Cadice says the game is a satire of a “horrid genre of anime,” but I simply don’t see the satire. It’s cuter, it’s lighter, but that does not a satire make. So I am meant to believe that while the game is based on the genre of tentacle rape anime, it is not about tentacle rape. There’s clearly a fundamental disconnect between our consideration of inference and implication versus intent.

I got an email from Cadice not two hours after my initial article, and within 24 hours the Kickstarter was canceled. We had a dialog all along the way, which was a very curious process. First Kickstarter limited the game’s searchability. The game was now only viewable through direct links. At the same time, my article, as well as Kotaku’s, had given the game greater media attention, and after my article went up the project rocketed up from $23,000 to $30,000 in funding. Clearly, as we scrutinized and criticized the project, we also popularized it.

After the project was canceled at Kickstarter, I wondered to myself – while I felt I had struck a blow against a game I found to trivialize rape and molestation, had I also struck a blow for censorship on Kickstarter? In the end, I feel this project shouldn’t have been allowed on the site in the first place – most of the approvals process at Kickstarter happens at the front end – it’s allowed, or not, based on what Kickstarter decides. I think this one simply fell through the cracks, and simply got canned much later than it should have.

I’ve been asked by some what part of the Kickstarter terms this game violates. It’s entirely subjective, but it’s right here: “Offensive material (hate speech, inappropriate content, etc).” There are some who don’t find this game offensive. Its creator claims the game is clearly not about rape or molestation. I maintain, based on looking at the Kickstarter itself, that it is, he just has a much higher threshold for it than I do. You could also make a case for it glorifying acts of violence, depending on which side of the “does this infer rape” argument you fall.

In the end though, I couldn’t stop the game from getting funded. The project had moved to its own site, and appears to be well on its way to coming out. I still maintain that the game is a trivialiation of rape and molestation, and that those supporting it are supporting that mindset. Cadice disagrees. In the following interview, Cadice speaks his mind about his project, and where he says it’s really coming from.

Brandon Sheffield: You send me an email after my initial article, and stated: “We figured it (TB) would be controversial, and anyone who knows the genesis of this game, knows that the project is entirely a satire on what I personally consider a horrid genre of anime. We do not in any way condone or illustrate violence in any way against any of the ladies in our game.”

In what way do you find Tentacle Bento to be satire, and why do you find tentacle rape porn to be horrible?

John Cadice: First off, we would like to apologize to anyone hurt or upset, rape is in NO WAY the focus or intent of our product and such detestable violence is not condoned or encouraged by Soda Pop or any of our products.

The “tentacle” genre is a well known cliche’ in the anime/manga fan circles. This product is one of many products we have designed, or are designing to touch on interesting or odd cliches or themes in popular Asian and Japanese sub cultures that have found their way over to the US. They simple “are,” and we wanted to give a snapshot that was true to the weirdness of the subgenre. A tip of the hat to one of the weirdest things I have ever seen come out of Japan, and one of the most “unspoken” of inside jokes within the US anime subculture.

As for why we would find tentacle rape porn to be horrible… I mean aside from visually depicting the abuse, murder, and violation of people in grotesque and deeply strange fashion… and being aware of the connection to our product went to great lengths to keep the cliche for the adult anime fans who would want to play with a product while not stepping over our personal lines of content that we don’t want to create or have our brands be associated with.

BS: If you find tentacle rape to be horrible, what differentiates Tentacle Bento?

JC: The same thing that separates entertainment products like “Kittens in a Blender” from the abuse and killing of innocent house pets… the designers and consumers will ride a morbid curiosity about a “thing” because of the thing and the notoriety or discomfort it creates. We are not trying to be edgy, and very few of our backers find our product out of any kind of norm as it relates to their interests. Find me any genre of entertainment that you enjoy, and we can see if it survives any kind of cross examination.

BS: You also said: “Yes, the art is suggestive, but there is no nudity, no running screaming fearful faces dripping with tears and horror, there is plenty of innuendo, as it is geared to get a naughty giggle out of a table of adult gamers.. but anime fans know about this genre, the taboos around it, etc.” – in my article, I asserted that treating the subject of rape or molestation lightly is part of the problem. How do you respond? It calls to mind these old ads. Some might call it harmless fun, others might say it perpetuates a mindset of casual treatment of violence toward women.

JC: It’s a valid point, there is nothing casual about violence, rape, molestation. Working in marketing, social norms shift and change depending on the audience you want to reach. I don’t ask everyone to love this game, anime in general is quite a rub to lots of people. I do not believe it perpetuates a casual mindset toward rape, because, as its designer, that was not the intent, and mostly because there is not rape in our game.

We can run down a million rabbit holes just as bad by cross examining why women wear high heeled shoes, the appropriateness of camouflage as a textile pattern for children… etc etc etc. Show me ponies being ridden by children under a rainbow, and I will find someone to shout about the subjugation of intelligent animals for our petty amusement with as much intensity as this argument.

BS: You further said: “In the end, we make a series of game exploring the “whole” culture (and in this case, sub-culture) of Anime, Games, and Manga. It is not our intent to trivialize molestation or rape and the strong use of that language has already produced real damages to our funding effort.” – if it is not your intent, why make a cutesy game about the subject? To at least some extent that is trivialization.

JC: Back to our previous response, it is something that “is.” The project was an interesting premise, and we test marketed that premise with our target audience with great feedback, we overcame whatever our personal misgivings were and gave it a shot. We felt we dealt with the subject in a funny way to play up the relational iconic images of aliens snatching up humans for nefarious purposes, if those purposes were for eating them up… we wouldn’t be having this conversation, the natural inclination of sexualized imagery in some Japanese manga and anime lends to a more lascivious bend, and in the culture, it simply “is.”

BS: The toughest thing for me to reconcile from that discussion is the following. You stated: “I am also of the mind that any sort of violence against women would be a horror of a product and would go to greater lengths than just writing a blog post.” – what is happening to these girls if not violence? I mean this earnestly – what is your interpretation of what is happening?

JC: I’m not sure what you are driving at? I am providing a narrative about aliens grabbing up school girls. Notice the large sucker covered tentacles for “grabbing things.” I do have a card with a girl being tickled, and another baking a cake… the perceived notion became the narrative here, and that is the problem. We do not address or imply what happens when you are capturing the students. We opted to leave this open and not censor the player’s imagination in our belief that the vast majority of people do not define “nefarious” purposes as rape as this article did.

BS: Now that the kickstarter is canceled, what would you like to say to me and those that supported my viewpoint? What would you like to say to your fans?

JC: To you and yours, I am not asking everyone to like or purchase our products, we treat these subject matters in what we view as a responsible and interpretive manner regarding the sometimes dark subject matter they spawn from. We recognize the association would be there for a few of our target customers. But, they are also part of the canon of anime and manga culture, they are recognized, and like many things, they are taboo. As for my fans, they have spoken, we love their support, and they have helped us heal a few cuts and bruises we were not anticipating.

BS: Did you receive any official word from Kickstarter regarding why your game was taken down?

JC: An official response to my repeated emails concerning the slow strangling of and then cancellation of our funding project was simply “suspension,” then “cancellation.” The reasoning, was derived from a narrative shared on this website and another, and no attempt to contact us or clarify was expressed or tried. Lights off.

BS: I have seen both you and your fans (on the Kickstarter page) call my article, as well as the one on Kotaku misguided, but you also said they gave you a fair shake. How do you feel the original article missed the mark?

JC: As a marketing and product manager in another life, the use of language is an important and persuasive tool, how you flow and present information guides the readers response and leads them down a logical path. The constant battery of sexual terminology (where there is not one instance in our product) and lines like “The style is a cute, lighthearted, pastel-colored look at the wonderful world of forcing your way inside a female against her will,” is your assertion and not fact, and colored the whole conversation. What “is” fair is the general response to trivializing something as horrible as sex crimes and violence against anyone for that matter. It is a worthy discussion and needs to be at the front of conversations in our culture. This is not a product derivative of our culture. To quote one of our supporters, “..it is a wink at a culture that we westerners find ineffably bizarre, and in turn, we are fascinated by it.” And thus, a product was born.

BS: A top reply on the Kotaku forums said: “It worries me that Soda Pop Minis is doing this. They always went for the Anime Girl sex appeal before, but I never expected them to do this.” What is your reaction to that?

JC: We will do many things, We explore Japanese culture in popular culture with games and gaming.

BS: Any closing words?

