初めに言っておくとこのゲームは名作と言われるものではありません

日本語の評価を眺めているとこのゲームを「奇作だ」といっている人がいるようです。「奇作」とは名作ではないがゲームの中に素晴らしく光るものがあり, かつ他のゲームでは一切見られないものを表現する際によく使われるようです

数年前。私がゲーマー知人の何人かに勧めたところ, 全員から芳しくない評価が返ってきました。評価内容は他のレビューが語っているものとだいたい同じなので繰り返しは避けますが, システムやシナリオ面での不備や粗が目立つようです

では, このゲームは面白くないのでしょうか？ このゲームが駄作であれば, 私は当然ひとに勧めていません。当時から, 私はゲーマーを自認する方々に「とりあえずプレイしてみたら」と言うようにしています

本作の場合, 人のプレイを眺めるのではなく, 自分で体験することで何かを感じることができるはずです。何も感じないのであればそれで終わり。あなたには合わなかったということなのでしょう。システムに不満はあるかもしれないし, 場合によっては画面酔いすることもあるでしょう。重大なバグが２つあり, ゲームが詰んでしまうこともあるかもしれません。ですが, 忍耐強くゲームをクリアしてほしいと強く思います

プレイする前に一点。このゲームは主に日本語が使われています。正確には日本語以外にもいくつかの言語が使われていますが, 特に日本語のリスリングが重要になります。ムービー中に日本語音声が流れてきますが, 字幕は一切ありません。もし完全にこのゲームを体験したいと考えるのであれば, 日本語音声を字幕にしつつ理解できる程度には, 日本語を勉強することをおすすめします（現代では様々なツールがあるため, 日本語音声を字幕化することはさほど難しくないと思われます）

初めにこのゲームは奇作と言われているという話をしました。現代では多くのゲームがあり, それぞれに強い個性があります。その中でこのゲームだけがもっている個性を探すのは, 現代では難しいのかもしれません。ところで私がプレイした７年前, とあるゲーマーに勧められるがままに購入し, 以来ぶっ続けで１週間。頭を悩ませながらプレイした感想は「は？」でした。しかし, ゲームをクリアしてからずっと, このゲームのことがトゲとなり自分に刺さっているのを感じます

最悪も最善も, 体験して確かめてみてほしいと思います

“Wannin are—how should I put this—a human that has become half-object. There’s no other way to explain it. Well, then why are they called wannin? When someone becomes a wannin they have to keep thinking they’re no longer human, but an object; they must have delusions. If those delusions run out they’ll become an object instantly, and completely.

That is to say, continuing their delusions is proof that they’re half-human.”

Kowloon’s Gate is a game that I’ve been interested in since I first saw its name in a collection of PS1 isos. Feng Shui? The Kowloon Walled City? 4 discs named after the Four Symbols? It was immediately interesting to me, and only became more so after I saw images from the game. I only had good impressions, so how was the actual game?

Well, it’s good, there’s some issues, but no more than the average adventure game, and they don’t really bring it down too much. It’s really surprising how mundane the issues for this game are, all things considered: I’ve experienced more surreal gameplay issues in low-budget brawlers. A couple simple flaws you’ll observe early on: incredibly slow movement in the JPEG dungeons (the non-combat pre-rendered sections,) annoying specific dialogue flags in the JPEG dungeons that block off progress, and the navigator holding your dick so hard in the first real-time dungeon that you might as well not be exploring. The latter thankfully resolves itself after the first dungeon, since the later dungeons have more complex layout, but the former two remain throughout the game. Thank god Kowloon’s Front is destined to go to hell and die.

Anyway, the gameplay foibles for me were fairly minor. I can see people possibly being annoyed by the real-time dungeons since the gameplay is fairly basic (you attack weaknesses based off of wuxing,) and the dungeons are labyrinthine, but I thought they were a nice breather from meandering and dialogue-heavy JPEG dungeons. The main draw for this game is its story and art, so I’ll move to that now (well the story, I don’t have any ability to judge the art, besides saying I like it.)

