HERO MYTHS IN JAPANESE ROLE-PLAYING GAMES
Kieran G. Blasingim
A Thesis
Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green
State University in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
August 2006
Committee:
Dr. Marilyn Motz, Advisor
Dr. Jeremy Wallach
Dr. Andrew Mara
ii
ABSTRACT
Dr. Marilyn Motz, Advisor
The Purpose of this text is to examine the cultural mythologies present in Japanese
console role-playing games as they are transliterated for American audiences in an effort to
understand how these texts might influence notions of identity in contemporary Western culture.
Specifically, this text is concerned with the way these games play out the conflict between
traditional cultural values and posthumanity in a postmodern context; the narrative elements of
Japanese RPGs seem to be deployed in an effort to problematize any relationship between the
posthuman and the heroic, and the gameworlds reflect this demonization and Othering of
posthumanity. Specific texts will be examined in the context of the traditional narrative
elements which they employ, including various Japanese myths, legends, and narratives, in
hopes of exploring not only the loaded comparison these games make between traditional
Japanese heroism and posthumanism but also between Japanese and American notions of the
heroic. Finally, this text will attempt to combine the theories of ludology, narratology, and
folklore for the study of digital games, an approach uncommon in this highly factious discipline.
iii
I would like to dedicate this text to my parents, who bought me my first game console (a NES
cartridge deck) in the mid-80s against their own judgement, and who have despaired of my
unwavering interest in video games since that day.
iv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, I must acknowledge Drs. Andrew Mara, Marilyn Motz, and Jeremy Wallach for
their help and support throughout this project; it was a joy working with each of them, and I
hope that they have had as much fun as I have these last two years. Secondly, I would like to
extend some recognition to my fellow graduate students at Bowling Green State University, all
of whom have helped to make this experience one that I will look back on fondly. Third, I
should acknowledge Patrick Sanders and Shaun Edmonds, who helped me with the phrasing of
my classification of J-RPGs. And, finally, I'd like to thank the many gamers with whom I've
played over the years, and with whom I've had so much fun.
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ABSTRACT
............................................................................................................................................ii
DEDICATION ...........................................................................................................................................iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS......................................................................................................................... iv
PART I: TRADITION .................................................................................................................................. 1
CHAPTER ONE: VIDEO GAMES AND VIDEO GAME THEORY........................................... 2
CHAPTER TWO: CONSOLE RPGS AS CULTURAL ARTIFACTS....................................... 13
PART II: FORMULATION ....................................................................................................................... 22
CHAPTER THREE: THE JAPANESE HERO ............................................................................ 23
CHAPTER FOUR: THE HAKKENDEN AND THE J-RPG PARTY .......................................... 32
PART III: DECONSTRUCTION ............................................................................................................... 42
CHAPTER FIVE: THE POSTHUMAN WORLD ....................................................................... 43
CHAPTER SIX: SCIENCE, MAGIC, AND THE POSTHUMAN HERO.................................. 51
PART IV: REMEDIATION ....................................................................................................................... 62
CHAPTER SEVEN: “ACTION” ADVENTURES AND “REAL-TIME” COMBAT ................. 63
CHAPTER EIGHT: THE DEATH OF STORY............................................................................ 71
BIBLIOGRAPHY....................................................................................................................................... 77
APPENDIX A: TEXTS EXAMINED ........................................................................................................ 82
PART I
TRADITION
2
CHAPTER ONE
VIDEO GAMES AND VIDEO GAME THEORY
The critical study of console video games as cultural works is a relatively recent development in
academia, and like most branches taking their first breaths its theories have, for the most part,
been brought from other disciplines and reapplied in this context. Insofar as they are games, the
theories of ludology seem to be a natural choice for their evaluation; insofar as they allow a
player to inhabit another being in a world bound by different physical, moral, and social rules
they beg for psychoanalysis; insofar as they attempt to tell stories – to portray narrative
movement – literary analysis seems to be an obvious choice; and insofar as they attempt to
define that nebulous concept, heroism, through performance, they seem to have ready within
them a room for the application of folklore theory. And so, for the last few years, the field of
game studies has been racked by a battle between academics of various disciplines attempting to
lay claim to this fertile – insofar as video games account for a rather large amount of youth
3
leisure time – terrain for their own theories1. The one thing that is known – and known
definitively – is that elements of each of these disciplines apply in different ways to different
game genres.