JC: I am deeply sympathetic to the arguments presented, and intend no harm with our product, being deeply sorry for any hurt perceived or experienced.

I also very upset by the language used to brand my products, customers and supporters as something they are clearly not. A clear jump to conclusion was made without proper research, and in effect, have done more to drag people down a dark path than any we could possibly create.

We do not depict, peddle, or push sexual subjugation in ANY of our products. No more than the millions of (Insert Popular First Person Shooter) players should be relegated to slander for trivializing controversial military engagements, killing of unarmed civilians, terrorism, propagation of a “gun culture,” or something..something…military industrial complex…something…

My closing words
Cadice unfortunately does an unsatisfactory job of describing the game as satire. Tentacle Bento seems to be playing with the cliches, but in a direct manner, not in a satirical one. The idea that tentacle rape in anime is something that simply “is,” does not satisfy. He says they don’t push sexual subjugation, but to buy that you first have to buy that what the tentacle monster is doing to these girls is non-sexual, and second that they are happy to receive the attention.

I don’t buy either of those, and I’ll use his own words to prove it. In the context of a game that is based on the tentacle rape genre, satirical or not, read this sentence from the original Kickstarter page: “Girls, Locations, and Snatches are broken down into essence types or ‘suits,’ representing the particular girlish essence the aliens are after, and the locations and traps best suited to catch their quarry.” How does that read to you? Why quarry? Or this line about the “sporty” female students; “no matter how mouth watering the thought, these girls are in peak physical condition, and quite capable of holding their own.” Why would these girls be interested in fighting you off if you weren’t doing something bad to them? Why use the word mouth watering? He says rape and molestation are in no way the intent – and he says that nothing is implied about what happens to the girls after they’re grabbed. But to me, the language used in the pitch infers what happens quite strongly.

Maybe you’re not convinced. Please then, watch this play demo of the game from Cadice himself.

Here are a couple of interesting quotes from his demo that seem to negate the clean image of the game he is trying to propose. At the 1:15 mark, he says, “”In this case we grab poor sidney, drag her to the classroom, and we have ourselves a ‘cram session.’” After saying this, he suggestively bites his lip. At 1:53, he says you can “take a sexy student to the headmaster’s office, and then get slippery when wet.” Does this not imply sexual contact, in his own words? He calls the tentacle monster’s position “envious” and its traps “nefarious,” in spite of directly saying it is not nefarious in this interview. Combining the sexual nature he himself infers, with the word nefarious, what conclusions do you draw? I really don’t think I’m stretching here.

Ultimately the attempts in this interview to classify Tentacle Bento as something other than a game about tentacle rape fall flat. If you’re going to make a game about this, for the sorts of people who would like to play a game about this, own it. Don’t pretend to do something you’re not doing. In the scene from Modern Warfare 2 where you shoot (or don’t shoot) civilians in an airport, referenced in Cadice’s final comment above, the developers never once said “these people aren’t innocents,” or “this isn’t what you’re really doing.” They owned what it was, and spoke about it clearly. To pretend this game is about giving girls cakes and tickling them instead of the larger inference of tentacle rape, is to deny all the evidence presented by Cadice himself.

People will continue to say this is blown out of proportion, and is just humor, and isn’t a big deal. But I have already addressed my thoughts on that matter. It is a big deal to trivialize rape, and it’s up to you to decide whether you think Tentacle Bento does that.

This is a game about tentacle rape – you are meant to “get your slimy tendrils” on as many girls as possible within the given number of cards. But there are other tentacle monsters out to rape girls before you can! And dastardly school officials who can get in your way! Just choose some girls (sexy, sporty, smart, et cetera), a location, and a “sneaky snatch” to grab them with.

The style is a cute, lighthearted, pastel-colored look at the wonderful world of forcing your way inside a female against her will. There are, to my mind, a lot of things wrong with this.

For one thing, rape is not cute. Amnesty International states that 1 in 3 women is molested, sexually assaulted, or otherwise beaten in her lifetime. I’ve heard many advocates say this number is low, due to under-reporting. And it’s not cute, and should never be depicted with such saccharine sweetness as Tentacle Bento does. It is terribly damaging to anyone it happens to.

The more troubling thing is how many people are supporting it without thinking about it. Or even worse, maybe they are thinking about it.

Jokes are jokes, and they are relative to taste. To me, Tentacle Grape Soda is in poor taste, and I think the women who shill it at conferences demean themselves. Others don’t think the joke is bad at all – poor taste maybe, but funny to them. Tentacle Bento takes the joke a step even further by making it an action.

Now we get into a similar territory to games. People have called GTA a rape or murder simulator, and blame crimes and moral decay on its depiction of sex and violence. But we know that influence or interaction does not equal causation. Tentacle Bento won’t force anyone to go out and rape people, and it is clearly couched in fantasy – there are no real-life tentacle monsters that rape human girls, that I know of. It is a fetish, and it is a fantasy for some. What’s more, I do believe sex has a place in media – it’s a natural part of life, and it makes me crazy that people try to ban games because there are boobs in it. Everyone has seen a boob! Even with all that though, there are some things I don’t think should see prime time.

I am not everyone. I am offended by the game, but some may think it’s funny, or that there are more important things to focus on. Still others might be turned on by it. But regardless of personal opinion, this is not something a world-class organization like Kickstarter should be facilitating.

Moving back to games for a moment, if Capcom, say, were to make a tentacle rape Street Fighter game, certainly many people would support it. And they would be happy to play it! But Capcom as a company would be heavily criticized for its insensitivity toward women, and to me that would be the correct response. And that’s why they don’t do it, even if it might please a section of their audience, and it might make them some money. They are a professional company.

There are shades of grey everywhere, and that makes my argument against this card game difficult. How do we decide what is proper and what is improper? The U.S. Constitution says people should be able to say and express what they want. We just won a major court battle granting video games free speech protection. But do you feel good about rape being looked at as cute, even so? What of the actual rape simulator, Rapelay? I used to cover that company on this very site, because they were pushing the boundaries of what games could be. But I do not think these games are good examples of what our industry should be.

Many people have argued to me that I shouldn’t care about this. “What is so bad about this compared to games about violence?” That’s the biggest argument. I counter that violence and sex are a part of life. It happens around us and shouldn’t be ignored. But torture and rape should not be part of life, even if rape is a subset of violence. I would no sooner support a cute game about torture in Guantanamo Bay, even if the torturing protagonists were space aliens. Making fun of suffering is not acceptable to me.

Again, Tentacle Bento won’t make anyone rape a girl, or even encourage them to. Some might argue it is a healthy outlet for unhealthy desires. In a sense, my problem with this game is more a problem with the view of rape and molestation in current society.

I understand, yes, that games and movies trivialize violence all the time. But in real life, very few people trivialize violence, and the ones who do are regarded as psychopaths. On the other hand, people trivialize rape and molestation all the time. Priests cover up their rapes, and apologists say it’s no big deal. Women in many countries are put in jail or killed by their own justice systems, after their own rapes (see here). If a woman was raped, people will think, “well, at least she wasn’t killed,” not realizing the terrible and permanent damage that does to a person. Soldiers get PTSD. So do rape victims.

Tentacle Bento’s Kickstarter success is the product of a society that doesn’t take sexual assault against women seriously enough. It shows that enough people think it’s “not a big deal.” The argument comparing a game about rape to games about violence is limited by the fact that murder is almost universally penalized in our culture, meaning there is a clear line between fantasy and reality there. With rape and molestation, that line is not so clearly drawn, and it results in “cute” games like Tentacle Bento.

I have been told the game isn’t overt about its scenarios, and is more about innuendo than obscenity. But there is no doubt where it comes from, and what it’s drawing on. And molesting girls “just a bit” or through innuendo does not make the game much better.

I’m not the morality police, but I’d like to make a citizen’s arrest. Do not support Tentacle Bento. Instead, write to Kickstarter (the link at the bottom), and complain about the content. Kickstarter is a big enough company that it should be filtering this sort of thing. The company should not help to facilitate the idea that rape is no big deal.

“It’s so competitive when you play against another person.”

“It’s too hard.”

“You have to practice so much.”

“There are just so many good players out there.”

I hear these things a lot. The person I am talking to–let’s call him Johnny Doughnuts–is making an excuse, even if he doesn’t realize it, for why he isn’t as good at Starcraft 2 as I am. Why he chooses to spend his time doing something else. And really, I don’t care. Some people want to get good at Starcraft 2, others want to get good at skiing or whatever.

