The Shibuya of my memories

Shibuya brings out the feels

In 2008, I visited Japan for the first time in my life. Me and my partner stayed at a little business hotel in the middle of Shinbashi (chosen as our lodging, I’m embarrassed to admit, largely because of a flash animation listing train stations on the Yamanote line). The Shinbashi station is a simple affair: a few rails, a few buildings and a lot of outdoor space. It was from this relatively straightforward place that we boarded the Yamanote line on our first outing to Shibuya.

Now, here’s the thing about the Yamanote line: it’s a long loop line that visits most of the central districts of Tokyo like Ginza, Akihabara, Ikebukuro, Shinjuku, Harajuku and, of course, Shibuya. But in between these hubs the Yamanote stops at smaller stations (which, this being Tokyo, are rather big as well, just not... mind-numbingly gigantic). If you board the Yamanote line at Shinbashi and travel the loop west, you’ll mostly hit small stations, leading you into thinking maybe all the talk about crowded Japanese megastations is the stuff of urban legends after all.

That was what I thought up until we got off at Shibuya. A chill went down my spine. People. People everywhere. So many people, so very very many people. More people than I’d ever seen in one place. A bustle that short-circuited all my senses and left me in a sort of social shock. Coming from the sparsely populated Finland, Shibuya was a bit too much.

The station square at midnight, when there were relatively few people around

The station is the fourth busiest in Japan, with some 2.4 million people flowing through it every day. It serves as a station for two JR lines, three private railway lines and three subway lines, all with their own exits, entryways, ticket gates and facilities. In addition, the station houses an impressive assortment of small boutiques and is integrated with the large Tokyu department store that has its own entrances and exits, some connected to the station and some not. Also, the whole station complex is naturally comprised of multiple floors, from several underground levels to floors rising up to who knows how high.

To this maze of commuters and commercialism we plunged, trusting that we could find an exit to the famous Scramble Crossing and the statue of Hachiko. Alas, we took a wrong turn and instead of going via the short route to the exit gates and the Hachiko exit, we ended up into the maelstrom of passageways connecting the Yamanote platforms to the non-JR substations. I grant, it’s easy to get to the right exit at Shibuya station, but if you take a wrong turn you’re in for a harsh lesson in counterintuitive architecture and spatial traps.

We wandered around the station, in the crush of late morning commuters, trying desperately to see any exit gates or info signs. At one point, through a dusty window, I could see a glimpse of the Scramble Crossing, but could not find an exit anywhere nearby. After a while I caught a glimpse of the same landscape, through the same window. And again, a few minutes later.

We were going in circles, seeing the same bagel shops, family restaurants and station snack booths over and over again. No matter which tunnel we took from the little clearing with the dusty window, we always ended up back, shooting increasingly desperate looks at the grimy window that seemed to mock us in a way that was like straight out of a video game.

It was like the level designer of Shibuya station had locked us within an endless loop of scenery, like a variation of Persona 3’s Tartarus, and had further underlined the artificial nature of our surroundings by letting us see that one dusty window, so out of place in the otherwise immaculately cleaned station, over and over again. The Scramble Crossing seemed like a background texture placed behind the window to offer us a glimpse of things to come, in an obvious act of foreshadowing.

I began to wonder if it wasn’t the window that was dusty but the world beyond it. If something had happened to reality while we were trapped within the surreal experience of the neverending station. Silly, yes, but that’s the kind of place Shibuya station is.

We got desperate. To break the spell, we decided to just keep on going, somewhere, anywhere, until we got out of the nightmarish ouroborean Shibuya station. To hell with signs and layout maps, we’d run straight ahead, always towards the first tunnel we saw, until we got out.

And we did get out. Through the grocery and gourmet section of the Tokyu department store, briskly walking past all manner of dead sea creatures and walls upon walls of cookies and little biscuits.

We stumbled out of the building into the heat and sunshine of mid-summer Japan, having no idea which exit we’d taken, where in Shibuya we were or where we should head to get to our destination; the Scramble Crossing and Hachiko. Scramble Crossing was our anchor, our focal point. The one place in Shibuya we knew, and which we planned to use to orient ourselves in respect to the rest of the district. Without it we were lost.

Our maps showed the station as a vaguely rectangular geometric shape, reminiscent of some asymmetric space carrier from an ‘80s anime. There was no knowing where we were, especially since in our mad dash we’d strayed deep into the department store which spreads well outside the perimeter of the station proper, so for all we knew we were no longer even near the station itself.

Then I noticed the buses, and the bus stops. All around us, the easily distinguishable Toei buses were going about their routes. I realized I had seen something like this before.If my hunch was correct and this was the Shibuya bus depot, I knew to the north there should be a...

Hello!

Moai statue. “Mr Moyai”, to be exact, donated to Shibuya by the kind people of Niijima island in the 1980s.

And if I could navigate from the buses to Mr Moyai, I could surely find an underpass somewhere nearby to the north of us. In the cool shade of the underpass I was sure we’d find Hachiko and the Scramble crossing just ahead.

I knew where we were. More than that, I knew where everything else of interest in Shibuya was. This was my first time in Shibuya, in one of the busiest, most tightly-packed urban districts in the world – and I knew my way. The experience was one of the strongest I’ve ever felt as a gamer. And I wasn’t even gaming, I was standing with my mouth open in the middle of a bustling city!

The reason I knew my way around Shibuya’s landmarks was that I’d been obsessing over The World Ends With You for the last month. Originally bought as entertainment for the oncoming 11-hour flight from Helsinki to Haneda Airport, I was too excited about the game and about going to Japan that I had to play the game right away and get a peek of the digital Shibuya before going there in person.

That little peek turned into around 20 hours of gaming, carefully spent admiring the game’s urban world, grinding for experience points in the fun battles and trying hard not to trigger too many story-advancing scenes so that I’d have something left to play on the flight.

Turns out I had learned Shibuya’s landmarks in and out even before I knew they were real. I had no idea how faithful a representation of the real Shibuya the game really is. Instead of a short – and very fiction-heavy – tour to some of the well-known parts of the district I got a full map and a head full of little details about department stores, restaurants, record shops and tourist sights.

