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In August, I plunged deep into every damned PlayStation2 game on the market. I was in a situation where she said "You want to play _________?" and I usually said "Sure." I then ended up with a stack of games on the floor next to the sofa, and I figured I had to play them. Three-quarters of the way through the year, and thanks to the readers of my website and some woman I met tangentially because of that website, and I had played more total games than I'd played in the last ten years. Thanks to compassionate friend Yuji Horii, I now had Dragon Quest V for PlayStation2, a godsend since each Super Famicom cartridge I bought of the game had a habit of erasing twenty-hour-old quests twice before making me very angry. Thanks to the woman, I had a heftier stack of games than I knew what to do with. Afraid that Dragon Quest V was getting too much attention, I turned to the stack, and learned . . . not much. I finally had my own copy of Katamari Damashii, the most enlightening game of the year, which is saying a little less than you might think it's saying; I played it for all of two hours before silently deciding never to play it again.
The games I played most, in August, were Interchannel's Gakuen Heaven Boys' Love Scramble! and Sega AM2's Virtua Fighter Cyber Generation. Seeing as I haven't read any reviews of these games anywhere, I suppose I'd better write something about them here.
Interchannel's Boys' Love Scramble is a gorgeously retarded adventure game about a boy who, much to the horror of his parents, receives a golden ticket of sorts in the mail, telling him he's been accepted to enroll in Belle Liberty All-Boys High School out in the vague "countryside." The boy heads there aboard a bus, which soon crashes into a lake because of a shady student who wanted the bus to crash into a lake. The game then careens on for six hours of text windows without any player input, as a kind fellow escorts us around the school, revealing with brilliant pacing that every person on the school grounds is flambuoyantly, flamingly, violently, cartoonishly homosexual. Our beloved protagonist, the kind of unassuming type of short little Japanese teenager best described as a "boy" who gay Japanese young men think is just the bees knees, is bandied about by dotings and implicit sexual advances by all of his classmates. All of his classmates, you must understand, are these two-meter-tall, flowing, blond-haired, broad-chested, lip-stuck creatures who don't exist with Japanese names in such high volume anywhere in the world. Soon, the game lets you play, by picking where your hero goes and what he eats for lunch every day. You're supposed to solve some kind of murder mystery eventually, though that doesn't matter. Flirting with the other boys is the main draw, here. The tennis coach, the "easy path," as we would classify him in dating-sim terms, is bold enough to stride forward and kiss the hero on the lips not five seconds after making his acquaintance. The boy guiding us around the school, who is as shocked by the sudden homosexuality of his surroundings as our hero despite the fact that he's been at Belle Liberty a lot longer, immediately screams "WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?!" Our options are to tell him, "I don't know, it's his fault!" or "What, indeed?"
The voice-acting is great. It's the best part of the game. Most of the boys are voiced by girls talking out of their noses, reminding me of some ex-girlacquaintances who used to read my volumes of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure aloud.
This game retailed in regular Japanese game stores -- and even department stores -- for just 4,900 yen. This is kind of an accomplishment. That it was originally rated CERO-18 is curious; the rating was awarded because one early scene depicts Belle Liberty students, at a party in one of the club presidents' dorm rooms, playing cards for money. Interchannel, convinced that a CERO-18 rating would hurt sales, removed the few lines of dialogue that mentioned money, and were awarded a CERO-15.
Says a woman on the team I met much later, who will remain nameless, "The CERO people had to invent a new symbol to represent content. The symbol was two 'male' signs touching." She says this with a grin. She's proud.
Certainly, she goes on to explain, there are gayer games on the Japanese game market. There are games that actually depict the men getting naked and touching each other. There are plenty of fan-made games that depict the same breed of long-haired pretty boys that star in Boys' Love Scramble! in much more compromisingly uncomfortable positions. However, all of these games are for PC, and cost upwards of 9,000 yen each.
"With Boys' Love Scramble!, we made a game that no one could play and not know, deep down, 'there's something kind of gay going on here.' And we made it for PS2. That's the most important part."
What about the game itself? How does it wind up? Where does it wind down? Does it approach brilliance, or even touch brilliance with a ten-foot pole? Not in my critic's eyes. Does it have a lot of charm, and heart? Well, sure. I laughed easily (as opposed to uneasily) at many of the characters and their situations. It was the funniest game I'd played since . . . well, since I played Gyakuten Saiban 3 five months before. Yet, what does this say about the game, if anything, that a man who is unafraid of his not being gay laughs at the characters, knowing full well that it wouldn't be funny if they weren't gay?
