Behind the Gun: Half-Life 2

I’ve had it in my head for a while now to write a series of “reviews” of first-person shooters.  I somehow doubt I’ll be doing so exclusively for the next little while, but we’ll see.  In any event, here is the first.

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I have a fascination with these bleak, dystopian settings, these harsh wastelands barren of hope and promising decay, and death for the unwary.  I think I’ve felt this way ever since I was a child, reading through the mini-comics that came with the Starriors figures I got for Christmas for a couple consecutive years.  The idea that the Earth might be damaged to such an extent as to be inhospitable to human life—that it might conceivably be destroyed, even—is so repellent to instinct that it becomes in some way perversely compelling.

Half-Life 2 pretty much opens up with that kind of scenario and gets progressively more grim from there.  I think it’s safe to say I was going to be a fan right out of the gate.

You start off on a train, a nod to the tram car where your player character, Gordon Freeman, ended the original Half-Life after doing the smart thing and accepting the G-man’s offer of “employment”.  He took you into some kind of stasis, and now here you are, some twenty-odd years later (give or take).  You haven’t aged a day, but things sure have become different while you were gone.

“Wake up and… smell the ashes,” the G-man tells you, in his oddly haunting and strangely emphasized tones.  Who he is—what he is, precisely—remains unknown.  What we know for sure is that he is some sort of interdimensional bureaucrat who has retained you for your unique skills.  Your first glimpses of this future world are not uplifting.  Wake up and smell the ashes, indeed.

You have only the vaguest notion of where you are and what you’re supposed to be doing. The question of “where” is easier.  You are in City 17, located somewhere in eastern Europe, which serves as a sort of capital for the much-diminished human civilization.  The Earth has been overrun twice over.  First it was the creatures that slipped into this dimension due largely to the events of the original Half-Life.  Then came the Combine, a collective of alien races bent on utter domination.  Between creatures making the countryside and wilderness highly unsafe, and the Combine’s efforts to corral and control humanity, the numbered Cities seem to hold the majority of humankind.  A suppression field prevents reproduction.  Volunteers are modified to become troops for the Combine; troublemakers are also modified, but in a much different, less pleasant fashion (not that the volunteers’ modifications look to be all fun and games, mind you).  The message is clear: those who can be used, will be used.  Those who cannot will be driven to extinction.  The bottom line is that humankind as we understand it will be destroyed, and the Earth will be gutted for its resources.  Half-Life 2 shows us subtle signs of this gutting already happening.  Docks and boathouses on dry land, well away from the shore, give a good indicator of how much water has been drained from the oceans already. 

None of this is shoved in your face.  The Seven-Hour War, in which humanity rose up against the Combine and was decisively trounced—which served, really, as little more than a prologue for the complete surrender and “treaty” brokered by one Dr. Wallace Breen—is hardly mentioned.  It’s in a few newspaper clippings you’ll find here and there, pinned up by the sorts of characters who would want a reminder of all that has been lost, perhaps to goad them ever onward toward some action.  Maybe some conversations mention it.  It’s difficult to recall, exactly.

One of the many strengths of Half-Life 2 is in its narrative subtlety.  There are very few scenes where characters exposit at you for long stretches.  People talk about background events and history in much the same way you or I might talk about history.  They talk about the Seven-Hour War like we, today, might talk about 9/11.  We don’t expound on the tragedy.  We mention it; we share a grim, knowing glance; and everybody understands the full meaning of what’s been said.  In much the same way, characters in Half-Life 2 don’t feel the need to speak in brief history lessons specifically for your benefit.  They talk how people talk.  You want to be in the know, great; go figure it out on your own. 

So there’s Half-Life 2’s setting in a nutshell, if we want to be flip: part War of the Worlds, part 1984, part Children of Men.

That answers the question of “where” nicely enough.  What about that question of “what”?

What, indeed?

The G-Man himself provides a subtle answer to this in his brief opening monologue.  “The right man, in the wrong place, can make all the dif-ference in the world,” he tells you with his off-kilter enunciation.