I had a learned a lot, and now it was all being transformed by the experience of actually being there, experiencing the original Shibuya. The clash of digital and physical space was awe-inspiring.

To explore what happened there, let’s dig into some concepts of space and place and the way they pertain to The World Ends With You and Shibuya. 

In his article Kairotopos: A reflection on Greek space/time concepts as design implications in Minecraft [PDF], Isaac Lenhart describes several temporal and spatial concepts that originate in ancient Greek. Of these, especially the concepts of chora and topos made an impression on me as I worked to unpack my experiences with The World Ends With You and Shibuya.

Both chora and topos are words that somewhat correspond to terms we already have in the vocabulary of games writing. They roughly mean a “game world”, as in the full world of a game, and an “instance” (or maybe a “level” in some cases), a smaller unit that’s separated from the larger whole. But game world and instance (or level) don’t really work when discussing a place that’s meaningful both as a real physical place and as a fictional construct within a game.

So, rather than labour under terminology that doesn’t quite fit the bill, lets discuss chora and topos instead.

Chora is a place, an unified area where things can be. As Lenhart describes:

An example of chora would be something like "our country" or "this land", a semi- abstract concept of a world/region that objects can occupy.

Hans Rämö, in his (most awesomely titled) paper An Aristotelian Human Time–Space Manifold – From chronochora to kairotopos [PDF], describes chora like this:

Thus, chora does not denote meaningful place, but a "place" of convergence that is crossed through and "erased".

For Rämö, chora is first and foremost an abstract space rather than a clearly definible physical whole. The exact nuance of the word is somewhat eluding but for my uses the definition of a “space” in the most generic sense of the word is more than adequate. Chora is where things can take place. It’s one level zoomed out from the more specific places of action.

Or maybe it would be more illuminating to say a chora is the space where more specific places can exist. As Heidegger put it in An Introduction to Metaphysics: "[Chora] signifies neither place nor space but that which is occupied by what stands there." Like a stage which in itself is but a space to be transformed into a place by the sets and actors.

Topos on the other hand is a more specific, or more identified, region within a chora. Like a park, for example. Or in Lenhart’s words "[...] topos is a kind of 'special' chora, a subset, a piece of the whole."

The distinction between the two words isn’t, however, especially clear, and they’ve been used for centuries to mean slightly different things.

Lenhart refers to Keimpe Algra and his book Concepts of Space in Greek Thought:

Keimpe Algra goes to great length to tease apart the differences between topos and chora, finding that they are largely synonymous, yet topos connotes a more relativistic and referential kind of space/location.

So, topos is a somewhat subjective term, marking a place as felt, as lived and as experienced, more than a somewhat defined cartographic area. Despite this slight subjective bend, topos does not, in its original form, imply an emotional link or any sort of specifity with a place. For example, it does not imply the sense of "home", as Lenhart states, but is more "neutral and scientific" as a term.

But as is the case with words, over time the term topos has opened up to different interpretations. Lenhart continues by saying that "In the process of by naming and singling out a piece of topos from the general chora, we cannot help but to make it meaningful and significant."

So, even if the term did not originally mean anything but, basically, “somewhere” (if even that), it has in time transformed to encompass the emotional connections too. The term, as it now stands, refers to a place, in contrast with chora which has more to do with the more neutral and generic term space.

Again, from Hans Rämö:

The difference between chora (space) and topos (place) is that, when the former is a geometric or cartographic extension, the latter (topos) is contextual localization, without sharp demarcations.

As a concrete example, Lenhart sums the terms up like this:

To talk about chora, one needs only theoretical knowledge and some technical skills. "My world", "my land", the Minecraft world, even "Azeroth" all qualify as chora when talking about them in an abstract way. To talk about topos, technical skills and wisdom are needed to identify it, why it is set off from the rest of the undifferentiated chora.

Of course, Lenhart reminds us that the exact understanding of the nuances of the words is a tricky business, and my simplified hack job here does no more credit to Lenhart than to the ancient terms and concepts. Nevertheless, the terms are useful when making sense of Shibuya, both the real and the imagined.

For the purpose of applying the term to Shibuya, let’s say the sprawling urban tangle that I call Shibuya is a vague geographic (and mental) label for a district within the city of Tokyo. It has very concretely drawn borders somewhere in the bureaucratic depths of Tokyo Metropolitan Government and its agencies, but as far as the layman wandering the streets is concerned, Shibuya is just “a district”, a perfect example of a rather abstract place of convergence, or in other words, chora.

Fuck yeah, words!

You could argue (and make a good case of it, too) that this whole “Shibuya of my memories” business is actually contributing towards making Shibuya more of a topos than a chora: A place felt and experienced rather than a mere space for things to take place in. But wait! For this specific instance of defining space and place, the various topoi within the chora of Shibuya justify the elevation of Shibuya into a chora. Shibuya is filled with memories and places of meaning, all of which are contained in the chora of Shibuya.

Within the larger whole of Shibuya there is a multitude of smaller, more specific, nodes, consisting of my personal experiences, as well as of those of countless other people. Places that are set apart from the larger whole of Shibuya. For example, the great Scramble Crossing is a place and a state of mind, a very specific spot within Shibuya, immediately recognizable to anyone who knows anything about Shibuya. A topos if I ever knew one, yet utterly void of identity without the chora of Shibuya lending it its surroundings.

In the context of The World Ends With You, the whole game world – Shibuya – forms a chora. A world in itself. (Now, the real-world Shibuya naturally is a topos within the chora of Tokyo, which itself surely is a topos within the chora of Japan, but for the sake of clarity and sanity, Shibuya is the world as far as this post, and TWEWY, is concerned.)

The chora of The World Ends With You exists as this sort of a half-real place. There is a “whole” Shibuya in the game, but it exists only in the background, as a concept and as a geographical tag for the place the game takes place in. You can see the whole Shibuya on the game map, but you can only ever visit parts of it. It is implied that the game takes place everywhere in Shibya, but actually the player can only access certain key locations of the district. Or, to use the Greek terms, the player never actually experience the chora but instead only the topoi within it.

