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Number Ten:
I was at Tokyo Disney Sea one night in late September. It was part of the Tokyo Game Show. As part of the Tokyo Game Show, Koei had invited me out to Tokyo Disney Sea, a ridiculously large ocean-themed theme park, where in a ballroom I ate chocolate mousse more expensive than my entire wardrobe while looped videos of the new Dynasty Warriors game played on and on. I stumbled around, filming video of the whole party, eating that chocolate mousse and drinking fine apple juice that was probably worth more than my AB blood. At a certain point, I sat in a soft chair, and some journalist guy started talking to me.
"You've got to love Koei," he ordered.
"I will, then," I said.
He was drinking a complimentary beer.
"They always do crazy shit like this. It's great. Every year, man."
"My first time," I said.
"Great shit. Topped themselves, this year. Disney. Hell, can't believe this shit. Free tickets and everything."
"Ah."
"This is just like Koei."
"It is," I agreed. I then rose and headed for the buffet table. Hungry as the bastard I am, I was gratefully partaking of giant boulders of bread mountainized before an ice sculpture of Mickey Mouse. I found some packets of strawberry jam, and a knife that was, in all seriousness, gold-plated. Feeling fine, I took a savage bite of the bread-boulder with the intent of then scooping some jam inside. Imagine my revolted surprise when my tongue struck a familiarish rubbery substance and screamed backward into the top of my throat.
I peered into the bread.
"Squ-squ-squid?!?!?!"
The bread was full of squid-meat. Mouth full of the stuff, I stumbled around the ballroom looking for a disposable napkin. When a Japanese man asked me in English if I needed some help with something, I shook my head at him, not fully acknowledging that he was a producer of the Three Kingdoms series. I found my napkin, and promptly spit up the squid like a disciplined vegetarian. I then headed for the bathroom, where a cleaning lady greeted me with a smile. When I arrived back in the ballroom, things were changed. My eyes were opened. I was able to drink in my surroundings, and understand that the whole thing was rather idiotic.
This is to speak no hate for Koei. I love that company. I love their games. In a sea of titles that I don't want to play, Koei's games are most often ones that strike some large side of my interest. I spent the rest of the party watching the promo videos, and getting violently excited about the upcoming PTO battleship commander simulation. I tried to keep my back turned to the buffet table at all times. I didn't need that stuff. I had my apple juice. I was okay. I had to resist the temptation to walk up and say something idiotic to the pianist woman, who could have probably killed me in one punch. I kept my eyes on the games, honestly wanting to form something worth saying.
Then I and my "fellow" "game journalists" were released into the theme park, where there were no videogames of any kind. Under the midnight-blue starless sky of Chiba, I walked scenes that were straight out of movies. I rode rollercoasters and watched pleasant fools dancing in pleasant foolish shows. Tokyo Disney Sea isn't so much Disneyland as it is a bizarre Disneyland variant. It's light on the rides, and heavy on the places to sit around and look at pretty things. A giant building the shape and size of an old steamboat is full of restaurants with windows from which to gaze at a man-made volcano with your sweetheart.
Koei, however, had invited journalists to this place after six in the evening, after night had fallen, to wander until closing. Most every journalist was either alone, or with a colleague. There was little romance in the way journalists wandered Disney Sea with colleagues, and there was little romance in the way I wandered alone. I was getting disillusioned as the world grew darker -- it's a dark theme park, perhaps to facilitate dately hand-holding. I could still feel the squid-bread (IKAPAN, in Japanese) filth on my tongue. Here I was on only my second day as a "professional" "videogame journalist," and I was already feeling like a fool.
At one point, I ran into Steve Marks, a Koei PR guy. He read my name tag and knew who I was, so he invited me to walk with him and his posse. At that time, he couldn't have made a better offer. We boarded some Indiana Jones ride where Indiana Jones spoke Japanese, which was pretty cool. A little while later, we were walking around, talking about Koei.
Steve got into Koei, he told me, because as a youngster he'd been mostly fascinated with Chinese history, including Luo Guanzhong's Three Kingdoms novel. He'd also had some substantial experience watching Chinese television serials based on Water Margin (the inspiration for Koei's Bandit Kings of Ancient China and Konami's Suikoden, among other games). We had a good talk about Chinese history, and it was pretty nice, because before I could start recalling certain unknowledgeable PR people at E3, someone was confirming to me that some of the people working in videogames have some idea what the hell they're talking about.
To this day, I don't know what to think of the fact that, for the moment, I pay my rent because I write about videogames. I'd be perfectly alright with it if videogame journalism wasn't such a strange god-damned beast. As I have said too many times in too many places, and in far too many words, game journalism these days is extraordinary in all the wrong ways; reporting on videogames as one would report on earthquake statistics is welcome when one is looking for information; putting this on a pedestal and publishing an entire bookstore-magazine-rack full of such personality-free magazines is brain-dead.
Further brain-deadness can be glimpsed with horror in the reasons journalists will give when asked why they flew all the way from France to attend only day one of the Tokyo Game Show:
"I HEARD THEY WERE GOING TO DEBUT FINAL FANTASY XII."
The way gaming journalism is structured these days, I, Tim Rogers, could write (and . . . have written, for personal amusement) a magazine-worthy review of any game ever made without once playing the game, complete with as much personality as (if not more than) you'd find in your average magazine. Game journalists get their jobs through friends (as I got mine), and then hold onto them until they've had their fill of chocolate mousse and squid-bread. They attend things like the November Final Fantasy XII announcement press conference, where they see three minutes of noisy, wondrous game footage they're not supposed to share with anyone, and one of the last questions during the question-and-answer period is "Can we see the video again?" They then line up to take pictures of the game's team during the photo shoot, then fire up their laptops and feel important as they inform the world that "Final Fantasy XII will be released in summer 2004." What they saw for those three minutes of video, no one else may see, and it's somewhere like here that games still differ in artistic and PR maturity from movies. What's far darker is that it doesn't bother a single games journalist that he can't share something like this. He's happy seeing something like that for himself, and keeping it and his love for it to himself. Sharing it isn't just out of the question -- it was never a question to begin with.
To me -- and maybe to someone else out there -- this is weird. Why crusade for factual, punctual, up-to-the-minute, spell-checked, comprehensive games journalism if you're going to be so fucking selfish about it?
Years ago, there was a magnificent independent website, the name of which history has grown tired of heralding. This website was a revolution in the way videogames were talked about on the internet, and anywhere else, really. Tired of seeing misspelled developer names and/or strategies that simply didn't work, this site crusaded for a revolution, and it made one happen: it made even the big guys care a little bit more the fact that the president of Nintendo's last name was Yamauchi, not Yamaguchi.
And now it's come to the CEO of Koei telling me, a journalist who will hype her games to the masses of people who buy games, to help myself to bread that, in secret, is full of squid.
The world has dealt me a blow. I'm going to try as best as I can to return it.
Still, though, I've got to admit that Koei's 2004 lineup strikes me as interesting, if only for Sengoku Musou, a feudal Japanese take on Dynasty Warriors, and one that looks wicked cool. Nobunaga's Ambition Online, too, is one that I'd like to see released to the Western hordes; judging by the talk of the salarymen in Tokyo, it's far more than a match for Final Fantasy XI.
[next: number nine: instruction manual of the year goes to . . .!]
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