But I do find it interesting that Johnny Doughnuts describes Starcraft 2 as an anomaly. As though it is practically the only thing challenging–in life, in video games, whatever.

I have, in the past, described Starcraft 2 and Street Fighter as “one of the finest things a young man can devote himself to” with only the slightest bit of hyperbole. Before I unpack that, though, I want you to read this excerpt from Daniel Pinkwater’s The Education of Robert Nifkin, which I was one of those books I read long before I ever imagined it could actually have been useful.

I spent a solid year and a half of my life more or less playing Starcraft 2. I would wake up in the morning and play a few ladder games to start my day, watch live streams and replays during my lunch break, watch the Day[9] Daily on the commute home, play a few games before going to the gym, come home and watch some more streams and go to sleep thinking of how I could have avoided losing the games I lost that day. I stopped playing with any reasonable frequency probably about six months ago, and I’ve been happier and healthier since–yet I still recommend the experience to anyone and everyone else.

It’s a beautiful thing, really.

Starcraft 2 is just a game. To a very special few, it is also a livelihood, but for the most part, no one plays Starcraft 2 with the illusions that it will provide them with food or shelter. Yet people take it seriously–seriously enough to devote all their free time to learning new openings, memorizing matchups, and playing playing playing playing playing. Playing even though the game itself is full of negative emotions like panic, anxiety, fear, frustration, and even loss.

Starcraft 2 is brutally honest. You open it up, log on to Battle.net, click Find Match, and you’re almost instantly paired up with someone deemed to be within your skill level. Then you play, you win or you lose, and eventually it’s over. You can study the graphs and the replays, you can watch professional streams and the Day[9] Daily and read all the forum threads you want–at pretty much no point does the game not reward you for doing an infinite amount of homework–but at the end of the day, you have to click that Find Match button again, play another game, and inevitably lose if you want to get better. As professional player Aleksey “White-Ra” Krupnik puts it, “More GG, more skill.”

There are plenty of games that are competitive. You can play Call of Duty online and get your balls e-stomped by lots of folks. The difference is that Starcraft 2 don’t fuck around. There are no teammates or lucky shots. There is no respawning. There are no unlockables or pay-to-win mechanics. The only difference between you and the guy who won is that the guy who won has trained harder and worked more so he was capable of outplaying you and sending you back to the Lose screen that helpfully reminds you that you’re ranked in the bottom 20th percentile in the world. It is cruel, almost.

So now let’s return to Johnny Doughnuts and his excuses. I’ve heard them a thousand times, and I don’t care, because those are the excuses that reveal everything I need to know about you.

Robert Nifkin discovered chess, became obsessed, and (perhaps wisely) decided to cop out–but he came out of it wanting to think he was willing to make a sacrifice that big, just not for chess. That right there is The Point.

When Johnny Doughnuts tells me Starcraft 2 is hard, I nod my head and say “There are two kinds of people in this world. Most people play Starcraft 2, lose, feel crushed, think to themselves ‘I never want that to happen again,’ and walk away. Some people play Starcraft 2, lose, feel crushed, think ‘I never want that to happen again,’ and decide to get good at it.” Then I give a polite smile and change the subject.

Getting Good at Starcraft 2 isn’t the goal in and of itself. Everyone has their own line to draw–the point at which they decide they’re not willing to make that sacrifice for what is, ultimately, just a game. The point is that you have found an activity that you are willing to sacrifice your time, your money, your health/relationships/happiness/whatever else you value in order to improve your skill. You are willing to go further and harder than the Johnny Doughnutses in your life so you can be better than them at this.

Not to get good at Starcraft 2–I said this already–but to learn how to get good at something. To be able to practice a skill in a place which isn’t affected by your connections, your charisma, your good looks, your pedigree, your reputation, your education. To see that number that tells you how you stack up against the rest of the world slowly climb.

Why? Because everything worth doing in this world requires a skill to do it, and if you’re going to spend some of your finite time on this world doing something, damn it, you might as well be good.

I recently got a new job. Kind of a dream job, as far as jobs go. Definitely the kind of thing that I could see myself doing for a long, long time. Decent pay bump, too, though I’m not making big money or anything. I got it in part because I was good at my old job, and in part because I was eager, available, knew the right people, and wasn’t as expensive as the caliber of guy they really wanted to do the job, I’m sure. I consider it both a recognition of the good work I was doing at my old job, and an opportunity to step up my game and prove I’m worthy of more responsibility.

But after I finished being congratulated and patted on the back, I realized that this was a wakeup call–that if I wanted to be good at my job, I needed to examine the skills I employ in that job (editing and writing) with the same importance that I treated my Terran vs. Zerg build order, because I care about doing well in that job. And really, if I didn’t care about my job enough to be at least as good at it as I am at Starcraft 2, then honestly, why the fuck should I be spending 40+ hours a week doing it?

If I could sit down and compare my skills to a list of people across the world and ascertain where I fell on the Great Editing Ladder, I’m sure I’d find a few hundred thousand people better than I for the job I’m doing. That’s a pretty awful feeling. But it is also an honest one, I think, and a good one. So I am trying to write more, and edit more, and find all kinds of creative ways to stretch my appreciation for the English language.

If you can get good at Starcraft 2, you can get good at anything. Not because it means you’re smart or naturally talented, but because the dedication, hard work, smart work, and effort required to get good at Starcraft 2 are equal to or greater than what you need to get good at pretty much anything in life–work, play, happiness, romance, relationships, whatever. What Starcraft 2 is particularly good at doing is reminding you that, well, you ain’t shit at what you do in life, Johnny Doughnuts. And if you don’t want to get good at the things you’re doing in life, Johnny Doughnuts, then you’re just wasting your time.

patrick miller is taking care of business

He told me to go ahead — but conversation quickly turned to why I like the Tales series so much, when he’d never been able to get into it. We started to talk about it, but we both quickly realized I should write about it instead.

The in-your-face anime aesthetic of the series is what turned him off. This is comprehensible. It advertises what the series is about; it’s a stake firmly planted, and depending on where you’re at, it just as much says “not for me!” as it says “come on in!” to the people who like it.

I’ll start where I started: I like the series because of what it’s not. This all began for me in 1998, when I’d got fed up with the tedious, self-important Xenogears and, on a lark, followed it up with Tales of Destiny. I found it to be everything Xenogears wasn’t: cheerful, dopey, energetic, unassuming, entertaining, fun.

I know that if you’re like Brandon, and you haven’t really played a game in the series, what you’re thinking is “it looks like it’s a bunch of generic anime bullshit,” and in fact, that is inarguably what the series is. It’s full of high-pitched girls, corny jokes, melodrama, and idiotic plot twists.

There are two mistakes you can make at this point.

1. Assuming that this is all there is to the Tales series

or

2.  Assuming this overwhelms everything good about the games.

The Tales series is special because of its beautiful attention to detail — both in terms of the visuals, which are charming and toy-like, and the gameplay, which is precise and rewarding. There’s really no other RPG series that’s anything like it; the battles are fluid and fun but also nuanced and polished. It’s a gameplay-driven series, which I think runs counter to the assumptions people make about JRPGs these days, especially candy-colored ones. Playing Symphonia, the first game in the series that I really loved, I found myself often running toward the enemies oh the map screen rather than away from them.

While the games can get bogged down in everything I listed above, it’s also easy to overlook the fact that anime storytelling is good for something: establishing a strong cast of characters and defining their relationships. There’s a reason fans of the series are obsessed with the optional dialogues, or “skits”, that play out every so often. These little sequences add shading to character details, perspectives, and backstory in ways often overlooked in games.

The series has a pervasive, pleasant wistfulness; nostalgia is one of the key elements of Japanese melodrama. What ends up shining about these games is their pop fantasy realms, and the sense that the world would be beautiful and simple if we just let it.

It’s not as simple as it looks, though: the games are built very deliberately, with all elements carefully arranged to appeal to sub-groups of fans. This approach has delivered the series a devoted constituency in Japan. The single most crowded event I’ve ever seen at a Tokyo Game Show was a Tales of the Abyss voice actor panel at the Namco Bandai booth in 2005 — more crowded than the Sony booth before the release of either the PlayStation 3 or the PlayStation Vita. This says something.

Yes, anime is often formulaic, and so are these games; but I think what’s easy to forget is that anime is formulaic because that formula works, and that while being formulaic may limit creativity, it also offers a boon to craft. When you know what works and you aim for it, you can pursue that without hesitation. You have a framework.

