i had a brief opportunity to meet keita takahashi at a pax signing one year, while wattam was still in development. i had seen a tweet about the appearance ahead of time, but many others (who i assume hadn't) opportunistically used what they had on hand, or could purchase from the annapurna booth beforehand. there were a few shirt signings, of course - but keita seemed most pleased when people brought out any other stuff for him. he drew over top a page of someones sketchbook, adding extra characters to their scene. the guy in front of me took off his basketball shoes to get noby noby boy stretching around them. i had prepared by bringing a notebook i planned on using for the next year of college, or sketching and jotting ideas for games. he was disappointed to see it still empty. what i wasn't ready for was him to ask what i wanted him to put on it, i stammered something like 'uh, a cool creature?'. its sitting on the beach, and has an amoeba shaped head with 11 eyes. he ended up being pretty embarrassed about the pair of exposed breasts he tacked on after the face, and by the end appended a '?' to his signature to avoid total responsibility for the drawing. it's the only notebook i've completely filled out, and still on my dresser today.

that day ended up explaining a lot to me about what goes into his games. keita takahashi seems to have an acute fascination with clutter and stuff. his landmark title, katamari damacy involves collecting objects - how insignificant does each thumbtack feel by the time you're rolling up people, buildings, countries? noby noby boy focuses not only on consumption, but growth, as you lend your length to a concerted greater goal. a short lived AR app, wooorld, has users adorning their real life spaces with various interactive digital decorations. in these games there is not much to be said about any individual item other than it's mass - they exist to create a ramp of progression. they're just items.

by comparison, wattam is a game almost without clutter. there are still a lot of items, but now the game's levels are constructed as delicate table-settings. every chunk of the game a constructed tableau designed to show off the purpose and connection between each object. in wattam these things have shifted from intractable components, markers of score of a game, to the subjects of it. they are now characters for you to play with and as. in fact wattam celebrates the act of collecting items as you form a chain and explode in giggles and fanfare.

i really appreciate this change simply for the fact that it's so easy to come away from his previous work thinking about the falls of materialism, or some other pseudo-zen message about making a trip to the nearest goodwill. i really don't think those are components at play in his work. the items in wattam are selected lovingly in the way you might have a favorite pen at your desk, or book at your nightstand. not all our stuff is equally useful, but we still have reasons why we feature them in our lives. i cherish getting to stare at an 11-eyed screaming naked monster every time i grab a new pair of socks. i don't even like breasts. dare i say, wattam might be the game to explain to me what funkos, or nendoroids or whatever are all about...

keita's much more key outlook in his games is a straightforward message about love and unity. while a bit un-challenging as a concept, is kind of necessitated by his games' broad age appeal. it's no less obvious in wattam, where most the 'mayor' characters text bubbles are shown in different languages and everyone joins together to hold hands in the end. i won't spend much time on this as its pretty well tread elsewhere.

i think another way of viewing this theme of 'unity' is to look at the individual and collective value of each of these objects in the game. by the end they all form together to create mother earth. so i think something is being said here about being able to make use of, or at least enjoy all that we have. we have raw materials like stone, toys to entertain us, household appliances, tools. you could say the way characters like the mouth and tree interact is a facsimile of our ecosystem - producers, recyclers, consumers. the way one object might eat or morph another into something more suitable for some third object - these interactions are where much of the lateral thinking is expected of the player.

so with that, what is the game actually like to play? i first got a chance to try the game at that same signing event, paired with someone else who just happened to be in line. we quickly discovered that the hand-holding mechanic of the game applied to both players, and if one was holding on they could sort of drag you around, which made it difficult to progress through the game's 'puzzles'. it's a bit reminiscent of the main loop of most point and click games - finding new items, then dragging them over to every other interactable to see if something new comes out.

the characters you aren't actively controlling have some pretty simple but fun ai where they chase each other around or have different goals. in fact while i was struggling to fumble from one place to another to progress the game, the ai was creating new characters from it's interactions and practically playing itself! so before it was even complete i understood well what the ethos of the game was here. i didn't have such an opportunity to play the full title as a co-op, but i would recommend it as the intended experience. this is a game about being playful, and the best way to do that is with someone else.