Perhaps it is the fundamentally different nature of mediations within the context of video
games that gives rise to the difficulty of examining it within any existing framework. Unlike
television and other traditional forms of mediation, video games encompass a spectrum of
configurative genres – immersive first-person shooters, puzzle-solving adventures, and
narratively-structured role-playing games, to name a few. Control and interaction are much
more variable between these genres than between genres of TV and other forms of standard
mediation – player-character relationships are multi-leveled and may vary depending on the
genre in question. Moreover, control and interaction necessitate mechanics and rules – the
building blocks of all games – and this leads to an assumption that digital games should be seen
first and only as remediations of board games.
Individual video game genres may find themselves more or less easily encompassed
within various schools of critical study: folklore, narratology, psychoanalysis, etc., or within the
newly-defined (and militantly policed) school of ludology, which defines itself as the study of
games and game systems. The truth, however, as notable critics have pointed out2, is that aspects
of all of these theories are more or less applicable – and, thus, should be incorporated into a
larger discourse on the study of digital games. It is with that approach in mind that this text
intends to examine a specific genre of digital games using various tools and conceptualizations
from several of these fields. Specifically, the object of study shall be console role-playing games
created in Japan and transmitted (via translation and transculturation) to Western audiences. My
1
See, particularly, Gonzalo Frasca’s “Simulation Versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology” and James Newman’s
“The Myth of the Ergodic Videogame.”
2
Henry Jenkins is a particularly good example.
4
purpose here is not to provide a comprehensive examination of all aspects of the genre, but to
investigate the ways in which these games transmit alternate notions of gender (particularly
masculinity), heroism, and life within a postmodern or technocratic world, as well as alien
cultural information, to their new audiences.
Each of these aspects of digital gaming seems particularly relevant given the current
discourses on the role of digital games in influencing the behavior and identifications of
American youths and on the role of digital culture in general in producing a postmodern,
cybernetic revolution in the construction of society and self in the 21st Century. Setting aside
first-person shooters and action adventure games; the genres of digital games most commonly
discussed by ludologists and psychoanalysts3, this work will deal primarily with one of the more
overlooked genres within the medium: Japanese console role-playing games. This subset of the
larger category of digital games can be identified as those games which include the following:
1. An overwhelming4, predefined narrative arc or story that is told through the
play experience.
2. Characterizations which problematize the relationship between player and
avatar by, at the least, establishing a persona which cannot be meaningfully5
manipulated by the player and, at most, which may result in the player distancing
herself from the narrative’s “primary” character.
3. A lack of a singular, directly corresponding avatar – which is replaced by a
“party” of characters with different skills, motivations, and visual representations,
3
See Alison McMahan’s “Immersion, Engagement, and Presence: A Method for Analyzing 3-D Video Games,”
Bob Rehak’s “Playing at Being: Psychoanalysis and the Avatar,” and Mark Wolf’s “Abstraction in the Video
Game,”
4
By which I mean that the narrative provides all motivations and characterizations, and serves to limit the play
experience by ordering the actions of the player.
5
A loaded term, by which I mean that the player’s actions cannot deviate from those that are “appropriate” for the
character as determined by the designer.
5
from whom are selected the “active” party that takes part in the configurative
portions of the game.
4. Systemic breaks in the experience of play to allow the game’s narrative arc to
be advanced by static, prerendered scenes which serve to establish or advance
characterization, character relations, motivations and goals, and other aspects of
the player’s relation to the gameworld.
5. A set course of play which discourages deviation by not advancing the player
towards the completion of the game unless she completes the narratively
significant events defined by the designers.
6. Said games are designed or produced for use on a dedicated gaming console
(XBOX, PlayStation 2, etc.).
Working within these limitations, then, it will be the purpose of this text to analyze using various
theoretical tools the ways in which heroism is used as a canvas upon which to explore questions
of tradition, humanity, posthumanity, technocratic culture, and masculinity. The selection of
Japanese console role-playing games (hereafter J-RPGs) is based on their unique approach to
each of these issues and the ways in which that approach has begun to spread into American
culture through fan-based and subcultural productions; primarily webcomics and other online
productions of gaming culture. In short, the project has grown from a desire to examine the
ways in which these games teach young adults to construct their own identities – in relation to
and against the dominant paradigms of American culture as presented in digital games.
