Second Drafts: Reflections on Alpha Sapphire and #TooMuchWater

The last seventy-two hours have been a hallucinatory blur of rest stops, slow fast food, landscapes swirling by in the window, Pokémon Contests, gym leaders and berry harvesting. As I write this from the balcony of our beach condo I am feeling wholly devoured by Hoenn. It is one of the most vibrant, multifaceted and living worlds out there, shared in the handhelds of elementary school kids and starving college students alike. Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire have injected fresh life into the first Pokémon games to be called repetitive. I cannot get myself away from them now, and organizing my awe is proving fruitless.

I was a skeptic going into Alpha Sapphire. The game had a lot to stand up to, and it still does in my playthrough because I'm writing this thinking on what I've seen in the first three badges. In the first place, ΩRαS are remakes of very weak entries in the franchise. The only harder job would be to remake Diamond and Pearl, a task I still don't think Game Freak is up to. There is a preconceived idea of what Hoenn as a location is, what the games set in Hoenn represent and how they will play out. Ruby, Sapphire & Emerald were the first games in which the player was following a formula of acquiring eight badges, defeating an evil gang, becoming regional champion and catching legendary Pokémon to restore order to the world because "that's what you do in a Pokémon game." The franchise was a cliché in 2002, and it took years for it to recover from that image of being strictly formula. The first task for Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire was thus to overcome the preconception of Ruby & Sapphire.

The second task was to overcome the limitations artificially placed on the 3DS games by their developers. The lack of trainer customization was a swing factor for many players in whether or not they would buy into the latest Pokémon games, and regardless of Game Freak's other achievements with ΩRαS this is a step backwards. The creative strength of the Pokémon games is self-expression, and limiting a form of expression that fans have been clamoring for from day one (a form of expression that was the only selling point for Pokémon Battle Revolution, quite probably the biggest critical bomb in franchise history that still broke one million sales) is a self-destructive decision. There is reason to do it beyond Masuda citing Kalos' specific identity, namely that the clothes from X & Y can't be blanket applied to the player characters of Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire and so would require more development time to remodel, but in face of players being unwilling to buy the games based on customization not making the cut these aren't good reasons. Throughout my playthrough of X & Y my first priority in every new town was not to make a beeline for the gym as in past games, but to see what new fashions were available. It speaks volumes that the ultimate rewards in X & Y, a 2013 JRPG, are not some kind of ultimate sword, armor or those items' pocket monster equivalent, but clothes. Boutique Couture's hundred thousand yen blouses and jackets are the apex of material status in those games because one's visual appearance can be shared with others as a marker of their achievements. How much time do you think the world's elite Pokémon players spent picking a virtual outfit they felt comfortable in for the world championships?

What I was startled by was how ΩRαS applied itself to these tasks. Certainly, some locations lost their significance in the transition from 2D sprites to a 3D plane, with the once-dazzling water effects surrounding the bridge on route 104 coming off as lame in the remakes. But in other areas, ΩRαS is more alive than its predecessors. The gyms are exemplary of this; in RSE the Rustboro city and Dewford island gyms are abstract spaces in which Pokémon battles take place because you need to beat eight gym leaders to earn eight badges to get into the Pokémon league and prove that you are The Very Best There Ever Was. There is no sense of place about why you are there or what kinds of spaces these are. What purpose does a gym serve? Why are they created, why do people wait in them all day fighting every person they lock eyes with, who stands around in the dark on an island worshiping the very ground some beach bum with Fighting-type Pokémon walks on? They are no better than the castle dungeons and evil overlord palaces of medieval fantasy RPGs. What ΩRαS does is inject these dungeons with place. Roxanne's gym is a fossil museum with a secondary purpose for the public, an extension of the Trainers' School that does something other than host a boss battle. Brawly's gym is more clever, being an actual work-out club with a reception lobby, stairclimbers, yoga mats and a working vending machine next to the trainer certification listings. Wattson's is easily the most abstracted of the gyms because it's obviously the workings of a bored old electrician fooling around in his retirement, but compared to the other gyms this has an effect of giving Wattson more character.

Those are only the modifications made to the gyms. Granite Cave now serves a much stronger purpose in advancing the storyline. Instead of just introducing Steven arbitrarily the caves foreshadow the rise of Groudon and Kyogre, and the wall murals hint at the ideas that Archie (or Maxie in Omega Ruby) will espouse not long after in Slateport city. The dialogue has been carefully rewritten to carry a greater symbolic weight. Archie seeks to "return everything to its unspoiled beginnings" and Kyogre's mural depicts it with an α carved into each arm, the oceans now embody the origin of all life and the land its terminal destiny. There is a palpable conflict between the harmonious primordial forms of life beneath the sea, and the chaotic land-dwelling life that is struggling to break into the heavens and reach for space.

