Neverending Lessons From Japanese Games

The first time you glimpse Zero, you instinctively know something’s amiss. There is a striking, irreconcilable contrast between her silvery hair, snowy outfit and otherworldly stature and her monstrous prosthetic arm, the flower growing from her eye socket and her malicious air that seem to upend our aesthetic codes. Once forced into prostitution, Drakengard 3’s heroine has now embarked on a series of cold blooded murders. Yet her beauty is almost unmatched in the history of video games. The floating discomfort players may experience when looking at her comes from one thing: her soul is too dark for features so delicate.

Similarly, one could never suspect that Kaine, NieR Gestalt & Replicant’s slender female lead, was born a hermaphrodite. In Persona 3, summoning the physical incarnation of the hero’s psyche to battle requires to simulate an act of suicide. And, in order to slow down the seemingly inevitable transformation of the innocent Elena into a gruesome beast in Pandora’s Tower, her lover Aeron has to feed her raw flesh extracted from the monsters he has killed. There are countless more examples, but it does not take long to realise what all these games have in common: a defiance towards the traditional imagery and codes of morality and political correctness as well as a willingness to explore uncharted ethical territories. And, incidentally, all happen to be Japanese games.   

It may well be that over the past decade, as the industry talk has been drowned in a sea of complaints about the dwindling of creativity in mainstream blockbusters and a general tiredness with the extreme financial prudence that prevented development teams from taking any bold orientations with AAA titles’ content, a steady stream of creative endeavours still continued to flow from Japan, but we chose to collectively turn a blind eye on it. Along the years, I have progressively stopped entertaining hopes that the themes addressed by large Western game productions could escape the vapidity in which they seem to be entrapped. Many Western games are of high quality and perfectly fulfil their entertainment goal, but they share one common pitfall: they strive in the comfort of political correctness, of straightforward plots and conventional ideas, with hardly any element that will make you stop and reflect. While Western games are certainly leading the way in terms of graphic achievements and have benefited from the successful adoption of dynamic storytelling methods and plot twists from the cinema (GTA V and Call of Duty being perfect examples of that), we have been seriously lacking in daring ideas and themes, translating into a general meekness of our game scenarii and a convergence of narrative structures towards Hollywood blockbusters. And in that matter, the Japanese gaming industry is a mine filled with treasures that may yet hold useful lessons, even though we thought it had run dry a long time ago.

It is understandable that we thought we had learned all there was to learn from Japanese games, which golden era certainly belongs to the past. When the industry anticipates a wave of gaming innovation, eyes scarcely turn east instinctively. Their graphics are often out-dated, and the gameplay of many emblematic series has barely evolved in decades apart for the ones produced for the global market (for example Final Fantasy, in which the battle system changes with every title, coexists with many games only sold locally where conventional long-established RPG mechanics are still in full force). Moreover, their reluctance to change recipes that work with the Japanese public has been consistently frowned upon by the Western gaming industry as the mark of a frozen creativity, mostly because revolutions in Japanese game dynasties happen over a long period of time. It is true that changes with each iteration of Fire Emblem, Persona, and countless other series hardly seem groundbreaking, as their core mechanics have remained the same for the past two decades. But the progress that they have missed in gameplay and graphics has been more than compensated through unique, unsettling, edgy and solid storylines, atmosphere, music, character design and development, conveying a sheer pleasure of play which ultimately lies at the core of the video game experience and that many Western games have so far struggled to match.

I believe a possible explanation for this difference is that there are no themes Japanese game developers refrain or shy away from addressing, and they cultivate ambiguity when doing so. They deliberately walk on the edge of these ethical cliffs from which we stay comfortably clear, often leaping into the unknown rather than avoiding it, and occasionally extracting a gem from the dark emotional depths they’ve explored, such as Pandora’s Tower or Drakengard. Japanese games strive amidst stories of forbidden and repressed feelings, and openly address mature topics which have only rarely made any incursion in Western games such as suicide, incest or deep psychological troubles. They step on what we have always held to be self-evident and taken for granted, and shamelessly break taboos and tackle sensitive topics that would often be addressed in a too conventional way in Western games, when not avoided altogether. This narrative ambiguity is further reinforced by their use of aesthetical paradoxes to deliberately distantiate themselves from the imagery traditionally used to convey a theme: In Pandora’s Tower, the sweet and pure Elena progressively transforms into a hideous beast and, to the growing discomfort of the player, starts to enjoy eating monster flesh as the story progresses. In NieR, while it is hinted that Kaine is a hermaphrodite, her physical features are those of a beautiful feminine woman. And more importantly, these narrative twists are often hinted through allusion and insinuation, but not exposed directly as is the case with most Western games where little is left to the player’s interpretation and imagination. Ambiguity is inconclusive, inherently unclear and does not bring definitive answers. It does not hold your hand and guide you safely to the light at the end of the emotional journey, but instead leaves you inside the tunnel to find the exit by yourself, whichever it might be. It asks more questions than it gives answers, and because of this very nature, it can sometimes be unsatisfying to the player, who may seek some well-drawn moral boundaries. As a result, certain Japanese masterpieces have achieved a universal value because, by addressing mature and somewhat extreme topics and exploring the tortuous confines of the human mind, they make the player think and stop and wonder, and at the same time leave ample room for extrapolation, ensuring that each person’s emotional experience and attachment to the game will be truly unique.