And this is true for both the game and the real Shibuya. The division into places of meaning and un-places of meaninglessness. Our cities are full of places that are, in general, essentially not places. Roads, alleys and vaguely unmemorable stretches of suburbs don’t stay with you, unless there’s something personal you associate with them. Something to separate them from the larger whole. Something to make them topoi. An unmemorable street you only use once and never remember afterwards does exists, sure, but to you personally it might as well not be there after you leave it behind.

The playable locations in The World Ends With You are centered around major landmarks and points of interest in Shibuya. Each in-game location has at least one iconic object (a statue, a building, a shop and so on) that is instantly recognizable for someone who has visited the place in the real Shibuya. Or, vice versa, is instantly familiar when seeing it for the first time in real life, after having encountered it only in the game.

As such, the places both in the game and in the real world are heavy with meaning and history. Playing TWEWY weaved fictional meaning into these key locations which already were rather well separated from the generic urban noise of the rest of the district. This turns the locations to some sort of über-spaces. Spaces that are more than just spaces in the conventional way. Spatial points where experiences from two different worlds meet, blend, and bleed into each other.

Seeing the statue of Hachiko for the first time in Shibuya reminded me of the story of the faithful dog, and all the tourist photos I’d seen of it. The real-world cultural jetsam and flotsam I’d picked up over the years. But it also reminded me of Neku and Shiki meeting there, trapped in a weird world, looking for a way out from a surreal situation. The experience was a combination of geography, history and fiction.

Aside from chora and topos, analysing my baffling experience in Shibuya requires us to review one more term: The magic circle.

Scholars of game studies have, for a good time now, used the concept of a magic circle to describe various spaces and boundaries of play. For as long as the term has been in use it has attracted both adamant support and schorching criticism, both of which stem largely from the vagueness of the concept and its origins.

The magic circle was first introduced to game studies via the Dutch scholar Johan Huizinga, who made some references to it in his seminal book "Homo ludens" in 1938. This is the passage that is often quoted from the book:

All play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the "consecrated spot" cannot be formally distinguished from the play-ground.

The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.

Huizinga never thoroughly investigates the concept of the magic circle, and though he certainly makes a case for play being separate from non-play (or everyday life in general), he remains rather ambivalent about the whole term.

The commonly used contemporary interpretation of the term comes from Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, who in their book Rules of Play introduced their own version of the magic circle, based on – but not limited to – the works of Huizinga. As Zimmerman pointed in his magic circle retrospect on Gamasutra earlier this year:

To be perfectly honest, Katie and I more or less invented the concept, inheriting its use from my work with Frank, cobbling together ideas from Huizinga and Caillois, clarifying key elements that were important for our book, and reframing it in terms of semiotics and design -- two disciplines that certainly lie outside the realm of Huizinga's own scholarly work.

The bottom line is, there really is no “magic circle” as such. It’s a metaphor – a tool for effective separation of play and non-play, to be used as one best sees. The use of the term hinges for the most part on one’s definition of it rather than an agreed-upon fixed meaning.

But if we distill the magic circle to its most basic form, we can define it as a boundary between a game and the rest of the world. It demarkates the game, basically.

Hmph.

Right.

What The World Ends With You does is it extends the magic circle beyond the game and into the real world. All of a sudden, the separation of the fictional Shibuya and the real Shibuya is blurred. By enhancing the speciality of the already rather special topoi of Shibuya, the game hurls you into the physical city in a way unlike anything else I know. It felt like I was playing even when the game was turned off.

It’s like the game is constantly layered over the observations you make when walking around Shibuya. And the game, when I went back to it after the trip, felt more real, it’s locations more tangible. Not real as in “realistic”, of course, but it felt like the locations somehow contained more of themselves, like they had gained a stronger identity. I had a better understanding of what the game objects signified and symbolized. The chora of Shibuya – the overall game world of TWEWY that is – felt just as it had previously, but now it was filled to the brim with something new: Topoi with an air of life. Places of significance that starkly stood out from the rest of the fiction.

The game world had escaped the digital and entered the real, and simultaneously the real world had come rushing in, subverting the caricature of itself, lodging itself into the game.

The World Ends With You stretches and transforms the magic circle until it covers all of the real Shibuya. The chora of the real Shibuya was overrun by the multitude of fictional topoi, each more important than the other. The effect was most starkly felt near the major landmarks of Shibuya. I could go to any of the central locations of Shibuya and feel like I’d never closed my DS. Walking into Tower Records I almost expected to see the familiar sales guy behind the counter.

But it did not stop with the specific locations. The magic circle was everywhere, filling every street and alley. Even if I wasn’t next to a topos, I knew I was close to one. When I wasn’t at a place of meaning I was inhabiting something else, traversing the meta-Shibuya of the loading screens and background maps, on my way to the next interesting location. The magic circle did not break even when I wasn’t close to recognizable topoi.

In Shibuya, I can’t watch the storefront of Tower Records without thinking about boss battles and cutscenes. I can’t walk from Shibuya to Harajuku, seeing all the little cafés and fashion boutiqués that fill the space between these two magnificent districts, without thinking that somewhere nearby Mr H is fixing yet another cappuccino at WildKat.

And so it is that now the chora of Shibuya is filled to the brim with topoi; The space filled with places, all thanks to just one game. The awe I experienced when the game’s geography started lining up with the real geography was what happens when a magic circle breaks – or doesn’t break, necessarily, but at least spreads to cover much more than a game.

The World Ends With You has a central theme of how the world doesn’t, in fact, end with you, but that we’re in this together, all of us. And only by sharing our worlds we can expand the borders. It is fitting, then, that the game itself has offered such a perfect chance for me to have the boundaries of my personal experience be so radically altered.

It’s a common worry for many a concerned person that video games make us forget what is real and what is fiction. That we somehow lose ourselves in made up worlds and afterwards find ourselves unable to handle reality as it is.

I’m sure those people have never lost themselves and stood in awe in the middle of a foreign city, amazed by how they know where everything is just because they’ve been there before, in another life.

I have fought, I have laughed and I have cried in Shibuya, and I don’t care whether it was real or fiction because I remember it all; The Shibuya of my memories.