Ever since Black & White, Pokémon has been on the ascent. The legacy of Ruby, Sapphire & Emerald as the slow death of the franchise and the destruction of Gold, Silver & Crystal's golden age has been shattered. At the moment those games hit internationally in 2011, the veil was torn from top to bottom. Black & White were the best Pokémon games ever. Black 2 & White 2 were the best Pokémon games ever. X & Y were the best Pokémon games ever. Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire are the best Pokémon games ever. Any opposition to this view is easily dismissed as the counterfactual nostalgia of genwunners. ΩRαS has taken some steps back, but every step back is accompanied by ten forward, by the tempering revisions. Alpha Sapphire strikes me as something unique in Pokémon history, a polished second draft that fully surpasses its former self in every regard, far exceeding the nebulous accomplishments of the third and fourth generation games. You can easily tally the number of video game remakes that pile content over content like some bad fanfiction given life in RPGMaker, but it is comparatively rare to see video games that cut content that needed to be cut. The Granite Cave mentioned before has been revised. Steven is now accessible directly from the ground level. The darkened lower floors that players need the Flash move to light up are now optional, pushed to the side behind a special road they need the bicycle to access. The one-note town of Mauville city has been cut entirely and replaced with a new multistory underground mall/apartment complex that reinvisions Mauville as a metropolitan society. There is concision and flow to the environment and narrative of Alpha Sapphire that wasn't there in vanilla Sapphire. Effectively the process that Red & Blue started which was carried over to Gold & Silver was resumed eleven years after by Black & White, and the torch has continued to be passed up to Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire. The legend of Gold & Silver is almost out of sight, and once it's gone Game Freak will no longer have its legend to live up to--they'll have written a new legend.

The imminent question is of when the golden goose will stop laying. Nintendo's old anniversary Game Boy commercial made some inadvertent commentary on just what Pokémon was doing for the company, and the sudden end to Pokémania was not taken lightly. In the past it only took one generation to discredit the entire franchise as the passing fancy of small children. Whatever follows Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire will only either carry the torch for another year to come, or discredit the games once again. There's virtually no other path for such a polarizing series. Whether what follows is Chaos Delta Emerald, seventh generation games or Sinnoh remakes, ΩRαS will be a tough act to follow. In this moment, the Hoenn remakes have taken the games that formerly spelled the beginning of the end, and rewritten them into a masterpiece that has tapped into the psyches of fans everywhere.

There are some things I doubt ΩRαS will ever live down. Maxie and Archie's baby boomer redesigns, including the bad glasses and campy Sentai villain outfits, are just the tip of the iceberg. Hoenn is a region without clothes. The act of carting around a Zigzagoon (nicknamed Pickup) that knows Rock Smash, Cut and soon Surf, is an activity I never missed and will be glad to say goodbye to. Yet if such concessions come in exchange for a cohesive work that approaches a literary quality and advances the medium, then these casualties of development can be written off as acceptable losses.

(And speaking of cutting, the first chapter of Pokémon Blue is currently sitting at 6500 words and I'm agonizing over where to partition the beginning of the second chapter and what to trim from the first.)

Tajiri's Box, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and Se Jun Park: an Introduction

In 1996 Satoshi Tajiri unleashed a terrible and profound chain reaction that threw world culture off its axis. I cannot imagine going into a 2015 without Pokémon; the franchise has deeply affected my generation's views on materialism, morality, animal rights and competition. Between 1996 and 2000, 46 million first generation Pokémon games were sold, and much of the intrigue behind the Twitch Plays Pokémon social experiment earlier this year rested on the 1.16 million people that collectively participated in a playthrough of Red and Blue. The rapid, ravenous growth of the video games into a global phenomenon and its subsequent deathgrip on humanity can be understood as a kind of Pandora's Box from which all things Pokémon spread. While the nostalgic appeal of the original games may be reduced to mobilizing just 1/46th of its original audience and the much-maligned "genwunners" were already being discredited as they came into being, the relevance of Pokémon in contemporary times is indisputable.

To claim otherwise would be to ignore that Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire's first week in 2014 sold approximately five times the units of Red and Blue's first week twenty years ago. Every day new trainers are recruited into the ranks of Pokémon Leagues around the world, participate in a global trading network, and compete for regional titles at Nintendo and fan-sponsored conferences. Each year a handful of successful trainers are cheered on at the World Championships while their matches are streamed live to anxious fans, and are then awarded scholarships worth several hundred thousand dollars for their skill at the games.

Artwork by 12m, used with permission.

Pokémon has changed the ways in which people relate and interact with one another, and attracted a periphery audience of onlookers vastly exceeding the scope of the 1990's arcade audiences. Consider the success of the 2014 Pokémon World Championships. Illustrating the climactic moment in which, against all odds, a squirrel held up the entire world on one finger quickly became a rite of passage for Pokémon fanartists. The livestream of the 2014 world finals drew over 4.6 million views and almost 450 thousand more between its multiple YouTube recordings afterwards, making it the most watched Pokémon battle in the world. World champion Se Jun Park has become a minor cultural icon to South Korean fans. For the Karenites, a faction opposed to traditional competitive values comparable to Super Smash Bros.' "tiers are for queers" crowd, Park is a heroic example of a trainer that plays their favorites instead of what's strongest.

(This last point is counterfactual to history. Se Jun Park was and is a competitive player who carefully selected and bred his Pachirisu for a deliberate strategic purpose that catered to the VGC's double battle format.)

Artwork by pictolita, used with permission.

Park's achievement shook the world much like Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky's 1972 chess match. More people were tuned in to a single Pokémon battle than ever before. Any trainer that sends out a Pachirisu in-tournament again will be doing so in his shadow. Competitive Pokémon has become a spectator sport that fans bite their nails over, rather than being confined to the competitors' experience.

Going back to the Twitch Plays Pokémon example, no one would be worshiping Lord Helix if Ken Sugimori hadn't sat down and drawn an ammonite Pokémon in 1990. The popularity of each respective generation in comparison was made clear during the height of the TPP streams. TPP Red averaged 80 thousand continuous viewers during its initial run, but by the time the stream got to Crystal there were already complaints about a lack of participation. Some qualia about Red and Blue still resonates with those that experienced it at the turn of the millennium, and the games stopped retaining this in Ruby and Sapphire, if not earlier.