Most Japanese games are not on par with their European or US counterparts when it comes to graphics, but their capacity to transport us to alternate worlds has not been hindered by this in the least. The greatest achievements of Japanese masterpieces lie elsewhere, past right and wrong, good and evil. It’s about drawing the players out of their comfort zone. It’s about making them think. Fundamentally, it’s about catharsis, and addressing disturbing controversial themes of universal reach that can be comprehended by all but powerful enough to resonate in each player and make them grow emotionally. Western games have forsaken ambiguity for a long time, to retreat to the comfort of blockbuster scenarios that will appeal to the widest audience. Because it is uncomfortable, ambiguity is not an easy pick for game creators. It is about making choices that will be controversial, finding beauty in improbable places, and making the players reconsider what they thought and empathise with characters that could not be more different from them or that they could instinctively despise or hate. Certain western games, like Mass Effect or Beyond Good and Evil, have managed to take the leap, and are showing that the gaming industry can also tackle mature subjects, but they are still too few to show the world a true momentum towards the maturation of the industry as a compelling storytelling and narrative medium which can display layers of emotional complexity on the same level as literature or motion pictures, and still largely behind Japanese games in that regard.

One potential explanation for this is that games in Japan are not considered a subpar form of entertainment, an inferiority complex that has consistently plagued the Western gaming industry versus other forms of art. This higher social acceptance of games in turn gives Japanese developers more freedom to tackle mature themes without instantly sparking heated public debates about morality and the alleged detrimental psychological impact of such games on its players, which often exclusively result in bad publicity for the industry in general. This debate is often centred on one key feature: the interactivity allowed by games, which sets them apart from other entertainment media, should naturally impose tighter boundaries to the themes addressed and the messages conveyed by developers than there are in, say, movies or literature. And while I agree that game creators should indeed be careful what they allow the players to do when embodying a fictional character, there is no theme that they should refrain from addressing because of a fear of the media repercussions, which could ultimately prejudice the commercial viability of their games (or in a few rare cases just fan the flames of their reputation like GTA). Unfortunately, as of today most Western market observers do not seem intellectually ready yet to judge the content of video games without the moral bias that has been tainting the public debate over the past decades, but when this happens, it will represent an invaluable step forward for the entire industry, and free game developers and writers from the shackles of flatness to finally advance towards a universal resonance of their productions.

The second valuable lesson from certain Japanese games, which is at the root of their being able to transcend time, is that they do not try to achieve gritty realism, but instead aim at visual harmony and beauty. While Western blockbusters are often pursuing the closest depiction of reality that can be achieved with the technology available at the time, in either characters appearance or environments, many Japanese games are simply pursuing beautiful aesthetics. Or simply the difference between East Asian painting and say the 19^th century European Academy. This key difference today can be seen when you put side by side a largely anticipated RPG from Japan, Final Fantasy XV, and its overseas counterpart The Witcher 3.

As a result, many Japanese games’ aesthetics have endured the succession of console generations and changes in engines. Some images from Okami are stuck in my memory as hanging moments of timeless beauty that ensure the game will stay on as a classic and avoid the threat of becoming irrelevant with the passing of time. And to this day, Shadow of the Colossus is still cited as one of the many sources of inspiration for numerous game developers, and seems to be constantly rediscovered as a provider of never-ending lessons in game design, storytelling and music, to name but a few.

Also, Japanese developers do not refrain from blending different artistic genres to create unique atmospheres, thus not staying confined within the boundaries of a specific visual paradigm. For example, they have produced more than a few games blending sci-fi elements like flying space vessels with classical architecture to create more or less convincing dystopias, which unfortunately often fall short of being truly immersive, but offer certain moments of breathtakingly majestic landscapes. A typical example is Rogue Galaxy and its flying pirate ship exploring planets with each a different civilisation and technological advancement. While the game came nowhere near achieving the status of gaming masterpiece, and was certainly not at the forefront of graphic sharpness at the time of its release compared to its competitors, its diversity was a true pleasure for the eyes of the player and offered numerous moments of highly inspired scenery. This aesthetic openness often results in the birth of game environments mixing magic, technological prowess as well as an architectural style often inspired from European antiquity or renaissance, and while player immersion may suffer if the execution is not as strong as the creative intent behind it, it has at least the merit to limit restrictions on visual innovation and leaving the door open to creative endeavours, where slaying dragons could be done in a different way than atop a castle battlement in plate, mail and armour.

In recent years, the only Western games that made me put aside my controller for a few moments to admire the sight displayed on my screen were Journey and, as improbable as it may seem, GTA V. It strikes me then, that as we are waiting for the new, the revolutionary, the yet unseen and unheard of, to breathe a new dynamism into AAA titles creativity, and desperately reaching forward, rushing headlong into the future, we should maybe look back and around first, and rediscover how Japanese developers make unchanging recipes endlessly stir a renewed pleasure in gaming because of the sheer inspiration, poetry, and humanity they put into their themes, characters and storytelling. Maybe then Ubisoft will produce less Watch Dogs and more Child of Light. And we will know we have advanced towards the future.