"We're not trying to make any kind of artistic statement. Nor are we trying to make gay people look funny. We just want to make something someone can play, and relax, and enjoy."
So says one of the story-writers. What kind of people, though? As gay as the characters in Scramble! are *I say "gay" and I mean it; they are men who lust after men, though that lust does not come to fruition even once(, I don't forsee any lonely gay men masturbating while playing the game. It's just not that kind of atmosphere.
"The important thing is that the characters just, you know, happen to be gay."
I call her out on this -- no, they have to be gay. If they weren't gay, there'd be no reason to play the game.
She cocks her head to one side and makes a "Hmmm." She then looks me in the eye. I'm afraid she's about to say "We'll take that into consideration for the sequel." (The sequel is coming soon, you know -- it's called Gakuen Heaven Boys' Love Okawari! -- Boys' Love "Refill!") Instead, she simply says, "That's a straight man's way of looking at it."
Now it's on. I ask -- what are you, if not a straight woman? If I were to write a novel about lesbians, no matter how platonic and witty, even in Japan, I'd get my throat ripped out by straight women. I know this, and you know this.
"In Japan, it's acceptible for a straight woman to think gay men are funny. Straight men can think so, too. Look at TV for various examples."
I thought about Japanese television. You can see plenty of gay guys on there, alright. One television program this summer, I'm quick to remember, a kind of countdown program that once devoted fifteen minutes to reading off a viewer-selected list of "most appetizing foods ever in animated motion pictures" (number one was the spaghetti in Hayao Miyazaki's "The Castle of Cagliostro"), had once ticked off the "most luxurious gay bars in Shinjuku 2-chome." The host was a gay man who screamed at everything and threw his limp wrists into the air. He wore a pin-striped suit. On Christmas Day, I saw a television program in which a clean-faced healthy young woman traveled the south borders of Tokyo with the same young man-on-fire, testing out a range of hot-spring inns; in one touching scene, they sit side-by-side in a "foot-bath," pant-legs rolled up and faces stained with smiles.
Also, I remember once seeing a show hosted by a transvestite who gave house-cleaning tips. She insisted to her alpha-male hip-hopper co-hosts that "Gay people with the audacity to dress like women are the best house-cleaners in the world!" I must admit, straight-facedly, that she was a good-looking transvestite. She used the term "kamachan" to describe herself, which I would translate, roughly, as "fruitcake," when spoken by one gay man to describe another. There never was another episode of that show.
I wrestled with a few thoughts. "Well -- these gays on television here, they're . . . well. No, they're . . . two-dimensional. Like the gays on American television. On American television, gay people are always sipping champagne at sitcom art-gallery openings. In Japan, they're becoming a staple for any show that requires celebrities to taste expensive noodles. It's type-casting either way."
"Not type-casting per se. They're still given a chance to grow and act artistically. Right now they're establishing their credibility is all."
"You say that like they're subhuman," I said.
"Any person who agrees to appear on television agrees to be treated as less than human."
I opened my mouth. I closed it. I thought about Jerry Seinfeld's old comedy routines, full of flat-falling "what's the deal?" jokes comparing men and women. He didn't hit his comedic stride until he started joking "about nothing" -- the idiosyncrasies of everyday life. For some reason that reminded me of the current situation with homosexuals in pop culture in Japan. On television, they wear wigs and pinstripes and glittery eyeliner that tells all viewers: yeah, don't even ask -- this guy's gay.
The gays in Boys' Love Scramble are funny. The "target audience" for the game, according to the woman who worked on it, is "anyone who thinks it's funny." I told her this was not a satisfactory answer, that my old college creative writing professor -- also homosexual, and so proud of it I almost always felt jealous -- would bite a student's head off if he said the "intended audience" for a short story was "anyone who likes this kind of short story."
"Alright, alright. Girls, then. Girls are the intended audience."
"Oh."
Hearing it explained so simply had hurt me. I felt like a married woman who, knowing of her husband's affair, can do no more than cry when he answers her question of "Are you cheating on me?" with "Well, yeah."
Scramble! is a "Boys' Love" game. It is not "yaoi" and it is not "shounen ai." I hardly know the difference between the three genres. I know, for one thing, that yaoi is less a genre than a feeling; a yaoi story can be about anything -- detectives, doctors, lawyers, medicine men -- so long as it has two not-at-all gay male protagonists whom circumstance keeps forcing to touch each other in suggestive ways that make fifteen-year-old girls giggle. Shounen ai is a usually fantastic story in which the two guys fall in love, and sometimes have fairytastic sex. From what I understand. Also from what I understand, which might not be anything, Boys' Love (Boizu rabu) is the homosexual equivalent of a harem manga, in which there are no girls and the boys all scramble around squealing about which ones are the best-looking, without indicating what they'd want to do if they were alone in a dimly-lit room with that guy. A "harem manga," you must realize, is a story where one boy is surrounded by gorgeous girls; the boy is usually inept at love, and his ineptitude entertains young girls. Boys' Love is the same thing, only with no girls. It is, of course, aimed at girls. It's enough to make some homophobes shiver, yet nothing to make a straight man viably angry.