The original Half-Life saw you pretty much being exactly that.  Surviving a catastrophic accident that opened a portal to another dimension was practically a fluke.  The game from that point forward amounted to little more than the player character’s attempts to escape from Black Mesa (the research facility where the disaster occurs) for much of its length.  That there are alien creatures running around, and later, U.S. military personnel whose job was to shush the whole affair up, is practically incidental.  Freeman just happened to be fit enough and determined enough to beat the odds and escape.

The right man in the wrong place.

So, rather than give you any real direction (or even a stated goal), the G-Man just drops you into a train car bound for City 17, apparently having faith that you’ll do exactly what he (or his employers) want, just by doing what comes naturally.

You’re quickly pulled aside at the train station’s processing center, presumably for understandably lacking important documentation.  Thankfully, the guard who pulls you aside is Barney Calhoun, one of the heretofore nameless security guards from Black Mesa.  He discreetly sends you on your way to Dr. Isaac Kleiner, one of your colleagues from the back-story of Half-Life who is, despite his apparent nervous disposition, part of the resistance in City 17.  Lacking a map or even basic directions, however, you are quickly cornered by the City Overwatch.  You’re saved in the nick of time, however, by Alyx Vance, the daughter of Eli Vance, another scientist from Black Mesa.  Alyx guides you to Dr. Kleiner’s lab, where you’re given your familiar Hazardous Environment (HEV) Suit.  Also, your old crowbar.

This is pretty much the iconic image of the series in a nutshell: the bearded and bespectacled theoretical physicist-turned-action hero Gordon Freeman, with nothing but his HEV Suit and trusty crate-breaker to fend off hordes of aliens and other assailants.

From here, you’re pretty much on your own.  You’re tasked with finding Black Mesa East, which is the resistance headquarters, and reconnecting with Eli Vance, where Freeman will theoretically do some science for once.  Of course, this is not to be.  Upon being discovered at Black Mesa, Freeman is forced to flee through Ravenholm, which has been infested with headcrabs, which effectively make zombies of their victims, and make Ravenholm one of the more unnerving sections of the game.  From there you go through the mines, and shortly thereafter find yourself tooling along a lonely stretch of sea-cliff highway toward Nova Prospekt, which is a political prison.

Half-Life 2 never seems to wear out its welcome.  The various environments you traverse last just long enough to feel substantial (especially on your first, most clueless playthrough), yet are short enough that you never really get tired of a particular area.  Even in the game’s various areas, there is often diversity in the different sorts of places you’ll go.  The aforementioned highway section is broken up frequently by various obstructions.  You find yourself dealing with the occasional ambush, or removing a barricade, or deal with rolling mines or any of a number of other things.  There is always some variety to keep things interesting and novel.

The game occurs largely in big setpieces.  There’s a rhythm to the game; you’re usually alternating between more navigation-heavy sequences which involve solving puzzles on your way from Point A to Point B, and more combat-oriented sequences where puzzle-solving is nonexistent and you’re gunning down bad guys or blasting a way to freedom.  But even in combat, you have to use your head.  Sure, some minor encounters can be solved by charging in with guns blazing and mowing down every mook that comes into sight.  Most battles don’t work that way, though.  Like most FPS games, Half-Life 2 requires you to manage your resources.  There are only so many health and armor recharging stations and items in the game.  Likewise, there is only so much ammunition.  And while there are also only so many enemies, unlike you, they can shoot and throw grenades forever.  Some of them are immune to most your many weapons.  (Half-Life 2 is somewhat old-school in that Freeman carries an arsenal of nearly a dozen weapons, and ammo for each, on his person throughout much of the game).  Fight smarter, not harder, in other words.

