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Number eight:
I've taken up some odd little jobs, these days, at about ten magazines, one of which you might read, and I'll respect the privacy of the places I'm working for, because I'm about to reveal one of their secrets. I shall not be mocking in my exposé. Observe:
One magazine's review template mentions getting "another editor" to "chime in" with "his experiences" so that your review will cover "multiple perspectives." "It helps if this reviewer disagrees with you." It's not this idea that bothers me -- it's what comes next.
The review template then explains that, in order to "help along" the process, you should leave the game running on a console set aside, and try to lure another editor away from his desk to play it. The note then goes on to say that you should make sure everything is in place -- don't leave a controller unplugged, because the other reviewers certainly have other things to do than look for controllers so they can help you finish your writing.
This makes me think -- well . . . it makes me think something pretty deep. Or pretty shallow, depending on how you look at it.
If I asked you right now what the "ideal" circumstances were for watching a movie, how would you answer? You'd probably tell me "in a large room, in the dark, with a big screen and loud speakers." People like the Tin Man at the end of The Wizard of Oz might tell me the above, and then add "and someone to share popcorn with."
What about videogames? If I asked you what the ideal environment was for playing a videogame, how would you answer? It's tricky, isn't it? People with hearts will find themselves unable to accurately grope a date's body while challenging The Library in Legendary Halo, and I get tired of wiping my popcorn-greasy fingers on my glamorous pajama pants when Metal Gear Solid 2 suddenly turns into something that requires me to press buttons. Some games that I own, I will currently not allow myself to play because I'm not satisfied with the length of my headphone cord.
Some people will say there are games you play alone in a dark room, and there are games you play with a rowdy group of friends. I partook of both kinds of these experiences in 2003, and one of those, I found, was perfect.
In February of 2003, just two months into "The Year of Final Fantasy," I was living in a room the size of a coffin, thanks to a mix-up involving, among other things, a hell of a lot of money. My Gameboy Advance was far, far away, in a suitcase locked in someone else's house in Saitama. All I had was my computer, so night after night, during my three-hour break in novel-writing, I played Final Fantasy VI on a ZSNES emulator, with headphones, in a room the size of a coffin.
Lest I earn Squaresoft's ire, let me attest: I own Final Fantasy VI in its every possible incarnation. I own it for Super Famicom three times (nine quests, yes), and I own it for Super Nintendo once. I own it for PlayStation three times (as a standalone Japanese edition, as part of the American Final Fantasy Anthology, and as part of the Japanese Final Fantasy Collection deluxe boxed set). For me to not have downloaded the ROM (and all its hacked variants) would have been to betray the completist tendencies Square has been fortifying me with since 1987.
So it is that, on one day in February, I started playing the standard ROM of the game in its English translation. Low on cash, while I waited for money to come and pick me up, I slinked over to the department store down the street and bought bags of 100-yen popcorn. At a Korean grocery store, I stocked up on Kirin Afternoon Tea Lemon Tea, and poured my soul nightly first into writing a book and then into playing Final Fantasy VI.
My quest was (and still is -- email me if you want the save state file) an odd little number. On the first night, I managed to make it all the way to the Lete River. There, I decided to enter the perpetual experience loop; some part of my brain justified this: if I have to play with a keyboard, I might as well be super-strong. So I entered the loop. I then tooled with the emulator's settings (it was, honestly, my first time tooling with an emulator's settings) and set the "O" key to auto-fire A-button. I then set the tilde to fast-forward, and then found two CD cases, which I propped up on the proper keys. Now the game was locked in fast-forward at the experience loop. I hopped out of the coffin and made myself an omelet.
This was the night Kazue moved in next door. Kazue is a surrealist painter who lives in France six months out of the year. She moved into my hell-hole living establishment back in February because she was back in Tokyo and running away from a lover. She needed to be alone from her problems while she finished polishing up a gallery exhibition's worth of paintings. So before my crafty "landlord," who had inherited the bottom floor of said building in his father's oddly-worded will, could build a dormitory next door to the kitchen where I lived, Kazue propositioned him about letting her rent it out and use it as a mock-up art-gallery. So that's what she did, for a month.
Kazue poked her head into my -- and her -- kitchen about an hour into my omelet marathon.
"Hello," she said, her only slice of English vocabulary.
"Hi," I said. She then started speaking Japanese. This accounts for my muddled lucidity in the following account.
"I . . . well, Kei said I could use this kitchen. You know Kei, right?"
"Right."
Kazue folded her hands, and stared me down from across the TV-dinner-tray-sized kitchen table.
"What's your story?"
"I'm not sure," I said. I was slicing up an apple and watching an obstructed old television.
When I looked at Kazue, I noticed she had a little boy's haircut, and was wearing gloves that wouldn't look out of place on Oliver Twist.
"Nice gloves."
"The room over there is so cold."
"The walls are thin," I said. "You'd better bundle up."
"You've got a heater in here," she said, kicking a big rusty tin can.
"It's out of gas."
"Well, damn."
We were silent for a minute. The television was muted. Kazue's nose was twitching like a rabbit's.
"What's that noise? I thought I heard a noise next door, I . . . what's that noise?"
"What noise?"
Kazue was standing up now, heading for my coffin. She slid open the door, and there was my computer, sitting on top of my futon, at Kazue's shoulder level, CDs balanced mostly-precariously on two meaningful keys.
"THIS!" she screamed.
I was on my feet. I scratched the back of my head. "Oh, yeah, that."
"There's, what -- headphones?" She picked up the headphones; out came a tinny sound of a fast-forwarded battle-theme peppered with explosions of monsters.
"Yeah, I got headphones."
"No wonder it sounds so far away; what were you -- oh my."
"Well . . ."
"I remember this part."
"You . . . do?"