It plays to a female fantasy, this woman tells me. "Some men like exclusively 'lesbian' pornography, whether the girls in the videos are pictures are really lesbians or not, simply because they don't want to see another man's penis. Some girls in Japan generally grow up to dislike men the way lesbian-liking men hate other men. Male viewers of lesbian pornography won't reject having other males as friends, just as female viewers of boys' love won't reject having another male as a boyfriend, or having another girl as a friend or acquaintaince. It's a . . . tricky preference to play to. As long as the boys in the stories don't actually have sex, the girls go on giggling. And on the other side of the spectrum, we have pop-stars like Ayumi Hamasaki, who are secretive about their relationships because it's be nearly scientifically proven that girls sell more records when their male fans are allowed to think they'd have a shot at dating her in real life. It's kind of like the American dream, where any young boy might think he has a shot at growing up to be the president. Of course he's not going to grow up to be the president. Yeah, it's kind of like that."
When I asked this woman to sign my copy of Gakuen Heaven Boys' Love Scramble, she refused, saying she wasn't a high-ranking enough member of the team. Which is good enough -- I wasn't even carrying the game at the moment. I'd never imagined I'd find myself talking to her at that restaurant in Saitama, following a production of a gay-themed play my old friend had written. Yet I did. Why the woman had come to the gay-play (which I must say, even while respecting my friend, was sub-par and rather cloying) in Saitama was anyone's guess. I didn't ask her. I'd like to pretend she would have said "lingering interest."
My final question was a simple one: "Were there any gay men on the team?"
Her answer was a simple one: "Duh."
I never got her business card. I felt kind of stupid about that, because now I don't know her name. There you go, though.
**
The day after meeting the Interchannel Woman, I started an earnest quest of Yu Suzuki's Virtua Fighter Cyber Generation, which we will henceforth call Virtua Quest, because I think that's what it's going to be called in America, and I couldn't help thinking that the whole thing would be so much more amusing if someone would fit in at least one sexual innuendo.
It would have been great. The hero is this kid from a normal town in what must be Japan, simply because it can't not be Japan. Everyone has Japanese names, and speaks Japanese, besides.
The hero is a normal kid whose first adventure involves walking down a city street and killing three tiny robots that look like enemies in a videogame. He obtains something called a "data chip," and is them beamed out of the virtual world like he's on "Star Trek." It turns out that he's not really in a city with palm trees; he's in the laboratory of his friend, also middle-school-aged, who must be from Osaka, because he talks like he's from Osaka. He really, really, really talks like he's from Osaka. I mean, they spread the naturally lisped Kansai on thick, there. It reminded me of the bicycling straight boy in Boys' Love Scramble!, who was straight because he was also from Osaka and no one, least of all a chubby Japanese schoolgirl who weekly buys fat comic magazines that require three layers of paper and half a roll of packing tape before they can shamelessly be transported home, wants to take part in a story involving a gay male from Osaka, even an animated, adolescent one. I imagined the boy gay for all of an afternoon. He described how to jack in and hack in and get back in to the virtual world, walked you through a few tutorials, and then turned you loose to look for "data chips" so he could repair his real-life hovering motorcycle and win a big race.
The setup is quite surprisingly, honestly pure. You're this kid. You have access to many sectors -- city, jungle, et cetera -- of a Matrix-like virtual world created by a corporation a long time ago. In this world lie many secret sealed-off areas; of course our hero discovers some of them early. He makes the acquaintance of some behind-the-sceners who are involved in bringing down the evil corporation that created the Matrix in the first place.
Where Virtua Fighter fits into this is clever -- trapped in secret boxes and scattered all about the Cyber Generation world are items called "Virtua Souls." Collecting one warps our hero into a virtual-reality-grid reminiscent of the Metal Gear Solid VR missions, where he then battles a warrior from the Virtua Fighter games, following a short speech about one of the qualities of a true warrior. Victory in the battle nets a new technique learned and a revelation, fresh from the properly-proportioned Virtua Fighter's mouth, about the evil corporation that staged the original tournament as a means of collecting these "Virtua Souls" and building "Dural," the ultimate synthetic "Virtua" fighter. So it is that, in each stage, in order to gain techniques like flying elbow drops that will help us hit switches in the oddest places, we bear witness to characters we've played as in videogames that feel centuries old compared to this one, for no real reason, and those characters are basically telling us that their games were mere simulations, and this game is the cold, hard truth. Each warrior then teaches us something about channeling our inner soul; our big-headed hero then performs a kata alongside the real-looking hero, creating further creepiness. This amounts to, for me, the trippiest game experience of 2004.
