CW for discussion of systemic racism, blackface

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Responding to an inquiry about the seeming removal of the game from digital storefronts in August 2020, a representative from Her Interactive had the following to say:

“Thank you for your interest in Nancy Drew: Ransom of the Seven Ships. We have discontinued this game as there is a character who disguises himself as different ethnicities.

As a company, we are addressing the critically important issues of racism, inclusion, and diversity that Black Lives Matter has helped us all to place a spotlight on. Meaningful changes need to happen within companies, and we will continue to be a part of these changes. We are committed to being sensitive and respectful to people of color, and therefore have discontinued availability of this game.

We apologize for the inconvenience. Please consider another game from our collection.

Thank you for understanding!”

Now obviously gamers by and large did not understand and the majority of responses I could find to this were breathlessly, embarrassingly trying to explain why this character was not doing blackface and his portrayal was not racist, how this was a bad move that would hurt the company in the long run despite as far as I can tell this also being generally the least popular and most critically reviled game in the series, etc etc. But we’re not gonna spend a lot of time on that, it’s not news that there are awful gamers in all corners of the medium.

No, what I think is noteworthy here is how incredibly revealing this statement is about the failure of these games, and this company, to understand or grapple with actual material conceptions of things like race and class and how they relate to systems of power, and how the media we create reflects those understandings.

Because looking at this statement in a vacuum, right, it does feel less cynical and more genuinely well-meaning to me than the overwhelming majority of Corporate Responses To BLM, an absolutely rancid genre of company PR interaction. They didn’t make a big thing out of it, they didn’t try to cash in some good will, they didn’t make a public statement at all – they just quietly removed the game from sale, and this only came out as the reason when they responded directly to a customer’s private request. Hell, the only reason I know about this whole thing at all is because I tried to buy it, first from Steam, then from their website, and couldn’t and went searching, and stumbling into this saga. It’s just listed as “sold out” on their website, no note or anything. And I mean come on, it’s Her Interactive, they have very little to lose or gain here, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on this one, for better and worse.

But to look at the blackface in this game (which came out in 2009! Fuckin’ hell dude what the fuck), say “oh yeah that’s pretty bad we should just scrub that from history” and call it a day really reveals how shallow the thinking is here. Something that is very pointedly not mentioned directly in that statement is the way the most highly publicized protests of 2020 (which were not unified by a singular cause and despite what the news would have you believe never really petered out so to lump them together as a “BLM movement” feels weird because that’s not really a thing in the way The News talks about it) were direct responses to abuses of power by America’s police. This is important in the context of Her Interactive’s relationship with their art, right, because Nancy Drew as she’s presented in these games specifically is at the core of her a cop. She is deeply loyal to interests of the wealthy and the powerful. In every instance so far she has aligned with The Letter of the Law even when she would have good reason not to. They obviously don’t see it this way but in every game where issues of race and/or class and their conflict with the state or other hegemonic structures are front and center (The Final Scene, Secret of the Scarlet Hand, Creature of Kapu Cave, and to a lesser degree Treasure in the Royal Tower and The Phantom of Venice), Nancy comes out on the wrong moral side of things without fail and without ever questioning her conviction that she’s in the right, even when the system she’s working for is openly corrupt – which, it should be said, it is in LITERALLY each of these games.

I believe that this statement is an earnest apology for an uncritically racist act by a heretofore uncritically racist team, but it’s blackface lol. It’s the layup of apologizing for racism. It’s the easiest thing you could possibly self-identify as a mistake if you were looking through your past actions. It doesn’t convince me that there’s an understanding here of the colonial violence against the people of Hawaii, not only by governments but by corporations and gentrifiers. It doesn’t make me think they really understand why it’s fucked up to have the game about the US government conspiring with a famous museum to steal indigenous cultural artifacts from Mexico and then grossly undercompensate them when their government is rightly mad about it ends with the Mexican consul arm in arm with the people who are robbing his nation, sharing a laugh and applauding Nancy’s puzzle solving ability despite the situation being essentially identical to where it was when we started. It doesn’t give me faith that they understand that the wrong guy went to jail at the end of The Final Scene.

I understand that this isn’t what these games are, there’s a degree to which this isn’t what these games would ever be allowed to be, and these are issues that the entire genre deals with. I also understand that media can’t and shouldn’t be a moral barometer that perfectly reflects an idealized version of my own morality for me to gratify myself with. I’ve never expected or really wanted that from these games, and I’ve generally really enjoyed my time with them, ridiculous, occasionally evil politics and all. But when the developer is taking actions like removing a game from sale and directly citing real social movements to customers with a stated intent of critically examining their own work and promising to be more responsible with their content in these specific ways, it’s hard not to want to hold them accountable. This isn’t to say that I want them to go back and strike all of their racist games from store shelves – it’s only to say that I am incredibly curious to see what the future of this franchise might look like if A. any more Nancy Drew games ever even come out at all (given the relatively well documented behind the scenes troubled the studio has faced since 2015, this is in serious doubt) and B. whether the modern Her Interactive would even attempt to address subject matters approaching their thornier entries in the early canon. This statement was made in 2020, and the last Nancy Drew game was released in December 2019 to turgid reception with not a peep on anything coming down the pipe since then, so we may never know.

So that leaves us with Ransom of the Seven Ships, the blockbuster twentieth entry in the Nancy Drew cyber mystery saga. ASIDE FROM THE THING, how is the rest of the game, you ask?

It fucking sucks dude. It’s one of the bottom five dirt worst video games I’ve ever played. When we talked about Creature of Kapu Cave I was like wow this game is fucking boring and nothing happens and the puzzles suck shit and it’s racist and the story is stupid trash and I feel like I owe that game and apology because this is in a lot of ways Just That Again but Worse lol.

Nancy, Bess, and George win a free vacation at an island resort, Nancy has to do rich people shit with her dad and arrive a day late, when she does George is like “yo Bess got KIDNAPPED and they’re holding her RANSOM” and the kidnapper is like “you have to solve this island’s secrets and bring me the treasure if you want to get your friend back” and that’s it. It’s back to the semi-open structure of Blackmoor Manor which I generally dislike but has seen greater success in more recent entries (Phantom of Venice did it too and that game rules, for example), except here’s the big kicker: there aren’t any characters in this game. The only person on the island besides George and Nancy is The Guy Doing Blackface, so like, yeah, of course he’s the culprit. He is literally the only other character in the entire game. They REALLY try to make you think it’s the owners of the resort who are themselves on vacation somewhere else but, again, they are not in the game. So given that there is only this one guy to interact with, you spend most of your time doing Chores for him (another bad sign for one of these) and doing tedious minigames over and over with the other denizens of the island, mischievous and intelligent monkeys who have trained themselves to play various boardgames, and are voiced by Lani Minella, the voice of Nancy, who also voiced the annoying parrot in Blackmoor Manor, and also oh yeah, there is another parrot she voices in this game, except I could not figure out a way to get a game over by killing it this time, so that also sucks. I guess Lani Minella just really likes doing these voices? I dunno man.

Everything is so monotonous, so stretched out, separated by a wind waker-esque sailing minigame where you’re at the whims of randomized wind currents, forced to repeat the same minigames and puzzles multiple times, fetching back and forth between George and Blackface Guy for scraps of nothing because there’s no mystery because there are no characters to bounce off of or investigate. Occasionally you will have to switch perspectives and play as George will usually have to repeat whatever you just did as Nancy, so that’s fun. There’s nothing here, nothing to latch onto, no joy to be had, none of the little flourishes or charms that make this series stand out. What should be a celebratory milestone (20 games!!) would be a disgraceful flop even without the overtly racist stain it leaves on the series.

And speaking of that, to really kick me in the teeth personally, Blackface Guy turns out to be our first returning villain, the bad guy from the second game, Secrets Can Kill, and once he stops doing an offensive Jamaican voice and takes off his makeup he immediately reverts back to that unhinged persona and for three glorious minutes I got to bask in Dwayne Powers again. Cannot believe they brought the best Nancy Drew voice actor back and THIS is what they did with him.

Jesus fucking christ, Her. What were you thinking.

PREVIOUSLY: NANCY DREW DOSSIER - LIGHTS, CAMERA, CURSES!
NEXT TIME: NANCY DREW DOSSIER - RESORTING TO DANGER

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES

Note. There are many quotations. In addition, there are many proper nouns and anecdotes about Japanese culture. And this is just my theory. This is not a complete account of the Mother series, and you may not enjoy reading it. The most important thing I wanted to say was part of "2", so if you can't be bothered to read a long text, please skip it.
Well, OK desuka?

