Renzu blog

After playing Chromehounds, a friend and I both expressed our sense that it was an "accidentally American" game– a Japanese title with a lot of appeal to the semi-nerd "western" gamer. The more we discussed the issue, the more we charted the murky dichotomy of "western games" versus Japanese games.

It’s easy to think about the kind of games that are unlikely to come out of the Japanese games industry:

• A highly realistic flight simulator, vehicle sim, war sim, or any kind of simulation of anything inspired by real-world mechanics, behavior and history.
• A freeform, "sandbox" game like GTA and its clones, Spore, The Incredible Machine, Civilization, The Sims and other management games.
• Non-linear adventure games (with an emphasis on exploration and freedom) like the Ultima series. Fallout 3 and Fable II serve as a modern examples.
• Sophisticated hybrid games like Battlezone (1998) and System Shock 2 that present lots of possibility and freedom to the player.

While there are certainly exceptions to the above, along with Japanese games that edge toward some of those designs, Japanese games tend to follow these design philosophies:

• Relatively rigid, linear stories (JRPGs)… OR, heavily branching stories driven by arbitrary decisions as opposed to moral/judgement choices (visual novels).
• A well-defined task that emphasizes diligence and skill rather than creativity as the path to victory. JRPGs are the first thing to spring to mind here, but this also applies to fighting games where special moves and combos are academically memorized & practiced, shoot-em-ups where arrays of projectiles are meticulously navigated, and so on.
• A simplified, iconified, symbolic world. Just like in manga, anime, and classic Japanese aesthetics, Japanese games also express the desire to reduce and simplify the world into comic book representations. This applies to gameplay as much as graphics: the reduction of skill and learning into statistics and "level ups", gameworld attributes into "hit points" and stat bonuses, boxing and fencing into rigid "moves" and "specials"… Japan excels at making "arcade-style" games, because of their cultural knack for funneling complicated, abstract concepts and mechanics into easily understandable icons, quantifiable values and symbolism.

Why is Halo 3 a distinctively "western" game?

I can talk all I want about Japan never producing a sim or "western-style" CRPG, but what about Halo 3, the most archetypal and mundane of all "western" games in a genre that’s purely "western"? After all, it’s just a simple kinetic action game. What if you up and replaced Master Chef and his alien sidekick with anime equivalents, slung the camera over the shoulder, and performed a similar manga-esque graphic overhaul on the rest of the game world? The subtle difference is, Halo 3 emphasizes creativity and self-expression through its gameplay, relative to the way Japan would design such a game.

Japanese games derive their sensibilities from comics and animation. "Western" games derive their aesthetics from Hollywood, which is not based in reduction and symbolism, but rather heightened reality. This is a critical difference. Japanese aesthetics essentialize the world into abstraction, while Hollywood aesthetics attempt to exaggerate "realness" (not to be confused with realism). One exaggerates reality, the other attempts to essentialize & abstractify it.

Master Chef does not have any "special moves", "combos", or an abstract gauge which must be filled in order to unleash his "ultimate" attack. Instead the world presents him with a large landscape, multitudes of enemies (and some AI allies) acting somewhat independently, and most importantly, toys– toys in the form of vehicles, guns and gadgets. As the chaos unfolds in the game, it is left to you how you’re going to vanquish your foes. Will you pick them off at long range? Will you take a wheeled vehicle and plow through them? Will you pick up an assault rifle and jump into the fray? Will you just dick around and do crazy stunts? Most likely you’ll perform some combination of the above and laugh your ass off while doing it. While Japanese games emphasize sharpening your ability to master a convoluted, abstract game system and perform a fixed task with maximum efficiency, "western" games tend to be playgrounds that emphasize the player’s self-expression in an exaggerated world.

Japanese games allow you to escape yourself

While Halo and Final Fantasy both take you away to impossible, imaginary worlds, FF takes escapism one step further– it removes you from the picture. In Halo, the game has you looking through the eyes of Master Chef. In a way, Master Chef is removed from the picture, replaced by the game player himself. In Japanese games, which are overwhelmingly 3rd person, it’s just the opposite. Japanese games not only take you away from your world, they take you away from yourself, allowing you to experience a reality untouched by your own.

In Japanese adventures/RPGs, there is little meaning or logic in the relationship between your choices and their consequences upon the story. While western games seek to emphasize the relationship between the player’s ego and his avatar/the game world (obvious moral choices, karma gauges etc.), Japanese games sever your ability to project your ego into the game world by making the choices and their effects obscure and arbitrary.

You know the drill when starting a JRPG: read an F.A.Q. to discover what seemingly innocuous tasks you must perform throughout the game in order to get certain rewards and/or "The Good Ending" (Suikoden 2 anyone? Tales of Symphonia ?). Japanese games want you to master their fictional worlds on their terms, rather than take control of it and creatively subvert it with your individualistic ego.

Becoming someone else

There is a Japanese theme in the arts that stretches back to Kabuki theater, where a character would unmask himself in a Scooby Doo-like surprise moment. This "big reveal", the moment of transformation, would be a conventionally pivotal moment in the play. It conveyed a romantic notion that you can escape yourself and live a second life.

This theme carried over in a big way to anime, manga and sentai. For every series with a superhero, whether it’s Sailor Moon, Ultraman, Jubei-chan and so on, the transcendent transformation of a character into their "other self" is so celebrated that it’s often accompanied by a highly elaborate piece of special effects animation. The same cannot be said for Superman. Jubei-chan serves as an interesting example. The ghost of Yagyu Jubei literally possesses the protagonist and forces her to transform into his incarnation against her will, as he seeks to resolve the loose ends of his past life. The protagonist struggles to reconcile her mundane school life and her second life as the legendary Yagyu Jubei.

In Halo, Master Chief becomes your avatar in a playground built for your enjoyment and expression. In Final Fantasy, you become the protagonists and live out their lives and their adventure in a world built for them, performing tasks and experiencing a story that is largely not dependant on the player’s own creativity or individualism.

Japanese games grant players the opportunity to live another life as a person completely disconnected from them, in a world so heavily abstracted that it bears almost no functional resemblance to their own (e.g. you do not "level up" in real life). The countless gameplay conventions of Japanese games are all designed to protect the fantasy world of the game from intrusion from the player, and to simultaneously immerse the player in the motions of a self-contained, far away "second life".

It is for this reason games like ArmA 2, Fallout 3, and even Halo 3 are incompatible with the artistic objective of the vast majority of Japanese games. Rather than produce the next Little Big Planet, Japan will continue to perfect the art of removing the player from his world and himself.

Back to Chromehounds

Chromehounds is an "accidentally American" game because, while it has a razor-sharp emphasis on mech-building and optimization, it ultimately encourages creativity and individualism. Since it’s impossible to design a decent all-around mech, players must necessarily specialize and team up with other players in order to fight effectively in its simulated, online war. Chromehounds, like the best of "western" games, is a playground for expression and creativity, and is a social experience online. It’s as far removed from Persona 4 (a dating sim JRPG) or King of Fighters 12 as a Japanese game can possibly be.