The game plays out like Pokemon without the social elements. All of the other aspiring net-hackers are there, in the clearly Phantasy-Star-Online-inspired hub city; however, they don't do anything. They stand around and talk about how hard it is to earn money as a "hunter." Meanwhile, you're raking it in, and getting entangled with gangsters. And, of course, fighting a hell of a lot of bad-guys who look a lot like the "Putty" soldiers in "Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers." That you do this with grace, speed, boldness, and dare makes the game breeze by lovingly. Press the square button to attack the enemy. Press circle to block. X jumps. Hit the enemy so that he flies backward, and you just might see a red crosshair flash over his floating form. This is your cue to flick the right analog stick, which lashes out at him with a laser lasso, freezing his position in mid-air and pulling our protagonist closer. Continue jagging the square button to rack up more combo hits. Should the enemy slip out of your reach again, you'll have to flick the right stick if you want to grab him again and keep comboing. And then -- get this -- when the enemy is finally dead, you can lasso someone else, and start comboing him. Yes, combos can incorporate the "Virtua Soul" moves. It's most fun when they do.
In the end, the game is like Pokemon, only easier for me to like because I'm collecting Virtua Fighter series special attacks and not moneymaking monsters. When our hero learns a lesson from a wise man like Shun Di or Lau, it's not something like "Ash, you must more firmly grip your Pikachu if you wish to defeat rock Pokemon" -- it's something about the human spirit, concentration, or breathing. Fully voice-acted as it is, Cyber Generation looks and plays more like a Saturday morning cartoon than any cartoon that airs on Japanese television on Saturday mornings.
Curiously, your character's movement, even when dashing along walls, is on a square-by-square basis. Everything feels very digital. Odd for a game with such an integrated fighting engine. Or maybe it's not so odd. I suppose it is an RPG after all; as far as fighting-franchise spinoffs go, it has more in common with Chun-Li appearing in Breath of Fire than Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub Zero.
I was struck, again and again and again, by the quality of the voice-acting. It's very good, even for a Japanese title, and lord knows they lavish a lot of love on their videogame voices, maybe even more than is necessary. The voice-acting in Cyber Generation is almost too much when it comes to quality. The voices sound too real, especially when the speakers of the lines are making these shruggy gestures that remind me of Japanese kids in a high-school play.
***
In other places in the world this month, some people, I think, were playing Fable. I knew no more about the game than what a gamesTM preview told me. I remember talking about it with a Japanese female friend one night.
"So, in Fable, you can make all these choices; each choice affects the path you walk down. You can get married and have kids and make the kids good or evil. You can make fun of people in the streets. You can refuse to save people in distress. You can rescue princesses and slay dragons. You can even be homosexual."
Her reply came quickly and off-the-cuff:
"Is that the evil path?"
***
Somewhere else, Sega / Visual Concepts went ahead and promised to sell their NFL 2K5 football game for only twenty US Dollars. Electronic Arts responded first by lowering their Madden game down to thirty dollars, and secondly, months later, by buying out all the rights to use NFL football likenesses in videogames.
Back in 1994, it was just starting to amaze and delight me that used games cost sometimes around twenty dollars. If you would have told me then that in September of 2004 Namco would release a double-A, high-production value videogame for only twenty dollars, I wouldn't have believed you. If you would have told me this in 1999, I would have said something like "it's about time."
Things certainly are heading in interesting directions. I remember an article in Electronic Gaming Monthly, in 1994, which explained why videogames must cost fifty dollars each. It seems the real reason could be summed up like so: there weren't enough people buying games. I for one hope to see the American twenty-dollar game trend fluorish, and I say this out of the generosity of my heart, as a guy who gets all of his games for free. I also say this as a guy who, at the end of August, 2004, preemptively absorbed the news that guaranteed sale Dragon Quest VIII had been awarded a hundred-dollar price tag by Square-Enix. Noting the differences in Japanese and American economics, I continued living out my fruity martial arts fantasies on a thirteen-inch television, and September arrived, and I passed it mostly in the same place, after forsaking one girl for another and formulating a plan to score Dragon Quest VIII for free.
[next: september]
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