This leads to a certain disconnect between the goals of this text and those of the most
common strains of ludology. To accurately apply most theories of ludology to the study of a
given game, it must be provable that the game in question presents as its primary form of
6
interaction that between the player and the game’s mechanics. To quote Gonzalo Frasca, who
first applied the term “ludology” to the study of digital games, “the central argument ... is that,
unlike traditional media, video games are not just based on representation but on an alternative
semiotical [sic] structure known as simulation” (221-222). However, Frasca does go on to point
to the fact that a purely mechanical understanding of the game elements would be insufficient for
the study of digital games:
Of course, we need a better understanding of the elements that games do share
with stories, such as characters, settings, and events. Ludology does not disdain
this dimension of video games but claims that they are not held together by a
narrative structure. Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that ludology’s
ultimate goal is not a capricious attempt to unveil the technical inaccuracy of the
narrative paradigm. (222)
Despite Frasca’s claim that “ludology does not disdain this dimension of video games,” however,
many ludologists do exactly that. Espen Aarseth, whose Cybertext served as the point of genesis
for ludology, claims that
Unlike in music, where a national anthem played on electric guitar takes on a
whole new meaning, the value system of a game is strictly internal, determined
unambivalently by the rules. Among the many differences between games and
stories, one of the most obvious is that of ambiguity. In Tetris, I do not stop to
ponder what those bricks are really supposed to be made of. In Doom, there is no
moral dilemma resulting from the killing of probably innocent monsters. The
pleasure of games is quite different from the pleasures of the novel: for a chess or
Tetris player, replaying is the norm, while most novels are read only once. You
7
can be an expert chess player without playing any other game, but to understand
even a single novel you will need to have studied numerous others. (Genre
Trouble 48)
In response, Stuart Moulthrop – another noted advocate of ludology – points out that
If these claims seem indisputable at face value it is only because they are
alarmingly narrow. Mink takes chevrolet6 may contain no reference to chivalric
hierarchy but it does assert a logic of territorial domination and unequal privilege.
No doubt one can play the game without connecting this logic to European
history, but such an approach reduces chess to a series of abstract transactions,
which may work well enough for mathematics but seems far too narrow for any
serious cultural critique. Tomb Raider shows even more clearly this artificial
restriction of focus. Certainly one could swap Lara Croft for a digitized Rowan
Atkinson without technically changing the feedback loop between player and
program. It seems unlikely, though, that Mr. Bean: Tomb Raider would sell
nearly as well to its primary audience. Lara Croft’s physique may consist of raw
data but it cannot be treated as such for critical purposes. While one may look
past or through the avatar body during play, the significance of games as cultural
forms goes beyond the player’s time in the loop. (Ibid 47-48)
Aarseth’s final word on this issue is that “the polygonal significance of Lara Croft’s physique
goes beyond the gameplay. But that doesn’t mean it tells us much, if anything, about the
gameplay, does it?” (Ibid 49). He seems to ignore the point of Moulthrop’s argument – that
6
Moulthrop had previously likened Aarseth’s argument to a claim that chess would be the same game “if the pieces
were replaced with bottle caps and called minks, warts, and chevrolets instead of bishops, knights, and pawns” (47)
8
there is more to studying games as cultural artifacts than analyzing their gameplay – in order to
glibly defend his assertion that ludology need not bother with any literary theory, as it only
describes unessential elements of the game.
For the purposes of this study, embracing that element of ludology would seem counterproductive; the goal of this text, after all, is to explore the construction of characters and worlds
within digital games. To do this, some narrative theory is, by definition, needed. On the other
hand, certain other elements of ludology can be deployed in this discussion of RPGs, and some
are actually implicit in the framing of these thoughts. Aarseth, despite eventually giving in to an
urge to reject all theory before his own, does provide a useful tool for examining cybertexts as
distinct from traditional (or, as he claims, any) narrative forms. The tool seems more useful,
however, as revised by Marie-Laure Ryan in her “Beyond Myth and Metaphor: The Case of
Narrative in Digital Media.” Here she describes two binaries at work in notions of interactivity
as present in digital media: internal/external and exploratory/ontological7. The combination of
these two binaries creates four “groups” of interactive media, in two of which she claims digital
games can be placed. In Ryan’s work, digital games can be separated into those which present
the player with a “god-like” perspective (external) and those which seek to connect the player to
a specific character or avatar (internal). In both cases, however, digital games are ontological –
by which Ryan means that “the decisions of the user send the history of the virtual world on
different forking paths. These decisions are ontological in the sense that they determine which
possible world, and consequently which story will develop from the situation in which the choice
presents itself” (7). This serves to establish RPGs as internal/ontological structures, despite the
fact that they contain a great deal of what James Newman calls “Off-Line” state time. In short,
“videogames do not present a singularly ergodic experience. They are highly structured and
7
6-12.