A common complaint with Half-Life 2 is that its enemy AI is lacking.  This complaint is probably lent more weight than it should be on account of how intelligent (relative to the standards of the day) the enemies in the original Half-Life were.  When it comes to Half-Life 2, the complaint is both true and false.  Custom-made levels have shown the enemy AI to be quite intelligent.  However, the way environments are set up, it’s difficult for the enemies to really showcase their abilities.

So all of this provides a halfway-decent description of the game, but why do I like it so much?  If it’s my favorite FPS of all time, surely it does something special, right?  Well, yes and no.  I tend to think of Half-Life 2 as the sort of game where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  The game is getting somewhat long in the tooth by now—it was released in late 2004, after all—but that doesn’t matter much to me.  After all, I’ve played the living hell out of older games.  Quake, for instance.

A lot of it comes down to the atmosphere I mentioned back in the beginning.  And it’s not just that Valve chose a post-apocalyptic atmosphere (or one similar to it) when they made this game.  It does take a little more than that to get my interest.  It’s that they were at some considerable pains to reinforce the sense of despair and slender hope that are manifest every inch of the game’s world.  You periodically run across resistance outposts, all of which have the appearance of having been lightly manned and (in most cases) hastily abandoned.  You’ll walk into a room in some dilapidated shack by the road, or some platform tucked away just out of sight, and there will be a small cache of supplies there, and a mattress and a radio to show that someone, however briefly, occupied that spot.  If you’re observant, there are occasionally clues as to why that person isn’t there any more.  The atmosphere is in the way the people dress, the way they talk, the way they mutter to each other about how terrible things are, or warn you not to drink the water while in the city (there’s something in it that makes you forget, apparently)…  There are probably a hundred things that are beyond description because I’d take them for granted, and only notice them by way of their absence in other games.  “Man, I wish this game did X like Half-Life 2 did,” I’ll think, and then pause.  “Or that it did X at all.”

I tend to come back to atmosphere a lot when I think of what makes a game’s story good.  That’s mostly because I think atmosphere is one of the most important things a game has to get right in order for its story to have the greatest impact.  Atmosphere is in the subtle, delicate details of the game world.  A game may look real and sound real all it wants to, but atmosphere is what makes it feel real, in a compelling way, and that feeling is infinitely more important than any one thing we see or hear.  The environment doesn’t have to be realistic, but atmosphere is what gives a game’s environment a sense of consistency and purpose, which translates into a form of realism.

Of course, the rest of the game is also great.  The graphics, despite showing signs of age, still function perfectly well.  The sound effects and music are done admirably.  But I tend to look at the overall experience, and what stands out to me is the attention to detail everywhere you look, the atmosphere balanced so well that it helps to sell the setting while not being cloyingly thick, the aggressive adherence to realism in the environment's details.

Long story short: go play Half-Life 2.  Then go play the two episodes.  Then go play Black Mesa (the fan remake of the original Half-Life).

The Other M Is for “Missing the Point”

I started out wanting to write about Super Metroid, and sometime I will, I swear, but somehow this happened instead.

In my first draft of this write-up, I had a several-paragraphs-long tirade about the unfairness of gender roles in our society today.  I talked about how it seemed unfair to me that male heroes in video games can look any way they want, because they have and exercise power in some form in the game world, and that seems like the ultimate basis for “traditional” values associated with male attractiveness.  I talked about how unfair it was that when it came to female heroines of video games, they all had to conform to a certain much narrower standard of attractiveness, governed by a “traditional” mindset regarding what makes a woman attractive, with physical beauty being a mandatory characteristic (for male heroes, it is recommended, but optional).

I want to be proven wrong, but I don’t think I will.  Find me one heroine (assuming she’s a full adult, and that we’re playing a game with relatively realistic character models, and that she is the protagonist) who lacks a respectable bustline and an hourglass figure.

While you’re at it, find me a dodo bird or two.

Actually, no, the dodo is a bad comparison.  It at least existed at some point.

I took the tirade out because it was long-winded and probably ill-informed.  I refer just to the crux of the dilemma, however, because it’s a large part, probably the largest part, of what pisses me off about Metroid: Other M.

