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< At the end of March I went to Korea. When I arrived back in Tokyo, the world had changed completely, and I owed a woman several hundreds of dollars. My apartment, the one I'd shared with Kasugi Kimoto, had been repossessed in the middle of the night. The locks were changed; because of a dispute involving garbage-separation, we'd been evicted.
Let me tell you about garbage in Japan. You have to seperate it. That's about it. You put burnable garbage (paper, cardboard, paper money) in one bag, and unburnable garbage (plastic, metal, coins, condoms) in another. If you don't do this according to the law, and you set a bag out on burnable garbage day (that's Monday in Itabashi-ku) that happens to contain unburnable garbage, the garbage collectors are going to get pissed, slap an orange sticker on the bag, and throw it back on the curb at their earliest convenience. If they get pissed twice, they tell the manager of the building that someone isn't throwing away things like they're supposed to be. If they get pissed three times, they fine the building manager. When building managers get fined, oh, about six times, they get a little pissed themselves. They put up signs in the elevator that say
LOOK. SOMEONE HERE ISN'T GETTING THEIR BURNABLE GARBAGE AND UNBURNABLE GARBAGE STRAIGHT. DO IT RIGHT. PLEASE.
Eventually, they started doing this in all katakana letters. Kasugi, who hails from "a part of Osaka" where "they don't do that shit," had been throwing everything into one big bag. In February, I put on some rubber gloves and did the dirty deed myself, getting the garbage where it was supposed to be. At the end of March, I left, and the day before I came back, I got an email from Kasugi which said
"i lose my tokio life. kusoOOOO."
He rolled back to Osaka; I showed up in Tokyo, accosted by customs as always (they do it because they love me), high on Castlevania. I took in the cherry-blossoms at Ueno Park with Don Marco on the first of April, dined that night with a kind woman, and parted from her a homeless man.
I soon wound up relaxing in a house by the sea in Kamakura with a Welsh Corgi named Tuffy. Being taken in there, by an old man who reads Natsume Soseki (and who will therefore be called "Sensei") and attends church despite writing many science-fiction novels, and an old woman who is not-senile enough to state, plainly, when pop-star girls on television look stupid, was a surprise. It was like waking from a long dream. I wrote a book in the parents' wayward daughter's room (she is currently employed as a "world explorer," plays trumpet sometimes for a group called Mondo Grosso, can fire a pistol, is a black belt in karate, and as of next week will be my new drummer), with Tuffy by my side, and with the help of plenty of Coca-Cola and store-bought korokke. It was during this time that I ate Indian Curry for the first time in many years, and I have continued eating it until now. My PlayStation2 was out of my reach during this period, and it'd be out of my reach until the beginning of November. Chuck Franklin kept good watch over it, and when I got it back, it wasn't broken at all.
Chuck also had all of my Gameboy games. Asking him, at any time, to bring a certain cartridge or other when he showed up to a group dinner in Ikebukuro, alas, is much like praying to God for a pony.
Sensei, however, surprised me early by buying a Japanese PlayStation2. I thought it might have been for me. It was not. It was for him. He bought it because of Dragon Quest VIII. He told me this:
"Dragon Quest VIII is coming out before the end of the year. They said so on the news. So I bought a PlayStation2. I got one of those Koei games too, with the guy and the spear. And some game with a nice box."
The game with the nice box was Ico. It was a value pack version. Used, it had set Sensei back a thousand yen. There's a game I've been trying to beat for years. I start it, I gape at its beauty, I play it for an hour, and then I snap out of the trance and play something with really large firearms and bleedy monsters. Sensei managed to beat it in one night, after watching me fail to do anything in it for an hour. I didn't see Sensei beat it -- I went back and worked on my book -- though I'd believe him when he said he did. A bright old guy, he is and was, to be able to play a game like that to completion in one night despite having only played four or five games in his entire life.
My inability to beat the game stems not from its difficulty. I just can't get involved in it deeply enough. I'm not afraid to admit this. I just don't care, once the fascinating setup settles into a castle-wandering groove. In April, however, I fixed myself to the task, and decided to finish the game.
It didn't happen. I doubt it ever will. One day Sensei brought the remake of Dragon Quest V back, and that was the end of any Ico for me. With excellently competent direction from Enix's new studio Arte Piazza and music by the real, live, honest-to-goodness NHK Symphony Orchestra, it was something of a revelation. A mingling of the past with -- well, spectacular music.
I didn't get to beat Dragon Quest V in that house. I had other things to do. I kept going back to Ico and just staring at it. I bought Ridge Racer 4, and played that a little bit. My "Billy" quest in Dragon Quest V didn't go anywhere. Billy arrived at a small port with his father. On the boat, he saw a dream of his own birth. Except his father was a king. Waking, he sees his father is an adventurer. Everyone in the small seaside town loves Billy's father. Everyone in the next two villages loves Billy's father. Eventually Billy befriends a little girl and earns a Killer Panther cub. Soon, his father is assigned the task of protecting a bratty young prince, and then savagely killed by a brutal wizard before he can rescue the prince from bandits. Billy and the prince are then imprisoned by the wizard and forced to build a giant tower to heaven for ten years. When Billy grows up, it's in an environment when he lifts plenty of boulders. He grows up to be a tough dude; he'll eventually get married and have children, before finding his mother and avenging the wizard. It was a damned good RPG storyline for 1992. It's even better in 2004, with new music and shiny graphics. I've beaten it maybe five times in my life, and none of those times were this year, though I did, distinctly, start six whole quests and never finish them, across four copies of the game. In the end, I regret nothing. I enjoyed each aborted quest, each Slime I raised up to level twenty-one despite logic's insistence that this was kind of a stupid thing to do so early in the game.