MOTHER/EARTHBOUND BEGINNINGS
Itoi Shigesato' main inspiration for creating MOTHER was Dragon Quest.
Programme broadcasted on NHK Educational TV
INTERVIEWER - What was your motivation for making games?
ITOI - It's Horii-san's fault.

Before the release of MOTHER1, In a conversation with Yuji Horii, he talks at long length about how impressed he was with DQ.

*July '87 Advertising Review - Special Feature: The Great Famicom Study
ITOI - I've just started the second round of DQ2.
HORII - You like it. (Laughs)
ITOI - I changed the prince's name to "wee-wee". It's funny. Like, "My wee-wee took a beating." (Laughs), Like, "But what is this, brave wee-wee? Defeat do ill become you!", hilarious.*
Shigesato Itoi speaks happily.
The look on his face and the words he said were hardly those of a man over 30. In the NES game boom of the time, many TV personalities only submitted their plans and threw away the production itself. (Takeshi Kitano and Samma Akashiya are typical.) In contrast, Itoi did his best to make MOTHER. The essence of Dragon Quest has been sublimated in Itoi's style, bringing to fruition the world and adventures he envisaged.

MOTHER2/EARTHBOUND
The world Itoi envisages
I think there are many good things about the MOTHER series. Among them, I think many people like Itoi's unique humorous texts and his "world view”. The following text explores what lies at the heart of him humour and worldview.

MOTHER has the same auxiliary line all the way from 1 to 3.
There is, of course, the main line, Shigesato Itoi. We will now talk about what drew the lines of the world that Shigesato Itoi envisaged. On the whole, the world of 1 and 2 has many optimistic and Pollyanna side. That's why the horror of Moonside in the middle of the game and the last boss, Giygas, stand out so much. 3 was the opposite of 1/2, with a story that emphasized the darker side. The story of what that auxiliary line is, is at the core of this review.
Let's be frank. I mean, it's 落語/Rakugo.

What is "Rakugo"?
There are many different interpretations, and as I am not as well educated as Itoi, I will rely on the definitions of the Rakugo professional. 立川談志/Tachikawa Danshi. A master Rakugo storyteller who has been called a heretic in the world of Rakugo.
Danshi's Rakugo philosophy is that "Rakugo is an affirmation of human karma”. In other words, "Rakugo is a form of storytelling that acknowledges human weakness and stupidity, and depicts this humanity.” And, "Rakugo is the affirmation of non-common against common sense.” Last, he goes so far as to say.
"Anything that doesn't smell of Vice I don't enjoy as an 芸/art form."

Specific examples
A boss who cautions his subordinates but falls asleep with a pen in his hand.
A father who scolds his children for wasting money, but gambles himself into oblivion.

Example sentences
My neighbors' wife had an accident and her face was injured!
Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.
Then, a good doctor restored her face to its original state!
Oh, so you're back to normal? Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.

A case study of my own as I write this.
Me - "Mr. K, you always lie like you breathe!"
K-san - "Thanks to you I can't breathe!"
Me - "...I lost."

A scene from an online program. It's a low-key show with just two people: a scholar with a PhD in political science and the show's host. The scene is a commentary on the current news with the expert knowledge of the scholar.
Moderator - "O-san, You know a great deal about political science!
Dr.O with a bitter smile, paused for a moment and then said, "A little."

During the first bombing of London in 1940, part of a department store had been destroyed. The next morning a large sign was erected at the entrance, which read: 'Entrance extended from today'.

A foreign joke I learned recently that I thought was similar to Rakugo.
A word to Scotland, the only UK to lose at the 2019 Rugby World Cup.
'Brexit achieved.'

Lately I have been reading a little bit of Don Quixote, and I felt smell the Rakugo in it too. Putting them side by side, they seem to be no different from jokes from abroad. (laughs)

MOTHER3
In Japan, 3 is not so popular compared to 2.
There is also the fact that the SNES is a legendary piece of gaming hardware compared to the GBA. But in the end, the conclusion is that the Japanese do not like dark stories. I think it's natural that people prefer to watch light-hearted and funny programmes rather than serious political dramas.
And, from what Itoi has said in conversations, he did not intend to make 3 as universally popular as 1/2 when he planned it.
*
https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm5093966 (Probably the content of this video has not been translated into English.)
32:00~
ITOI - "It's like brother/eldest son who died in the war. I mean, there was a war. World War II, for example. He died on a kamikaze pilot. And eldest son's wife is a fan of MOTHER1/2. And MOTHER3 is eldest son's young brother. The mother of the eldest son, who was killed in the war, was living with his wife, and on one occasion said to her: ‘His brother is single too, why don't you marry him?'
Its young brother is MOTHER3. I mean, eldest son was really kind. He's manly, he's heartwarming, I can't say enough! Perfect!"
IJŪIN - "When people reminisce, they say, 'he was a good man!'"
ITOI - "If we had a お通夜(Otuya. Is that the English word for wake? Finnegans Wake) every day, we have a drink every day! In this context, the young brother says, 'Marry me'. That's what it means to bring MOTHER 3 into this world."
IJŪIN - "Why do you take the trouble to use such a confusing analogy?(laugh)"
*
MOTHER3, Shigesato Itoi, human beings, karma
Shigesato Itoi is Ninten/Ness/Lucas, Phone Papa/Flint, Giygas, Fassad and Porky.
He is never perfectly good. He was such a militant student activist that he was arrested by the police five times. And he is a man who had an affair and married his partner. (I writes things that would be very difficult to write in Japanese. Well, forgive me, Itoi-san, because it's public information that you can find on the internet.)
When talking about the Fassad, Itoi refers to Shinran's "Tannisho".
*
http://mother3.fobby.net/interview/m3int_10.html
Itoi Actually, I haven't really prepared any answers about Fassad. So if you really want to know the answer, I'd like you to read the Tannisho and think it over.
[omitted]
- And that's where the mouse who's attached to Fassad comes in.
Itoi That's right. So MOTHER 3 might not appeal as much to people who can't enjoy gray areas. They'd just want to demand that characters are either good guys or bad guys. (laughs)
*
Itoi himself can be interpreted in terms of Tannisho, and so can I as I write this. And what about you? Perfectly good? Perfectly evil?
It is human nature to oscillate between these two extremes, and it is also human nature to continue to suffer from them. The theme of MOTHER 3 is pranks," says Itoi.
*
https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm5093966 75:00~
ITOI - "As long as you have good and evil fighting each other, it's not interesting whether good wins or evil wins. What I like best is that it's funny. What would happen if everything in the world was based on good values alone? You can't live. I can't live either. On the other hand, we don't want the Sex Pistols to rule the world. I mean, you're enjoying classical music on one side of the room, but 'Poop!' or ‘Anarchista!', then the people who are just enjoying the music will lose their position."
*
So how can we overcome these polar opposites of good and evil? That is "Rakugo".
Danshi's definition of Rakugo, "the affirmation of human karma”. If I were to rephrase this into a word that even a person with no Rakugo education could understand, it would be "しょうがない/shouganai”. It is a Japanese word that is difficult to translate into English. Or, to put it another way, "That's life” or "That's human.” this is it?
In other words, we should try to forgive ourselves and others as much as possible for our inability to do so with a single word: "shouganai".
"To err is human, to forgive divine."
This is what the poet Alexander Pope wrote. I do not know what A. Pope’s intentions were when he wrote these words. But I feel that we are looking in the same direction as Rakugo.
Well, it's not as simple as that, and that's the REALITY.

MOTHER4
Either there is a MOTHER 4 or there isn't!
*https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm5093966 98:00~
ITOI - "There is no MOTHER 4! FOOOO!" (He's imitating a comedian who was popular at the time.)*
*https://twitter.com/itoi_shigesato/status/1356435755292266496
Once again, I think you can see that there will never be a "MOTHER 4". It's each (points at) your job!*

In fact, MOTHER 4 has already been made.
Undertale, LISA, Yume Nikki, OMORI. In some ways, the Pokémon series may be the most famous MOTHER4.
They are MOTHER 4 if you look at the many children of MOTHER being born. If you say that MOTHER without Shigesato Itoi is not MOTHER, you are right, but MOTHER4 can be made without him. If you want to get the unique humour of MOTHER, I think the above text is the small answer. I hope this will be of some help to you.