There's been a lot of speculation about why Pokémon took off as it did, and what it was that the series tapped into in the children of the world. I'm concerned less with how Pokémon's become a front-and-center feature in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and more with the consequences of it upstaging Santa Claus. What values did Red and Blue instill on the children of the late 90's, and the adults that they've grown into today? Pokémon is part of a grandscale Japanification of the entire western world that's been going on since Voltron hit in 1984 and has continued to the present. In 1975 Japan was grappling with Americanization; forty years later in 2015 the pendulum has firmly swung in the opposite direction. Today in the United States you can buy children's jerseys with "super kawaii" on the back, when prior to 2000 the most prevalent Japanese word in the American lexicon was tycoon (大君 taikun) brought over in 1857.

I have always thought of Pokémon more as a kind of time, setting or place rather than as a story or narrative. The fact that it was born, died and gave way to a restoration of itself is testament to the games' cultural footprint. The first Pokémon games were the beginning of an experience from '96 to '04 that brought a close to the cultural 90's, the tail end of which dragged into the release of Pokémon Emerald. I'm not in a position to say whether the changes brought on by this experience were positive or negative. But I can interrogate how they have reshaped my home country.

Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire have been out for a month now, but for me they're still on the horizon. I know that once I have them I won't want to put them down for a while, so in the spirit of the season--not of Christmas nor Saturnalia but of Pokémon--I want to jump headfirst into 1998 and illustrate the cultural impact of the original games on today's USA, and to a lesser extent on a global scale. I should clarify that I am not a competitive Pokémon trainer, no matter what aspirations I held in my youth, but because of the unique concessions and simplicities of Red and Blue it's easier for me to grasp them than the later games. I am more comfortable as a Pokémon naturalist. I enjoy capturing the image, spirit and personality of the species. So my position is not one of total authority on the subject, but with all this said, I'm ready to go back down the rabbit hole.

Index

Chapter 1: Interpretation, Nostalgia & EarthBound (Pallet town through Viridian city)
Chapter 2: Forests & Representation (Viridian forest)

Shifting Gears

As I've been going through the material that I've written for the Kongokai and drafting up more, I've come to recognize the warning signs; I'm burning out on iOS. It's become a chore instead of a joy. I'm not writing because I want to espouse the ideas that I'm forming, I'm writing out of obligation to a readership.

One of the luxuries that I have with Juraku is that I can put things on hold until they're ready. I don't want to deliver anything short of the best that I can, and right now I'm headed down a road that I don't want to go--low quality, minimal effort, churning the updates out instead of analytically composing them with an eye towards the big picture. That's not the kind of ship I'm running. Nothing is allowed to be rushed here. It goes to publish when it's ready.

And right now Shin Megami Tensei isn't ready. I can't write it in my current mindset and have confidence in the work that I'm putting out. I look at the short stack of reference materials I have and dread leafing through them again for page numbers. The convenient thing about my LPs is that the documentation is heavy enough that I could practically go back and start up my ill-fated Gale of Darkness LP again if I really wanted to. I've referred to Juraku as my getaway villa, and I'm acknowledging that SMT has to be on hold while I burn this out of my system. It's sad that I can't get to it yet, but we're better off this way.

So I'll be temporarily shifting gears for a bit. It will be the same type of discourse, but on a topic I can maintain more enthusiasm for right now. Don't worry, Belshazzar's Feast is still gonna be up there in the background, I'm not dropping anything. But with winter break here, for now I want to talk about a franchise that has gradually become Megaten's boogeyman, a series of games that face demonization by its fanbase significant enough that by now you really ought to be able to summon it out of a COMP.

I'm doing a series on first gen Pokémon.

End of Hiatus and the Beginning of Escapism

I am done with my examinations for this semester and I am exhausted.

I cannot voice properly the realization of having no more obligations to meet for several weeks. The idea that I am not in school for winter break has not yet set in. But I am very ready to return to doing the things that I enjoy most. To give an idea of what I've been working on to build credits in undergrad, back in November I had written ~1200 words on executioners and the life of Meister Franz Schmidt, in comparison to a bad 2002 Matrix derivative. The film could have been improved by cutting its action scenes altogether, but it was ultimately its preoccupation with the spectacle of violence that made it relevant to the discussion of execution, torture and state control. Over the following weekend I hurriedly completed two other papers for a course on a survey of French history from 1789 to present, papers on nouvelle vague cinema and the socioeconomic changes brought about by the Great War. This was followed by another paper on structural violence and poverty in the slums of Mumbai for an anthropology course, and then one on the historiography of the archaeology of Chinese writing. Some of these papers were better put together than others, but in all I felt them to be some of the driest, most regurgitated writing I had ever put to paper. I'm sorry I wrote the one on Mumbai and made the TA sit through it, but only two days before I turned it in she had mentioned offhand to a student that she hadn't actually started reading the book yet and none of the other graders had either. This is the systematic paper mill we live in, a Frierian nightmare of inputs and outputs and meeting academic criteria for spitting up information as quickly as we can swallow it.