9
comprise episodes of intense ergodic engagement. However, these sequences are punctuated and
usually framed by periods of far more limited ergodicity and very often, apparently none at all”
(Myth 3). These two notions seem to point towards a function of video games in more narrativeinspired genres: an ability to vacillate between a highly ergodic8 and an entirely non-interactive
state (in the sense Ryan means; Newman points out that players still interact with the game
during off-line periods, they just don’t do it ergodically). The question becomes, then, how
relevant are these non-interactive periods? Aarseth and Ryan would claim that they are entirely
irrelevant to the study of the game, as they do not permit interaction – Aarseth, himself, points
out that “in more dramatic adventure games, the characters’ behavior is entirely prescripted, with
a few lines repeated endlessly and brainlessly. The dramatic ambitions of these games remain
unfulfilled and seem as unreachable as ever” (Genre Trouble 51). In fact, Aarseth even goes so
far as to claim that “we could say that this genre is really only one and the same game, the same
rule system repeated over and over with variable cultural conventions and increasingly better
technology” (Ibid 51). But I would argue that those “variable cultural conventions” are one of
the most important aspects to be examined in the cultural study of digital games. Without
understanding or investigating the cultural assumptions and ideologies built into these games,
ludology falls into the trap implied by Moulthrop: a criticism so superficial that it fails to
understand its own purpose and settles, instead, on studying pure mathematics.
Additionally, those non-interactive passages can be – in this genre – more important than
the ergodic portions of the text. As Greg M. Smith points out, “games ... do not need to remind
us continually of the moment’s plot goal because they can depend on the moment’s battle to keep
us involved ... The interactive combat sequences scattered throughout the game’s narrative serve
8
“Ergodic” is a term coined to refer to the ability of a player to configure and interact with a given game. “Highly
ergodic” means that the player has a great deal of control within the game system.
10
a narrative function that in film is often entrusted to dialogue: keeping us moving forward
urgently” (3). While the implicit assertion that games are a primarily narrative structure cannot
be left unpacked, the fact remains that the ergodic, on-line portions of RPGs consist almost
entirely of random battles, purchasing equipment, and moving from place to place. Interacting
with important non-player characters (NPCs), learning vital plot information, and the
development of character and motive are all handled within the off-line, non-interactive periods.
In short, then, it can be argued that the truly interactive portions do, as Smith claims, serve
primarily to keep the player interested in the game between non-interactive sections. This, then,
makes most of ludology inapplicable to the argument I wish to present.
On the other hand, approaches such as Smith’s serve to highlight another common
misconception of digital games: that they are simply (if it can be called simple) remediations of
existing narrative structures, and that they can be studied using a purely literary approach. This
has the unfortunate effect of undermining the interplay between the interactive and narrative
elements, the “on-line” and “off-line” interchangeability, that makes digital games such a
fascinating medium. Therefore, it is my intention to complicate three notions prevalent9 in the
study of digital games within a specific genre: that they can be studied solely as games, that they
can be studied solely as narratives, and – more importantly – that they can be dismissed as
narrative structures using Proppian folklore analysis. The first two will be handled implicitly by
my implementation of a hybridized examination of both the technical and narrative aspects of
digital games, but the third is an issue of some greater magnitude; Marie-Laure Ryan writes,
after all, that
9
Espen Aarseth, Marie-Laure Ryan, Selmer Bringsjord, Markku Eskelinen, Jasper Juul, Michael Mateas, Alison
McMahan, Janet Murray, Greg M. Smith, and Stuart Woods engage in either the first or second of these two implicit
notions. Ryan and Aarseth are two of the most direct in their use of Propp and Campbell to dismiss narrative
structures in video games.