That's all! Happy New Year. This is my New Year's gift(お年玉/Otoshidama) to you.



THIS IS! TRULY! THIRD STRONGEST!!!

Hard DNF. I made it I think eight hours in, which is more than this game could ask for. Everything I could reasonably say I liked about this one comes down to “production value” plus the basic hook of “Final Fantasy with four dudes in a car.”

In that sense, the thing I can most fairly compare this to is X-2, the “girls rule” Final Fantasy to this one’s “dudes rock” Final Fantasy, and a game that also wound up pissing me off. X-2 had some of the same flaws at this—it only has one real character and the other people have nothing going for them other than “they’re her friends,” and it’s full of minigame chaff. But X-2 at least tries to make an argument for itself early on (“it’s showtime, girls”) whereas XV’s equivalent gambit is the smarmy “Stand By Me” scene, which just doesn’t cut it.

Mostly this game wants you to marvel at how big and expensive it is. Like many open world games, it’s very aesthetically focused on things that look good from a distance, which mostly means interesting rock formations. The main characters are also designed like rock formations, and have about as much personality. I don’t really begrudge them doing the broad archetypes of “nerd, jock, funny guy, main guy,” but generally in the “adventuring party” genre it’s considered polite to have all the party members experience conflict or interact with the story in some way. FFXV doggedly refuses to do this. Several hours in, all I had was that one of the characters had a sister, but then once I met the sister the sister only wanted to interact with the main guy. (It’s funny that the most solipsistic Final Fantasy game I’ve played is also the only one where the POV character is royalty.) As for the main guy, he has a bland-on-purpose personality for the player to project himself onto, and the main bit of character intrigue is that it’s unclear how he feels about his maybe-cancelled arranged marriage to “Lady Lunafreya,” a sort of soft Yuna figure who pops up for a little twenty-second aside every couple hours of gameplay, hanging around in some sort of foreign land and doing Yuna stuff. When I stopped playing, the game was teasing a love triangle, which I’ll grant was more interesting than anything else going on. The third vertex on the triangle was the aforementioned sister: she told me she loved shopping, and I was given the options “Act Interested” and “Act Uninterested,” and when I picked “Act Interested” I got 250 EXP. Presumably it was the right choice. If you hooked me up to electrodes, that scene was probably the most my brain chemistry spiked during the whole time I played that game. It used to be that you could play a whole array of games along those lines on Flash right on your browser!

I’ve only really played a handful of big-studio games released since I got out of college and read Infinite Jest and realized I should try and do stuff I enjoy instead of stuff that sucks. But based on this one, it strikes me that the purpose of games now is to generate content that you can share on social media to create free advertising for the game. The ideal way to do this is to create a very beautiful game with lots of interesting emergent-narrative events that won’t necessarily happen the same way for all players, and then stacking on some cool sharing tools. But if you don’t have faith in either your game or your player base, you have another option, which is to create a lot of content that’s meant to /look/ like emergent narrative but is actually totally uninteractive and scripted, and then simply hand the player the content to be shared. So, for instance, you see a clip on Twitter of four Final Fantasy boys in the middle of a field in search of an ore deposit—a Garnet stone, which one can imagine has some interesting crafting applications. They approach the indicated spot on the minimap, and—whoa! A giant bird! The size of a house! Luckily, the bird is asleep. The player, wisely, goes into a crouch and walks slowly around the bird. He grabs the ore and heads back to the road. As soon as he does, the bird rouses itself and takes to the skies, passing overhead on the way to another part of a map, and luckily not bothering the player. What a close shave! And the player was able to get all these cool screencaps of the whole event. Neat! Anything can happen in the wild world of Final Fantasy XV, right?

Wrong. In fact, the episode I just described is an early main-story mission. A guy who is both a journalist and a jeweler blackmails you, the Prince, into collecting a garnet for him. He marks on your map the only space in the world where you can find a garnet deposit. You go there, encountering no combat on the way, and the game has placed the giant bird there. You don’t have to do anything to start sneaking around the bird—the game decides that for you. It doesn’t seem like there’s any way to actually wake the bird. Getting the rock and heading out is trivial. Then, when you’ve reached the road, the game triggers for the bird to wake up and automatically pans the camera so you can see it pass overhead. You go back to the car and drop off the rock. In exchange, the journalist / jeweler promises to give you a ferry ticket, but makes you go to sleep first. In the morning you decide not to take the ferry due to unrelated plot events. This is what passes for a “game” now.

Now, of course I didn’t take any screen caps to share this wonderful event, because I was bored to tears the entire time. Luckily, the game has me covered! The funny guy, Prompto, has the “special skill” of photography, and he makes sure to document my journey for me. Every time I turn in for the night, he shows me all the cool pictures he took of my wonderful adventures in the world of Final Fantasy! And every time, about two thirds of these are pictures of cutscenes, which are presumably exactly the same for every single player doing the same quests. (Pictures taken during combat are usually visually incoherent, just as combat is visually incoherent… but we’ll get there). Nonetheless, I am given an option to share these photos on the social pages I have linked to my PS4, so everyone knows what a fun time I’m having playing Final Fantasy XV.

These games are designed around stuff that looks good from a distance. The idea of a Final Fantasy game where you drive a car around looks good from a distance, because driving a car around is famously one of the most fun things you can do in a video game. Of course, the game doesn’t want to ruin Prompto’s photographs by letting you drive over the line, so it pretty much railroads you during the driving sequences (and, for an early stretch of the game, forces you to put the car on autopilot while Ignis drives). Nevertheless, the game insists that some sort of gameplay is happening, even when it clearly isn’t. The last story quest I made it through was called “A Dubious Drive.” My mission was to follow a guy who was setting up a meet between me and some sort of imprisoned God (presumably this would have been explained better later). He intoned, just as if he were explaining a GTA mission, that I wasn’t to get too close to him, because it might cause an accident. But /also/, I didn’t want to let him out of my sight, because then I’d get lost on the road. I was not allowed to let Ignis drive; this was a challenge I would have to endure alone. Throughout the drive there was a big flashing warning on the screen: “IF YOU LET [I already forgot this dude’s name] OUT OF YOUR SIGHT, THE GAME WILL END.” I pressed the accelerate button continuously and made two turns and then was directed to press “X” to pull in to a rest stop. The quest was completed and I was awarded experience. The story then commanded me to go to sleep, and then Prompto showed me three photographs of cutscenes.

Well, all Final Fantasy games have minigame chaff, you will say. It is the way of things. What about the combat? What about the combat, indeed? At some point in the mid-2000s ten million guys, their MKULTRA programming triggered by a scent deployed in the upper atmosphere by crop-duster planes, had the same observation all at once: “RPGs are boring. You just press circle to decide who to attack? Where’s the game?” From that day on, traditional RPG combat was considered retro. The age of the action-RPG had begun. In an action RPG, instead of pressing circle and selecting who to attack, you press circle and the game selects who to attack for you. But then there’s a fluid, “cool” looking animation of the attack, so it looks sort of like an action game in trailers or in screencaps.

What’s weird is that right around the time the one million gamers had their great revelation about RPGs being boring, Square created two incredibly fun action RPGs twice in quick succession: first with the original Kingdom Hearts, and then a few years later with The World Ends With You. If you squint, every mechanic in this game has an analogue in Kingdom Hearts: you have a little D-pad controlled menu in the bottom of the screen that lets you cycle through different spells and attack options, you are encouraged to “lock on” to enemies before attacking, and you have NPCs who you can direct around and occasionally exploit for a combo attack. Kingdom Hearts maintains most of the qualities of a good RPG—you can customize your play around different styles; different enemies require different strategies; and it’s immediately, brightly apparent on the screen what the consequences of a given action might be—while also providing fun reflex challenges and making you exploit space on the fly in a way typical of good action games. it also has well calibrated difficulty, with multiple modes for players of different skill. You would think that having mastered this genre over a decade ago, Square could come up with an analogous system for their flagship franchise that didn’t play like the Mama Bear’s cold porridge.