It's this kind of thing that compels people to escapism. We want to put ourselves in a different pair of shoes. Like Kafka beleaguered by his breadjob and wanting to pursue his true calling, people are compelled to wonder if they could be something else. If they could be born in another time, place or world entirely, and step into the shoes of someone who occupies a completely foreign social role. The allure lies in the idea that this role may be better than one's own.

This fantasy is at the heart of games like Crystal Chronicles. You roleplay in the most in-depth fashion possible, becoming a self created from the ground up from a pool of fantastic races so far removed from your own reality, that you can treasure the character without having to put a second thought to why the game was created with the idea of race as something other than socially constructed already built into its system. Myrrh is the sacred lifeblood of this game's world, and as a caravanner it's your responsibility to go out and gather it each year to keep an encroaching toxin from breaching your village's walls. Crystal Chronicles is completely noncommittal. You can walk away from this second life at any time, then come back later and resume freely at your own leisure.

In spite of it being so noncommittal, choosing your family's profession can be as paralyzing a choice as naming one's character. I remember spending a half hour or so deliberating over the options as a child. I knew what race I wanted to play well in advance because I'd been reading about the game for months in Nintendo Power magazine, but nothing I'd read prepared me for this other decision well enough that I could call it informed.

When I first rented Crystal Chronicles from a local Blockbuster back in '04, I played a solitary Selkie boy, the son of an alchemist's family, who led his town's crystal caravan out into the mist entirely heedless of the dangers at work. The Selkie race has a particular reputation as outsiders even within the villages they've settled in for generations, perpetual vagrants and thieves that will drive unfair bargains and pick the wallets of anyone dumb enough to look the other way. As I found out in a string of embarrassing letters from my in-game mother that made me grateful to be caravanning alone, the stereotypes are pretty much true. I think I received a single letter from Rah Sie that did not at some point urge me to swindle every poor sod that crossed my path, and I think I made a rather disappointing son to a clan of thieves. And for the longest time, I didn't understand everybody's complaints online about Leuda village because--well, Selkies don't steal from other Selkies.

This act of roleplay colored my outlook significantly. When The Crystal Bearers came out in 2009 I was ecstatic to receive it for Christmas, having followed the hype train for Crystal Chronicles' many sequels much as I had the original game. Yet I found myself sympathizing not with the game's Clavat protagonist, but with Keiss, Belle and Vaigali: the local Selkies. I had sufficiently internalized the race values of Crystal Chronicles to the point of excluding the other in-game races. The fictional culture of Chronicles' world had been instilled in me as it had in others, creating preconceptions about races and professions that do not exist.

The game world thus acquired a kind of presence as a location and space that people have interacted with but never set foot in. Coming out of the early 2000s push for social gaming on Nintendo's then-newest console, Crystal Chronicles has an Animal Crossing-like atmosphere. You're supposed to play with two to four other players using one of the jankiest hardware setups money could buy, plugging in up to four separate GameBoy Advance handhelds through an equal number of GBA link cables into a single GameCube. Any lesser number of players means that the houses in the starting village of Tipa are unoccupied, with only a single Moogle doing the housekeeping while they wait for residents to move in. Like Animal Crossing's Gyroids bouncing around outside of homes, waiting for new families to arrive, the Moogles encourage you to find friends to accompany you or otherwise face the journey alone.

Crystal Chronicles came out right as I was moving cross-country into a section of Orlando that was caught up in the craze of video games as being the work of the devil, so I never got to take part in the collective player experiences that Nintendo Power had been hyping me and my school friends up for. Nevertheless, I could indulge in the feeling of being part of a living world interconnected by fragile roads of trade and the exchange of Myrrh. Perhaps the most startling thing I realized about this world is that the story begins and ends inside of a self-professed dark age. With its reserves of iron long since dry, the last great civilization of the Lilty empire had already collapsed about a hundred and fifty to two hundred years before the game's start, and by its end there are no signs of the empire returning. The world of Crystal Chronicles is idyllically disconnected, barely more than a handful of settlements struggling to keep the Myrrh supply sustainable.

In finally freeing the world from the grips of the toxic miasma, and so also removing its dependence on Myrrh, you both set the stage for this idyllic setting to be destroyed by urbanization, and erase your own social role. With the caravanning done, the world doesn't need you anymore. So it becomes tempting to ignore saving the world even once you know how to do so, and instead keep on caravanning forever as part of an endless line of Myrrh-hunters. At some point though, you'll inevitably feel pressed to know how the journey ends.

I don't know how quickly I'll get back into Shin Megami Tensei, but I'm considering TJB live again.

Hiatus & Status Update

This is long overdue, I haven't had time to check comments or even traffic but what's going on right now is that school started up again over the last week of August and I'm in an intense survey of French history. Moreover, the annual Cardfight!! Vanguard World Championships are going on and I've been preparing for a major trip around the 20th; not only for news coverage, but because I'm competing in a regional qualifier. This is the biggest tournament of the year for the United States, so preparing a deck and practicing with my teammates has taken up a lot of my time.

The basic status of the LP right now is;
-Diamond Realm is entirely screenshotted, but not totally written up out of my loose notes
-My most recent save file is in post-destruction Shinjuku, with some of the early parts captured
-I might have gotten slightly sidetracked by Fiends

I want to continue this when there's time for it, realistically sometime during or after the first two weeks of October. I don't want to make promises on those dates because I'm familiar with people being disappointed by LPs dying off trying to reach deadlines, and I don't know exactly what kind of impact WCS2014 will have. The Vanguard fandom tends to react to the World Championship with either remarkable enthusiasm or this idea that the sky is falling, and both require a lot of work on my part to capture what players are thinking, feeling and doing. I'm anticipating total exhaustion after the Illinois qualifiers. But hopefully I'll have time to get back to JBS in October.