**
In September, I met Fumito Ueda, the producer of Ico and the upcoming Wanda to kyouzou. His new game is an action-adventure with rolling hills, a hero on a horse, and various giant beings that need to be killed. The theme of the game, says Ueda, is movement. The hero will be always moving. That sounds all well and good. It looks like something I'll never finish, however. I can say this because I talked to Ueda for a while, late one night in Chiba, when the world glowed darkly and orangely beyond the seventh-floor hotel windows. I tried to get a rise out of him. I asked what his favorite game ever was. He looked at the floor and said "Too many to mention." Hell -- not even the producer of Viewtiful Joe gave me that one (he said Wizardry, for Famicom). I told Ueda to just tell me what one game title pops into his head when he first thinks of "great videogame." He gave me one: "Lemmings." This made me think of the gaming press. Or maybe I was just thinking of Lumines for PSP, a square-building simulator with boring music that changes based on your conditional color preferences -- my later, published review would read "something to do while listening to cheesy techno" -- and how the gaming press was all over it like flies on something flies like, quick to declare it the "game of the show" because they wanted to believe they liked it in a way no one else could. I remember watching Chuck Franklin play it right in front of producer Tetsuya Mizuguchi's eyes; Chuck just wouldn't die at that game. I had to tear him away from it. He stood there mumbling about how "I don't get it. This is boring" while plinking down square after square as Mizuguchi's face turned pink and he told me, of the PSP, "I need more memory. Visual. Audio. Just -- more."
Sure you do.
I asked Ueda about his hobbies, the things he likes to do when he's not making games, which he doesn't really make many of, anyway. I figured I'd get a good response.
"I like movies and music."
I noted that the music composer for Wanda is an old producer for Japanese pop band Dreams Come True (whose CDs I am ripping to my iPod right now in all honesty; iTunes does not have the correct track listing; I do a search on HMV, and see that their LP Delicious, which retails for 2,016 yen, is on-sale for 2,813 yen; hmmmm, Japan . . .); I asked if he liked Dreams Come True.
"Not really."
"What kind of music do you like?" I had heard that he sings anime theme songs in a girly voice at karaoke.
". . . Movie soundtracks."
"Oh. You did say you liked movies. What kind of movies do you like?"
"Too many to mention."
"Just . . . what recent movies have you liked?"
His answer: "'Spider-Man 2' and 'Gladiator.'"
My revision of the Donald Kauffman rule (which applies only to interviewing Japanese videogame producers): everyone says "'Spider-Man 2' and 'Gladiator.'"
When asked his "dream," Ueda replied, "To make a game that sells to a lot of people." I at first liked this answer -- he just wants to show his vision to a lot of people. Then I thought about his "Spider-Man" and "Gladiator" response. I ending up with the impression that he was more of a businessman looking for good fourth-quarter numbers than a renaissance painter looking for wall-space in the Sistine Chapel. Maybe it was my ear infection talking, either way.
So it stands, 2004 shows us, that game designers are sometimes tough nuts to crack. This man, Fumito Ueda, had gone through a wringer of European press interviews before I got my long-form sit-down with him. He was tired of the questions they ask, and by default tired of any questions all people might ask. I was reminded of my earlier lament of E3, my wonderment at why game events had to exist at all. Really -- why does everyone have to announce all of their new games at the same damned time, in the same damned building? What's the use of a hundred thousand journalists being there, if a certain website is just going to scoop all the games three days before the show opens? Sure, sure, chalk this up to the idea that the game industry is still, pretty much, growing its legs.
At that Tokyo Game Show, I would have had to wait in line for four hours to play Dragon Quest VIII for five minutes. I had a bad ear infection, and could not do this because of magazine articles that will soon net me money. I'd end up one-upping the entire world by receiving the game fresh from Yuji Horii's hands two weeks before its release.
That Ueda interview is a real shame, though. I guess sometimes things don't go well. I got some good tidbits about his designer philosophy, for sure. It's just that none of them are really worth mentioning. If you're the kind of person who can beat Ico without wishing you were playing Flashback on MegaDrive, then you probably understand Ueda's philosophy for game-design as well as he does.
So there you have it: Fumito Ueda is an okay guy, and so is Tetsuya Mizuguchi. I just won't be inviting them to any karaoke parties any time soon.
I'd invite the guy responsible for Katamari Damashii, however, and that's the point of this writing -- to say that Katamari Damashii, a game I don't play anymore because its reveleations are all finished for the moment. Yet I don't even know the guy's name. Someone told me a while ago. I must have forgotten it.
[next: may]
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