You’d be wrong! It’s difficult to express how little I felt like I was playing a game the entire time I was playing FFXV’s combat system. Apart from the way-too-strong giant monsters dropped cheekily on the map so you can run away from them (they never seem to chase you, so this is not really a source of tension), all strife in this world can be solved by holding circle and closing your eyes. If you see your health getting low (one of your friends may helpfully say “Noctis, you’re not looking too hot!” in case you get too bored to look at your health bar) you can pop a potion, which you can always do with no time delay, so you don’t have to worry about mistiming it and getting finished off before you can heal. Occasionally there are little QTEs, or, well, the same one over and over: the game will tell you to press square, and then tell you to press circle, and sometimes this causes you to block and parry an attack, but usually you or the monster has incidentally wandered out of attack range before the prompt resolved and it turns out to be a false alarm. There are other things you can do—spells, companion abilities, “Warp Strikes,” various weapon switch-outs, a plot-relevant thing where you can summon holy weapons and spend HP to use them—but none of it feels very different or has measurable consequences on what’s going on. I found myself judging these things by not letting my various bars overfill: if I’m fill up on the little green bar, I let one of my friends take an attack at random; if I’m full up on elemental energy, I make a very powerful spell and use it at the beginning of the next fight; if one of my friends yells “Noctis, DON’T use that weapon! The enemy is STRONG against it!” I switch to another one at random.

It’s almost never clear how many enemies are on the field, partly because of the camera and because they tend to spawn in waves but mostly because most of the monsters are a tangle of dark grey limbs and all of the dungeons are dark grey caves and you are playing as four dark grey lads and the camera doesn’t reliably stay around Noctis instead of the other ones, so I sometimes lose track of which gray blob I am, although it doesn’t matter, because as long as I keep holding circle, the fight will be over in a couple minutes. After almost every fight I am awarded a score of “A+.” I tried making the game harder by avoiding sidequests and going into a plot dungeon underleveled, but it just made the fights longer and more Potion-intensive, and I still wasn’t spending healing items faster than I was getting them.

I happen to love traditional JRPG combat, although I’m not a stickler. I like gameplay in Fallout 3 well enough. I liked Skyrim’s a bit less, but it had odd moments of glory every now and then. I didn’t much like FFXII with its “you don’t have to press any button at all” system, but the mechanics there felt intuitive and meaningful so when I non-interactively walked my PCs through a dungeon I at least knew what was going on and why it mattered and could feel some sort of satisfaction. The World Ends With You was a game where it was almost impossible to understand what was going on, but that one was both overwhelming and hard, and made it rewarding to try and figure out some combination of street fashions and stylus taps that made the bad guys go away. I even got really into the awful brain-intensive deckbuilder system in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. FFXV is just shitty mush. I got excited for a bit when it dropped some Flans on me, thinking I would have to do something on-purpose in order to exploit the Flans’ elemental weaknesses, but then I found it was easier to just hold circle and kill them with my sword. I thought I noticed the little damage numbers turning a different color, indicating that my attack was either strong or weak against them, but they didn’t seem to take any more or less time to kill than any other enemy. Ah well. Final Fantasy used to be my favorite game series. But “They have passed like rain on the mountain / Like wind in the meadow / The days have gone down over the hills into the west / Into shadow” I guess.

There’s an initial wave of disappointment here when you realise it’s mostly a value-rebased model/sprite/palette/layout swap of the retail Ocarina of Time rom, but that quickly gives way to a discovery that there’s been significant-enough fuckery with Link’s movement options and item pool to make this worth playing for way more than 10 minutes.

Only True OoTHeads will care about ideas like “what if you could manually control Link’s jump attack with two button presses?” or the ability to passively block while still running, but for those of us who know this game like the Triforce on the back of our hand, it’s just neat to have manual oversight of things like whether Link carries his shield in his off-hand or on his back. I ended up spending a hell of a lot more time just doing the classic Forest Temple Stalfos fight with the new (old, I mean…) control scheme than actually visiting beta map layouts of Kokiri Forest.

Would love for this mod team to refine Beta Link’s handling a bit and then stick him and his new magic spells into the v1.0 finished product for some kind of Ocarina of Time: Professional Edition hack that challenges your ability to make use of these refined gameplay raiments. Why wasn’t this stuff in the final game already, I wonder? I can only guess that Nintendo wanted to simplify things for players of all abilities, at the expense of some finesse that veterans of the 3D Zeldas would no doubt love to have back now. Kinda ironic that an attempt at niche nerd nostalgia for a prototype that was too rough to release ends up feeling like a natural forward progression of the final release candidate… Makes you wonder what wonders we could find in the uberblocky/janky Zelda 64 build.

Also just incredibly pleasant to have a debug menu that lets you load between N64 Hyrule vistas in a matter of seconds. I got to walk around the Chamber of Sages and talk to them! Wild horses roam free on the fields! Awesome!! Check it out!!!

Many years ago, Dara O’Briain did one of the only good standup routines about video games. Video games, O’Briain argued, are the only entertainment medium that actively tests the observer, withholding their content behind challenges of mentality and dexterity. Albums, television shows and films will carry on regardlessly from the moment you press play; sections of a book that prove hard to read can be flipped past; but challenging sections of a game have to be bested or even mastered in order to progress. Want to see what happens next in Dark Souls, but can’t beat the Capra Demon? Too bad. Heard that Through Time and Space is one of the best video game levels ever, but can’t grapple with The Witcher’s inventory management and combat systems? Tough shit.

While there’s an amusing honesty to the bit, it kinda belies an uncomfortable truth about video games - that the parts where you’re moving the joysticks are likely to be the only moments of intellectual stimulation that most video games have to offer, with cutscenes more or less functioning as rewarding soap opera spectacle. It’s hard to discuss this kind of thing without sounding like a wanker, but it’s just a fact that even prestigious “adult” game-fiction like The Last of Us or God of War still rarely stirs anything more than an acknowledging “huh” in the players who’ve deigned to step outside the cultural borders of electronic entertainment and other mainstream media. Games narratives still tend to rely on cinematic cutscenes to convey information and drama, and most of the time said information or metatext is barely worth parlaying to the player - $10 million spent on comic book writers telling us “man is the real monster” or “depression is bad”. At their very best, our prestige video games are still just doing replicas of better movies.

killer7 differentiates itself from this convention in a number of ways. It’s a game that makes no concessions for those who expect a linear, event-driven narrative, peppering weirdo pseudo-plot and thought throughout map layouts, door keys (ever thought about what the Soul Shells are?) and helpful hints from dudes in gimpsuits who are prone to taking left turns into Baudrillardian philosophy while directing you to the bathroom. Textual and subtextual ambiguity reigns supreme. The gameplay (on Medium, at least) is unlikely to challenge the player all that much - aside from a few head-scratcher puzzles, it’s more or less a case of walking from point of interest to point of interest to open doors and shoot zombies. And, in a strange inversion of the problem outlined above, it’s the cutscenes and character dialogues that will tax a player’s brain far harder than anything that involves clicking buttons.

I think killer7 is a work of profound ridiculousness. Or ridiculous profundity. Something like that, anyway - I’m not quite sure of the precise term I need here, but I think Suda and Mikami are pulling from the playbooks of guys like Thomas Pynchon and David Lynch with this game - keep throwing potentially meaningful ideas and images at the screen, both within and outwith the realm of the cutscene, and let the true ones stick - the viewer will be too busy grappling with the good to remember the bad. It’s a technique that surprisingly few games dabble in, despite the supernatural properties of the medium and the obnoxious, inhuman lengths that most games require a player to play for.

So what are the good images here? Well, I guess it’s a function of the temporal, political and personal preferences of the player. Like abstract paintings, surrealist movies and post-modern novels, killer7 is wholly open to interpretation through your own kaleidoscopic lens. Unlike most game narratives that more or less bluntly prescribe a story and some associated themes (if any at all), killer7, like most Suda games, seems content to spray blood against the walls and do some interactive Rorschach testing with your psyche. Sure, there’s talk of American-Japanese relations and terrorism and borders and killers and the valise of our personae, but there’s nothing proscriptive or particularly didactic here - it’s more or less a presentation of post-9/11 realities that the player is asked to order and interpret as they see fit; a balancing act of feelings versus facts in opposition with fictions. Hand in killer7, the companion book for killer7, even (deliberately?) contradicts the facts of its own reality within the first ten pages - as if to highlight how pointless an endeavour Making Sense of it All is, especially in our Fukuyama/Fisher-influenced End of Capitalist-Realist History-Present.