Extra Chapter: Fighting Gotou and Neutral Dialogue

Before getting into the next arc there's another point to address; alternate scenes. Law and Neutral-aligned players have different objectives at this point in the game, getting a different boss fight and dialogue that we wouldn't see by siding with Gotou. We're still at the point where it's not too much of a pain for me to load my previous save and see these, so I decided to show off how things play out from a Neutral perspective.

Gotou's sitting pose seems to be based on a wax figure of Mishima that once occupied the Tokyo Tower Wax Museum. I say "seems to" because the museum was established in 1970 but some of its collection (particularly the 20th century figures) is as recent as 2001, so the figure may not have been installed until after SMT was produced.

By Tamotsu Yato in Young Samurai: Bodybuilders of Japan

There are some similar photographs of Mishima from his lifetime, like the one displayed above, that could also have conceivably been the basis for Gotou's pose. The Mishima figure itself was taken out sometime around March 2008, and I don't know if it's been reinstalled or not.

Like at the Government Office, Gotou's gimmick is that we have to make it through several waves of demons before we can fight the core boss, which wears us down over time to make the last battle more difficult. Rusalka uses Marin Karin to Charm the Nue here, which takes it completely out of commission while we focus on the Pisaca. As the Pisaca and Nue are technically in separate parties, the Nue can only attack itself while Charmed and eventually kills itself before we can. In its own way the whole idea of a spell that intoxicates you so much you'd rather die than fight the enemy is morbidly humorous.

And Rusalka doesn't even get a chance to Marin Karin as Cyak oneshots Baykok with Hama and Nekomata takes out Shade with her Extra skill.

Gotou: It seems demons are not enough to kill you. Very well, I will use my own hand.

Like Thor, Gotou has been upgraded for iOS to be immune to Charm tactics. His moveset has Shibaboo and a Diarama self-heal, but his most dangerous play is a critical hit ("uses all of his might") which deals around ~50 damage. This oneshots Cyak but not before we get off a couple Ziongas. The main problem is that he only gets one turn to our five, and even after Cyak goes down we can summon demons in its place. On-defeat he yields ¥1344, 560 MAG, -32 (Law) points and the Kotetsu. The last of these is a sword that was called the Meitou Kotetsu in Aeon's translation; it's named after Nagasone Kotetsu, a famous Edo-period swordsmith whose work was so well renowned that many forgeries submerged attempts at reliably determining the number of real Kotetsus in existence. A Meitou is a sword bearing the signature of its smith, so this would be a signed Kotetsu work, fitting for the personal weapon of a pseudo-Samurai.

While he was featured prominently in several photoshoots and videos depicting his swordsmanship, he wasn't a collector and I haven't read of Mishima owning a Kotetsu. In life his actual personal sword had a false reputation for being forged by the second Seki no Magoroku (関の孫六), also called Kanemoto II, a sixteenth century swordsmith whose line of smiths survives into the present. According to the swordmaster that sold the sword to Hiroshi Funasaka (who then gifted it to Mishima in August 1966), the sword actually originated from a shop in Yokohama, bought in the early 1960s. (Ross 220) The sword was unsigned and so not a Meitou, but its papers attributed it to a later-generation Kanemoto. Mishima's sword was thus either an unsigned Magoroku from a later generation than Kanemoto II, or it was a convincing forgery using Kanemoto's name on its paperwork. Mishima's Magoroku is said to have gone missing after it was used to decapitate him. It was also instrumental in his real coup at Camp Ichigaya--pretending to present it to the SDF commandant was the signal for his accomplices to accost and tie him up, but it was also the weapon he arranged to be used to finish himself off during his suicide. In effect, what he saw as a historical weapon would be used either to initiate the coup d'état that would reinstate the emperor, or it would be used to kill the man that tried to create that coup, giving it a lot of symbolic weight in addition to being a historical artifact. These days the whereabouts of it are unknown. The last person to handle it (in its bloody and rusted state) may have been the journalist Christopher Ross, who investigated it extensively in 2005 and was finally able to see it under certain terms of secrecy. By his own admission, what he saw may not have been the genuine article. He published comprehensive book on his investigation in 2006, Mishima's Sword: Travels in Search of a Samurai Legend, which also included a useful bibliography linking to other works on Mishima. I'd recommend it if you're interested in the novelist, as it provides a useful frame around which his beliefs and goals can be studied and makes links to a lot of the important figures in his history.

If we were on a second cycle, Gotou would drop a vision item. One of the obstacles with the whole vision system is that to really get all of the items, you have to do a minimum of four playthroughs; there are 15 items that can be acquired on a first playthrough regardless of alignment, six that can only be acquired on a second or greater cycle, two that can be gotten on a first playthrough by being Neutral-aligned, one which requires the Neutral ending, one which requires a second cycle and a (current) Neutral alignment to obtain, three which require the Chaos ending, one that requires a Chaos alignment, one that requires a second cycle and Chaos alignment with no ending requirement, three items for being Law aligned on a first playthrough, and two for having the Law ending. Since Chaos has the most items unlocked by doing the Chaos ending and Law has the most items unlocked by having the right alignment, to get all 35 vision items it's best to do the first playthrough as Chaos, the second playthrough as Law and the third as Neutral, adjusting alignment as needed to pick up the one Chaos-aligned second playthrough item. The fourth playthrough to pick up the Neutral ending item doesn't even have to be completed all the way, as that vision item shows up early on in Shinjuku. More simply organized, you can do your first playthrough according to whichever extreme sways you, do your second as the opposite alignment, and your third as the secret Neutral ending; which is appropriate, as by your third playthrough you're much more well versed in how to balance alignment and which options trigger which flags.