The white cloak

This is the lesson I learned on my voyage through thatgamecompany's superb friendship generator and awe machine Journey.

During the story of Journey, Great Ancestors, clad in shimmering white and gold, tell your character about the world's history and, I presume, the meaning of your travels. The story is relayed with mural-like cutscenes consisting of simple pictures full of symbols and vaguely recognizable elements from the world.

The point the ancestors are trying to make gets across to you eventually in some form, but very likely only after repeated playthroughs, and even then it’s difficult to decode their message with any degree of certainty. For beings of an advanced civilization that’s some pretty ineffective communication. But then, it's the same vagueness that has ailed ancestors and advanced beings in fiction for ages.

God never spoke especially clearly in the Bible, Gandalf knew a lot more about the world than he let anyone in The Lord of the Rings ever know, and Kosh rarely spoke at all in Babylon 5. It's the part played by all manner of precursors and advanced entities in fiction. Superior beings rarely impart knowledge in sensible manner and verbosity. For all their eminence, they communicate rather poorly.

I've always wondered about that. I mean, god, God, spill the beans already if you want us to follow your plans.

In Journey, all characters start out looking the same. They have a red cloak, a red hood and red clothes. At some point they get a scarf, the length of which varies throughout the game. But in essence, all travellers look the same.

Until you finish your journey, that is. When you start a new journey, your character's cloak has more embroideries than it did before. In practice this means you can tell how experienced someone is by looking at the decorations of their cloak.

At first all the characters were equal. Equally lost, equally bewildered and equally clad. But it wasn't long until everyone changed. Soon the little travellers had capes full of ornaments and everyone knew at first sight who was and who wasn't on their first trip to the mountain.

During the travels you find symbols, little glowing things that make your scarf longer. Once you've found all of these, you unlock an option to change your cloak from red to white. After changing the color of the cloak, your little traveller bears a striking resemblance to the ancestors.

Also, from that point on, it’s obvious to everyone travelling with you that you're no mere enthusiast, retaking the trip to the mountain: You're someone who knows the game's secrets in and out. You're akin to the ancestors in look and in knowledge. You know things a common traveller doesn't.

And wandering around in my white cloak, looking like an ancestor, made me understand.

I had become a God, a Gandalf, a Kosh. I was a being of superior knowledge, empowered with the ability, and responsibility, of sharing it.

I could lead my companion to every secret in the desert, show every trick I know, and in doing that pass on my full knowledge. But in doing that I would also rob them of an important experience. I would rob them of their own journey and discovery. They would learn everything and learn nothing. In a game like Journey the, well, journey is more important than the destination. And I would take that away if I taught my red-cloaked friends all the rules.

So I became vague. I led less-experienced companions near secrets, but didn't always reveal them. I hinted and suggested. Sometimes they discovered the hidden delight. Sometimes I let them run past it even when they were close to a discovery. I would make sure they found something new on their trip; maybe a wall glyph they meant to run past or a scarf symbol they clearly missed. But I let them miss just as many.

And now I know. I know the weight of holding back. Of making a journey worthwhile by being obscure and vague. Of holding yourself back so someone else could grow.

I have become a God, a Gandalf, a Kosh. I have become an ancestor, and I only speak in riddles.

Security detail

Adam Jensen, the protagonist of Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a fearsome guy. He is, by all measures, thoroughly superhuman.

He can hack into any computer, security robot or surveillance camera. He can withstand sustained fire from any source. He breathes poison gas like it was nothing, and can jump higher, run faster and punch harder than any human ever has before him.

But there is something even Mr. Jensen is afraid of: Keyboards. Nothing hinders his advance quite like a keyboard, which he is forced to jab, one key at a time, like it was the first time using such a device. And who knows, maybe it is, judging by the difficulty I’ve been having with them in the game.

I suspect the PC version of the game allows typing passwords and codes via the player’s own keyboard. The PS3 version, however, forces the player to input everything via an on-screen keyboard, one character at a time. And nothing is more frustrating than trying to punch in a long password one key at a time when a security patrol is right around the corner.

I’m frankly somewhat baffled why the game doesn’t include an option to bypass the typing altogether, something along the lines of “press key to enter code”. Jensen simply cannot be as clumsy with keyboards as he is made out to be. It feels very out of character when a player has to input everything like they were spelling out a trainer’s name in Pokémon. It breaks immersion to have this superhuman character sweat over little typos, worrying over long passwords. It’s weird that the best security feature in the world of Deus Ex is a really long password. Hell, given the option of logging in with a password or hacking my way into a system, I almost always choose hacking because it’s less trouble.

And it doesn’t stop there. When you make a mistake while typing a passcode, you can select backspace on the on-screen keyboard and correct your mistake. But when you need to erase something while writing a password, the only option is to use L2 on the controller. This breaks the immersion even further.

The game has you thinking keyboards are diegetic, part of the game world. You accept the clumsy interface because it’s “realistic” in the context of the game world. Yet with this one little detail the game switches to an external input mode and reminds the player that yes, there are numerous non-diegetic ways to influence the world. Sure, pressing L2 to erase is a lot easier than tap-tap-tapping the cursor over to yet another on-screen key. But it’s exactly that little hint of usability that highlights the inconvenience of the rest of the input experience.

It’s a minuscule detail, of course, but it’s nevertheless in stark contrast with the techno-centric world of Deus Ex. Adam Jensen, the biomechanical Jesus that he is, is humbled in front of the de facto human–computer interface of the world. Keyboards must’ve been the prevalent input method for the whole of Jensen’s life, and it still takes several seconds for him to write something as simple as “Unicorn”.

Maybe there’s subtext here, about the emergent interface paradigms human augmentation is rapidly bringing forth in the world of Deus Ex. Maybe underlining the limited accessibility of older technology suits the themes of Human Revolution.

But it’s still annoying.

Characters in translation – Waka, the gods' gift to man

We write a lot about video game characters. And with good reason, seeing how characters are pretty essential to games. But something that’s surprisingly often left out of the ponderings is the staggering influence translation and localization have on characters.