By complete coincidence, I played through this game in parallel with the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, and finished it on the same day she was convicted - so Target 03: Encounter (Part 2) - where the Killer 7 head to an Epstein-pre-Epstein prescient-simulacra of Little James Island to take out an organ trader and implied child molester - held particular relevancy to me. The Jeffrey Epstein case and its relevant co-conspiracies are probably the best examples of what I’m prattling on about above - get ten, twenty, or a hundred people in a room together, and you’ll probably get a hundred interpretations of what the inner sanctum of Epstein’s reality really was - a whole smoothie bar of blended facts, news, fake news, Facebook news, speculation, fiction, fact and fuck knows what else. killer7 is often lumped together with The Silver 2425 as part of the “Kill the Past” series, and I think this info-meld of history in the melting pot of public consciousness is one of the chief relationships the games have with each other. Ironic that games about removing the past would so thoroughly realise the future of our present.

How did Suda51 know that the word’s top players would conspire to send an assassin after a sanctioned private ally of the United States government, a living evil who trafficked young girls with both personal and ulterior purpose? And how did he know a global pandemic would (temporarily) return humanity to a road-faring race? As is often suggested with Suda51 (see also: The Silver Case, No More Heroes) he may be one of gaming’s top producers of prophetic works. “Prophetic media” has been in vogue since March 2020 - references to media-elite paedophile rings in mid-2000s Nickelodeon cartoons; references to coronavirus in mid-2010s K-Dramas; references to Tom Hanks getting sick in mid-1990s episodes of The Simpsons. Wow! How do they pull it off?! Well, as with killer7’s imagery, I think it may be down to volume of produce rather than accuracy of content. The Simpsons is able to predict so much shit correctly because every ‘incorrect’ prediction isn’t even recognised as a prediction until it comes close to resembling some form of the truth we want it to be. The same applies to the images that Grasshopper’s games create.

Is this the secret to making remarkable, meaningful art and cultural commentary? Just keep producing, producing, producing until your images become resonant by virtue of the typewriter-monkey principle? That’s maybe underselling what Grasshopper achieved here - the foundations killer7 are built upon are more or less rock-solid. The cel-shaded mono-colour aesthetic is timeless, and the chosen palette for each Target is fittingly eerie. The control system, while initially awkward, is ultimately a solid compromise for a game that distills a gameplay fusion between Mikami’s Resident Evil series and Suda’s Silver Case adventure games - and it feels even better on PC, where 90% of the game can be played with just the mouse.

Although often cited as unconventional, I think the gameplay style of killer7 is a fairly logical compromise for these two creators, who seem more concerned with tone poetry and 2000s-exploration than providing a compelling and practical gamefeel. Anyway, it’s sometimes more important that a game feels good in the brain than on the hands moving the controller. killer7 is a game that locks its content away inside your mind, with progress often being made many hours after you’ve stepped away from the console and allowed your third eye time to process the images your two eyes have seen. It’s all in your head.

A genuine love letter to gaming - specifically the fifth and sixth generations - that champions the virtue of video games as social conduits without ever making it explicit in its text. It Takes Two is perhaps the apex of Girlfriend Gaming, but also acknowledges the general magnetic pull of video games as shared experiences that draw us together - and this is an experience that can be easily enjoyed with partners, pals and family.

The story seems to be getting a rough reception from players here, but I appreciated a new game that isn’t yet another low-fantasy fable about finding the Amulet of Kwisatz-Haderach to prevent The Third Reckoning or whatever. Sure, other games have tried the romance genre on for size, but it’s almost always about the early blossoms of teenage and pseudoteenage lust-love affairs - Twitter oft-demonstrates that games writers and “narrative designers” are still emotionally and intellectually 15 years old, so it shouldn’t come as much surprise that divorce and parenthood are still remote concepts for video game stories. As a bumbling stay-at-home dad partnered up with a 12-hour-working doctor who’s constantly on a career-induced brain-edge, perhaps my girlfriend and I are just easy marks for this slight, specific Mrs. Doubtfire-esque story about a long-term adult relationship struggling to keep its flame alive, but I thought it was softly thoughtful, sincere and well-intentioned. I agree that the dialogue is over-resplendent with Uncharted-isms (“No no no NO!” “Oh ya GOTTA be kiddin me!”), but please give Hazelight some credit for managing to fill a 12-hour experience with a near-constant stream of dialogue that doesn’t often make you wanna claw your ears out - a rare, praiseworthy feat for any video game.

Reviewing the “gameplay” here is nigh-on impossible - taking this thing apart would be like individually analysing the content of every microgame in a WarioWare title - so I’ll just echo the general consensus and say that it’s incredibly impressive how freely this thing leaps branch-to-branch in a wide, shallow forest of genre and styles filled with obvious but welcome homage. As a long-term gamer working side-by-side with a new recruit, I took a lot of pleasure in telling my partner about Mario Sunshine and Diablo II and Dance Dance Revolution. FULL JOURNALISTIC INTEGRITY DISCLOSURE: When I found the Ocarina of Time room, Josef Fares may as well have handed me a crisp $100 bill, patted me on the arse and sent me on my way. I’m an easy mark.

Was this thing too corny? Probably. Is it too long? Definitely. Did I have a lot of fun sharing a video game with some I care about? Absolutely - and that’s more valuable than what I thought of the dialogue or specific mechanics. I think this is a perfect example of a game that defies rational critique by virtue of its virtues and a commitment to doing things a little bit differently - and in the midst of a medium that’s constantly trying to deconstruct and twist and prove its own maturity by doing the same thing for Sad Dads again and again, something that speaks sincerely holds genuine, unironic value to me.

Nothing… Nothing ends.

Simplest point of comparison with Halo is Star Wars. Two original-borrowed trilogies of soft sci-fi fantasy that broke barriers of paradigm and profit, only then to be cast adrift in the outer space of an expanded universe, occasionally pulled out of statis by old gloryhunters and new profiteers in search of new-old money and not much else beyond. No one will ever be able to recapture their bottled god-fire because it now permeates and binds the air around us, invigorating countless other franchises and indies across the galaxy. You can’t really make a new Halo when a new Halo already exists within most shooting games on the market today. All that’s left for the forerunner is to try and make something new to itself with its own old tools.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve worked with Microsoft on software projects (at a thankfully comfortable distance). They know how to ruthlessly manage their first, second and third parties, and 343’s close-leashed position as custodians of Halo’s corpse makes for a fascinating case study - intrepid fans have dug out [countless examples](https://www.reddit.com/r/halo/comments/g2wf8e/is_anyone_concerned_after_reading_some_of_the/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf ) from across Infinite’s lifespan that point to a game development studio that functions more as a monitor of revolving independent contractors than a true arbiter of a franchise’s will. Why is this internal drama important when talking about this game, though? Well, Halo Infinite, moreso than almost any other game I can recently recall, is a series of parts that don’t just fail to add up to a sum, but could be regarded as a P = NP math problem that no one can reasonably solve - by all accounts, Halo should be dead, but capital keeps trying to bring it back to modern life by stitching together disparate product-pieces.

To return to the Star Wars analogy - Halo Infinite is the Force Awakens of the Halo saga: a grab-bag of all the things you remember liking about the franchise (there’s a mission where John Halo literally just walks through corridors listening to audio dramas of the old games), hastily bound together using a vague plot that promises explanations that will finally dig the series out of the lore-hole it has created for itself. Luke Skywalker has vanished / but that’s a story for another time / somehow, Palpatine has returned / etc. You know the drill. Hokey Big Picture lore-weaving aside, the core premise here - that Master Chief has in-media-resurrected himself in the middle of his own franchise reboot and is the only one opposed to the rebuilding of the Halo rings - is surprisingly rich for a series that’s usually as straight as a battle rifle’s burst, and coupled with nascent themes of classic hard-male stoicism in the face of 2D-wife grief and a new life in a present-future society that no longer really venerates government agents and supersoldiers, there’s plenty to work with here; but like the Star Wars sequels, an intriguing foundation can’t be meaningfully sustained or built upon because every member of staff involved in the project is working themselves to death to meet truly insane deadlines. Apparently the final year of delays gave 343 time to add a ton of new (often funny, creative!) dialogue, and it’s telling that so much of it is self-aware - “The Banished only have one idea and they keep reusing it” sighs your companion as you complete your fourth ‘find the battery for this door’ quest in the space of the same mission.

