CW: Murder, gun violence, child death, sexual violence, cannibalism, suicide, gore, eroticism of gore, knife violence, glorification of tragedy and crime, misogyny.
Updated version
Video version of this review

Preface

First, I would like to make abundantly clear this is a heinous work. On a surface level it is reprehensible. Digging into it makes every aspect of it worse. If it could only be played with a critical eye that would be one thing, but as I will get into this isn't just some curiosity to dissect.

The United States has had 27 school massacres since 1927. 16 of these occurred after Columbine. All but two were carried out with the use of firearms. Since 2000, there have been 388 school shootings in the United States.

Canada has had three school massacres ever (ignoring the genocide perpetrated by the Residential School system). One of these occurred after Columbine. It was carried out with a firearm. Since 2000, there have been 8 school shootings in Canada.

Japan has had one school massacre ever. It occurred on June 8, 2001. Eight children were murdered. All but one were girls. The perpetrator used a kitchen knife. There has never been a school shooting in Japan. There have been two multiple fatality shootings in Japan since 1952.

Potential

I think this is important to bring up because, from a Western and particularly an American perspective, school shootings are a dark reality that happens with shocking yet numbing frequency. The Onion's perennial publishing of their "No Way to Prevent This" article is testament to that. While it would be disingenuous to say school shootings have had no resonance in Japan, it is true that they have not happened there. The distance from tragedy lessens its emotional impact.

This is to say that, in a vacuum, Morimiya Middle School Shooting (MMSS) reads as intensely insensitive but not outright malicious. It is, in a vacuum, akin to Postal or Hatred, mimicking real world tragedy without outright reference to any specific event. An argument could even be made that there is some merit to MMSS in its commentary on the why of school shootings. The unnamed player character walked in on her mother's suicide, her father was an abusive alcoholic who disappeared. Her rage turns outward towards those who do not give her the attention she was missing from her parents. It ultimately manifests as a desire to commit murder after the game's fictionalised Japan reports on regional mass killings.

Like Super Columbine Massacre RPG, MMSS appears then to be a work which asks for a societal introspection alongside our abject horror. By not referencing a specific historical event, MMSS has the potential to make commentary without inflicting direct emotional harm. Its gamification and unnamed player character have the potential to instill a sense of being complicit with the act, as with Brenda Romero's 2009 board game Train. Even its arcade gameplay loop, high scores, and unlocks have the potential to increase engagement for some grand payoff of self-disgust that one would invest so much time into becoming good at murdering teachers and children. A part of me held out hope in my few playthroughs that there would be some message at the end of it all, that this glorification of violence would have a point. Instead, MMSS is closer to JFK: Reloaded. It teaches nothing. It has nothing to say. It exists to shock. It exists to hurt.

Play

On a technical and mechanical level, MMSS is something of a marvel. It is an RPGMaker game with gunplay. There is an undeniable element of strategy to it. Suffice it to say that every aspect of school shootings are on display here. If you have seen coverage of new schools in the United States being built to 'confuse and frustrate' school shooters, you can intuit how the prototypical Japanese school might facilitate mass murder with firearms and explosives. The player needs to slow down to increase their accuracy. I leave it to you to put two and two together. The unlocks amount to different weapons the player can use, as well as cheats. The player needs to manage the loaded ammunition between their weapons so as to not end up reloading while students wielding poles lunge at them to stop their advance. The player has a very strict time limit before the police arrive to arrest them. The player gets the most points for killing female students. None of this is particularly fun, even if it were removed from what it is depicting, but that it has been done on an engine meant for traditional JRPGs is impressive. That it is mechanically more than pointing and shooting is noteworthy. It is just barely engaging enough to warrant a couple playthroughs.

Precedent

Discussion of MMSS necessitates consideration of its creator and their niche. MMSS was developed by エリック aka erikku aka eric806359 aka kata235. They are an ero guro artist. Their depiction and obsession with the macabre is not in line with an H.R. Giger type, however. It comes across as more similar to the work of the Marquis de Sade. Reading through erikku's Twitter feed and scrolling through their Pixiv feels like trawling through The 120 Days of Sodom; it is a display of an amoral libertine.

Some choice textual excerpts from their Twitter (roughly translated):

"Drawing muscles makes me want to eat them."
"A touching coming-of-age story in which a young girl who has just lost her father gets a gun and grows up to be a splendid mass murderer."
"If I'm going to die anyways, I want the human race to perish while I'm still alive."
"I'm not a monster. Even for someone like me, I have human likes and dislikes. ...For example, what I love is 'Decapitation'"

I think you get the idea.

Their Pixiv is similarly naught but ero guro. Ero guro is not some 'release valve' for erikku, it is their sole purpose.