11
Adventure and role-playing games implement the archetypal plot that has been
described by Joseph Campbell and Vladimir Propp: the quest of the hero across a land
filled with many dangers to defeat evil forces and conquer a desirable object. The
main deviance from the archetype is that the hero can lose, and that the adventure
never ends. In most action games, this archetype is further narrowed down to the
pattern that underlies all wars, sports competition, and religious myth, namely the
fight between good (me) and evil (the other) for dominance of the world. (12)
It is this which leads to Aarseth’s statement that these games can be considered “one” with only
minor cultural differences; Propp and Campbell have established a way of reducing stories to
component parts, and the narrative structures in video games use the same parts in – generally –
the same order, which leads Ryan and Aarseth to the conclusion that exploring those elements is
no longer necessary. Unfortunately, this approach ignores both the basis and stated goals of
Proppian research; to say that all stories of a certain culture draw from a pool of distinct formal
elements is not to say that they are unworthy of study. Nothing in the work of Propp or
Campbell serves to dismiss further study of repetitive narratives; Campbell, in fact, begins with
the notion developed by Propp and attempts to explore where those formal elements developed
and what they suggest about the culture which has produced them. Ryan and Aarseth’s dismissal
of RPG narratives is a perversion of the goals of archetypal research – a willful misappropriation
meant to devalue narrative in video games as too traditional to be worthy of study. These games,
however, do something that the narratives studied by Campbell and by Propp did not: they
attempt to link traditional formal and stylistic elements to modern questions of cybernetics and
posthumanity through a “present” setting which allows those ideas to interact with one another.
J-RPGs are exploring the disconnect between traditional cultural values and posthumanity; they
12
use elements of both in their examination of the ways in which identity and heroism are formed
within the posthuman context. They are, to reference an intriguing project by three
undergraduates at Brown University, a “digital Propp10” – a collection of formal and traditional
elements which are mobilized in an effort to explore the future of digital culture.
10
This site by Celeste Lim, Laura Tam, and Nicole Wee examines the failure of a direct application of Propp to
digital games and some of the inherent flaws in Proppian theory which led to that failure.
13
CHAPTER TWO
CONSOLE RPGS AS CULTURAL ARTIFACTS
Antonia Levi, in Samurai from Outer Space, spends some time discussing the success Japanese
narratives have had among a certain group of American adolescents and young adults – in many
ways, her work is a parallel to this text, insofar as it explores the characteristic elements of
Japanese anime and its impact on American audiences. “The new generations of both Japan and
America are sharing their youth,” she points out, “and in the long run, their future. However
much their governments may argue about trade and security in the Pacific, America’s Generation
X and Japan’s shin jinrui will never again be complete strangers to one another” (2-3). She goes
on to academically dub1 this group of American youths otaku, a Japanese colloquialism roughly
equivalent to the English “geek.” “To say that an otaku is an anime fan doesn’t really describe
the phenomenon,” according to Levi (2) – it refers to American consumers who are “obsessively
interested” to the point that it affects not only their trends of consumption but also their
1
The group itself had appropriated the term some time before, as Levi herself points out.
14
interactions with others. “Some go even further, voluntarily spending hours in language labs
learning the basics of a language that is far more difficult to learn than Spanish or German,
namely Japanese” (2).
More importantly, Levi points to an interesting implication of this practice:
[Japanese culture’s] popularity with young Americans is probably one of the
biggest surprises of the nineties. For all the complaints about Generation X’s
“sound byte mentality,” and all the cracks about the “dumbing of America,” this
generation has chosen a form of entertainment that is uniquely difficult to
appreciate. It’s not just the language barrier. Subtitles and dubbing take care of
that. Culturally too, anime comes without an operator’s manual. (3)
It is, in other words, a demanding and difficult form of entertainment to consume – references to
cultural information foreign to American consumers must be decoded either by an intermediary
(in the form of idiomatic language and socio-cultural signifiers) or by the consumer herself. “It’s
simply not possible to watch anime without picking up a smattering of knowledge about
Japanese customs and beliefs” (ix).
Scott McCloud, a theorist dealing primarily with comics, describes the difference
between Eastern and Western storytelling as the goal against the journey. To him, Western
comics are focused on “things happening” – a form of storytelling which acts as a “connected
series of events” (76). As he notes, the most common transitions among Western comics are
action-to-action, subject-to-subject, and scene-to-scene2 – with the overwhelming majority of
transitions being action-to-action (74-77). This conceptualization of story as connected actions
makes more reasonable the focus on action genres in academic research on video games – they
2
For descriptions of these and the other forms of visual transition in comics, see McCloud’s Understanding Comics.