Our heroine Samus Aran has proven herself time and again to be an absolutely professional warrior.  Her occupation in the games, overall, is that of the one-woman army.  She is the sort of person the Galactic Federation calls in to take care of a situation after more typical military solutions fail.  She has saved the galaxy more than once, with little oversight, support or backup at any given time.  This is not a secret.  This is the reputation she has earned for herself.

What I personally find remarkable about the Metroid series in general, and its heroine in particular, is that no particular issue, in the universe of the games, is made of her gender.  She is a female warrior who performs most of her missions clad in a suit of powered armor that makes her gender ambiguous.  Come to that, she doesn’t even need to be human.  Any kind of humanoid creature at all could lurk under that armor (and in fact, series lore states that it was made by a non-human race).  Nobody remarks how amazing it is that a woman is the one saving the galaxy with all this heavy firepower.  They just call on her to do a job, she does that job, and everybody just kind of rolls with it. 

To me, this is the ideal goal of feminism.  Her femininity is not an issue of any kind.  It’s neither overplayed nor underplayed – it isn’t played at all.  It doesn’t need to be.  She’s a woman; so what?

Then, in Other M, she falls in with a group of soldiers with whom she worked previously, before she began her solo career as a bounty hunter, and… they all treat her like a brash, over-eager younger sister who can probably hang with the boys, but still warrants a certain amount of looking after.  And she just kind of goes with it.  Grudgingly, sure, but with no real protests to speak of.

Now, narrative isn’t usually a big point in the Metroid games.  It normally just provides a reason for the places you’re going and the things you’re doing there, and that’s it.  It’s the kind of thing that exists mostly in the manual, or in opening and ending cut scenes.  The in-game narrative in Metroid games is often subtler.  The things you do, the way the environment changes as you progress, the new abilities you gain as you explore: that’s the story.  That’s always been part of the genius of the Metroid games.  The story is solid, but heavily understated.  Where so many other games are content to disconnect the narrative from the gameplay, and reward you with non-interactive chunks of the former after completing a certain amount of the latter, the Metroid series on the whole avoids that.  There are exceptions (Metroid Fusion and the Prime trilogy, though they try to keep their non-interactive bits brief and infrequent), but aren’t there always?  Metroid games let your exploration, your brooding sense of isolation and your unanswered questions about all the weird vistas and objects you encounter, be the story. 

Metroid: Other M does not.  It wants to tell you all about Samus’s motherhood instincts, and rather than do it subtly, as Metroid II and Super Metroid did, Other M wants to beat you over the head with it.  It wants to make sure beyond all doubt that you understand that Samus Is A Woman, and that she has a deep-seated need, despite all this galaxy-saving she does, to mother something.  This is why the game has so many terrible ideas, such a distress call being referred to as a “baby’s cry” (seriously), or the space station where the game takes place being referred to as the Bottle Ship (and it’s shaped pretty much like a baby’s bottle, with some additions which obscure this, very slightly).  It has other weird and kind of ridiculous ideas, such as trying to parlay the whole “thumbs-up, thumbs-down” gestures into something with deep meaning and symbolism, but that’s a lot less offensive.  What is offensive is how Metroid: OtherM tries to enhance the overt femininity of the heroine by giving her powered armor a wasp waist and a more pronounced chest, emphasizing the femininity of the whole thing, and by putting fucking high heels on the skin-tight Zero Suit she normally wears beneath it. 

Let me repeat that, because it’s so fundamentally ridiculous that it really should be highlighted.  A woman who is known for single-handedly succeeding where armies fail for some idiotic reason goes into combat with high heels.

It also tries to downplay her known and oft-demonstrated strengths in order to play up her insecurities, with the stated goal of making her a more well-rounded, fully realized and interesting character.  Except she was already interesting and well realized.  The games prior to this mostly took the ancient maxim of storytelling – “show, don’t tell” – to an aggressive extreme and in so doing gave us ideas about the character that we could interpret along certain general lines.  And it did this without getting in the way of the game itself, for the most part.  So few games do this well, or at all.  The ones I can think of offhand are Another World, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. 