It’s really hard to articulate the feel of Halo Infinite’s campaign without playing it yourself. After a tedious tutorial section that evokes The Library from Halo: Combat Evolved, the game begins to present itself as a hacked-together Forza Horizon-like: a never-ending treadmill of disposable jaunts, enjoyable content you can mindlessly cycle through without greater thought and commitment. Set marker, follow line to marker, click on things that are marked, open map, set marker, follow line to marker. And honestly, when you’re burst from the stresses of reality, trying to fill out a spare lunch break or blow off steam after work? Idly driving a warthog to a big field where you can go back to 2004 and do some double-taps on shield jackals is not the worst feeling in the world to immerse yourself in. I did everything on the open world map, without even meaning to - and I enjoyed myself! Microsoft are beginning to properly stake a pitch for their coming generation, I think - assimilate previously beloved IP, distill their essence, and crush tired contractors under a corporate boot-heel until they can present the game in an easily consumable form that can satisfy broader and broader generational divides in the product marketplace. Games really can just be mindlessly tread-milling cyphers of low-level brain activity for kids and adults alike.

The hands-on gameplay - the moving of Master Chief, the shooting of his guns, the effects of shooting his guns at different targets, managing which guns should be doing the shooting, managing your position in the sandbox, etc. - is tight, and perhaps the best that I can remember it feeling since Halo 3. The grapple is a welcome addition for both traversal and combat, albeit one that overpowers all other equipment options to the point that it might as well be your third gun, a (perhaps unintentionally) radical departure from Halo’s unbreakable twenty-year two-gun tenet. I do think it’s worth putting a disclaimer on this review: about three or four hours in, I was being bore down upon by a Sword Elite on the edge of a cliff, and managed to beat him by pulling a nearby hammer into my hands as he ran towards me, leaping off the rock-face’s edge and then grappling myself back towards the poor guy at full tilt for a face-breaking gravity swing that sent him ragdolling into the horizon - a moment so awesomely Halo that it positively coloured my perception of the game for at least three or four more hours that followed. If nothing else, it’s worth trying Infinite’s open world just to see what grapple-hooking can do for the classic Halo combat pyramid.

Certain enemies, like elites, jackals and brutes, function the exact same as they always have, and it’s fun to watch classic Halo AI reckon with the new abilities of Spider-Chief - they’re often powerless to deal with an enemy that swings from post-to-post and can disappear in the blink of an eye. It feels like 343 were almost afraid of how powerful the near-unlimited use of grapple makes the player - I played on Heroic difficulty, and the game responded in kind by putting me in countless situations that would have been deemed unreasonably cruel in past Halo games - multiple hammer brutes, backed by rocket-launching grunts, covered by jackal snipers from all angles. It’s mad! Taking outposts and bases really can end up feeling like a miniature RTS or tactics game, with thought constantly being given to marine placement, jailbreaks, weapon loadouts and the front-lines of enemy encampment that need to be broken. Going in gung-ho is totally possible, though, provided you are willing to constantly web-shoot yourself from alien freak to alien freak with a god-almighty upgraded Sidekick pistol in hand - one of the best FPS guns in gaming history, and it’s a tragedy that they don’t have this thing in multiplayer!

As another reviewer said on here, this is, at its best, the second level from Halo: CE (aptly named “Halo”) spun out into a full video game - and it’s clear 343 are still building their stuff with Bungie’s software toolbelt. I don’t think having some things stay the same is necessarily a bad thing - why mess with success? - but there is something oddly perverse about 343 Industries doing a Weekend At Bernie’s on a digital corpse Bungie has long since discarded. Three core games in, and nothing 343 has originally developed thus far - the Promethean enemies, the new weapons, the dual Spartan protagonists, the squad-based shooting, the Cortana AI army - has stuck to the wall. The story here, about the Precummers and the Foreskinners and the Banished (totally not the Covenant!) and all these other meaningless alien factions - is pure, unadulterated “Somehow, Palpatine has returned” B-movie badness for readers of Kevin J. Anderson novels, and barely registered on my synapses as anything other than an obstacle that stood in the way of me filling another warthog with rocket launcher party boys on a one-way trip to blowing up more armoured monkey fellas. You’ll just need to steel yourself against an unceasing torrent of cutesy quippery/one-linery between Master Chief and a version of Cortana who’s been patched with all of Twitter’s “men, am I right ladies?” talking points of the past decade. It can sometimes all be worth it, though, when you land a clean sniper bullet right between a hunter’s eyes on the upswing of a well-positioned grappleshot.

Unfortunately, an otherwise mindlessly enjoyable game shits on the table and closes the door by ending with four unbroken hours of linear snap-map corridor shooting, a The Library on Spartan II growth supplements that only ceases marching down hallways to deliver static exposition delivered in a strict “Master Chief look at hologram” style that wordlessly screams “we already delayed this game twice and I haven’t seen my daughter in three weeks, please let me leave”. It’s so copy-and-pasted painful that I’d genuinely recommend just clearing out the open world and then shelving the game instead - unless you like struggling tooth and skewer for an ending so incomprehensible that all you can intuit is that you’re watching a bad-trip Battlestar Galactica cliffhanger of some kind.

Microsoft and 343 have talked a lot of talk about Halo Infinite as a platform for ten years of Halo games, and I can see what they mean - the meat and potatoes of this package in single and multi-player is hearty, fulfilling stuff. The problem isn’t really with how it looks or moves or feels or plays - it’s all fault of a hastily-wrapped enclosure that constantly deploys what I can only describe as “halo simulcra”, best exemplified by the game randomly letting you outside for ten minutes of the finale to drive a warthog and listen to the Halo theme song. Why? Because this is a Halo game, I guess, and Microsoft are giving you Halo as you most viscerally recall it. Don’t think too hard; like Forza Horizon 5, this is brain-off Game Pass Gaming at its very finest. Just don’t let it trick you into thinking it’s anything else. It will try.

Understands that the true Dark World is adulthood and that Time will mold us all into adults, whether we want it to or not. Collect your spiritual trinkets if you want some illusion of choice, but those in charge are pulling up the strings of your playpen from the shadows. Seven years will pass and the apocalypse will arrive with droughts and flames and frozen wastes, the leaders and heroes of youth rendered useless against the unstoppable forces of evil, leaving you to pick up the pieces. Masterpiece. You had to be there. Each playthrough allows you to see your past gaming selves as Young Link; you now naively see yourself as the more capable and wise Adult Link who is too embarrassed to use the boomerang. A Nintendo game that forces you to grapple with mortality and innocence and the cycle of fathers and sons in ways that grim Atlus JRPGs about demons could only dream of. Godlike!!! Majora's Mask stans will talk about their little stories that they write down in their little bomberman notebook or whatever, but it was all in here too - you just didn't have a checklist or trinkets to reward you for engaging with the material. Gameplay is still rock solid (on Nintendo's first try!!), but you come to this thing for mood, atmosphere, text, subtext. OCARINA OF TIME BABY

Warning. Long text. This is not a review. Many quotations.

Have you read the warning? Then let's begin.

To be honest, I wasn't going to write a review of this game. There are 3 main reasons.

The first is that I don't think I fully understood MGS2.
I can't say that I understood this difficult game myself, nor that I got the whole picture of MGS2 by thinking for myself. Besides, I thought I only needed to listen to Snake's solution/sermon at the end of MGS2. MGS2 is a fun game, even if it is difficult to understand. It's got a lot of gameplay finesse, cool visuals, and a lot of playful mind. I had no complaints at the time about being able to enjoy an evolution of the classic MGS. I didn't think for a minute that Snake had to be the protagonist. I liked the character Raiden. (I liked him even more in the later MGS4. I haven't played the Rising games, sorry.)
Story in games is certainly an important element.
The story of MGS is interesting, humorous and above all, always surprising. (I like to be surprised, not only in games.) But the great thing about Hideo Kojima, I felt, was that even if you put the story aside, the exploration, ingenuity and fun of the gameplay shone through. That's why, although I was baffled by the story of MGS2, especially at the end of the game, I thought that "the difficulty of the story is just a trivial matter" and that "it's a fun game and, above all, Snake gives the answers, so that's all that matters". At that time, I was not interested in the opinions of others on the internet, so that's all I could think about. As I write this, my opinion has not changed.

