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January of 2004, my hair was too long and I was wearing a "JAPAN" soccer jersey everywhere, which meant FIFA fans were screaming at me wherever I went, and asking me if they could buy me a beer, which of course I kept refusing. Back in those days, I was holed up in the house in Itabashi, not paying water bills because we had alternative ways around everything, ways that included semi-daily trips to the public bath in frigid air. Walking back from those bath trips was miraculous; even when a winter rain fell over the shop-street, I'd walk out of the bath with my hands on my pajama-pants'd hips, shirtless, with a towel around my neck and my shoes in my plastic shampoo bucket. Barefoot, I'd stop at a vending machine and grab a can of Coke. I'd pop back up into the apartment to find Kasugi wearing four sweaters, three pairs of jeans, ski goggles, and a futon blanket, playing a texture-smoothed Gran Turismo 2 on Chuck Franklin's Japanese PlayStation2. We'd been playing Gran Turismo 4: Prologue for a while, though we gave it up because there was no music, and not much else, besides. Our TV was big and spacious, wide and luxurious (in other words, twenty-seven inches, and stereo, too, which is right kingly in Japan), so we could even play split-screen two-player duels of GT2 without feeling cheated. It was fun while it lasted, and it lasted for a pretty long time.
One day late in the month, at the request of Mr. Don Marco, I wrangled up press passes to the first-annual Tokyo Anime Expo. The Expo turned out to be little more than an excuse for a few hundred American self-professed "otaku" to gather in the kindergarten-sized convention center atop Ikebukuro's Sunshine City shopping complex. We turned out to be two of only about a dozen members of the press covering the event. This gave us . . . well, not much of anything. It let us look important, and that was about it. Me, though -- I merely looked unwashed. On the first day, I was unwashed as I think I have ever been, when I handed Mr. Fred Gallagher, artist of the online comic MegaTokyo, a tangerine fresh from the fields of Chiba. On the first night, I went to the bath, washed my hair and everything, and even shaved. I paid attention to my hair, and my personal hygiene gave me the confidence I needed to score points with a professional-cosplayer bunny-girl who would eventually invite herself over to my apartment, where we would have an adult sleepover party. Bless her heart, she was carrying a pink Gameboy Advance on her, because she was that kind of girl. Inserted into that Gameboy Advance was Treasure's Astroboy, which I played and found quite chokingly brilliant, and was hated on my very own forums, the forums I created, because I liked it so.
I was similarly hated by my own citizens when, later in the year, I professed my love for Sony Computer Entertainment Japan's Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex for PlayStation2. I can understand this hatred a little more. Stand-Alone Complex is a harder game to love than Astroboy. Astroboy -- hell, it's a virtuoso piece of work, and we're going to go ahead and put it on our list of best games to come out in 2004. Stand-Alone Complex also belongs on that list, if in a much different place.
I first played Stand-Alone Complex at Anime Expo, see. I played it at a demo kiosk alongside a guy named Kevin, who teaches English in Saitama and knew he was standing next to me, even though I didn't know I was standing next to him. I would later meet him at a couple of punk-rock shows, and I don't think we've ever once talked about Stand-Alone Complex. As one of the only "press" members at the show, the game's producer, Yuya Takuya, was quick to give me a tour of all the game's features, and even promise me a copy of the demo at the end of the show. I didn't wait to obtain my demo. Instead, I emailed him about playing the finished version. He sent me the finished version eventually, and good on him for doing it. I played it once all the way through over the space of two days, and then never played it again.
Until October, of course, when I played it again through all the way, three times, just to see if I could do so. At the end of my experience, I was left believing that the game before me was a god-damned steak of brilliant ideas. Mr. Takuya told me, with very shaky gestures, that he first pitched the idea to Bandai as an original game. Yet as great as it was in concept, it had no character. He was quite surprised, he said, when they decided to strap on the Ghost in the Shell license and a large budget's worth of polish.
The finished game is confusing to a person who expects too much out of videogames. Its single-player campaign lasts only about seven hours' worth of small stages. Its story covers one small police case that fans out into something only slightly larger before it resolves neatly and discretely. Those fooled (perhaps by Batou's voice being acted by Akio Otsuka, the voice of Solid Snake) into believing that any videogame with airbrushed three-dimensional graphics should have a story and a scope that involves five of the seven earthly continents, outer space, and a robotic ninja were quite violently disappointed. What they got in Stand-Alone Complex, instead, was a three-dimensional third-person shooting game that controlled a lot like Halo and included some of the most finely tuned, razor-sharp, fun to play 3D platform sequences since Metroid Prime.