"How long you plan to leave it on?"
"'On'?"
"The experience loop, I mean?"
"Oh. I, well, I don't know. Once I start seeing high quadruple-digits, I'll be happy."
"Huh."
A moment later, Kazue was asking me if she could borrow an egg. I told her to knock herself out. She whipped a one-egg French omelet using some of the resident Romanian Woman's refrigerated things. When she was done, she sat before me, accepted an apple slice, and took up the conversation where it had been cut off.
"You know, that experience loop was running when my dad died," she said, pointing her chopsticks at my coffin.
"Was it?"
"Yeah, my little sister was playing the game."
"Oh."
"She had an Ascii pad set on turbo for, what, like, four days. Her Tina only had a maximum of like 5,000 hit points."
"Huh."
"She had the battle speed on the slowest speed, is why. She didn't realize it until two days in. I told her -- it'd be more worth her time to just reset, tweak the settings up, and run through it again. Did she listen to me? No. She said she'd let it run, and run it did.
"Well, my big sister, she hated this. She was all tense because our dad was in the hospital with pneumonia. It was exam time for my little sister, so between school and visiting our dad in the hospital, she wasn't paying attention to the game. My big sister hated the idea of leaving a videogame on while no one was around to play it. My little sister kept saying -- you can change the channel if you want. My big sister wanted to watch channel four. My little sister said you could unplug the console from the TV and watch TV if you want. (We were using the -- what's it called? [RF switch?] Yeah, the RF switch.)
"My big sister wouldn't listen. She absolutely refused to watch the television that way. She couldn't bear the thought of the Super Famicom . . . doing something while it wasn't plugged into a television.
"I think she wouldn't have wanted to watch TV, anyway, what with all that was going on.
"I'd just graduated from art school at the time, and I was staying with my sisters in the old house in Yokohama. At my sister's demand, I'd painted a copy of Yoshitaka Amano's 'Tower' tarot card, back in those days. Aside from that, I hadn't done anything once back from school. I was reading a book in French when my big sister got the phone call that my father had just suddenly died. My little sister was standing in the kitchen looking for cookies when my big sister hung up the phone. My little sister asked what was wrong, and my big sister told her to turn off her videogame, because we had to go to the hospital."
Kazue nodded for herself.
"It's kind of nice to see it again, though, isn't it?" she said, looking through me at my half-closed coffin door.
I then told my only story of any worth about Final Fantasy VI -- my high school was the first on the proverbial American block to be partly burned down due to the lazy arsonist tendencies of the bored 1994 grunge American youth. It was all over the national news. One day in November, a six-million-dollar half of the school gymnasium went up a cloud of red smoke. We had off school for the following week. I arrived home from school two hours early to find my copy of Final Fantasy III on the experience loop for the second consecutive day. I ended the loop instantly and played the game to completion as the first snow fell on my hometown, and Thanksgiving Break loomed up. When I went back to school, the place was under constant police surveillance; at the time, the fat, repulsive, laddish Tim Rogers was delving into Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities with deep concern, and the new school rules that commanded a student be taken into police custody if even one second late for a class struck me as something out of the French Revolution, or else out of the Gastoria Empire's seizure of Thamasa.
Kazue offered me a cup of tea before the end of my story.
"The last game I played must have been Final Fantasy VIII," Kazue said, just to say something.
"Didn't like it?"
"Nah."
Another awkward silence leaked into the cold kitchen.
"I'd better let you get back to your blankets," Kazue said. An hour or so earlier, I'd shown her the stack of blankets that half-filled my coffin, and I'd even been kind enough to give her one, which she'd run next door to install immediately on her cot.
"It's been nice meeting you."
Kazue shook my hand for the first time that night, and she shook it most recently just four days ago, before I left for Korea, when she arrived back in Tokyo from Paris for a new "top-secret art-gallery-thing."
When I picked up my Final Fantasy VI quest in earnest two days after meeting Kazue, my characters were on level-79, and magic ensued. Content to never press the tilde key to speed up a battle, after spending two days with my notebook computer warming up my little coffin room while I slept, I quietly played a game that had been my friend for almost a decade. Before, when I had had no friends, I would play from beneath the blanket in my blue, dark bedroom, and I wept more at Locke and Celes' hammy love story than most fanboys wept at Aeris' 3D death in Final Fantasy VII. Final Fantasy VI had been my friend. My friend was standing before me, captured inside a twenty-five-inch television set, music flowing out at me in stereo, words entertaining me more than any novel ever had. Now, thousands of miles away from my former self, mere weeks after the passing of a good friend, a new flesh-and-blood friend was painting surreal things next door while whistling Kefka's Theme, and sometimes, when I took my headphones off, I accompanied her with bass, and drum-slaps of my thinning polka-dotted-pajama-panted thighs. All the while, within that tiny dark room, headphones in perfect place, dressed in blankets, shoulders and face cold, body warm, the friend from my past was holding me and weeping as my frigid fingers pressed buttons, making memorable things happen.
{Ice-breaking italicized comedy bit, which utilizes all forms of text-emphasis and PG-13-level profanity}
It was better than Virtual Boy, that's for god-damned sure!
I finished writing a book I don't plan to publish. I then wrote an article called "Final Fantasy VI With Headphones On," which I never revised to satisfaction. I have, if nothing else, far away from my PC and its stores of top-secret data, managed to recount the majority of the article here, in Korea.
I wonder, if it had been any other game, would it have worked as well? Would I have been compelled to finish?
Games are such personal things, more than movies or books can ever be. If I ever become a "professional" "games journalist," I promise to review all games based on experience gathered in my own way, and I'll even let you know what that way is.
Because damn it, games keep going when the console is unplugged from the television.
[next: number seven: (gaming) lost in transit(ion)]
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