Now, sure, we write about the version of the game we’ve played and to hell with the rest. It doesn’t matter what this or that JRPG character is like in the Japanese version, when the product we’re scrutinizing is, for example, in English. It just isn’t practical to try and include every version imaginable into one’s reading of a game and its characters. And that’s all fine and good.

Yet, I argue taking at least a cursory glance at how characters are portrayed in the original work, and in what way they fit the cultural paradigms of their origins, offers valuable context for understanding the characters and the intentions of their designers. To see what aspects of the character originate from the translation and localization is often of immense help.

To use an example, think about Waka from Clover Studio’s Ōkami. Waka is a recurring antagonist and a key NPC in the game. Shrouded in mystery and unanswered questions he appears from time to time to deal vague prophecies, look cool and act weird.

In Waka’s case the key difference in characterization, the thing that is most affected by the translation, is how he speaks. In the English version Waka speaks an odd mixture of languages and tones that can be summed up in four categories:

1) Standard English
2) Pompous “Ye Olde” English
3) English slang / Informal English
4) Simple French

The different speech quirks are demonstrated as soon as Waka makes his first appearance in the game. His first lines of dialogue are:

Hark! The call of the heavens, the earth, the sea... They summon me forth to defeat evil! Waka, the gods' gift to man, is here! Bonjour!

That crimson shading and Divine Instrument on your back... You look kinda weird, but I reckon you pack a punch, baby.

First you have “Hark!” and “forth”, clear allusions to old-fashioned grammar and wording. Then there’s “Bonjour!”, which is a jarring departure from the style the rest of the line has, but at the same time is simple enough to be understood by anyone playing the game regardless of their fluency in French. And, finally, for the English slang category, we have words such as “kinda” and “baby”.

All of these special styles are cocooned in a safe wrapping of standard English, most plainly evident in the expository bit that follows the previous two lines:

Oui! This is how I get my point across, pun intended... The moment the cursed zone started spreading across Nippon, I saw the shadowy figure that removed the sacred sword Tsukuyomi flee into Kamiki Village and seal the entrance with a huge rock. You guys know anything about that?

These four levels of speech lead to a somewhat messy characterization that portrays Waka as a wise (albeit pompous) sage, a cool and wildly anachronistic bad boy, a mysterious stranger speaking a foreign language, and an all-round average guy who happens to know a lot about everything. With all these more or less conflicting ingredients, Waka’s dialogue conveys a very mixed character. The longer Waka stays on the screen the harder he is to make sense of. It’s impossible to tell which of the different speech patterns are his “real” ones. The gimmicks, when used as often as they are, undermine his characterization rather than support it.

Compare that to the original rendition of Waka, or Ushiwaka, as he is called in the Japanese version, who in his first lines says:

天呼ぶ　地呼ぶ　海が呼ぶ…
The heaven calls, the earth calls, the sea calls...
物の怪　倒せと　我を呼ぶ！
"Defeat the mononoke!" they ask me
人倫の伝道師　ウシワカ　イズ　ヒア！
The messenger for humankind, Ushiwaka, is here!

その　深紅の隈取
Those crimson markings
そして　その身に　粧し込んだ　神の器…
And that divine instrument you are wearing...
なるほど　傾いた　ルックスだけど
I see. It looks weird, but
その実力は　本物かな　…ベイベィ？
Could its power be real... Baby?

(Kudos to my illustrous spouse for the quick & literal-ish translation)

His first line, the one about the heaven, the earth and the sea, is pompous, definitely, but it lacks the “ye olde” connotation the harks and the forths have in the English translation. It’s simply pompous, in a dramatic and silly way. He wraps the line by saying “... is here!”. And he really does say that. As in, he says it in English which, after the pompous start, is an obvious comedic twist, utilizing an anachronistic surprise. He does it again at the end of his second line with the somewhat mind-boggling “Baby?”. It’s not just that he says baby, something that in itself would be plenty odd, but it’s framed as a question, and as a sign of hesitation.

Further examples of his English quirks later on in the same scene include his use of the word ユーたち which combines the English “you” with he standard Japanese plural suffix “-tachi”, used when referring to Amaterasu and Issun, and the way he starts his first fight against Amaterasu by exclaiming レッツ　ロック　ベイビィ！, Let’s rock baby!

Waka talks in a funny way, and his dialogue shifts between pompous, neutral and weird, but there is a certain consistency to it. Where the English translation has four levels of tones in these first bits of dialogue, the original version only really has three. That’s only one level less, granted, but the internal consistency between pompous Japanese, standard Japanese and English gimmicks makes the Japanese Waka a totally different character from his English counterpart. He’s more... whole, I suppose. He swings between fairly normal Japanese and catchphrase-like English weirdness, forming a clearly defined juxtaposition that is occasionally spiced up with more pompous bits.

The translation obviously cannot (and indeed should and could not) include all the nuances of the original, and while I’m somewhat disappointed in the chaotic potpourri that is Waka’s translated dialogue, I still think it’s actually done pretty well, all things considered. It just isn’t what the original Waka is.

What’s important here is that Waka, really, isn’t the character we outside of Japan think he is. Or rather that he is, but when we discuss Waka what we really mean is the translated Waka – a character quite removed from the original one.

I’m not arguing we should always check the translations and see what the characters originally were like. But I do stress that if we want a deeper understanding of a character, we should pay at least some heed to its original form and characterization, if only for context...

Baby?

Train of thought

Mawaru Penguindrum is a series about three siblings, a hat and some penguins.

And yet it’s not about them, really. Three siblings, a hat and some penguins is where the series starts but, unlike too many other stories, Mawaru Penguindrum isn’t afraid of motion, of going to places. Where I was expecting a series revolving around its premise, Mawaru Penguindrum soon abandons the initial setting and accelerates to awesome heights. Everything changes, all the time. The characters, the plot, the whole premise. 

Mawaru Penguindrum’s storytelling advances at an exhilarating pace. You think you’ve gotten the hang of the story, only to realize there’s yet another layer underneath. When you think it’s a story about three siblings, a hat appears. Then penguins, metaphysical teddybears, stalkers, destinies, mind-wiping slingshots, childhood traumas, cockroaches and oh god more cockroaches. Not once has the story been about what I thought it’d be about, because each episode has reshaped the very fundamentals of the whole series, all the while hurling the plot forwards with relentless inertia.