All of this came together for me with Tales of Symphonia, for the Gamecube. I played it the most in one weekend that I’ve ever played any game — around 25 hours over two days. My hands stung. I turned right around and New Game Plused it a couple of days after I beat it, too. It’s hard to explain why, because it’s certainly not the best game I’ve played; it’s arguably not even the best Tales game. But it just works — very, very well.

The simple truth is that there is a lot to like about the series, and if you play it — really play it — that stuff stands out. That’s why I like the series. In almost every Tales game, something about it stands out. It doesn’t need my help. Look harder.

Conveniently, two new Tales games: Tales of Graces f for the PlayStation 3, and Tales of the Abyss for the Nintendo 3DS, have been released recently in English. It’s easy enough to find out for yourself.

What follows is an email interview with Hideo Baba, General Producer of the Tales series.

The Tales series is extremely famous for having strong casts of characters — how are these characters devised? Do you begin with the artwork and then proceed to scenario, or is the other way around?

This can vary a bit depending on the title’s producer, but generally we start by creating the characters first. In particular, the hero and heroine serve as the core of the story, so we decide things like their age, sex, and how they talk, and then work on creating the supporting characters. Once we have the characters developed to a certain degree, we can start work on the game’s story.

What is the most important element of an RPG’s gameplay design, and why?

Even though RPGs are games, they are also stories, so I think the depiction of the hero and heroine’s experiences leading up to the end of the game is particularly important. How do they change and grow through their interactions with their friends and through their adventures? The player takes on the roles of the hero and heroine, so it’s important that they are able to empathize with them. Once you have this, then you can work on making it enjoyable as a game.

Tales is also famous for having action-based battles. How do you design these battles to make them accessible to casual players, yet deep?

We always try to make sure our battle systems have the right balance of fun. RPGs feature a lot of combat, and that’s because it’s an indispensible way of having your characters grow and develop. But it’s a game, after all, so you have to keep it fun as well. So we try to design systems that let the player fight battle after battle and still have fun with it.

How do you balance battle control schemes to make them easy to understand and execute commands, yet deep, as well?  

There are many different kinds of players — some want to enjoy the story, while others care more about the gameplay itself. So we use things like different levels of difficulty to make the game enjoyable for both types — players who may not be very good at combat, and players who want to delve deeper into the battle system. But regardless of which type of player you are, we always try and make the game enjoyable without requiring difficult controls.

The Tales series has dedicated fans in the U.S. but not the same success as in Japan. What do you think about its status in the West? Are you satisfied?

The Tales series has been developed with Japanese players in mind, so achieving success in Japan is a major goal for us. But when the development schedule makes it possible, we do like to create localized versions for some titles in the hopes that players outside of Japan will hear about the series and get to like it. While Japanese consumers remain a priority for us, as long as certain conditions are met, we do plan to continue releasing localized versions of our games for our fans outside of Japan.

In the U.S., players are often in their 20s or even above, but it seems most Japanese RPGs are aimed at teenagers — they often feature young protagonists. Is this true, and if so, why? 

It is true that the number of teenage JRPG players is higher in Japan than elsewhere, but I wouldn’t say that teenagers are the main audience overall. We think of people in their late teens and early twenties as being the main audience for JRPGs. As for the issue of young protagonists in JRPGs, this is just my personal opinion, but characters in Japanese anime have traditionally been relatively young, so having grown up watching this kind of anime, I think we Japanese don’t feel that having young protagonists in JRPGs is particularly unusual.

If you agree, does this make it difficult to create products with global appeal?  

When you’re trying to come up with a global strategy, it’s tempting to use gameplay or artistic expressions that can be easily accepted outside of Japan as well. But as I said earlier, the games in the Tales series are created first and foremost so they can be enjoyed by Japanese players. Then we give them to players outside of Japan. If we worried too much about what foreign players might think when we were developing them, we wouldn’t be able to take full advantage of our strengths as game creators. That’s our first priority — to preserve what makes the Tales series so great. It’s up to the foreign players whether they like them or not.

As I understand it, Tales of Graces was the first 3D game from Team Destiny. How was the transition, both from artwork and gameplay perspectives?

While there are of course some fundamental differences between 2D and 3D graphics, there weren’t really any big changes. The Tales of Graces team was able to make use of the knowledge we gained from Tales of the Abyss and Tales of Vesperia. We were able to carry over the warm, watercolor-like art style that we used in the 2D games, and there weren’t any major changes in the basic gameplay either.

Tales games usually have detailed 3D backgrounds — environments that give you a sense of the place you are visiting. Can you talk about why this is important? 

We think of RPGs as games where you experience an adventure along with the main character. They give you a chance to get away from the city or town where you live and have an adventure in a new world. When you go to a different country, they have a different culture, and with a different culture comes another lifestyle. We try to make each new location memorable, and we work hard to allow the player to experience a location’s culture and enjoy its atmosphere, so I’m glad to hear you mention that. The interiors and props are all made with the town’s culture and characteristics in mind. We try to maintain a uniform look, whether it’s the outward appearance of a town, or the inside of its buildings.

Every single Tales game has a different, sentence-length “genre” in Japanese. [I.e. TOGf is "守る強さを知るRPG", or "To Know the Strength to Protect RPG".] Can you talk about the philosophy behind these? How are they chosen? Is it something that’s set out before the project/writing begins, or at the end? 

Of course, the “genres” chosen for each game all have meanings. Each of the Tales games has a theme. You can think of this theme as a message that we want to communicate to the player through the game, and we thoroughly incorporate the theme into the game’s narrative.

Once the story is complete, we come up with a “genre” that expresses that game’s theme or message in a way that’s easy to understand. So while we might have a general idea of what a game’s theme or image might be when the project starts, we don’t make the final decision about the “genre” until after the game story is finished.

How is Tales Studio structured? Tales of Graces and Tales of Vesperia were by different teams, correct? How many teams are there in the studio right now?

Yes, each game was developed by different teams. However, at the moment we don’t have our staff strictly divided into development teams. Instead, we create teams for each title, taking into account the staff members that are required for a particular project.

- Christian Nutt imported Tales of Graces f, sure it would never come to the U.S. 

ZiGGURAT.

<If you are reading this strictly for tips on not sucking at ZiGGURAT, you can just jump down to the tip stuff here.>

I played a lot of Diablo II back in the day.

I actually didn’t get that deep into vanilla Diablo II, though. Beat the game on normal with a Conversion/Thorns Paladin, found myself woefully underpowered for Nightmare, and put it down until Lord of Destruction came out. That’s when I got addicted. Six months later, I had four high-level Assassins of various builds, a magic find Sorceress, and a Lightning Fury Amazon specced specifically for Cow Level runs. Yes, I made a character whose sole purpose was to mow down cows with alarming efficiency.

One decade later, I would reflect with some of my friends on our shared addiction to Diablo II. “Man, that game was addictive,” we said. Pause. Then I said:

“But, you know, it wasn’t really that much fun.”

Seems to be that a lot of what people call “game design” these days is closer to designing Amazon.com than designing something like Stratego. (Go to Amazon.com, add something to your cart, and click Proceed to Checkout, and look at how the UI changes. They make it really easy to charge your credit card, and really hard to leave the site or browse or do just about anything else.)

Diablo II isn’t really fun when you actually play it. You feel good when you level up, you feel good when you pick up shiny rare items, you feel good when you click a monster and it dies and you hear the gold hit the floor, but the actual playing-of-the-game is surprisingly not-fun.

Lately I’ve been playing Bastion and The Binding of Isaac and come to a similar conclusion. Bastion has an engrossing audiovisual motif that kept me playing to the end despite the fact that none of the weapons felt satisfying in the slightest. The Binding of Isaac is delightfully creepy, and once you get into the rhythm of the game, you’re able to plan your runs around big-picture strategies that try to take the advantage of roguelike randomness–but the actual combat is boring and slippery. In all three of these games, the “fun” is basically around building a character that lets you coast through as much of the game as possible with minimal resistance. It’s like the game is getting in the way of seeing your numbers go up/listening to that breathy narrator/etc.

With that, let’s talk about ZiGGURAT.