Secondly, My total love for the MGS series, including MGS2, is less than you Hideo Kojima(MGS) freaks in international.
I mentioned at the beginning that I was reluctant to write my opinion about MGS2. I'm reluctant to write or talk about this popular series. This is because, from my point of view, there seems to be more passion abroad than there is in Japan. I was even more convinced after the whole disturbance with MGS5. (Not just me, but all the MGS/Hideo Kojima fans in Japan were very surprised by the frankly angry attitude of you international fans towards Konami.)
I've played a lot of Hideo Kojima's work. I've played MGS2 to the point where I've completed dog tags on every difficulty level. But still, if you ask me if I like the MGS series as much as you, the international fans who write the reviews on this site, I can't say yes.

And finally, third reason, which is both the motivation and the purpose of this essay-like writing. In the past, there were enthusiastic Hideo Kojima fans in Japan.

A fervent Hideo Kojima fundamentalist, whom Hideo Kojima himself describes as "my alter ego, my disciple and my teacher". Yes, there were absolute Hideo Kojima freaks in Japan.

Itoh Keikaku/ItohProject.(Real name Itoh Satoshi/伊藤聡)

...At last I can get to the point.

He was a hardcore geek/otaku. He loved foreign films, novels, and was the biggest Kojima Hideo fan in Japan, having studied and reviewed every single one of his works, starting with Snatcher. Half the purpose of this article is to give you a glimpse of the astonishing analysis of MGS2 left behind by the enthusiastic Hideo Kojima fundamentalist, Itoh Keikaku.

The other half is to play a role. ...To be honest, it's hard to write this group of sentences. It's hard work. It doesn't bring in any money. So why am I writing this text? No, this isn't a text. This is a 'bridge'. Or a zip line, a rope, a ladder.
My role here is to act as a bridge between you, the rabid Hideo Kojima fans overseas, and the greatest/strongest Hideo Kojima fan that ever existed in Japan, Itoh Keikaku.
”I don't need a bridge!”
Some of you may say. Then don't bother reading this text, just read the Japanese text at the link below for yourself. (If you have an English translation of any of below sentences, please post a link in the comments section, as they are undoubtedly better than my poor English translations).

Fully translated into English. Bolded text is the part of the main topic that relates to MGS2.


"What is controlled reality?” Itoh Keikaku
When the aircraft crashed into the WTC, I was in hospital watching the footage.
I had just joined the ranks of the crippled at the time. I have just lost my right sciatic nerve and the major muscles in my right thigh, and said goodbye forever to all control and sensation below the knee. Below the knee became a darkman. There were many other issues that needed to be considered. The malignancy that led to this situation in the first place (in short, cancer) had such troublesome issues as metastasize problems and whether ABC and various other forms of hepatitis were latent in the transfused blood. If I metastasize, I don't know if my life will be saved next(or rather, almost no hope.), and if I have hepatitis C, I'll almost certainly develop liver cancer. Furthermore, furthermoree, if I look up the five-year survival rate of the sarcoma that bothered me on the internet, I'll find something like 50-70%.

Frankly, this situation was depressing. I would have been happy if I didn't know, but as soon as I heard the name of the disease, I connected my laptop to the hospital payphone and accessed the internet. I love Cronenberg(lol), and being the kind of person who wants to die knowing exactly what is happening to him, there was no stopping me from wanting to know. See, The Fly, there are? The protagonist is a scientist, so I understand all the grotesque festivities that happen to my body, such as the peeling of the nails and the dissolution of the skin, and I accept that "hmmm, this is what this is all about" and accept my path to becoming a fly man. I mean, what am I talking about(lol).

Nevertheless, once I knew the name of the disease, fear now came to me. Are my parents and doctors telling me the truth in the first place? I was struck by paranoia, almost like a Philip K. Dick's novel. Yeah, this is a bit amazing. After all, it makes me think that everyone involved with me is lying. This is exactly how I feel about Tokyo Total Recall, Rei Fukai being captured by the Jam Human and forced to eat chicken broth. REALLY. The slightest care from a nurse or the casual kindness of a parent would scare the hell out of meeee(lol). See, David Fincher's 'The Game', that Michael Douglas situation.

So I am still living in fear of death. I am certainly a little closer to death than most. I've managed to get out of the Philip K Dick state(I mean, there's no way for me to know if I've been deceived.), but there are many days when 'death' comes at me furiously in the middle of the night and I have to cry under the duvet.

Because I don't want to die at all yet.

I've been in hospital for about 10 days every month for the last year, with anti-cancer drugs in my system. Unlike in the past, recent anti-cancer drugs are not so hard, but the nausea is still strong and hair falls out. What's a bit interesting is that even though I'm dosed each time with an anticancer drug with almost the same ingredients, the hairs that fall out are in different places each time, really. The first time I lost hair, beard, armpit hair, breast hair(lol) and pubic hair, but the second time I lost no hair or beard at all, but instead a lot of nose hair. But at first I was happy. I thought, "I don't have to take care of my hair", but it turned out that this condition is fiercely vulnerable to dust. I can hardly stay in my room, which is the Lidley Scott room(in short, a dusty room), where I can see streaks of light from the window. Ugggghhh.

I have always had asthma and a sultanol inhaler was a must-have. Now I am injected with anti-cancer drugs and fighting the possibility of cancer in my body(maybeeee?). If it had been the beginning of this century without these drugs, I would be dead. It is the drugs produced by science and technology that sustain my existence.
Bodies maintained by science and technology. Bodies that would disappear without science and technology. What this means, in essence, is that I am a cyborg. Not only machine bodies with superpowers are not cyborgs. If not the word 'cyborg', then 'cyborg-like body'. 'cyborg feminism'(wow, I miss it) style thing. Not like Mitsubishi Genentech's 'Sarariman', which has embedded micro-processing equipment (lol). I maintain my body through chemical technology. Incidentally, do you know that the hospital code for anti-cancer drugs is 'chemo'? Chemotherapy, chemical, so chemo. My existence has been predicated on the existence of science and technology from an early age. (On another note, I was apparently born by caesarean section. I was a child who could not have been born without technology.) I was a child who would have disappeared without technology. And I still am.
I am one of the 'children of technology'. I am one of those people who have already demonstrated by their bodies that my lived reality has always been cyberpunk. Of course everyone's life is defined and limited by technology, but I have demonstrated this in my body almost from birth.

The body that is me. Needless to say, I have cancer, and this is a reality that never moves. It is nature itself, because nature is unpredictable and uncontrollable.
For survival, however, I have to anticipate, control and converge with its nature. It is to exclude nature, to construct the world as one in which nature does not exist from the outset. It is an impulse and an ideology rooted in human survival. (Survival is not an instinct, as humans are creatures capable of wishing for death. It is a desire.) Humans have extended their individual viability by assembling models, simulating, predicting, describing and controlling.

MGS2 is about a kind of paranoia. It's a Newtonian delusional pipe dream that says that everything in the world can be reduced to numbers, and therefore everything can be simulated, everything can be observed, everything can be predicted, everything can be controlled. Laplace's demon. The idea that, with infinitely precise data, we can perfectly predict the trajectory of a billiard ball. The delusion that the world is computable. Of course, this is impossible, not to mention quantum mechanics and chaos theory. But MGS2 shows that it is possible, albeit only in a social model.

I've seen some people say that MGS2 itself was just a VR experience for Raiden. That is, "Is this real? Or is it a dream?" It's a philosophical discussion about the definition of reality. I don't need to quote Mamoru Oshii, but I feel that this kind of theme has been depicted so many times in various works that it has already become obsolete. And Raiden does indeed come close to addressing such issues when he says that the Colonel doesn't exist. Another "common story" about people's sense of reality being diminished by virtual reality is told in Raiden's small story about VR training.

"It doesn't matter if this is a dream or not, what you think is real is real." Unfortunately, MGS2 doesn't jump to any of those "often" conclusions. and, nor does it let virtual reality encroach on reality. MGS2 ignores the concluding recipe of the "virtual reality" story. If you've ever said, or thought, that the whole "reality vs. dream" theme is a cliché, good job. If you thought I was saying that "the theme of reality or dreams is clichéd", well, good job, because MGS2 has a unbelievable conclusion that makes that point nullification. And good job to whoever said or thought that the theme of self-discovery was clichéd. Because MGS2 ends with a conclusion that invalidates itself.