Aside from the charms of a narrative arc with all the predictability of a giraffe on acid, Mawaru Penguindrum also excels (and surprises) with its bipolar atmosphere. The series has an abundance of comedic elements, to the point where one could almost pass it as a light-hearted comedy. But to label it light-hearted or a comedy would be a mistake. 

Mawaru Penguindrum is sick and twisted. Characters who initially appear amiable turn out to be utterly depraved, or at the very least fundamentally broken, and the story constantly steers towards the darker end of the emotional spectrum. Love and life in the series are only facades hiding darker undertones: Love is obsessive and consuming, and life consists of chaotic freedom clashing against immutable fate. Mawaru Penguindrum makes sure you never know what to believe in. The only thing you can count on is that nothing is permanent and nothing is simple. Not fate, not chance and least of all love. And still, in the end, the series somehow manages to be very optimistic about everything.

Mawaru Penguindrum is a series where fate and free will clash, where everything is in motion and nothing is constant. It’s a series where, above all, there’s a lot of sitting in trains.

Trains, for the most part, are the very pinnacles of destiny. You go through the station gates, pick a line, board a train and then you wait. Your free will means nothing on rails, where there are no surprises, only the railroad track guiding you towards the next stop. And even if there are surprises, you can’t do anything about them. Your will may very well be free, but it has no effect on the outcome of your journey. You just sit and wait and see where the rails lead you. No matter what is true in life in general, on rails there is destiny, absolute and pure. You know where you came from and where you’re going, and there’s not much you can do in between one station and the next.

But sitting in a train in Mawaru Penguindrum is never just “sitting in a train”. It’s sitting in a train that’s going to an unknown destination, or to an unwanted destination. It’s sitting in a train thinking thoughts you would rather not think of. And most of all, it’s sitting in a train, waiting to reclaim your life (or someone else’s) from the cruel grip of your (or their) fate. Sitting in a train in Mawaru Penguindrum often means you’ve set out to get things back on track, or off the track entirely.

The rails of destiny might move you one station closer to your ultimate destination but everything changes when you get off the train. Once you disembark, nothing is certain. The board is set but the pieces are free.

(Edit: This was written after seeing around 11 episodes of the series, hence the somewhat skewed perspective.)

The leading man

This is an ode to Balthier, the leading man of Final Fantasy XII.

I may have lied. This not really an ode. And Balthier isn't really the leading man of Final Fantasy XII. But he almost was, and he almost is, and this may be an ode to him after all.

Anyway.

Balthier remains my favourite character from Final Fantasy XII and he is also one of my favourite FF characters of all time. But why? Let's find out!

"Hmph. I daresay I've soiled my cuffs. If a dungeon's waiting for us at the end of the night, it had best have a change of wardrobe."

An important factor in Balthier's lure is the overall quality of Final Fantasy XII's game design. Despite numerous shortcomings it's truly a great game. The mechanics work well and give the player a lot of space to experiment. I think Margaret Robertson's post Final Fantasy XII, Wasting your time the scientific way over at the late Offworld blog sums up a lot of what's so great about the game. Specifically this passage hits very close to home:

Simply getting to watch a complex and beautiful machine do its stuff is captivating. What FFXII does is give you the chance to build that machine, and then stand by like proud parent and watch it go. Tweaking Gambits lets you take incremental steps towards perfection. Each time you try a new technique or set a new priority you get closer to the ultimate goal of being a perpetual killing machine, a super-efficient, zero-emission, friction-free engine of domination.

That's the very essence of what's so great about the game's mechanics. They are crunchy and tangible. The mechanics are not just sets of causes and effects running in the background, smoothed and simplified for the player's convenience. No, the core of the game's mechanics are felt viscerally at every junction, and are open for the players to experiment with.

The most tangible of the mechanics is the Gambit System: the programmable battle AI you endow each of your characters with. Through the Gambit System, the player has total control over what each party member will do in almost any given situation. You can create a Vaan who charges head-on towards any enemy, or a sly and ruthlessly effective Balthier who stays back and rains down barrage after barrage of projectiles and magic upon the monsters. Or you can equip Balthier with a gigantic hammer and have him smash monsters left and right at the head of your party. There are guidelines, sure, but very few hard limits. Through the License Board, a character advancement system of a sort, the characters can be further modified to your liking. My Balthier, for example, leaned rather heavily on strong magic and healing spells instead of raw physical strength and attack skills.

What the Gambit System and License Board do is they allow you to add your own flair to the predetermined characterization of the party members. And that's important! Player input is important in player-character interaction in all games, but it's especially important in FFXII because of the way the game's story is shaped and told. FFXII places emphasis on an epic story, operating on a scale that doesn't really include the characters. The characters of FFXII can seem distant because - unlike most other Final Fantasies - the game's story is not really about them. It's about bigger things, events of glacial scale and framing. The characters are merely operators in a chain of events so large that their individual story arcs tend to get lost in all the drama. In short, they are not driving the story.

The malleable nature of the characters is certainly something that makes Balthier, Vaan and the rest of the gang feel a lot more personal and distinct. The way they are open to player modification makes them more real, more defined. A very good case in point is Penelo. She is a nice addition to the party, but since I had no great interest in her as a character (and neither did the developers, if screen time and characterization are anything to go by), she would have remained totally uninteresting for my whole playthrough had I not had the option to actively create some personality for her through the Gambit System and License Board. True, even then she's merely a fun customizable doll to hang gambits on, which is not a very flattering thing to say of a character, but nevertheless the game mechanics managed to make her interesting even when her fundamental characterization didn't. The mechanics elevated Penelo enough to make her memorable, which shows just how powerful a tool player input can be when used for characterization. Making an unappealing character into an enjoyable one via game-mechanically enabled player-driven characterization is quite a feat.

But then, Balthier has something more to him. Something that makes him more than simply game-mechanically enjoyable. To find what that is, we have to look past the mechanics and observe him in the context of story and narrative.