Metroid: Other M says that’s not good enough.

It starts off well enough, giving us an early view of Samus’s life as a green recruit in the Galactic Federation army under her commander and mentor Adam Malkovich.  We get to see her as a raw, idealistic young warrior who finds herself at odds with the cold, hard facts of military responsibility.  We can guess this fiery temperament cools into a more level-headed perspective with time and experience, but here we would be wrong, despite everything the rest of the Metroid series seems to imply.  Part of the problem is that Other M has a short list of issues in the larger Metroid story that it wants to tackle, and is hell-bent on doing exactly that, however stupid the method might be.

Let’s talk about the military presence in Other M for a minute.

The story of Metroid: Other M proper starts with Samus responding to a distress call (I’m sorry, a “baby’s cry”; God, that’s a terrible idea) originating from a space station called a Bottle Ship.  Arriving on the scene, she runs across a group of soldiers who have also been dispatched to the Bottle Ship.  They are very familiar to her, as they should be.  They are the Galactic Federation 07^th Platoon, her old unit, still led by Adam Malkovich.  Adam is now a general.  He orders her to shut off her power suit’s many functions and weapons in order to avoid undue damage to the Bottle Ship until his unit’s operation is complete, and she willingly complies

The game has hardly started, and already, we have problems.

Platoons are not led by generals.  Generals are usually in charge of much larger units of soldiers – brigades, whole armies, etc.  They never, ever go to the front lines, and they certainly never take point I sensitive, secret operations with low survival odds.  This isn’t because they’re fundamentally cowardly, lead-from-the-rear sorts.  It is because military regulations prevent it.  The loss of strategic expertise and the compromise of sensitive information should a general be killed or captured is not acceptable.  A general would design and authorize a mission like this, sure.  And then he would send it to a captain or a major under his command to actually execute it.  He certainly wouldn’t go along on the operation and he especially wouldn’t be suiting up in armor to go with his men on the ground.

So why did General Adam Malkovich do exactly that?

Well, the first, most tempting answer is that series director Yoshio Sakamoto is an idiot who lost sight of his creative vision.  And this is probably to some extent true.  After all, despite the known predilections of Team Ninja (famous for the Dead or Alive series of fighting games, as well as Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball, and the Ninja Gaiden reboot), with whom Nintendo partnered to make this game, Sakamoto has gone on record as saying most of the story ideas came from him anyway.  But there’s another reason as well.  Sakamoto is hobbled by the overall story of the series.

Samus has a personal history with General Malkovich.  As explained in Metroid Fusion (chronologically the last game in the series, but the one where Adam is first named and his relationship with Samus explained), Adam was Samus’s commanding officer, back when she was still a soldier in the Galactic Federation army.  It’s clear from what she says and implies in Fusion that she cared for him, admired him and respected him.  It’s also clear that the feeling was mutual.  He often referred to her as “Lady”, a title that was both sardonic and fond; it served as a reminder of his authority, but was always delivered in a way that also acknowledged her autonomy and conveyed his respect.  This was my reading of it, anyway.  Unfortunately, Adam is dead in Metroid Fusion, and has been for some time.  Other M, however, seeks to explore the relationship between Adam and Samus.  Which is fine, in and of itself.  So Adam having that distant-yet-also-paternal authority, where Samus is impulsive, rebellious and brash makes sense.  Other M hams it up a bit for drama’s sake, but the relationship operates along the basic lines described by Samus in Fusion.  Placed where it is in the timeline of the series, though, it makes very little sense. 