That's all for Gotou. My umbrage with how they handle his character in all of the routes is that unlike with Thor there's no real resolution to him. Anticlimactically he either dies a low-key death or walks out of the room, and that's that. The idea behind his character is interesting and provides a charismatic figure to lead the Ring of Gaea and the coup d'état forces, but it doesn't go anywhere in the end. Of course, Gotou is very different from the person he's based on and those differences are an interesting topic of their own. Mishima's role in assembling the Shield Society was taking what were essentially an outcast group of university students--isolated individuals whose political views did not align with the majority of the student body--and giving them an organization where their views were encouraged and accepted as a majority viewpoint. That's very different from Gotou, an SDF general who spurs people on without a specific audience to preach to. Mishima did not just create the Shield Society, but was also created by it.

As with any other dead author, studying Mishima is an all-consuming vortex, but I am not studying him for his own sake. It is not my desire to be a Mishima biographer, but to approximate why Gotou, a caricature of Mishima, is used to represent for the Chaos alignment. My belief is that the effect is to repel, rather than to attract, Japanese players. Since his suicide Mishima has been something studied in the dark, behind closed doors. He's not a part of polite conversation, or at least he wasn't during the last surge of interest around '05. His books still sell surprisingly well for a literary author, but the initial reaction in the 70s was to call him "crazy" (気違い Kichigai) and since that time his suicide has deeply overshadowed his literary achievements. (Ross 240)

I believe that part of the reasoning behind Gotou's design is because of the beliefs Mishima expressed in his fiction. In his first and most famous work, Confessions of a Mask, the protagonist Kimi-chan quotes the novelist Stefan Zweig in rejecting orthodox morality. "What we call evil is the instability inherent in all mankind which drives man [...] toward an unfathomable something, exactly as though Nature had bequeathed to our souls [...] instability from her store of ancient chaos." (Mishima 104-105) Nature's "legacy of unrest" resolves itself into "super-human and super-sensory elements," and it is this quotation leafed from Confessions to which I ascribe the namesake for Gotou's super-human Meta race. Mishima's Confessions were a fictionalized autobiography that effectively served as his coming out story, although this description fails to encompass the dark perversity of the novel and its preoccupation with homoerotic sadism, blood and cannibalism. The point is that with few limits Kimi-chan's views are Mishima's views, and that likely influenced Kaneko and Okada in choosing the basis for Gotou's character. Paraphrased Kimi-chan (and by my interpretation, Mishima) believes that "what we call evil is just a portion of the original chaos out of which man was born." (Ross 208) To live is to be in chaos, and to retreat from chaos is to be dead.

In like, Mishima was preoccupied with individuality, cultivating uniqueness and an identity separate from the masses. The character of Kimi-chan was terrified of peace, because Japan's surrender in '45 erased the certainty of death as a solution to the banality of everyday life. Suicide was only impossible during the war because the war would kill him. Confessions also provides an interesting contrast to a normalized response to art, with a scene involving Guido Reni's Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. Where the default view of the Martyrdom would be to admire it for its spiritual qualities or impressive technique, Kimi-chan's first impulse in the novel is to masturbate. He treats a sacred work much as any other child in their first encounter with their parents' hidden pornography, in effect broaching holy iconography with homoerotic fascination, treading against a subject protected by God, and while I can only guess at this idea I believe this scene had a special influence on how Mishima was fictionalized into Gotou.

I think thus far I've given an overdramatized view of Mishima. While he had some skill in the martial arts, earnestly trained with the SDF and tried to embrace a warrior's lifestyle after the war, he never saw real combat and like his character Kimi-chan lucked out of the battlefield by coming down ill. Despite serious dedication to the craft, every witness to his actual martial ability testified to stiff wrists and a lack of mastery in kendo. He was an effete, awkward man who became a great author by essentially having nothing to live for after childhood and putting his death on hold for thirty years. Being able to do anything, he sought to do everything. And while his prose is truly important to the 20th century and he had a prescient understanding of how Japan was changing in its modernization, his real talent is often said to have been in the theater, in the realm of Kabuki and Noh drama. His first book was also his best, no matter how much he wanted the Sea of Fertility to be his greatest work. I think that in my research of him, the one thing I came to truly respect was his understanding of the nature of aging as a slow erasure of the senses, and his decision on when, where and how he would die. In the minds of everyone that knew him and in every article to be written about him, by dying at forty-five Mishima remained forty-five forever.

Gaean Priest: Although...If you give a large enough offering, I amy think about admitting you. Do you wish to offer 01000 yen to the Gaean Ashram?
At this point I need to exploit the specific feature of these healing areas, getting either +1 or -1 alignment points depending on which one you use. I have to pay the alignment fees seventeen times in total in order to shift my alignment back to Neutral after killing Gotou, which is pretty crucial seeing as I'm so Lawfully aligned at this point that it's impossible to summon Chaos demons like Cyak.

Ambassador Thorman: You have already beaten Gotou!? That...