There's a very persistent character role in many of the Final Fantasy games, as well as in many other games. The role most likely has a sprawling entry over at TV Tropes (everything does), but I've accustomed to calling it the Second Man. I use the word "man" because, at least in Final Fantasy, it's usually a male character that holds this position, and also because the role is most often filled with someone whose characterization leans quite heavily on the character traits often associated with masculinity and manliness.

A character occupying the position of the Second Man acts as a compliment to the leading character. They might be physically more powerful than the lead character (at least in the beginning of the game) and act as kind of mentors and teachers, but also as friends and accomplices. In a sense the Second Man is often someone well-informed of things such as the game world and the game's mechanics. Second Men are at times used to provide tutorials and act as stand-ins for the game developers, pushing the player character forward wherever and whenever needed. Of course, as the game progresses, the influence of the Second Man tends to wane somewhat. The exact role and function of a Second Man varies from game to game, though, so this is not really a very tightly defined character type.

The most stereotypical Second Men in past Final Fantasies are by and far Zell from FFVIII and Wakka from FFX. They both represent the "jock". A sporty, somewhat slow guy with a lot of power and a heart of gold. Final Fantasy VII's Barret also exhibits very similar tendencies, acting as a boisterous employer-come-sidekick. And of course there's also FFXIII's Snow, the insufferable lump of a bro-dude who would surely be the most hated character of FFXIII if not for Vanille. In essence, the Second Man is the stereotypical alpha male of the player party, who is usually shadowed by the less stereotypically masculine (and, as time goes by, more powerful) player character. The player character, in the end, has more control and authority, but the Second Man tends to act bossy, especially early on in the game. (As an interestign side note: The relationship between the player character and the Second Man often borders very close to the tsukkomi/boke dichotomy of Japanese comedy.)

The Second Men vary greatly, but what remains the same is the role they play in the player's party. The Second Man is someone who is almost as cool as the protagonist, but with either under- or over-developed characteristics that mark them as less desirable (or perhaps less identifiable, as the two so often go hand in hand). Zell is noisy and seems to irritate great many of his peers, and Wakka has enthusiasm to spare but is gleefully simple-minded, for example.

The Second Men seem to be catalysts for doing various things. They rush out to meet impossible odds, they don't believe in things they see, or they believe in them blindly. They are all about doing, going and moving, and are determined to drag the player character with them. (The same also goes in reverse: in games where the PC is rushing straight into danger, Second Men tend to be cynical and doubtful, balancing the lead character's youthful enthusiasm with a more reserved composition.) In a sense, the Second Men are very straightforward simplifications; characters that resist becoming full and rounded because they are created with only the very simplest of outlines in mind.

Balthier should be FFXII's Second Man. But he isn't. He's as close to a Second Man as it gets in FFXII, yet he isn't one. (You could, of course, argue it's actually Basch who is the Second Man of FFXII. I think he's too detached from Vaan and, well, from everything else as well to fill that role, but I admit he exhibits some of the relevant characteristics.) Balthier is impulsive, rash, and is overly eager to make the jump to the unknown. But where the Second Man tends to be almost-but-not-quite as cool as the protagonist, Balthier is actually totally on par with Vaan. Balthier's impulsiveness has a dangerous, calculating flair to it: he's not just doing whatever he thinks is for the best, he actually has a plan. In FFXII Vaan is the one who wants to blindly crash into danger, and Balthier is the one who, though entirely as eager, actually seems to be in some control of the situation. Yet Balthier isn't really the kind of cynical reverse-type of Second Man described earlier, either. He is far too involved and active (or optimistic) for that. His eagerness matches Vaan's, and rather than acting in a complimentary role he always seems to be stealing Vaan's show, vying for the title of the, in his own words, leading man. Or, in more game-mechanical terms, Balthier is constantly aiming to become the player character.

All in all, it's an interesting (and long-due!) role-reversal where the archetype of the Second Man is broken and reconfigured, and also where the protagonist's traditional position as the supreme hero is challenged.

Vaan: Who are you?

Balthier: I play the leading man, who else?

It's this play between Vaan and Balthier, and their relation to the status of leading character, that makes up for a large part of FFXII's, and Balthier's, allure. Vaan is of course the real intended main character of the story. His point of view is the one the story follows and his journey from a street urchin to an almost real sky pirate is the most obvious character development arc in the game (though Ashe's travails easily match Vaan's). But while Vaan is the intended protagonist, Balthier doesn't come very far behind. He takes the lead as often as Vaan, Ashe and Basch do, and in terms of characterization, he isn't at all behind the others. Though the limelight belongs to Vaan and Ashe, Balthier contributes to the story in notable quantities.

Vaan and Balthier work remarkably differently as characters, however. The traditional FF hero is someone who sets out to do something (Cloud hired by the Avalanche, Squall graduating and getting work, Tidus enlisting as Yuna's bodyguard), and ends up tangled in something a lot bigger (Cloud with Sephiroth and the whole identity-shaking business, Squall with evil sorceresses and forgotten pasts, and Tidus preparing to destroy Sin and, ultimately, facing his father). The basic story is about increased personal investment (Cloud transforming from a cold mercenary to someone who actually cares about people and the planet, Squall finding ways to communicate with other people and trust them, and Tidus solving his father issues), and is usually related to the deepening relationship between the male and female leads (Aeris as the sort of a personification of the Planet, Rinoa getting involved with the power struggle of the sorceressess and otherwise in need of rescue as well, Yuna's travel becoming more emotional along the way as the true element of sacrifice is revealed).

What's common with many of the FF plots is that the protagonist sets out to do something that leads them into getting drawn sort of accidentally to the tumults of the actual, bigger, plot. The protagonists develop stronger resolve and reason for their actions only after the plot has significantly advanced.

Final Fantasy XII does things differently. Vaan goes against the prior protagonist model in that he is actually very determined to fight the empire from the beginning. He doesn't need to be drawn into anything bigger because he is already actively seeking out trouble. Vaan has his reasons for getting invested: he hates the Empire and probably harbours something of a crush for Ashe, too (even if that doesn't go anywhere). For Vaan, the whole business with the Venat and Occuria is a tangent blossoming out of the overarching narrative about warring nations. Vaan starts out with smaller goals and gets drawn to the big mysteries only later on, sure, but defeating the spooky god-creatures and their control over Ivalice is penultimate to defeating Vayne and stopping the threat of war, and freeing Dalmasca from the long period of occupation. Vaan's ambitions, desires and goals need not change during the story. Vaan need not change as the result of his actions, nor of the actions of others.

