In a game, let alone continuity, lousy with sharp, confrontational artistic direction, it’s one as simple as the back of the box that continues to work its way through me. It’s the illustration of Kusabi, Sakura, and Kosaka, in particular - Sakura’s exaggerated frown extends out of the image towards you while Kusabi and Kosaka converse around her. If you’ve played the game, you’re aware that this configuration can only happen in the events proceeding the finale (a massive torpedo-spoiler on the back of the box, funny!). By extension, this also means that the illustration is, to whatever degree, a reflection on the status quo after case#5:lifecut, i.e. the chapter of the game where everything boils over, a majority of the Transmitter cast straight up dies, and radical actions by the hands of the remaining cast occur.

I love this illustration for a few reasons - for one, Takashi Miyamoto captures a sense of mundanity so well. In game, you’re never really able to bear witness to a Kusabi at peace in ordinary life, and here he’s beautifully human in his pose - well-earned after his arc through the game. Secondly, through that same focus on the mundane lies a commentary on the dynamics these characters are engaged in. I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to imply that the gender dynamics put forth here can be seen as a disappointing reminder that leaving Kusabi (love ‘em as I do) as the sole surviving veteran of the HCU means that the same bitterness which ostracized Hachisuka, possibly enabling something within to give in to her inevitable death-filing and appearance as Ayame, is likely still in the air. But these observations pale, in my opinion, to the context.

As she continues ascending the 24th Ward’s crime department, after bearing witness to the very operation that almost(/successfully?) doomed her and the player character to a life of artificial personhood, and after witnessing the takedown of the two major antagonists of the game, Nezu and (eventually) Uminosuke, she still frowns at us, the player. Why? I thought danwa was a happy ending.

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TSC is one of few games I can think of that really eludes simple genre description. Sure, it’s a crime procedural, up until it isn’t. It’s a conspiracy thriller... in spots. It’s Lynchian surrealist dystopia? Alright we’re just gonna say words now, I guess? The only thing that comes to mind for descriptors is, like, slipstream fiction, which, given 25W references seminal proto-Cyberpunk novella The Girl Who Was Plugged In, seems apt enough to settle on. I won’t even evoke the P-word. The one that rhymes with “toast auburn.”

But really, this thought exercise is all just a veiled move to get you to wonder about the limitation of genre fiction as it applies to TSC, and poke at its aspirations. For this to be a standard crime procedural, you’d expect the HCU to... function in some capacity? And conspiracy thriller’s a no-go considering the weight that spirituality and all other intangibles have here, in my opinion. The way I’ll continue from this point to put it is thus: the Mikumo 77 incident, the murder of Kamui by the underworld factions, and the ensuing Shelter Kids policy reverberate through the story on many different frequencies, and the effect of it all is so bleak that only genre convention can make the discussion palatable as fiction. But it doesn’t always cover it: the melancholic, ambling work of Tokio through Placebo, the brain-swelling conflict of information in Transmitter, I think both serve as a reminder that there’s no easy out from underneath the sin of government control. It’s no surprise, I guess, that the symptoms get much, much worse when we return to Kanto in The 25th Ward.

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Kamuidrome thru danwa (and the equivalent reports from Placebo’s end) are so dizzying and hard to come to terms with that I have literally shaved my head since first playing this game. This is actually true! I have death-filed!

That said, I feel like an essential piece of advice I could give someone who’s in for their first time is to enact judgment on the information based on who and when it’s coming from. This is easy enough in some cases - I think most people are primed from birth to hate pedo-fascist Nakategawa enough to not mind his words. But even fan-favorite Kusabi, for instance... this entire game is a slow fade-to-white for him as he unlearns an entire ideology of criminality equating plague, one he’s enforced so much with violence, not just as a cop, but as a particularly fucked up cop. In the beginning, I wouldn’t blame you for sticking with the competent elder authority of the cast, but if the ending moments of Parade don’t convince you to question the prior chapters, then I don’t know what will. The state of this world can be figured out with relative certainty as long as you keep track of where you are in the game’s web.

Though deeply confusing (& not helped by a localization that I can only describe as “challenging” (no shade to Grasshopper James btw, I can only imagine trying to piece this together 😭)), this game masterfully tiers up its information in a way that makes the trek through the underbelly of the 24th Ward feel so uniquely haunting. While certain aspects (the bench-warming faction war at the batting center comes to mind) do feel a bit bizarre and maybe even underdeveloped as words on a (cyber)page, the thematic tapestry of this game is exceptionally rich, even among other lauded-for-thematic-richness games. I’m a lifelong MGS fan and even I have to admit that after coming to conclusions confident enough to type words about, I think we might be seeing a lunch-eating of unseen proportions.