What I like most about Stand-Alone Complex, I suppose, is that it shows immense promise for a sequel. What the hell does that say? That I'm willing to call a game one of the best of the year just because playing it makes me excited for a sequel more than it makes me excited for the game I'm playing?
Well, it's a good game, full of bold ideas. I remember something the producer of Neo Contra, a wonderful, tight, joyous little game, said this year, about how right about now everyone is getting all excited about retro games, thinking with a feeling in their heart close to absolute correctness that the older games are better. He says that gamers ten years from now most likely won't be able to say the same thing about the games of right now, because, right now, we're too busy looking back.
He's right, you know. I know this because I have, as a videogamer, quite mercilessly been in the grip of 1994 since . . . well, since about 1997. I played Final Fantasy VII, beginning to end, and when I beat it, I emerged as a gamer who had loved a game in the present while bafflingly longing for the past. 1994 is a phantom year for me. I know without doubt that it was the best year games have yet seen. It was the year that, high on Dragon Quest V, I saw Final Fantasy VI and Mother 2 released. It was the year Donkey Kong Country (a bland platformer starring monkeys who need to inexplicably somersault off the edge of every platform before jumping on thin air just so they can reach the next platform) appeared, bringing its computer-rendered revolution as far as NBC Nightly News, winning awards from every respected videogame magazine. It was also the year Super Metroid was released, only to receive zero media attention and accolades. Seven years later, Electronic Gaming Monthly would call it the best videogame of all-time.
For me, Tim Rogers, the videogaming era we will forever call "Retro" ends with the release of Donkey Kong Country at the end of 1994.
I could sit here and list pages upon pages of games that came out in 1994 that were at the top of their fields, most ofthem for Super Famicom or PC-Engine Duo. Some, like Phantasy Star: End of the Milennium, were for Sega MegaDrive. I won't do this. Instead, I'll tell you that Yuya Takuya, producer of Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex for PlayStation2, too, is in love with 1994. He cannot forget Front Mission, and he is not sure he wants to.
Yuya's game is, when you play it enough and in a relaxed, popcorn-endowed-enough state, maybe with a warm drink and a blanket and comfortable headphones, a celebration of running around and blowing things up in videogames, wrapped with a thin layer of fetching items and pressing switches to open doors. It has enough recognizable characters and locations to satisfy the fans of its source material, and above all else, it is polished. It never feels forced or rushed, and it certainly doesn't overstay its welcome. Some of the middle levels are a little too long and not varied enough for some action enthusiasts; nonetheless, they're fun. The only reason these drier levels don't feel so exciting is because they lack the dynamic, deep, spacious flow of earlier levels that begin with our heroine at a train station, and continue to see her crawling around beneath a dam and eventually hopping rooftops to enter a hotel, all without a cut or a load. There's a mind-control mechanic in the game, where you can control certain enemies and make them do stupid things that are usually necessitated by the flow of the level. Some criticized these parts for not allowing the player enough freedom. I played it knowing full well that the game's creator is in love with Front Mission, and with 1994, and I knew that he wasn't giving us freedom because he doesn't like it, and sometimes I don't like it, either. If I am reminded of Halo, Metal Gear Solid, Contra, and Bangai-Oh while playing a game that is not really like any of those games, then I am enjoying very much not being free.
Stand-Alone Complex will remain, for a long time -- probably until the sequel arrives -- a precious game for me. I first played it unwashed at that dreaded, boring anime expo, the same expo where I'd later meet Imai Toonz, lead art designer of the film "Dead Leaves," and also make an acquaintance with a certain Japanese science-fiction novelist from Kamakura -- who looks very much like Natsume Soseki, actually -- who I'll be sure to tell you all about later. I suppose, maybe, that the circumstances under which I encountered it, at that little convention center a brisk thirty-minute walk from my house on that brighter-than-ice blue-skied day in January of 2004, have something to do with how much I like it, and why. I'm fairly certain that there is more to my favor than that, however. The modest mindset of its creator, a game-loving man who yearns for the past yet has the courage to make games now that push forward and show people that there are better ways to do things -- it makes for some progress. A little bit at a time. If the kids today would rather play Metroid Prime 2 or Halo 2 (nothing wrong with that, mind), I will not damn them. Because maybe they're better games than Stand-Alone Complex.
They're not on my list, though.
(And not just because I didn't really play them enough.)
[next: february]
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