"I’m only here to see how the story unfolds. Any self-respecting leading man would do the same." -Balthier's answer to Basch as to why he's tagging along.

Balthier on the other hand does the classic FF protagonist thing by having initially no great interest in the central plot elements, but getting dragged along nevertheless. Whereas Vaan is motivated by his inner desire to topple the empire, protect the people and so on, Balthier is in it for loot and adventure, and only later admits that things are getting personal as well as professional. His sky pirate bravado starts to crack when the plot arc with his father is introduced, and at the end of the game he is obviously a changed man, though still retains much of his bombastic ways. To writ, Vaan has an agenda, while Balthier just tags along on somebody else's quest. Balthier's initial agenda is something totally unrelated to the story at large (he's out lootin'), and his investment in the game's plot deepens as he becomes more emotionally attached to the other party members, and as his personal past is revealed and linked with the main storyline. In terms of their place in the narrative of FFXII, and in the context of traditional FF leads, Balthier reminds a PC a lot more than Vaan does.

All along while playing Final Fantasy XII, I had the feeling that Vaan was the one in whose place I inserted myself, the one through whom I operated in the game world, the interface if you will, and Balthier was the one I emotionally related to. Balthier, as a character, is a lot more resolved and stern than Vaan. Vaan has the drive and motivation to challenge the Empire, yet Balthier is the one I felt most strongly drawn to. In cut-scenes, Balthier seems to be the one who comments on things, whereas Vaan is used mostly when someone has to say something obvious or funny, or when the occasion clearly calls for the player character to participate in the action. In a sense, Balthier was what I expected from the protagonist of a Final Fantasy game, and Vaan was more of a... I don't know, a viewpoint?

This whole Vaan/Balthier thing and FFXII having a binary lead character dynamic shouldn't of course come as a surprise. When Final Fantasy XII was in the early days of development, Balthier was actually going to be the main character. As the legend goes, it was thought that Balthier was too mature for the core audience of FF, so they made him into a party member and created Vaan to answer the needs of the hypothetical average FF fan. Apparently one of the arguments flinged over the desk when Balthier was axed was that Vagrant Story didn't do particularly well. Except it kind of did, but maybe it didn't do, you know, Final Fantasy well. And Vagrant Story definitely had a more mature protagonist, who, now that I think about it, bears some resemblance to Balthier, even though their personalities are very different. The executives mused that having a more mature lead would cause less than optimal sales, and so Balthier had to go, being replaced by a younger, more feminine hero. I don't know how much of this is true. The developers have been vague about the particulars of the game's troubled development, and all I know are bits and pieces of information the real validity of which I have no means of checking. It seems legit, anyway, but should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Despite the game design drama, Vaan and Balthier actually compliment each other very handsomely. Whether it's an accident caused by the divided protagonist creation process or an intended dynamic, Vaan and Balthier really feel like two different sides of one character. They are essentially the one and the same, only tuned differently. Vaan is nothing more and nothing less than a younger, less experience Balthier. Vaan has the ambition and panache of Balthier, but lacks Balthier's finesse. Balthier has more cunning, more self-restraint and more sense than Vaan, but he still retains Vaan's boyish charm and impulsiveness, even if it is lined with a cynical edge.

In Final Fantasy XII's character dynamics, Balthier is more like the traditional leading character and Vaan is more like the enthusiastic Second Man, yet the game would suffer if either character was missing, or their roles reversed. It's interesting! And fresh in the context of Final Fantasy!

"Princess! No need to worry. I hope you haven't forgotten my role in this little story. I'm the leading man. You know what they say about the leading man: he never dies."

The final component that makes Balthier into something more than just another character in the player party is the game's writing, and the way it fits with all the other elements of the game.

Final Fantasy XII has superb writing. Yes, the plot is kind of iffy on more than one occasion, and many of the characters are either vague non-characters or totally irrelevant for both the plot and the player. But the overall epic yarn is sound, and though the characters remain secondary to the scenery and to the greater plot structures, they nevertheless are written pretty well. I simply enjoy learning new things about them, and I love to hear what they have to say about the world they live in.

The dialogue flows easily and the inter-party dynamics, though limited, offer insight and enjoyment. But what this has to do with Balthier, really, is that the game's good writing is especially obvious in his characterization. The clash of protagonists is cleverly written into his character: Balthier is conscious of his position as Vaan's rival in the race for protagonisthood, which is evident in his habit of constantly emphasising himself as the leading man during cut-scenes. The plot's reluctance to elevate any of the characters to the status of a clearly defined protagonist only lends more power to Balthier's bravado. His act is not merely cocky egocentrism, but actually an honest attempt at fulfilling the one role clearly missing from the game. He doesn't fill it, of course, but the attempt sure warms my heart. Seeing the game acknowledge Balthier's aspirations compliments both the game's overall writing as well as Balthier as a character.

The previous 3000 words essentially boil down to three primary reasons for why I like Balthier:

• He has the support of an innovative game design which allows players to experience the kind of Balthier they want.
• He surrenders to a delicious competition with Vaan for the role of the game's protagonist.
• He has backup from the game's writing that seamlessly meshes with the aforementioned vying for protagonisthood.

In short, Balthier has a strong personality backed up by the game's story and endorsed by the game's mechanics. He broke free from the traditional supporting role he apparently was meant to inhabit, and managed to settle himself somewhere between the Second Man and the Protagonist. Obviously I like his personal history and overall character design too, but what truly makes him stand out is the way he has unhinged some of the most entrenched tropes of Final Fantasy.

Despite all his bravado, Balthier isn't the leading man of Final Fantasy XII, not really. But that's exactly what makes him so interesting. He almost was, and he almost is, and that uncertainty is one of the most titillating experiences game characters have ever given me.