out of all his work, wattam is the title that best executes this idea of 'play'. the game is not entirely a sandbox; the goals are vague but it's a fairly linear experience. it overall feels like pouring out a toy box on the floor and much of the game is driven by seeing what fancies you. to compliment this most of the games sound effects are recorded by voice, and the acting is comprised almost entirely of children. katamari damacy implements an almost arcade-style time limitation on levels, taking what could be very experiment-driven play to a chaotic rush to the finish. noby noby boy while a lot more abstract about its goal still has a specific task to accomplish. this is true of wattam as well, but for most of the game it is really not clear what you are doing, which makes the main motivation just seeing what the game drops in next. the story eventually does begin to unfold in a way that gives you a bit more purpose, though. this really makes much of the tasks of the game feel like they are there to be exciting and fun in of themselves; not within the context of your greater mission, as you mindlessly wander around and smash your little toys together. in a lot of ways this game feels like an iteration on noby nobys free form gameplay - you can kind of trace the path these games make into less and less obtrusive 'gamifying' of their main goals.

this lack of central focus does make the game feel smaller in scope than other projects, though i really doubt this is actually true with the more complicated work on ai and other systems here. but since the setting is mostly flat planes in a gradient skybox, it does have me missing a bit of the 'grandness' of the settings of katamari. i ended up wondering if challenges of working under annapurna, or the newer engine technologies had them cutting down aspects of the core concept, because i do think the game is sincerely a major effort to offer solutions to questions and concepts his older games have brought up. i get the feeling that another project of this size might not be attempted by the team, though they have recently been hiring for their next game. who knows - i'd certainly be jaded after a back to back experience with namco and annapurna like this.

i don't have to tell anyone that this game is delightful to experience. go jump around and explode yourself with 20 3d poop emojis. it doesn't stop being cute. but i wanted to offer up this commentary because i think this game has gone less visible than previous games, and people might wonder where it fits into his greater body of work. to me, wattam is the most telling piece so far and clarifies a lot about the rest of this designer's projects.

on the surface the game is a crappy rpgmaker rpg and arguably a crappier horror game. the game all but forgets to be scary beyond the first dungeon, and its recurring motif of blood quickly becomes saccharine comedy, as the game wanders away from any particular horror theme to a game dependent on the whims of it's developer, thecatamites, at any time during development. you can almost tell by the pacing of events that most of the content in the game was decided essentially at the moment it was added in. there is no rhyme or reason why the merchant is a Peanuts character, or the player character can spend half of the game as a fish, or that one of the more lengthy dialogues in the game is an interrogatory conversation about dracula's smoking habits. almost every moment in this game can be explained away as the developer self-indulgently humoring themself as they go.

despite all this, there are clues suggesting a much deeper understanding and intentional, pointed rhetoric behind the 'form' the game takes. its going to take a bit to explain what i mean by this.

space funeral is most often depicted as a contemporary with other horror alt-rpgs of the time: OFF, yume nikki, Lisa, etc. ironically these titles have ended up being the standout successes of the rpgmaker engine, particularly because of how un-rpg they feel. i think its important to understand that the stated intention of space funeral was not to sit among these games, but actually with the rest of the 'less interesting' catalogue from the engine: the hundreds of substandard dragon quest clones it was posted among on rpgmaker.net. you can see the developer in the comments of this game and others debating its purpose with other users. some of it is kind of petty, even. this is a game by and for rpgmaker users. with this lens, many of the abstract or comedic choices the game makes begin to take on some clarity.

the moment you open the game it should be immediately clear you are playing an rpgmaker game. this is something the game expects of the players: the traditional new/load/end game buttons have all been customized to just read 'blood'. its not difficult to intuit what you should press to start, and the game knows you know this, which is why its freely able to modify its UI the way it does.

space funeral makes a point to showcase all the features packed in rpgmaker, while simultaneously making them feel pointless. a circle of wizards in the starting town of the game explain a complicated elemental weakness system in enemies. the protagonist, phillip, has a custom action in combat that has a myriad of random effects. despite this, combat in the game is painfully simple - most enemies are defeated in a few hits, and you can truthfully spam attack for every fight. the engine's boat/airship function is used in an entirely linear section of the game which could have easily been another plain or forest map. All the classical rpg elements are there. You go from town to town, collecting incrementally better equipment and fighting slightly tougher enemies. the only section of the game where it feels like gameplay was intentionally injected was the pyramid where you have to dodge mummy npcs through the hallways. each town has a 'church' where you may go to rest and regain full health, the sprite for which is a coffin which already has another copy of your body in it. Everything you can think of in an rpg exists in this game, functionally, but in this unrecognizable form.