Thor: Very good work. You have Deity Thor's praise, in the place of our Lord. Will you continue to do the Lord's work?
>NO
You will not listen to what I have to say!? Very well. I, Deity Thor, shall end your lives here!
I think that a lot of players find it confusing that a Norse deity like Thor would support the Judeo-Christian god, but there is a (possibly apocryphal) mythological basis for this. Over the course of Scandinavia's conversion to Christianity, the native Norse myths were gradually Christianized to make the invading religion more palatable to natives, with parallels being drawn between the Norse gods and figures in Christian iconography. This can be compared to the Romans equating the Greek gods with their own; Odin is treated as Yehowah, Loki is demonized into a Lucifer figure, Baldr compared with Jesus etc. So Thor was transformed gradually from one whose hammer could be used as a ward against the cross, into a figure of the newly Christianized mythology. His hammer would follow by being conflated with the cross. This irony was supplanted by the fact that participation in the Christianized myths would be his doom, as the Norse gods were eventually erased entirely along with the native paganism--Thor is reenacting his self-destruction by trying to create the Millennium Kingdom. There is a certain poetic statement to be found in the conflation of the cross/hammer iconography, as when Thor invokes his own hammer as the ICBMs this can also be read as the cross being called upon to destroy Tokyo. I would file this under Internet Knowledge though because I can't find a positive source for where the Scandinavia story originates from. You'd think it would come up in a survey of medieval art, but nope!

On a more easily overlooked note, Japanese fans have pointed out that Thor's disguise as Ambassador Thorman (トールマン Tooruman) is probably derived from President Harry S. Truman (トルーマン Toruuman) wrapping up the Shinjuku arc's World War II-centric themes. The names are one vowel mark apart in Japanese.

(This fight is unchanged except that I don't try to Charm him and instead set everyone to use guns, Zionga/Mazio and physicals and then go straight to Autobattle.)

Thor: But my hammer has been swung already. Tokyo's annihilation by ICBM is imminent. This city will perish, together with all its demons! Glory to the Millennium Kingdom!
This is the kind of dialogue that I could see lending itself to a remake. Imagine this line being read by Jamieson Price.

To close this off I'm going to address a vision item that weren't covered in the previous chapters; the Gnawed Ball from all the way back in Pascal's room in Kichijoji. You can pick it up as soon as he joins you, but this skipped my mind.

>Touya back in fifth grade...

......
Mother: I got him from Mr. Nakajima's place.
......
Mother: Oh good...It makes me glad to see you so excited over something. Remember how you were saying you wanted a pet? His name...? He said it was Pascal. That's certainly a funny name, don't you think? Try calling to him.
......
"Mr. Nakajima" is a covert reference to Akemi Nakajima, the protagonist of the Digital Devil Story novels from which the franchise was generated. It's not an actual connection though, only a tacit acknowledgement of the Megami Tensei games that preceded SMT. Nakajima's world has a completely different cosmology from most of the franchise, introduced demons to the world around 1986 and the tone of DDS was along the same lines as trashy airport novels. Having read the first novel I'm not particularly impressed with Digital Devil Story, I would compare it to the Twilight saga in quality. The novelty of intersecting magic with computer science has been put to better use elsewhere in the years since, while the actual content of the book skews towards gore matched with cheap pornography.

It's possible that the real purpose of referencing Nakajima is to cue players familiar with the novels to fuse Pascal into Cerberus, recalling Nakajima's own personal Cerberus.

Mother: (Touya was so down before, but he seems so happy now...I'm glad that I decided to go adopt that dog.)
Pascal: Arf! Woof!
Series scenario writer Ryutaro Ito once mentioned in an interview that to him, the reason we never see the protagonist's father is because his parents are split up. Pascal thus fills an important emotional void for the player character. It's a little corny, but now knowing where Pascal's fate will take him, the image of the gnawed ball is enough to evoke a sentimental feeling. Unsurprisingly, one of the driving motivations for the player up until they choose a side is to find Pascal, whose whereabouts are still up in the air. And for some players, the fact that the protagonist's dog is also a demon and an enemy of god can be sufficient reason enough to side against Thor. Would you really side with someone who wants to wipe out all of the demons when that includes one of your close friends? The Japanese transcript of this interview originates from Daisan Hinanjo "Shelter No. 3" a Japanese Megaten fansite generally held to be reputable. This is the same source which transcribed the Mega CD script, and its namesake is the protagonist's home in Megami Tensei II.

Closing thoughts; it's unfortunately rare to have genuinely learned something from a video game, but I can say for certain that I would never have read Mishima's Sword if not for SMT, nor had my interest piqued beyond a surface level on Mishima. So if nothing else, the game got me to pick up a book. On the other hand I can't say that anyone's read A Brief History of Time because of this game, but perhaps that should be next on my list.

References

Mishima, Yukio. Confessions of a Mask. Trans. Meredith Weatherby. New York: New Directions, 1958. Web. 16 July 2014.
Ross, Christopher. Mishima's Sword: Travels in Search of a Samurai Legend. Cambridge: De Capo Press, 2006.

Kousojin Maria & Shin Megami Tensei NINE

It took more than a week in customs, but I'll count myself lucky she wasn't stuck there longer! My deluxe pack of Shin Megami Tensei NINE arrived late Thursday afternoon and I was ecstatic to find it still sealed, untouched since it first left the factory in December 2002. Although maybe that's just testifying to how hard the Xbox flopped in Japan...