15
are those games most obvious in their emphasis on the action taking place, creating narrative
only as a means of linking actions together.
However, as McCloud writes, Japanese storytelling introduces moment-to-moment
transitions, reduces the emphasis on action-to-action by increasing the number of subject-tosubject transitions, and incorporates aspect-to-aspect transitions – in which nothing “happens” at
all, but the focus of the panel shifts to different visual objects3. This, McCloud argues, shifts the
overall emphasis in Japanese comics from action to experience and on “being there over getting
there” (81). Also, McCloud points out that this is not an isolated incident; “traditional Western
art and literature don’t wander much. On the whole, we’re a pretty goal-oriented culture. But, in
the East, there’s a rich tradition of cyclical and labyrinthine works of art” (81).
While this sort of essentialist view is problematic even in the specific field McCloud’s
attention is focused upon, his statement does point towards a fundamental difference in the way
that traditional – or, to use a slightly more charged term, folk – stories are constructed in these
two paradigms. Examining what could be considered some of the most fundamental of cultural
stories – the respective creation myths of Western Christian society and Shinto Japan, this
distinction between detailing the action and dwelling in the moment is already prevalent.
Consider this passage of Genesis, in which the world is created:
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a
formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God
swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there
was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from
the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And
there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
3
McCloud 77-80.
16
And God said, Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate
the waters from the waters.” So God made the dome and separated the waters that
were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so.
God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the
second day.
And God said, “Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place,
and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and
the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was
good. Then God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed,
and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” And it
was so. The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind,
and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was
good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day. (Genesis 1.11.13)
The Japanese Shinto origin myth “Takamagahara,” on the other hand, runs thus:
Of old, there was nothing in the universe but thick, sluggish matter. It was
shapeless and formless and stretched to infinity. All was chaotic. Heaven and
Earth were mingled like the white and yolk of an egg that had been stirred
through countless ages. Aeon followed aeon without change. Then, suddenly, a
great upheaval began to take place and strange noises filled the boundless, silent
universe, and out of the chaotic mass the light and purer part rose up and spread
17
thinly outwards, while the heavier and grosser elements gradually came together
and fell, until there was a distinct cleavage between the two.
The light mass moved steadily upwards. It spread and extended until it
completely overhung the solid mass below. Parts of it, as if hesitant and uncertain
what to do, still clung together and formed many clouds. But the great expanse
around and over them formed a paradise, and it was called Takamagahara – The
High Plain of Heaven.
All this while, the heavier mass was still sinking and seemed to have great
difficulty in taking shape. Another aeon passed. From the heavenly heights the
mass looked huge and black, and it was called Earth.
In this way the Heaven of Takamagahara and the Earth came into being, and with
them the legend of the birth of Japan. (Tales from Japan 4)
Notice the heavy emphasis on action and active voice in the passage from Genesis – every verb,
in fact, is active. More importantly, each action is engendered by an acting God – the ultimate
hero of the Western world, whose voice alone can cause inanimate objects to take on actions.
Compare this to the origin of Takamagahara, in which the majority of the verb forms are still
active (at least in translation), but the fact that “Heaven and Earth were mingled” (emphasis
mine) points to a notable absence in this story: there is no central actor directing the creation of
this world. Instead, the separation of Earth and Heaven takes place organically as aeons pass.
More importantly, notice the prevalence in “Takamagahara” of metaphorical language – the
Earth and Heaven “were mingled together like the white and yolk of an egg ...” while the light
18
mass destined to become heaven rose up and “parts of it, as if hesitant and uncertain what to do,
still clung together and formed many clouds.”
This contrasts sharply with the words of Genesis, in which all language is direct and
expository – there are no metaphors, and the personifications of the natural elements as they
follow God’s will are meant to be taken literally (ignoring the question of whether the entire text
might be seen as a cultural metaphor). This, arguably, carries out McCloud’s assertion – the
Japanese “Takamagahara” deploys metaphoric language to expand the moment and to add
texture to the experience of the creation of Heaven and Earth in a way that the Western Genesis
text does not. While the latter focuses primarily (almost solely) on the active account of creation
as a call and response between God and his creation, the Japanese myth removes the singular
agent of creation and instead focuses on the experience – by employing the language it does and
by glossing the passage of time, “Takamagahara” instead focuses on what it would have been
like to be there at the moment of the creation of Earth and Heaven.