you can close your eyes and play this game like its any other bog standard little final fantasy. try as it might to feel different, this is exactly the type of game it's toolset coaxes users into making. at a fantastic arcade presentation, thecatamites describes working with rpgmaker as an almost autopilot process: you start your passion project like any other, by placing a few grass tiles, then some trees - an hour later you are somehow building yet another sewer dungeon.

really the only things the engine allows you to customize are graphics and music. most of the graphics are scribbled in. tilesets do not repeat textures properly. assets are colored in with blood, or skulls, or otherwise goofy angry faces. its obviously not pleasant but importantly it's expressive; it sells the tone of the game well. the music is maybe the most genuine look at the developer of the game (within it's own text here) - it's sampled from various bands and radio broadcasts, small acts the developer clearly has a taste for. it does kind of feel like trying to 'show off', which is fine, but its also about one bauhaus or joy division track from me wanting to shove it in a locker.

all of it is so abrasive. the game seems to want you to spend time considering its aesthetics. why is everything so stupid. the characters are all mean to you. there is clearly some joke at the expense of the player. these days it's easier to revel in these abstract indie games. but i also remember a time where my understanding of free indie games was limited to happy wheels, and stumbling into games like a closed world, or triad laughing at the audacity that someone would make these games that don't even make sense and aren't fun. i am mostly glad that the net has come around on this, but i think its important to think about for the context of this game, as the type of player the game might be concerned with subverting here. the player character, phillip, sort of has a goal which i think mirrors that mindset in which he needs to go to the city of forms and change or 'fix' all of these things about the world. the game's antagonist, moon (likely a sort of self-effacing stand in for thecatamites or at least a reflection on their Point Here), has been faced with the same situation but only sees futility in it: moon has come to understand what this perfect version of the world is supposed to be, but it's too perfect. only shoddy copies can be made. so rather than fulfill this goal, it decides to distort everything completely. this is why the game is the way it is.

so what is the game about. ultimately when you defeat moon and accomplish your goals you are faced with stock assets from rpgmaker, the RTP (runtime package). what the game posits about the RTP is that its representative of this platonic ideal of the JRPG: a fictional game aspirational to many users that is ultimately unachievable. rpgmaker gives you the tools, sets the precedent for what to make, but leaves it up to the player to execute that vision. space funeral is making the argument here that when you act in your own vision you are poisoned by the medium you inhabit, but when you act in the vision of this 'ideal' the work will still exhibit your own hubris. there is a sort of nihilism to this. and i think at the time it comes from a lot of frustration at the surrounding community of users, who maybe were thought to have been wasting talent or potential on something they are only being suggested to do.

so largely this game is an argument for other developers to spend more time 'coming into themselves'. i think in some ways this point is self reflection on previous work and maybe other insecurities from thecatamites too. but the blatant cynicism of it here is not entirely something i agree with. at play here is an excellent understanding of what it means to use tools, and how they challenge and direct developers in certain directions. but i don't think there is as much interrogation of why the developers may choose to go one path or another with their projects, and it largely results in a lot of "why isn't everyone else like me"isms.

hobbyists make games for wildly different reasons. thecatamites clearly understands it's easy to fall into a pattern using this tool, but doesn't seem to recognize what is also valuable about that. there's a sort of catharsis in placing trees in your village and goblins in your haunted woods, and remembering the dumb names you gave your team in final fantasy 3. space funeral and these games it argues against are all self indulgent in their own ways, which kind of makes it moot to complain that one way is more 'fulfilling' than others.

i think space funeral ended up getting caught in the middle of a larger cultural shift of the attitudes behind indie games. generally in the 2000s if you made videogames outside the industry you were already pretty technically minded, and when like minded developers did meet, they'd try to create spaces. while rpgmaker has existed since then it was only popular in some spaces of the net, and fewer people were recreationally using their pcs for this kind of thing. space funeral's rhetoric is tied very closely with the site it came from. i think with the movement of indie game spaces from places like tigsource to more open social places like twitter and later discord show a lot about the changes to mentality surrounding indie development. more, easier tools have become available, and developers today are having a lot more 'fun' making games, though of course 'serious art' still exists too. in 2010 a game like space funeral could classify as dada, or at least low brow, but today just as easily file in with other 'meme' games too. because what is a meme, other than a set form that is meant to be followed, but also undermined for extra humor. im not sure what thecatamites would have to say about this take. but hey, if what one says was their Post another ascribes as a meme, it sucks but what can you do

does the platonic jrpg actually exist? can it be made? probably not, but space funeral is quite possibly the most rpgmaker a videogame can be.