Perusal

Despite this, MMSS contains zero erotic elements. ConeCvltist stated in his review that MMSS probably exists for someone to get their rocks off. I think he is at once right and wrong in this assertion. Without explicit eroticism, MMSS is only a guro work, and thus cannot be said to be primarily for sexual gratification. However, it is also inextricable from its creator's main body of work. His illustrations of MMSS's main character are surrounded by nude women's stomachs being cut open, by school girls being strangled to death, of raw human flesh being consumed next to bare corpses. MMSS is not explicitly sexual, but it is implicitly erotic. The primary demographic is not you or I, but those already familiar with erikku's portfolio. And while not in the game itself, erikku has made numerous animations of the player character shooting school girls, their inflated chests jiggling, their panties digging into their crotches.

MMSS is unable to depict this level of fidelity for gore or lewdness in RPGMaker due to the rapid pace of gameplay. What illustrative art is present shows up in the introduction, endings, and when in the apartment at the start. For erikku's intended audience, however, those depictions don't need to explicitly exist within the game. One's familiarity with those short animation clips, those illustrations allows them to, in part, fill in the gaps during gameplay. In researching erikku and being exposed to the supportive art for MMSS, subsequent playthroughs have been marred by more accurate depictions of the violence and murder rendered in pixel form. Furthermore, I have seen that his illustrations and animation snippets are released in packs with other, non-MMSS related works of an ero guro nature. The mind fills in the gaps, the mind construes all of this as sexual.

Pang

In MMSS, during the news report on recent killings, one scene shows a middle school girl being escorted by police as her victims clutch their stomachs. This murderer committed their acts with a kitchen knife. They primarily targetted girls.

As mentioned at the very start, there has been one school massacre in Japanese history. It involved a kitchen knife. The perpetrator primarily targetted girls.

This is odious enough on its own, this unveiled allusion to the Osaka school massacre as tasteless as anything making light of the mass murder of children. erikku's fanbase will recognise this as a direct reference to his other game, Rouka de Onigokku (Tag in the Hallway). You sprint through hallways and stab students before you can be caught. It operates like an endless runner. The William Tell Overture plays the whole time. While MMSS references tragedy broadly, Rouka de Onigokku references it precisely. In MMSS one can even unlock use of a knife to carry out the game's mass murder in the same manner as Rouka de Onigokku's main character. It is despicable. It gets worse.

Perturbed

There is very scant documentation of MMSS on the English-speaking clearnet. I myself only came across it by chance on Backloggd. What I have found is deplorable.

Following the release of MMSS, erikku started answering fan questions on Twitter. Most of these are in Japanese, but some have been translated by erikku himself.

"Q: [...] how do you deal with negative feedback or criticism regarding the sensitive nature of 'taboo' nature of your art?
A: [...] I try not to care too much about negative feedback and so on :)"

"Q: [...] what do you use for inspiration before making a picture? Do you read about some real life murder cases?
A: I often read about real life murder cases, and watch a movie and TV series about murder. But I don't use anything for inspiration. I just draw what I want to draw."

His tweets continued in their perturbing statements. Above the aforementioned illustration of Rouka de Onigokku's main character, he writes "I was caught by the Thought Police and was temporarily suspended. It was caused by the cannibalism animation, but I think all the zombies are gone now. ...By the way, the situation in the picture is a very, very, very healthy illustration of a student playing a prank with ketchup and being taken care of by the police."

They also started answering questions on peing.net.

"I'm just painting 'imaginary violence against non-existent people.'"

"Murder, abductions, and transportation of body parts over long distances are very hard work, but it's better than repeating the incidents in a nearby area and narrowing the scope of police investigation towards you."

"I think there are various reasons why the culprit in Morimiya didn't commit suicide (including suicide by police). One of the goals is to know the suffering of the victims, including the survivors and bereaved families. It may also be the result of hatred towards the mother who took her own life. No matter how many people you kill, the hatred toward your mother, who took her own life and became a 'suicide statistic' cannot be cleared, but 'I won't die like that!' Is that the result of trying to persevere?"

"I have been drawing pictures of killing people since I was a child, but it was when I was a teenager that I start having interest in killing (anime) girls."

MMSS and Rouka de Onigokku are not just gamified depictions of perturbed minds. They are the machinations of a fucked up pervert. It gets worse.

Perverse

When looking up MMSS, one of the only results is the RPGMaker Fandom wiki. It provides the Google Drive link I got the game from. Far above that download link lies a link to the 'Official Discord,' with the blessing of erikku.

The rules for the 'Morityu Community Server' notably state the following:

"Rule 3. Don't be a weirdo. Keep edgelording to a minimum. If it's TMI, don't post it.
You can love seeing girls suffer all you want, just don't tell everyone, because nobody wants to hear about it.
Don't be that guy who idolizes mass shooters. It's cringe as hell and a sign that you should probably go outside for once."