While working with translations makes the argument a bit more complicated, the similar
metaphoric elements at work in other traditional stories from both cultures (also in translation)
makes these statements fruitful. As Campbell has argued4, religious myths serve to underscore
the cultural ideals and mythologies of their contextualizing societies. Thus, in a discussion of
American culture, using the versions of these myths available to the audience seems natural.
These two stories and others like them, then, point to a difference in the fundamental
conceptualization of agency (which translates to a difference in representations of the heroic) in
each culture. In American English, for example, passive voice is considered a weaker form of
argumentation than the active, and rhetorical devices are deployed to retain agency for a given
4
This is not only the primary lens of his Myths to Live By, but also the point of departure for his Hero with a
Thousand Faces.
19
subject. In Japanese, however, unambiguous uses of active voice are considered immodest and,
thus, improper. The Japanese have a term, aiwa, for an intentional ambiguity meant to avoid
offense, and their notions of agency are built around this value and others, such as heavy notions
of filial piety, duty, courtesy, and wisdom which translate to a sense of the hero as self-effacing
servant of her society. These translate, in additions, to notions of heroic which embody selfsufficiency for Western stories and community for Eastern stories. Perhaps it is because of the
different cultural experiences of expansion versus overpopulation, but Japanese myths tend to
emphasize working with others to preserve harmony and to accomplish more difficult tasks.
This can be seen most transparently in “The Peach Boy,” the story of a young prince who is sent
to conquer a group of kami threatening the lands and does so with the help of retainers he gains
along the way: a dog, a monkey, and a pheasant, each of whom add different abilities to the
group as a whole. This bears some similarity to the land or airship stories of western culture5,
and those stories are knowingly referenced in the Final Fantasy franchise, but “The Peach Boy”
predates them by several hundred years.
Due to these cultural divergences, I will continue for this discussion to employ
McCloud’s notion of the Winding Path situated against the Noble Goal 6 – the emphasis on
experience or destination, respectively, that seems to characterize the structure of traditional
stories within each culture. Within the role-playing genre, this dichotomy is readily visible, as
one of the most distinct differences between games produced in Japan and those produced by
Western publishers is the relative emphasis on narrative structures involving resolution and
continuation. In fact, it is this distinction which makes obvious the other distinctions between
the two forms of “role-playing” – the difference in storytelling focus between the two cultures
5
For a recent film example, see The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
These terms are evocative of the visual elements of McCloud’s portrayal of Eastern and Western storytelling; his
text is a metacomic, as opposed to pure exposition.
6
20
produces, along with a visible issue of dramatics, a different understanding of the relationships
between characters, places, and even the player and the character or characters she controls.
Beyond its emphasis on the journey in game narratives, the RPG genre owes several
other notable debts to Japanese culture, including its emphasis on the party dynamic – a
successor to epic tales like The Hakkenden – its notion of the effeminate hero who is still mighty
– a paean to The Tale of Genji – and its problematic relationship to postmodernism and
cyberculture. Each of these three elements will come to dominate a segment of the following
text in some way, as the relationship between texts produced in Japan and America will be
explored through the lens of the relevant cultural context surrounding those texts. In particular,
Hakkenden will be used as a lens to explain the Japanese party aesthetic as defined against the
American lone hero – presented in the theory of writers like Campbell and Propp – while Genji
will be used as an antecedent for the feminized, sensitive male characters of Japanese games,
notable in their difference from America’s hyper-masculinized heroic – particularly evident in
examinations of film and other visual culture produced in that culture. In addition, the
relationship between hero and villain will be explored; a distinction can be drawn between
Japanese games, in which the hero and villain follow parallel but oppositional paths, and their
American counterparts, in which the villain serves as the more stereotypical (in Western culture)
catalyst. Finally, the apparent rejection of posthuman cyberculture in Japanese RPGs will be
explored and situated against the predominant theories of New Media as presented by thinkers
influenced by Donna Haraway. In the final pages of this text, some time will be spent exploring
more recent, hybridized forms of these games – primarily in the form of Massively Multiplayer
Online RPGs (hereafter MMOs) and Action RPGs, in which an effort has been made to increase
the ergodic elements of the texts in order to make them more intensely interactive. In the former
21
case, it can be argued that the inclusion of multiplayer elements undermines the basic goal of the
Japanese RPG – to immerse the player in the lives and relationships of the characters she
controls – by destroying many of the connections commonly created in console versions of these
games. In the latter, the argument will be presented that these games also undermine certain
aspects of the traditional RPG, but do so in ways that serve an interesting purpose – that, in short,
their hybridization may serve to combine two genre categories in a new way, which would lead
to texts with different semiotic elements and relationships, thus allowing for the eventual
development of a new genre.