If Samus was a rookie bounty hunter, fresh out of the army and stumbling into her old comrades during an early solo mission, then the relationship dynamic would make sense.  Samus would still be making her way in her new life, feasibly shaky enough on her own still that she could easily fall back into old habits of obedience when in proximity to (and under the nominal oversight of) her old commander.  It would also explain her abject terror at encountering the series recurring villain Ridley, who is responsible for the loss of her family and her entire way of life, because this would be her first encounter with a truly vicious, powerful and serious enemy who has also provided her with one of her life’s great turning points.

But Metroid: Other M occurs next to last in the Metroid timeline.  Samus is a big girl now.  She’s defeated the Space Pirates on four separate occasions by this point, and has destroyed her nemesis Ridley as many times.  She has committed practical genocide on a parasitical species whose use as a biological weapon also threatened the galaxy.  She was also indirectly responsible for the detonation of an entire planet.  She is a consummate warrior, a skilled veteran, and her quick thinking and determination have saved the galaxy time and again.  If Queen Badass of the Galaxy was a real title, it would be hers.

And yet, unaccountably, she obeys Adam’s commands with little question (and much figurative hand-wringing over what he might think), including arbitrary commands to deactivate most of the useful functions of her power suit.  Her encounter with Ridley, whom she has destroyed four times now (and whose reappearance after “death” should no longer come as a surprise to anyone, least of all Samus), has her inexplicably paralyzed with fear.

So the writing is terrible.  Both on the level of execution (some of the dialogue is pretty cringe-worthy) and on the conceptual, story level, it’s bad.  So, so bad.

So how’s the actual game?

It’s okay.  Probably the largest problem with Metroid: Other M from a purely gameplay standpoint is that it feels like a Metroid game made by people who enjoy the series thoroughly, but have trouble articulating what makes it great.  And since they can’t explain it, they’re unable to really create it.  There’s exploration, to an extent, but you are limited.  Previous titles in the series mostly feature a fairly open environment, allowing you to go wherever your abilities can take you.  Metroid and Super Metroid have become famous over the years for the sheer number of ways clever players have been able to exploit the heroine’s abilities to reach locations in the gameworld which they were not meant to be able to reach until much later in the game.  Metroid: Other M, on the other hand, has definite ideas concerning where it wants you to go, and when, and its structure allows for very little player freedom.  Platforms you might be able to reach with new abilities remain inaccessible due to invisible barriers; the only available entrance or exit to these areas is the one the game designers intended, even if your abilities should by rights allow you other means of access.  This flies in the face of the very essence of the Metroid experience.

Even the process of gaining new weapons and abilities is robbed of much of its savor.  In previous Metroid games, Samus gathers various upgrades in order to better explore the game’s world.  She empowers herself through resourcefulness, diligent exploration, and the competent application of existing skills and abilities.  You have to go out and find the items that empower you, and the ability to use them and apply them in other areas of the game is its own reward.  In Other M, Samus gains new weapons and abilities because… a man told her to activate them.  The sense of discovery is completely absent, and in fact no real discovery actually happens.  The abilities just become available to you at set points throughout the story, no finding required.  And the narrative framework makes this even more galling by specifically denying you these abilities that you always had, and in at least one memorable case only activating an ability after it would have been most useful. 

The story’s given excuse for this may be weak, but it can be made to work.  Samus’s weapons are deactivated so as to avoid collateral damage, okay, fine, I get it.  It’s stupid, but I can work with it.  But her armor abilities being turned off?  Is Adam really afraid that she could potentially damage something by, I don’t know, being immune to high temperatures at it?  And then, when all of Samus’s abilities are activated by the endgame anyway and fail to do any real damage to the Bottle Ship, the whole “authorization” business falls apart like the lazy fucking gimmickry that it is.

The game itself is all right and actually can be pretty consistently fun (I did manage to finish it, after all), if a disappointing low point in its series and a frustrating exercise in missing the point of what makes Metroid games interesting and fun in the first place.  But it’s saddled with some awful game design decisions and this frankly embarrassing plot that tries hard to be deep, and sacrifices no small measure of consistency with the greater series story in the attempt.  That it fails so miserably only makes the sacrifice all the more aggravating.

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.