If you’re reading this, you most likely know that ZiGGURAT is Tim Rogers’s thought-baby (as well as a bunch of other folks, since he didn’t make the game himself), and Tim is a Friend of Insert Credit. Tim has a Reality Distortion Field of sorts. It’s not like Steve Jobs’s–that was an RDF that made a thousand people buy an iPod Shuffle right after the Macworld Expo keynote and not think “Wait, why did I buy this? I already have an iPod” until after they swiped their credit cards and the deed was done. Tim’s is more insidious. If you don’t respond to him with pure white-hot hatred–and judging from some of the Kotaku commenters, that’s not uncommon–he’ll talk your ear off about “sticky friction” for years until finally he releases a game and you think it’s brilliant but you’re not really sure if that’s you speaking, or if he primed you to think it was brilliant years ago. Give Tim a second of your attention, and you’ll end up buying his $0.99 games for the rest of your life.

In other words: I think ZiGGURAT is excellent, mostly because it doesn’t start with a shitty game and add crap to it to make it “better”. There are things I would change about it, though I’m not positive that those changes would actually make a better game. (The first change I would make would be to change the gun to a guitar.) So rather than backseat-game-design, I’m just going to talk about some stuff I find really neat about ZiGGURAT. Specifically, how it has one really good central mechanic that gives rise to a whole bunch of complex systems.

The beginning of the End of the World.

To begin: ZiGGURAT is about the gun. You have one button–the touchscreen–and you use it to fire the gun. You can do all kinds of things with the gun–bounce shots down a hill, or charge up into a really satisfying ball, or use it as a shield of sorts. But that’s pretty much all you got.

The gun feels great. (It better.) Sit down and play the game for five minutes and you’ll start to feel it slowly become an extension of your body. That’s exactly how every weapon should feel in any video game ever. Honestly, the last time I played a game that felt that good was Quake III: Arena, which is a work of genius only because each weapon feels just as good as the ZiGGURAT gun. That’s why most Q3A players tended to focus on mods like Rocket Arena 3, which gave you access to the entire arsenal from the very beginning–you simply feel incomplete if you don’t have every weapon at your disposal.

So you have this gun, and you have bad guys swarming in on your position. Some are big, some small. Some jump at you, some walk towards you, some just kind of bounce in your general direction and shoot purple stuff at you. If anything hits you, you die. Simple, yes. Also so good that it is pretty much the only game I’ve played in the past week, forgoing mega-super-blockbuster-rereleases like Final Fantasy Tactics for iPad (which I paid eighteen goddamn dollars for), not to mention my backlog of Steam games. I’ve liked it enough to give a shit about the Game Center scoreboard (currently #9 on the only board that matters–total kills in a single game–booyah).

Cool thing the first: You can’t hold down a maximum charge. Your gun can charge to several different power levels, but it doesn’t stay at the most powerful when you hold it down. If you want to hit with a full charge (and you want to more often than not) you’ll need to time it perfectly. It’s like someone played any Mega Man after 3 and realized that there’s really no good fucking reason you should be holding down the B button for 98% of the game. That by itself is kind of cool. More “thoughtful”. The cool part is that the bad guys’ weak spots (their eyeballs) gradually grow and shrink. Hit them in the eyeball at their largest, and they’ll explode and take out their neighboring bad guys. Hit them with a small charge when their eyes are biggest, and they’ll make a decently-sized explosion. Hit them with a big charge when their eyeballs aren’t so big, and they’ll make a similarly decent explosion. Hit them with a full charge when their eyes are biggest, and they’ll damn near clear the whole screen. So it’s not just “charge, fire, charge, fire, charge, fire”. You need to time your charged shots with the bad guys perfectly, or else you will suck. (Bastion also does this, but it never really feels like it matters. You just get a marginal damage boost on your ranged weapons.)

If we transplanted that mechanic back into Mega Man, well, imagine taking on a Met (those little helmet guys) if you needed a fully charged shot to kill them, and you couldn’t hold on to a full charge for longer than a second. You could just do a level with five of those guys back-to-back and people would hate you/love you. (Someone, get on this.)

When there are two blue aliens on the screen, this is easy. When there are 30 aliens of different color on the screen, this gets significantly harder. Considering how powerful a fully-charged shot is when you hit a big-eyed bad guy, however, this is really your priority during most of the game. If you can consistently pick out the optimal alien to hit with a full-charged blast and execute it properly, you should have no problem at least breaking 150 on a regular basis. This is ZiGGURAT Skill #1.

Cool thing the second: Parabolas. Charging your gun doesn’t just make it hit harder, it also makes it shoot straight. Your shots are affected by gravity, and weaker shots will fall faster. You basically have a parabola gun. Since most of the aliens are more vulnerable in their eyeballs (which is in the top of their hitbox), this is actually kind of a good thing.

See, hitting perfectly-timed full-charge shots is great, but it’s not the only move in your arsenal. In the time it takes to charge and release a full-powered blast, you could have shot four small bullets that, if aimed perfectly, could clear the screen even better. This gets particularly important as the game goes on, because once you have a dozen bad guys up in your grill you won’t have the luxury of waiting for a full charge. If you were to think of your gun’s output in terms of Damage Per Second, you’ll get better results with perfectly-aimed dinky shots than you will with full-charged shots. Ideally, you want to hit the aliens (except for the giant ones) with the weakest shot possible and move on to the next target. If you hit them when they’re weakest, they’ll still blow up and create a chain reaction. So you can fire a bunch of weak shots up in the air, they’ll come down and land on the alien freaks, and since the alien freaks’ weak spots are at the top of their body, the arcing-shot actually makes it easier for you to hit them.

The downside (for you, anyway) is that since your weapon fires in an arc and is affected by gravity, some areas will be easier to cover than others.

The ZiGGURAT Danger Zones.

After the first 10 minutes of playing the game, you should almost never die because a yellow alien walked up to you. It’s hard to not hit them. If anything, you can think of them as opportunities to serve up a nice full-charge shot at your leisure, since it gets easier to hit them with it the closer they get to you.

After the first half an hour, you should be pretty good at keeping the green sections more or less clear, since you can cover those with low-charge arcing shots. Just spam a few of them here or there and you’ll clear ‘em out pretty quickly.

After the first hour or so, the only time you should be dying is if there are lots of bad guys in the red zone. The red zone is the hardest to cover because you can’t rely on gravity to make your low-powered shots work–you need to charge just to hit anything up here. Clear this area out as soon as possible. (This is one reason why the alien ship is so disruptive–it basically covers a large portion of your weak spot, which makes it harder to keep that area clear.) When aliens are coming in at you from 10 to 2 o’clock, you’re in some serious trouble.

Interestingly enough, the alien freaks don’t explicitly target this area: Yellow guys can’t get there, red guys don’t really jump at that angle (and they start in the light-green area so you can usually deal with them early on), and orange guys come to you so you don’t need to worry about charging the shot. Only blue aliens (large and small) and the later purple ones can get there, and it usually only happens if they build up a sufficiently critical mass that they can hop on top of each other to get out of the light-green zone, or if a giant blue freak is coming, in which case they all kind of bounce on top of him.

So ZiGGURAT Skill #2 is: Parabolas. Focusing exclusively on full-charged shots is kind of like using only special moves in Street Fighter 2. If you know how to do a fireball and a dragon punch, you can probably beat someone who doesn’t know how to do either, but if you’re playing against someone who knows what they’re doing, it’s more about using your normal moves well. In ZiGGURAT, your light arcing shots are your normal moves.

Cool thing the third: The gun acts as a shield. Charge your gun and point it at a bad guy. When they run into it, they will most likely die (the exceptions being the Giant Alien Freaks). Enemy shots will disappear. As long as you’re pointing the gun at the right target and holding the button down, you can’t really die. Try playing a game where you don’t fire any shots, and just use the gun as a shield. I just did, and got 44 kills before a Giant Alien Freak stomped me.

This is your block button, your safe zone, your ZiGGURAT Skill #3. If you take a typical shoot-’em-up–Gradius, or R-Type, or Ikaruga, you will find yourself in situations where you cannot help but die. Decisions you made five steps earlier–move here, shoot this, move there, shoot that–backed you into a corner. You get good at those games by recognizing which decisions will back you into a corner, and which decisions won’t. When you’re new at these games, they feel “impossible”, because you haven’t played the game long enough to know how you ended up in a guaranteed-death situation. ZiGGURAT doesn’t do that (well, not as much, anyway). There are very few situations where the reason you lost was because of something you didn’t do 10 seconds earlier. For the most part, if you are making the correct decision in any given snapshot of a ZiGGURAT game, you will not die. (That doesn’t mean that your decisions don’t have effects that come cascading down upon you later–take the wrong shots and you can be buried in shit that makes your life harder. But you won’t find many guaranteed-death scenarios.)