"Rule 5. Do not talk about planning any mass murders or crimes of any form.
You may talk about previous cases of mass murder, but do not talk about the possibility of yourself or others committing crimes.
Even if you're not going to do it and are just posting it as a "what if", it is punishable by a ban.
This is the one rule you don't want to break."

The server is a cesspool of racism, homophobia, sexism, and generally making light of school shootings as a topic. Users have /k/ommando avatars and names and banners. They share gameplay clips and compete for high scores. They share links to movie clips of school shootings, they share DOOM WADs for school levels. They pontificate about whether or not women get aroused during shootings. They cheer for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, for police murdering black people. They hide behind the thinnest veneer of respecting Discord's ToS.

Searching for MMSS information led me to a danbooru post making light of the Christchurch mosque shootings. The artist's commentary notes the inefficacy of focusing on the victims of mass murder rather than the perpetrators themselves, particularly when those criminals understand how to effectively use the memetic nature of modern media.

It was also on that Fandom wiki I learned that the art room in MMSS has portraits of several school shooters. Real school shooters. If this is not glorification, I don't know what is.

The citation for that art room tidbit took me further still. A forum dedicated to Columbine and other school shootings and crimes. A thread titled Video games about Mass Murder. Users laud MMSS as one of the best games about mass murder. Avatars depict children holding guns threateningly. The Similar topics at the bottom of the thread ask what games school shooters played.

It's then I decided I had had enough.

Perpetuity

I wish there was a conclusion I could make here. Some hopeful message about erikku realising this is fucked beyond belief. That Discord being banned. The host of the Columbine forum shutting down.

There is no conclusion. There is no takeaway. This is revolting. Researching put knots in my gut. Writing evoked constant self-doubt.

I believe there is room for societal introspection on serious, challenging topics through games. But when the act of playing tragedy is not contextualised, is not condemned, then those games will function as just that, games. Tools for amusement, not for learning. Something to strategise about, not think critically about. A pedestal for amorality, not a mirror reflecting it.

Irredeemable.

Reviewed on Nov 01, 2022


19 Comments


1 year ago

You're my favourite writer on this site 😭

1 year ago

Absolutely stellar writing as per usual, and it's the kind of thought-provoking and smart review I wish I had written back when I talked about this game a year or so ago. Keep it up!

1 year ago

absolutely knockout piece!!!!

1 year ago

i would never even consider actually playing a game like this, but i'm grateful you did such a deep dive in the interest of exposing this awful shit and the dangerous creeps it is made by and for. this writeup should have a much bigger audience.

1 year ago

I would actually posit that this game is more pornographic than you say. Pornography is a notoriously strange word to define. I have my own definitions, of course. (Personally, I believe it is, in part, derived from being "prurient" -- causing a bodily response that is prioritized over aesthetics.) But in this case, I want to point Nguyen & Williams, who wrote an essay called "Moral Outrage Porn", and frame pornography in a different way. They recognize the use of the word in phrases like "food porn" or "car porn" not as aberrant. They term this as "generic porn". For Nguyen & Williams, pornography is in art "when it is engaged with for the sake of a gratifying reaction, freed from the usual costs and consequences of engaging with the represented content." Generic porn is sort of a supplement to an action. It can replace or enhance. (Whether or not the desire being gratified is good or bad is a whole conversation, and whether or not pornography can prevent action, or whether or not it encourages it, and so on... all that is a whole can of worms I won't get to.) We can look at the cheeseburger with out eating it, we can look at the porn star without having sex with them. And here, the player can engage with school shootings without pulling the trigger.

MMSS is, in fact, pornographic in this sense. Invariably by juxtaposition, as you say, but also in this generic sense. For an entire community of people, games like MMSS operate with the express purpose of gratifying impulses and simulating actions, but also never involving their realization. The absence of explicit sexual content in the immediate text doesn't take away this fact; in a way, it actually exacerbates it. Without the presence of sexual imagery to invoke an erotic reading, the only reading available to derive pleasure from it is in gratifying the desire to kill. It is, in a literal sense, murder porn.

1 year ago

@BeachEpisode Thank you 🥺 I hope to never let you down
@ConeCvltist I said it elsewhere but thank you for your kind words, and for posting your review in the first place so I wouldn't be alone in a sea of chuds and edgelords.
@Woodaba Thank you so much!!
@zenoslime Thank you, my hope is that detailing it this extensively will dissuade others from trying it, and that if they do they will at least understand its context and why some aspects of it are ineffable.
@vehemently Thank you for bringing this up:

I was reticent to label MMSS pornographic primarily because of the ambiguity of the term in contemporary culture. I do think you, and by extension Nguyen & Williams, are right on the money though, that this work allows a sort of vicarious experience of the act of mass murdering children. You're absolutely correct about MMSS on its own being pure murder porn. However, I'm of two minds as to whether or not it is extricable from its creator's eroticism of gore and murder. With its initial release as a work for erikku's circle of fans and fellow ero guro artists, that iteration of MMSS is undoubtedly intended to evoke the same (sexual) arousal as the surrounding body of art. With increasing distance from its 'intended' audience, MMSS is becoming separated from that eroticism by the day as the curious find it by happenstance rather than having it served directly to them. As such, I think it is indeed shifting towards murder porn without any sexual element, and the above mentioned Discord server and Columbine forum are a perfect demonstration of how it is steadily becoming known for its allowance of carrying out a deplorable fantasy.

