, I wondered why I ever thought it would bother me. In a way, it’s actually kind of nice; certainly it’s efficient. Grinding for an experience level or two is a lot less objectionable when there’s so little real work involved in the task.

Another odd design quirk is that you can usually only have one item (aside from equipment like weapons, armor and the like) ready for use at a time, and when you’re in a boss battle, you cannot change it this item. You can pause, but your menu options are unavailable. Also, many of the most desirable items, such as healing potions, can only be carried one at a time. If you already have one in your inventory, you can’t pick up a second, no matter how much sense it would make to have multiples. If the game was less well balanced, this would bother me considerably. As it is, it’s probably just my RPG player’s instincts kicking in, demanding I have as many of a healing or restorative item as it is possible to carry, just in case.

I do also need to take a moment to comment on the music. Ys, as a series, has probably some of the most consistently high-quality music I have ever heard in a video game. The style swings back and forth from orchestral to hard guitar rock and back again, and points in between, and there are few soundtracks I’ve been more keen to own than the Ys soundtracks.

As far as actually finding the games, well, that’s gotten a lot less difficult recently. A few years ago, Nintendo released the TurboDuo versions of the games on their Virtual Console. More recently still, Atlus brought out the Nintendo DS versions of the games in the form of Legacy of Ys, though this version is sort of the ugly one out of the lot. It uses scaled-down two-dimensional sprite graphics for the characters and enemies, and awkward, blocky 3D graphics for the landscapes. It's not bad, just visually awkward.

Even better, XSEED localized Ys I & II Chronicles, the PSP version of the original two games, for the U.S. early in 2011. Based on the Ys I & II Eternal versions from the late 1990s, this is probably the definitive version of the two early games. XSEED also seems to have a sense of humor when it came to advertising the games, too.