This gives ZiGGURAT a certain calm to it–something unexpected in a game about the last stand of the human race, to be sure. As long as you are blocking correctly, you can keep yourself alive almost indefinitely. You can take a breath, ponder a plan of action, wait for the exact right moment to blow up the exact right alien and reset the screen. It’s not a “twitch” game. It’s about making decisions. Once you’ve mastered the three ZiGGURAT Skills--the weapon/enemy charge dynamic, parabolas, and the gun-as-shield, you’re ready to to figure out your Decision Tree.

A moment of calm.

See, each enemy taxes your decision-making capabilities in different ways. Small blue guys are rarely a threat on their own, but you’ll need to keep their numbers under control. Leave them alive long enough, and they’ll be able to hop on each other to get into your danger zone, pressure you with purple shit, and get in the way when you’re trying to soften up the blue giants. Large blue guys force you to charge up your shots to take ‘em out (they go down much quicker to stronger shots than weaker shots–I think it’s something like 3 maxed out shots to kill, or 20 slightly weaker shots, and they’re invincible to light shots), so even though they probably won’t kill you outright, they’re still plenty dangerous since they’ll push you out of your comfort zone. Red and yellow aren’t too dangerous on their own, but if you let them get close (which they usually can, when they’re covered by hordes of big and little blue guys) they’ll kill you. The orange guys will kill you if you take your eye off of them at the right time, which makes it easy to miss a window for a fully-charged shot. And so on.

Once you have a basic handle on your three ZiGGURAT Skills, you can make it to the End of the World (and beyond) by using those skills at the right time, on the right enemy. It’s less about blasting bad guys and more about juggling the order in which the bad guys will kill you, using the shield to not die, taking charged shots when you can, and popping off the odd small shot when you can’t.

————–

All that stuff comes from a person with a gun and a bunch of aliens. A simple mechanic that is built for the device you play it on and polished to excellence, yields a game that is elegant, deep, and rewarding.

There are, of course, a few other cool things about ZiGGURAT. I like how the first orange alien always comes out at a certain point in the game (with its own musical cue). I like that the game is set at the End of the World, since the setting makes things like in-app purchases seem trivial and stupid (you’ve made a game about the last human on Earth, and you’re going to nickel-and-dime your player for better guns?). I also like that the game doesn’t explicitly reward Big Combos, because who really cares how good you are at billiards when it’s the End of the fucking World and the fact that clearing the screen lets you live an extra give seconds should be reward enough. I like that there are multiple leaderboards and lots of statistics, because I always tried to get Most Deadly/Most Accurate whenever I played Goldeneye 64 multiplayer. But all of that is icing on the giant purple alien freak cake. This is the game that keeps me playing it because I want to keep playing it, not because I feel like I have to keep playing it. It’s addictive because it’s good, not because it was designed to be addictive. It feels like our generation of gamers is getting a new Centipede or Missile Command, and you know what? That’s pretty cool.

patrick miller will be damned if he’s gonna get knocked out of the top ten by the likes of you, kid

It’s with that in mind that I direct you to this. Anna Anthropy (aka Dessgeega from IC forums/Select Button) proposes adding an arcade machine to the new space, and will make a new game specifically for it. To do so, she needs funds. Unfortunately, the project was rejected from kickstarter, and now has four days left to meet the goal of $2,000. If you felt like it, you could help make an original occupy game happen in a rather interesting moment in a massive movement.

Here are some words from the project organizers that you can read: “Every community center needs a game room to draw in the general public, to give people some respite and lighten spirits, and to give people an excuse to meet others in their community. And every good game room needs an arcade machine.

…if all goes will, the OAK-U-TRON 201X will be an official member part of the Winnitron Indie Game Arcade Network, showcasing the true, independent, DIY spirit of game developers around the globe!”

Needless to say, I don’t play that many games these days. But I do play good ones, and I do play bad ones, so here we go: Patrick Miller’s Top Games of 2011, starting here. Note that I don’t really give a shit about things like release dates, so if you’re expecting a strict analysis of the 2011 videojuego canon, that’s not what you’ll get here.

5: Deus Ex: Human Revolution (PC)

But despite the garish way they’re marketed in the west, the Disaster Report titles were really quite slow and respectful games. Their subtlety is immediately visible in the trailers and Japanese boxart, which is soft and innocent. They don’t promise the thrills or graphical punch of some games. They only promise that they will try and show you what it is like to be a person escaping from a beautiful and welcoming environment that has suddenly become hostile.

In the games, you try to help people, but sometimes they die. There may be something you can do about it, something difficult and frightening. But often there isn’t. Coming to terms with this is evocative – it is not great art, but it is sincere.

There is an early sequence in the first Disaster Report. You meet an old couple in a collapsing building – a wounded man and his wife, who refuses to leave his side. Your character talks to them, you hear they have a son. You find a photo in the rubble. You give them the photo. It shows them with their son, whom they tell you is going to university. You hear a helicopter land outside, so you go to meet it. But as you begin to leave the building, it collapses. With some effort you manage to evacuate a friend, but the couple is killed. In the crashes and grinds of breaking concrete, the photo is blown clear and flutters to the ground.

Here we see the use of every convention in the toolbox of the action-adventure game designer. You have to make sacrifices as regards your inventory in order to pick up an item. You then give the item to someone by taking it out of your inventory, which is the only way that the player (rather than the “character”) can communicate with them, and you see that the item means a lot to them. You separate from them to meet the helicopter, emphasising your role as the one who must push onward. And then when the building collapses you have to navigate treacherous surroundings in a short space of time, trying to acquire something (your friend) while also under the obligation to leave some things behind (the couple).

The game isn’t just an action-adventure though; the team was willing to step outside the conventions of video games. They had to, to avoid being gratuitous.

How would you or I go about making a game about death? Bearing in mind that in almost every game ever made there is an awful lot of “dying.” In video games we drown, we have our bones crushed, we are burned into paralysis. What usually happens then is that the screen fades out, fades in, and there we are again, standing where we were a minute or so ago, right as rain.

There are good reasons for other games doing this, and good reasons to expect it to be done – resurrection allows players to engage with tense and interesting challenges. But this approach treats death with irreverence, which is problematic if you’re addressing real world events (as many noble game developers attempt to do nowadays).

The Disaster Report games make some effort to imbue their “dying” with the horror that a conscientious artist would want to. There is a mechanic in the original game centered around becoming “thirsty” (and “cold” and “stressed” in the sequels), and it can move the player to panic. Just like in the aftermath of a real earthquake, you are required to scavenge and scrimp resources. If you fail to do so, you may become so dehydrated that you collapse – this risks the loss of hours of progress. So you worry immensely about what you’ll find around you.

“Losing hours of progress” is a trite reflection of what is at stake for the real people who survive real hardship, but it is the most powerful punch a game developer can pack. It feels highly unfair. It makes you hate the environment. If you (understandably) don’t appreciate the symbolism, then you may even hate the game.

I should add that the games also contain quite conventional platforming challenges. These parts regress to the standard approach players “dying,” so there is almost nothing at stake. Perhaps here the developers had no other viable choice. But I maintain that the original sentiment was commendable, even if it turned out that its implementation was not in tune with the language of video games.

At the core of it, the Disaster Report games just have a simple and quite affecting premise, in stark comparison to other high budget titles. They do not involve hurting anyone. They do not involve feeling powerful or especially beautiful. They do not involve saving the world. They just involve saving yourself and the friends you make. With its limited technology, the first game was a subdued affair – no epic score, few dynamic environments, few human beings beyond what was necessary for the next setpiece. It felt desolate and cruel, which is exactly how it should have felt. We see this in the other games too.

Admittedly, the first games made a lot of mistakes, although at least they’re honest mistakes. The feel of the challenges is similar to Uncharted, with all the manipulative stupidity that that entails. The creators were interested in presenting the images and narratives that come out of a natural disaster – they weren’t all that interested in providing interesting or fair gameplay.

For example, when debris falls around you, the harm that is done to you feels random. You are able to defend yourself by crouching; the way your avatar cowers is theoretically compelling, almost educational. But it adds up to a blockheaded game mechanic. The philosophy at work here is “if they audience is pressing buttons while watching this, then they will feel involved.” The same as Uncharted, or any Adventure game – although at least it’s not as bad as Enslaved or Heavy Rain. Disaster Report contains moments of great friction, like when you’re trying to walk up a precariously tilted surface or pushing an object – you don’t get that in adventure games.