Kousojin Maria appears!

This figure is pretty hard to find, as she only came with the DX edition of NINE and doesn't turn up very often on auctions. Searching for her figure in Japanese even leads to search corrections for Mara. There are apparently a lot of unsold copies left over in Japan selling for ~1000 yen, but on eBay DX NINE tends to run for $50 shipping inclusive. I deliberated a bit over whether or not to go ahead and get her, but I decided I probably wouldn't get this chance very often.

Face detail.

Figures are something of a minor hobby of mine, and I'm making an effort at establishing an object biography of each figure I collect. It's an art thing--something that enters my collection will someday be inherited, so I maintain information about the figures that helps with their upkeep, including material composition, place of origin, nature of transaction, price I bought it for and an identification number. Maria here traveled all the way from Toyama prefecture, measures 9.5cm and (near as I can tell) is made wholly of PVC plastic, although I don't have much to go on for production history. Many figures produced prior to 2007~08 were made entirely of PVC to reduce production costs, while following an industry shift it became standard to use supporting material like ABS to avoid defects and leaning in figures, but I suspect Maria is among the ranks of pure PVCs. Fortunately the climate in my area demands conditioning such that she'll practically be living in the Santa Maria delle Grazie, so there's little to no danger of leaning.

Foot detail, showing crack.

There are two minor imperfections in the figure I received, a crack in Maria's right foot, and a spot on the left side of her head where the paint is worn. As she's been suspended in plastic for twelve years, I suspect these are due to age. A transparent piece of plastic holds her halo aloft her head coverings, borrowing the Christian iconography of the holy family and giving the illusion of it hovering above her as a symbol of divinity; we are not meant to see it, but to deny the supporting piece and envision Maria's halo as floating. Having the opportunity to see it as a sculpture in the round, I think the hijab is the most interesting aspect of Kaneko's design, because it points to the acultural roots of the clothing prior to the emergence of the major branches of Abrahamic religion, and tears away at the preconceptions of her legend that have been built up over the years. The holy mother is such a common icon even outside of Christianity that seeing her in period-appropriate dress, rather than through Renaissance or Byzantine conventions, appears startling and artistically provocative.

Rotom (Takara Tomy, BW2 Series) for scale. Rotom is ~4 cm.

The golden chain in the figure is not glued to the statue, but her hands are shaped around it and the chain falls freely into its natural position. My comprehension of NINE is fragmentary, based on dialogue that I kinda-sorta understood, but using what I've seen as a starting point I believe the chain was chosen as a symbol of how Maria, being the directing force behind Idea Space, imprisons mankind within the limits of a virtual world and ushers in the Neo Messiah Project, a path to salvation through technology. Granted, Idea Space is not exactly Matrix-level stuff, but the real world in NINE barely exists. There is an inscription on the underside of Maria's stand which reads ©ATLUS 2002.

Of course, the figure is my focus but she's hardly all that came in the DX package. There was also a binder, keychain and ID card set themed after the in-game Central Bureau of Administrative Services. If I'm reading the box and manuals right the ID was once connected to an online portion run by Atlus similar to Square Enix's old PlayOnline service. The figure even came with a free video game!

Joking aside, it's one of my long-term goals to translate NINE, perhaps in another Let's Play for the far future, but that requires a Japanese Xbox to bypass the region locking. As far as I'm aware there's no issue with connecting an Xbox's AV cables to my Dazzle equipment, so recording should be a sane procedure. The game is not exactly a graphical powerhouse beyond its prerendered backgrounds and character customization options, and battles move at the same pace as an old core SMT, so the screenshot format I've been using would suit NINE just fine.

Fun fact: The boss races in NINE are extremely obscure, most fansites don't list them. I actually don't know if you can get them to display in-game or not, but Maria's race is given by a few limited sources as 高祖神 (Kousojin) "Founding Divinity." I presume this information comes from either the Perfect or Master Guides. Founding here means to found a religious sect, the deity around which the religion develops, and also corresponds on Maria being the pillar around which Idea Space is built. To fit with the conventions of SMT's English race names I would translate this as any of Hodegetria, Anointed or Apostolic; the first translation is borrowed from a common iconographic depiction of the real Virgin Mary as "showing the way" through Christ, as Maria analogously shows the way to the Millennium Kingdom through Idea Space. Anointed is a common term for those consecrated by oil to do God's will in Judeo-Christian tradition, and these days is often applied to Christ as the "anointed one," but the process of anointment was integral to many founding figures in Judeo-Christian tradition. Apostolic is a descriptor taken from the Apostles, Jesus' disciples who were instrumental in the spread of the early church teachings. In this case I chose the term because of its connotations with foundation of a church, describing Maria not as an apostle but as someone with qualities similar to one. By dropping the spiritual implications as a compromise the race name could also be simplified down to just Foundation.

I'm not exactly sure if English race names are capped at eight, nine or ten characters by this point, but Hodegetria is definitely my preferred translation given that Kousojin is currently Maria's exclusive race. On the other hand, if it were ever reused it would create problems to give it such a specific translation. She would probably be Godly/Shinrei (神霊) if she were ever reused though. For the curious, her in-game skills were Trinity (shared with Yaldabaoth, Raguel, Sariel and Morrigan), Divine Light (shared with Lucifer), Immaculate Glow (exclusive), Megido Fire, Water Wall and Bufudyne.

A note--my universal tag for Megaten figures of all kinds on both blogger and tumblr is #mgtn.