I like the story of Kowloon’s Gate. A story, in part, about fate and destiny works very well with the linearity of an adventure game. Even if the protagonist changes every area they enter within the game, since you’re pretty clearly told what you need to do, it very rarely feels like something that you actually did of your own free will. The lack of puzzles might be a little disappointing, but it helps the story move along in several ways here: mainly, it allows for the game to go on philosophical tangents without much risk of the player getting too lost thinking about what it would be like to be an electric fan.

So, in effect I would say there’s two major aspects of Kowloon’s Gate story: the surface story you’re given at the beginning about restoring balance to the to worlds of Yin and Yang, and finding the Four Symbols, and then the more esoteric aspects like wannin, minli and so on. The former is effectively the vessel of the story, and the latter is the cloudy narrative liquid that resides within it. Part of one whole but distinct from one another, so the story ends up being simple and at the same time complex. Thematic! The general formula for the narrative is that you enter an area, scout around, find out there’s a problem, some guy hints that an item you got 1-3 hours ago can turn the problem into dust, some philosophy, some dungeon crawling, you find the problem and use said item to turn it into dust. Rinse and repeat until the end of the game.

Perhaps a little reductive, but it was a contrast I found difficult to ignore. For every bit like the start of this review, there’s another where someone tells you that the evil guy in your way is weak to wigs, and can be defeated easily if you have one. Personally, my favorite part of all of it was the wannin. Since being a wannin isn’t exactly a good or bad thing, you get a wide variety of wannin characters. Besides that, the wannin designs are interesting, and I like the odd metaphysical position the story places them in.

Anyway, that’s it for 2023 I suppose. Pretty good end to the year, maybe it’s for the best that I took a long ass time finishing this game.

Supplemental information for the initial quote: since wannin must have delusions (妄想) to live they are as a result, wannin.(妄人) The first character in the word for delusion+person. This is spelled out more clearly in the rest of the page past where I ended, but I preferred leaving it where I did.

Kowloon's Gate was sadly a little too dense for me. Not in the other senses of that word, but of layered and ornate. Overwhelmingly so for me -

For this is a game that boasts a cornucopia of influences - weird philosophy and psychology guys like Deleuze and Guattari, Carl Jung and the like; Not to mention steampunk, cyberpunk and according to this article (http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/kowloons-gate/) gothic architectural concepts. They wanted to create a whole new concept of "Asia Gothic" - very few games that I can think of have the ambition of creating a whole new aesthetic paradigm.

The game elaborates on the idea from Chinese spirituality - "Feng Shui". Of course, we might have the bastardized idea of Feng Shui which makes it simply a matter of modern interior design. Feng Shui is kind of about design - but not simply of furniture, and not simply about peaceful modern living. It's about arrangements on the Earth in general, and applied to Kowloon Walled City - finding meaning in dark and claustrophobic spaces full of suffering.

A game that tries to tackle the 'mystique' of this historical community, and does it in fantastical terms, seems to me pretty rare. The Kowloon Walled City of this game is a place where dark, sunless places are where everything is possible - not just in the optimistic sense, but in the sense of going beyond what is 'natural'.

It's a double-edged sword - Kowloon Walled City presented through this games wonders that a neon-lit, uncomfortably compact and self-contained city can nonetheless be deeply connected to some kind of possibility for our lives. What can a cramped room teach us, what is the poetry there? Even if it's that we float towards the sunlight, like shrimp. Yet it's far from romantic about these ideas - and this is the other side of it. It presents the problematic of Kowloon in a way I've never seen before. Nuanced, and only because it presents things in a fantastical lens.
Reading up on Feng Shui, and how it was intertwined with the architecture of the family unit (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feng_shui, under "expression of identity) and being used to analyze dualisms; I can also see the political side of it.

I'm grateful, because there is a translation team working on this game, and I've heard they are pretty much done with the translation part.
It's gonna be awesome.