My point is that the makers of these games treat their subject matter with reverence. They are aware that they have an artistic responsibility, something most game designers will go out of their way to avoid.

“The Kobe disaster of 1995 was in [the designers’] minds during the making of Disaster Report” a spokesperson for Irem told me. I believe that Irem could have continued backing the design team – in an ideal world at least. They have already proven they can use the conventions of games to effectively talk about this subject, and the recent catastrophe could have moved the team to even greater dedication. I know the people who carried out the cancellation of Disaster Report 4 believed that they were being compassionate. But in their fear of offending a wounded post Fukushima disaster Japan, they have missed an opportunity for great relevance.

-Hamish Todd had to import Disaster Report 2 from France

I imagine that attending Evo is, for a few brief days, a taste of what it’s like to be any average guy with a beer belly, some gym shorts, and a profound devotion to ESPN. A basketball fan can walk into any sports bar in the world and mouth off about how terrible the Warriors are and start a conversation. They can watch The Big Game with a crowd of people and not feel self-conscious about spending their time watching big guys play with big basketballs. And when they’re at work, they can say “So, how about them Knicks?” and everyone else is obligated to reply with “Hell of a team, gonna go all the way this year” whether they pay attention to basketball or not. Well, fuck the Knicks. Here at Evo, the name of the game is MAHVEL, BAYBEE.

Basically, it’s a brief trip into a world where taking games seriously is totally fucking normal.

So! You’re going to Evo next year.

—————–

I’ve been hosting a few video game viewing parties lately. They’ve been fairly well attended, too–usually about 10 people or so piling into my living room watching young men in blazers commentate the Major League Gaming finals on my TV. Beer and snacks flow as freely as the shit-talking and act-like-we-know side chatter. I used to host UFC viewing parties, before. The atmosphere is more or less the same no matter what we’re watching.

Only about half of the people in attendance actually actively play Starcraft 2, or Street Fighter, or whatever we’re watching. The others just liked to watch. Funny, isn’t it? We’re entering an age where people just really like to watch other people play video games. And frankly, I don’t think half the people that came to my last viewing party actually cared that much about the game. They just wanted to see what it was like to treat a video game like most people treat football.

Starcraft 2 commentators Day9 and DJWheat.

I had originally written this up as a simple ode to Evolution 2011, which I went to about 2-3 months ago. After running it by the rest of the insert credit crowd, I learned that I’d have to do more than that. My job is to convince you that professional gaming, or competitive gaming, or “eSports”, or whatever you want to call it, is worth your time and attention. Actually, my job is to convince you to come to Evolution 2012.

Even if you don’t particularly like fighting games.

So I’m going to start by telling you about why I give a shit about eSports. I don’t think that the skeptics out there will all of a sudden become crazy fanatics or anything. I do hope to plant the seed of interest that will eventually blossom into an “Aw, hell, I guess I’ll watch this stream for a little bit”.

(Why do I care whether you care? Mostly because I plan to write a whole bunch of neat stuff about eSports in the months to come, and if you don’t like it, well, we’re just kind of stuck with each other, I guess.)

———

Let’s start with a basic question: What does it mean to take video games seriously?

I took video games pretty darn seriously when I was 5. I didn’t own a console of my own, but you bet your ass I was better at video games than anyone else in my kindergarten class. All video games. Mario, Mega Man, Sonic the Hedgehog, you name it. I was the guy who got invited to the birthday sleepovers because you knew you’d need someone to get past whatever level you were stuck on. Serious business.

Other things I took seriously when I was 5: Candy. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. General avoidance of girls. Crayons.

I’m (something of an) adult now. I still take video games seriously. But not in quite the same way I did when I was 5.

I’ve had it in my head for a while now that the grown-ass men and women who grew up playing video games have stuck to the medium because they found something in the games they play that scratch a mature adult itch. The true connoisseurs–you folks who read insert credit are a good example–wouldn’t continue to play video games for the first few decades of their lives if it felt like they were watching Looney Tunes cartoons for a few hours every day.

So when I first discovered games writing that didn’t suck–The Gamer’s Quarter, The Escapist (back when it was on PDF, duh), the original insert credit, etc., I was hooked. I wasn’t hooked because of the games they were writing about, though. I was hooked because of the way people were writing about them.

See, I knew that video games were an integral part of who I was, by then, but I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to grow into them. What was I supposed to do when I took a girl back to my dorm room for the first time and she saw my MAS Systems arcade stick sitting in the middle of the floor? How could I feel confident about the fact that I spent at least an hour in training mode for Guilty Gear XX when no one in my zip code knew what the damn game was?

And really, that wouldn’t address the issue. It’d be like a kid being so into crayons that he decides to, well, make crayons for a living, and be the best damn crayon engineer he could possibly be. That isn’t mature. That’s obsessive-bordering-on-weird. See, the parallel should be between “kid likes crayons” to “kid decides he wants to be an artist that does amazing things with crayons”, but it wasn’t, because I wasn’t used to thinking of video games as a potential medium for a performance.

But that’s what it is. Video games are many things, but one thing they can be is a venue for performance. For spectacle. And we can watch them, and enjoy them, because they can provide us just one more way to see just how amazing people can be when they dedicate themselves to a goal. When they push themselves to their absolute limits. Just watch the Daigo Parry (“Evo Moment #37”) if you don’t believe me.

Which segues nicely into the topic of the day–Evolution.

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You’re going to feel embarrassed walking into the Rio for the first time with your gigantic MadCatz FightStick TE in hand, wishing desperately that you could just blend in. Then you’re going to realize that the guys in front of you in the check-in line are talking about this totally sweet Zero/Wesker/Haggar setup, the guys behind you are placing bets on Justin Wong making top 8 in every game he enters, and the girls standing by the roulette table practically swooned when they saw Daigo walk by.

You’re going to tell stupid Street Fighter jokes in the elevator to your friends, and you’re going to hear the strangers riding with you laugh with you. Because when you say shit like “I’mma Balrog that chick, all yelling ‘FINAL!’ “, well, they’ve gotten hit by that punch too.

And when Latif hits that oh-so-pretty 60% C.Viper combo to knock Poongko out and meet Fuudo in the finals, you’re going to get out of your seat and cheer and jump and make a goddamn fool out of yourself like the other 2000 people in the ballroom who are just losing their shit over a video game.

Enter the tournament. Don’t bellyache about the $60 or so. It’s a small price to pay to say you played in Evo 2012, and it makes the whole experience much more intense. You’ll probably spend a few weeks practicing your heart out, agonizing over who you’ll use, dreading the thought of going two and out (it’s okay, it happens to everyone), and secretly imagining yourself taking on Daigo in the finals to defend the stars and stripes (this also happens to everyone). Do it. You get a T-shirt.

Or maybe you don’t like to play fighting games that much. That’s cool too. You’ll find some of the best fighting gamers in the world putting on a show for your entertainment, and you won’t even have to pay a dime to watch.

The action doesn’t stop when the doors close, either. You’re in Vegas, of course, so plenty of folks are off to hit the bars, clubs (gentlemen’s or otherwise), or blackjack tables–no problem with a little vice. If you decide to stick around the Rio, though, you’re in for a treat. I spent Friday night playing a few solid hours of Marvel in a hotel room with some good friends of mine when who should walk in but Alex Valle. Bet that doesn’t happen to you every day. Man, I haven’t played that guy since Evolution 2004.

And if you’re really lucky, you’ll stumble across the Salty Suite. It’s not easy to find, and even if you do locate it, you’ll have to get past the doorman–this year it was Mr. SNK, in a blazer that made him look like he should have been standing in front of the Tao instead of room 6019. I got in by looking like I was part of Poongko’s posse. But once you’re in, you’ll get to watch the after-hours money matches between the best of the best. Did your favorite player get peaced out in the qualifying pools? He’s probably in the Salty Suite playing $100 money matches with Ryan Hart or GamerBee. If you’re feeling flush, look for a side bet–or if you’re a little crazy, put up a few twenties and try taking on your heroes yourself. Win or lose, you’ll get to put your name out there, in the suite and on the stream.