1 year ago

If you let Beach down Santa Claus might end up coming to town early, and we can't be havin' that.

1 year ago

you brave, brave soul for looking into this holy shit

1 year ago

I get you. Essentially, the line between erotic porn and generic porn is being blurred here due to the catalog of the creator. And further due to the spread of the art, where that specific context is lost. It does the bring up the question, though, as to how the audience is sort of self-determining in that way. Like, what highlights this to me is the makeup of the Discord; the people who want to circle around this game tend to be of a certain ilk. I think we can agree that it's not incidental that the Discord is full of fascists. Those kinds of people are going to seek this sort of stuff out. So, by extension, is there an inevitability to this being recognized as pornographic? I don't really know, but it's puzzling. I'm just rambling, haha

1 year ago

"I believe there is room for societal introspection on serious, challenging topics through games. But when the act of playing tragedy is not contextualised, is not condemned, then those games will function as just that, games. Tools for amusement, not for learning. Something to strategise about, not think critically about. A pedestal for amorality, not a mirror reflecting it."
I wish there was a way to give a standing ovation via text

1 year ago

I really like how you structured this. The use of italicized bold text helps micro chapter and prime the reader for whats to be said. I'm glad to see your research resonated with a lot of people but I want to stress here to anybody reading the comments that the game is not nearly as interesting as the air of it being a cultural taboo would make it seem. The game is incredibly shallow and all you do is aim shoot and run around a bit with none of it feeling that particularly gratifying to people who've played a lot of games.

Maybe similar to a Modern Warfare game in that way :P

1 year ago

I gotta say: I hardly ever read. I get far too distracted for it most of the time. However, I've noticed that there are more than a handful of long-form writers that not only captivate my interest but engage with it. I know this might come as a big old shocker to you, but you're absolutely one of them. Dare I say, good shit, and aideu. aiudue? adieu. It's adieu. Damn it.

1 year ago

Thank you immensely for the kind words. I still feel a little icky shining a spotlight on this but I am at least glad it has been interesting and informative enough for there to be value in it.
i feel you n agree somewhat but you could've fit this into 2 to 3 paragraphs.
from what i've scanned tho this is interesting analysis that can get kinda "things are bad!!1 what is wrong with society!1" at times
personally i think the dude who created this is just an edgelord with ero-guro fetishes. i don't think he intends to actually do the shit he made. he's just one of the many teenage/20-something edgelords n chuds congregating in obscure forums n discord servers. i'm glad you decided to actually talk about the game and the impact it had on shit instead of just going on some rant about how edgelord shit exists.
@zn0 they aren't "creeps" lol. they're annoying edgelords and chuds. you sound like a soccer mom. get rid of that mindset.
the concerns understandable tho these people are weirdos

1 year ago

For posterity, here's what I have to say in response to the above comments, and the unsolicited messages I received from the above poster calling me puritanical, telling me to loosen up because "some people don't want to think critically about things they consume."

I appreciate the input, my intent with the Morimiya writeup wasn't to suggest erikku et al. are hardened criminals or anything, rather that his approach, political stances, and followers typify a certain class of edgelord which is seemingly innocuous on the surface but reflect deep-seated problems when analysed more indepth. I went into the review expecting to actually defend the game in many respects, but small things like the scissors and their connection to the Osaka Elementary Massacre set me down a path to figure out what was mere coincidence and what was deliberately offensive and fostering further harm. At the end of the day I don't really care whether or not people play something like Morimiya or erikku's other game, what I do care about is people writing it off as swill or brushing aside criticisms towards it as prudish.

This comment was deleted

1 year ago

For those interested, a video version of this review is now available here: https://youtu.be/Tlu1yMHnF-I

3 months ago

I don't know how in the hell I saw your video but completely missed this was on here, but I'll take the quick chance to say that this is an amazing piece, both written and in video form; I wouldn't be able to tackle this game beyond saying that it sickens me to my very core, but you go above and beyond when talking about, and the documentation work you do on this as well in many of your other reviews is one that is inspiring. I almost never have nothing that interesting to add, and this is one of those cases, but mainly 'cause you covered everything possible in an amazing manner; fantastic write-up

1 month ago

Updated version with images and new figures available on Bump Combat. https://bumpcombat.net/2024/02/10/mmss/