With S3, the patriots have been able to control human society from an individual level. It's not about controlling the brain, it's about what kind of events can be accumulated to lead people to do what they want them to do. They have acquired such methods. The story of MGS2 was to test the effectiveness of this method and to establish a version of the protocol that could be used. Everything in human society can be reduced to numbers, and therefore everything can be simulated, everything can be observed, everything can be predicted, everything can be controlled.

Where then is the difference between reality and virtual reality?

Virtual reality does not come to reality. The possibility that this reality may be a virtual reality and that there may be another reality does not matter. MGS2 does not make the question of "what is reality?" a matter of ego perception. It doesn't make it a philosophical question. Because if everything is predictable and controllable, then it is a virtual reality. That this reality is at the same time a virtual reality.

That this reality can be defined as a virtual reality. To violently redefine it as a virtual reality. Such acrobatics are the substance of the idea of the S3.

When Neo realised that this world was a virtual reality, he was led by Morpheus to escape to another "reality". When Moroboshi Ataru realised that this world was only a dream, he returned to the real Tomobiki High School (even though it was also only a dream). But for Raiden and his friends, there is no other world to escape. Because, the "reality" they live in has become a virtual reality, and there is no "another world" to escape to. It is not even allowed to be a dream, no matter how far it goes, like the skin of an onion (which is what Avalon is). This is the story of April 30th, MGS2, the day when this only reality became a virtual reality.

"What is the world when everything can be counted, predicted and controlled?"

After pushing this assumption, MGS2 comes to this conclusion.

It's a virtual reality.

The perception that people already living in a virtual reality. A vision in which reality itself is virtual. This is not the same as some kind of escapism: "This world could be a dream (virtual reality)". It is not the same as the phrase that has been used a thousand times: "There is no such thing as reality."

It's about the fact that even though this world is a virtual reality, it's still real, it's still a unique reality with nowhere to run, and it's still a virtual reality. It is this despair that tints MGS2 to no end.

Shadow Moses Island, the setting of MGS1, was a hollowed-out facility on an isolated island. There was snow, rocks, trees, natural caves and permafrost. MGS2, on the other hand, is a man-made landscape in every way. It place in New York City, and a huge man-made structure floating off the coast. There is nothing in this place that does not involve human hands. At most, there are seagulls flying in the sky. Raiden's fight takes place in a thoroughly artificial environment. Unlike MGS1, which was about genetic determinism (and freedom from it) and was set in a harsh natural environment, MGS2 deals with the determinism of man, by man himself. It was inevitable that the place could only be so thoroughly man-made. There is no longer any need for the word "fate" to demand a god. There is no need for a cosmic mystery or a law of cause and effect. A world in which man predicts and controls himself. There, everything needs to be a product of human thought. Because nature is an unthinkable and therefore inherently uncontrollable and unpredictable factor. To live in a world where everything around you has been created by human hands. That is to say, to live in human thought. Elements that are unpredictable and difficult for humans to control are completely eliminated. There is no need to bring up virtual reality. Because this world is already a virtual reality.

Look around us, how much of it is natural? Is the grass, potted plants, roadside trees and weeds in the car park planted by man 'natural’? Is the river that runs through your neighbourhood a natural river? It is out of the question that some irrigation canals have been built recently, but in fact they may have been used for agriculture in the Showa, Meiji and even Edo periods.
We live surrounded by man-made things. We live surrounded by the environment that we have created by our thoughts. We live surrounded by the results of our thoughts. Why are we all surprised that 5,000 people die in a major earthquake, but not surprised at the huge number of deaths in road accidents per year? It is because nature is a "calamity that has come to pass", an unpredictable factor, whereas road accidents are merely a "socially predictable and acceptable by-product". Earthquakes are natural disasters, but road accidents are the preserve of human thought. That is, we live inside what the human brain has created. The roads, the buildings, the houses, the food, everything is just an artificial product.
Nature is not an entity created by the human brain. Nature is an inherently unpredictable and uncontrollable realm. It is not a symbol. The city is dyed with human thought to every extent. It's no coincidence that MGS2 is set in New York, a city within city.

It's the kind of writing that makes you feel crazy. I felt dizzy right after I read it for the first time. Hideo Kojima himself, who made MGS2, is crazy, but I think it's also crazy for Itoh Keikaku to grasp it so accurately.

Report on the talk show celebrating the publication of "The Chronicles of Itoh Keikaku : Phase 2"
The content of MGS2 was controversial among fans, and Kojima recalls, "I was worried about what Itoh-san would think". Fortunately, Itoh-san had praised MGS2 on his blog, but his blog under fire because he had written that "only I(Itoh Keikaku) could understand this".
Kojima expressed his gratitude and admiration, saying "It's not easy to find fans who continue to fight even in such a situation. The only people who understand what I'm trying to do are Itoh-san and Yano-san. (aka Nojima Hitori)

Since writing the above commentary, he has written commentaries in the limited edition booklets of MGS3 and other titles, and reviews of films, but in 2005 his cancer returned. In the midst of his battle with the disease, he dedicated the rest of his time to creating. This was Genocidal Organ, MGS4's nobelize, Harmony and his last work, The Empire of Corpses.

In an essay written around the same time as Harmony was released in December 2008, he wrote

"Human Story” Itoh Keikaku
https://itoh-archive.hatenablog.com/entry/2015/11/13/170413
"People die. But death is not defeat."
That's what Hemingway once said. What Hemingway meant by winning and losing, I do not know, but I understand what he meant. A man can dwell in another as a story. We can live in someone else's body as a story. It can be told in many ways and become part of a fiction that shapes many other human beings.

It is not only genes that people pass on. People procreate because they seek a familiar other to whom they can tell their own stories. A man begets a child in search of a listener, a most attentive and faithful listener. Listening, of course, is a metaphor, and there are many ways in which a person can tell his story to his children. The "way of life" is a synonym for fiction, and there are as many fictions as there are ways in which parents show their children their lives.

And I, as a writer, tell my own fiction as I write it here. I don't know whether this story will be remembered by you or not. But I'm writing this text because I'm betting on that possibility.

This is me.

This is the fiction that I am.

I want to live in your body.

I want to be passed on to others by your mouth.

About six months after writing this essay, he passed away.

This is a bit of a departure from MGS2, but when I was playing Death Stranding, I often thought about Itoh Keikaku. 'I wonder how he would have critiqued Death Stranding if he had lived longer'. It didn't take long for me to think: "...He'll laugh and do Thumbs up."

When Hideo Kojima looks at the deceased, there's no doubt in his mind that in the forefront is Itoh Keikaku.

He doesn't exist in the world now. But he is here nonetheless.

G.K. Chesterton, the great mystery novelist, wrote in his essay "Democracy of the Dead"
The argument can be summed up in one short sentence: "It is not only those who live now who will determine the country."

It makes sense to me to apply this to games as well. Rather, it seems to me to be far more adaptable than political systems. It's not just the gamers of today who are playing games. Don't the dead enjoy playing games and talking to each other as much as we do? Perhaps some of the reviews on this site have been written by dead people. When I look at the reviews of the MGS series I hear a voice laughing. The voice of Itoh keikaku. Bonkura, silly jokes, and the laughter of otaku laughing themselves silly. When you read his main book, you're pulled in by the surface image and you get the impression that he's all seriousness, but in reality he's a just otaku. Cinephile who loves Monty Python, Fight Club and The Dark Knight. His novels are masterpieces, but it's his geeky, silly short stories and film reviews that I love. Many of the subplots, especially in the Genocidal Organ text, are really ridiculous. The content of the game is really full of bonkurasness: 'Revolver Ocelot makes a cameo appearance', 'Initial D cars appear', and 'last boss mumbles Tokimeki Memorial’s song'. And, "セカイ、蛮族、ぼく。/World, Barbarians and Boku" is the best, and I still laugh out loud every time I read it again. I think, maybe he have written a review on this site.

Oh, I'm not.
I have substance. And, There is no alcohol in this substance.

小島秀夫 @Kojima_Hideo 2011年3月22日
From "The Second Phase of Itoh Keikaku's Chronicle".
”I don't feel comfortable with the word 'blessed'. I don't think there is a nether world, and as an idiom it is too meaningless. I don't think I've ever used the word "blessed" when someone died in all the years I've been writing my diary.
That's what I wrote about in the novelization of Metal Gear. When someone dies, what words should we use to mourn and remember them? I've always used these words.
Thank you very much.”

Thank you, Itoh-san.

From me too, thank you, Itoh-san.