All that is really just the prelude to hype, though. You might get a few flashes of hype here and there in the first few days, but the real fun starts on Sunday. That’s because the whole day is devoted to the top 8 players from each game, starting with the less-popular games like BlazBlue and working up to the main event: Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition. You can feel the hype build up gradually over the course of the day.

You’ll get there a little early, maybe during Mortal Kombat 9. You probably aren’t paying much attention at this point. In fact, you’re just there to get good seats for the main event. Maybe eat some lunch, or start getting good and drunk, or catch up on sleep. Then you look up at the screen and you see a close match. Even though you don’t really know what’s going on, you keep watching. And all it takes is one close match to get everyone standing in their seats. Most of them probably don’t know what’s going on, but it doesn’t matter, because you’re going crazy with everyone else.

That right there? That’s the beginning of hype. Then the next match starts, and you’re sitting down feeling a little bit more awake. And as the day goes on, these moments get more and more frequent until every round has an OH SHIT DID HE JUST DO THAT moment, and you’re losing your voice from the yelling and screaming (and possibly the drinking and the smoking), and before you know it you’re chanting “U-S-A! U-S-A!” even though you’re not really the kind of person who would ever do that.

I’ll tell you a secret: I don’t really like Street Fighter IV all that much. Compared to the games of the past, it feels a little bit too easy, a little bit dumbed-down, and I generally don’t play it. But I’ll be damned if I wasn’t yelling louder than any of my friends when Poongko beat down Daigo, and even louder when Latif beat Poongko.

Photo by Kara Leung.

Because for a few precious hours, I was in a 55,000 square-foot ballroom full of people who were looking at the exact same screen I was. There. Watching Street Fighter, the game we all played with as kids and now again as adults. It’s like going to watch the NBA Finals in person, except so much more delicious because you’ve been teased and eyebrow-raised and shit on and ever-so-secretly embarrassed about the fact that you’ve spent so much time playing Street Fighter.

But there, you’re just one of many people watching The Big Game. You don’t have to feel bad about knowing what can punish Ryu’s sweep on block, and you don’t have to feel silly for slamming your drink on the floor because you just got hype. And you can feel it linger in your system after the finals are over and everyone is going back to their real lives, where every day is not about Street Fighter. Until it’s gone, and you’ll just have to go again next year.

So go. Go to the next Evolution. Go for the games, for the money matches, for the friends and camaraderie, but most importantly, for the hype.

I’ll see you there.

Anime games like Evangelion 3nd Impact, released this week for the PSP in Japan by Bandai Namco Games. (“3nd“, by the way, is a play on the word “sound” — “san” being Japanese for “three” and, of course, the Third Impact being a big event in the Evangelion universe.)

Is it the stewardship of Akira Yamaoka, who has recently taken the title of chief creative officer? Is it just the way the Japanese market works, where studios rarely turn down paying work that in the west would seem undignified? It’s not clear, and unfortunately, I didn’t think to pose these questions to Yamaoka when I spoke to him at the Tokyo Game Show.

I was very curious about Evangelion 3nd Impact itself, however. It’s a music game based on the popular series’ recent Rebuild of Evangelion film series, which includes Evangelion 1.11: You Are (Not) Alone, and Evangelion 2.22: You Can (Not) Advance, and it came out this week in Japan. The Q&A, conducted at TGS, follows.

Can you tell me how the idea for Evangelion: 3nd Impact came up? Like, how you started making it?

Akira Yamaoka: So how it all started is that Namco Bandai, they just threw out: “Evangelion — is there anything that we think we can work on together?” And so Grasshopper actually came up with a few other concepts, including the one that now is 3nd Impact. “So an action RPG, and what about this music-based, rhythm-based game?” And from there on, everything just kind of moved forward.

Are you a fan of the original show, or the new movies, or anything?

AY: I don’t think I’d say that I’m a huge, huge fan. Not crazy about it. I just like it normally.

It was a big cultural phenomenon in Japan in the ’90s, right?

AY: It was a movement.

Do you have a lot of memories from back then? Have any of your memories of the phenomenon, or the show, informed the way you know you approached the game?

AY: Well, rather than going back in time and thinking about if I have any memories, or are there any elements from back in the day that sort of influenced or affected the way that we approach this game, it was more like, we already know that it already is an established IP, an established brand, and there is a huge fan base that has been following it. And it was probably another chance for attracting new users. So it was more like, we have to treat this with the utmost respect, so as to not take it away from the fans who are expecting what they would expect from another Evangelion installation, in the form of a digital entertainment.

You did the remixes for the music, right?

AY: It was me and a few other members at Grasshopper. And we also came up with some original tracks too.

Shiro Sagisu’s soundtrack is super, super distinctive. It’s very well known. When you hear the Eva music it triggers your feelings very quickly. What did you think about working with something so well known? 

AY: Similar to how we approach the game, we knew that we had to treat it with a lot of respect. Basically, like you just said, it’s easily, instantly recognizable to people who know the music. And so we wanted to treat it with respect.

However, it’s not like we’re just remaking a new soundtrack, or a modern version of what was available back then. We need to implement this into an actual music game, and so the music part of it is more of a component that we need to take a careful look at, and dissect it, so that we know which part would really mesh well as a game system.

And so, therefore, we had to kind of break it down — and make sure that we don’t break it down too much, to where it’s not Eva music. And try to retain the memorable moments, or the melody, or whatever it may be. We had to retain that, but make sure that it was enjoyable as a game.

You said you had come up with a few concepts. And you settled with Bandai Namco on a music game. But why did you come up with the music game concept in the first place? It’s unexpected.

AY: How we came up with this idea is that we were looking at this — even though it fits within the music game genre, the idea of it, and how the user plays this game, is not your typical sort of rhythm-tapping, button-mashing game, where prompts show up on screen, and you tap, and you make music. It’s quite different.

What we wanted to do was, we wanted to make sure that your priority — and the primary goal, the user experience and what’s going on on screen — is to have them see a more of a visual storytelling of the series of Evangelion.

So it’s not your typical button-tapping game. Rather, depending on what you tap, the action interactively changes, and therefore it’s the user interacting with the actual visual storytelling, and then progressing in the game — so that idea was probably pretty fresh to Namco Bandai, and they took that, and ran with it.

That’s unusual, because it seems developers find it hard to break out of that button-tapping mold.

AY: Yeah, I agree. I mean, if we were to just use the sort of standard music game button-tapping mechanic, then it would just be as easy as adding a skin, right? Using Evangelion, the IP. But that’s not what we were aiming to do, and so we’re really having the user interact, by choosing their action, and then seeing that actually play out in game.

Anime games usually suck. Now that you’ve made one, do you have any insight into why?

AY: There is probably a slight disconnect in how we and fans of anime appreciate anime in its form, and why that’s entertaining to them. And then you have this slew of titles that are based on anime IP, and the component that really sells that game is not the same sort of value or appreciation that they have when they view anime.

So if there’s a way that we can translate the entertainment value, and the appreciation for anime into a game, and it’s integrated well, then maybe there’s a tighter connection. And as a result, there may be anime games that could sell well, or that may be more favorable over some of the ones that we’ve seen.

But I think the game is just a basic sort of engine, and system, that is allowing for anime IP to be just kind of layered on top of an existing action game, or RPG game, or whatever it is. It’s basically a label that’s being added to a game system, and therefore the connection is lost, and not everyone who appreciates this type of anime will then move over and say. “I’ll purchase that game, just because it’s based on this anime that I like.” So there’s still a disconnect between the two.

So you’re trying to bridge that gap with the game design that the team arrived at?

AY: Yeah, you’re exactly right. We didn’t want to just take that IP and put it on as a skin to any kind of more standard existing play mechanic, and so we’re hoping that there’s a sort of a common denominator of appreciation for the music game that we created based on the IP, and that there are elements in there that are easily translatable, or connectable, into why they appreciate Evangelion in the first place.

Let’s say that if there are core music fans out there, who’d just rather be tapping just for the sake of tapping and making music, it might not be the right game for them. But for Evangelion fans, it’s sort of casual and light enough that they’ll be able to get into it, even without having played music games.

Did you have to work really closely with Studio Khara to  produce the game, or were you left on your own, away from the license holder?

AY: We had to work very, very closely with Studio Khara. And like I said earlier, it was all about being respectful to the franchise, but also making sure that it was treated in a way that anyone who would be touching this product knew that the DNA of Evangelion was kept in a way that it should. And so working with them was key in order to make sure that that came through.

- Christian Nutt has framed Evangelion art on his living room wall.