Each of these chapters will emphasize depth of study as opposed to breadth, opting to
focus more fully on a single text or semiotic presentation as opposed to a more cursory
examination of multiple titles. This has been done for several reasons, most notably because a
superficial semiotic reading serves primarily as an invitation for further study, as opposed to a
true examination of a given text. Additionally, a deeper examination is made necessary by the
additional goal of examining these texts as they are defined against Western productions, as the
distinctions operate primarily at more recessed layers of meaning. Establishing a traditional
context for each text also requires a more advanced description of the elements of study, in order
to avoid such apparent essentialisms as “this character is wearing such, which obviously points
to her role within this role, which can be explicated thus” – a cursory and uncomplicated
assertion, in short, which does not fully explore the multiple traditions in which characters and
texts may be produced. Finally, it is simply more fulfilling to explore the nooks and crannies of
meaning within texts than to relate them on a superficial level to one another; true scholarship
and criticism should have as its goal a complete, “deep” understanding of a given text rather than
a simple, relational one.
PART II
FORMULATION
23
CHAPTER THREE
THE JAPANESE HERO
The purpose of this chapter is to explore the embodiment of both traditional and posthuman
elements in the construction of J-RPG heroes. It will examine the nuanced and highly charged
representations of heroism which are present in these games and which are dismissed by
researchers like Marie-Laure Ryan:
Adventure and role-playing games implement the archetypal plot that has been
described by Joseph Campbell and Vladimir Propp: the quest of the hero across a land
filled with many dangers to defeat evil forces and conquer a desirable object. The main
deviance from the archetype is that the hero can lose, and that the adventure never ends.
In most action games, this archetype is further narrowed down to the pattern that
underlies all wars, sports competition, and religious myth, namely the fight between
good (me) and evil (the other) for dominance of the world. (12)
24
Later chapters will deal with other elements of Ryan’s dismissal, but the focus of this chapter
will be the unspoken implications of “the hero” as a social construct; in borrowing from Propp
and Campbell, Ryan also borrows their essentialist notion that all heroism can be boiled down to
Propp and Campbell’s Western interpretations of Western texts. What, then, is a hero? How is
the hero constructed, both in body and in spirit? To claim, as Ryan does, that all heroes are the
same – since all hero myths and all videogames in the role-playing genre are the same – ignores
the cultural representations of heroism which define a society’s concepts of gender, class, and
identity. This text, then, will seek to problematize Ryan’s statement by exploring the ways in
which Tidus, the player’s avatar in Final Fantasy X, contradicts traditional Western notions of
heroism.
Perhaps the single most transparent aspect of Tidus as a heroic character is his relation to
the game’s female lead, Yuna. Their star-crossed romance – revisited in the game’s sequel –
forms the core of the dramatic motivation for much of the later portion of Final Fantasy X
(hereafter FFX), including the decisions which lead them to fundamentally alter the nature of
their world by destroying instead of suppressing Sin, a monolithic magical carapace which serves
as armor and life support for a fading god bent on destruction of all living beings. This romance
is fairly stereotypical in its combination of common conventions from various forms of Western
romantic film and literature – the star-crossed lovers, the mistaken identities, the initial
misunderstandings, and the secret which – when revealed – threatens to end their relationship
abruptly. This plot is twisted, however, by the inversion of standard Western gender roles by
these two characters. It is Tidus whose overly-emotional attitudes serve to problematize this
relationship, while Yuna serves as the calm, rational cornerstone of the relationship – even when
she’s contemplating her own inevitable death, she makes the decision to hide this from Tidus in
25
order to spare his feelings and to avoid fragmenting their developing love before it is even
established. In fact, very nearly the only good thing that can be said of the sequel to this game1
is that it inverts the standard “kidnapped princess” fantasy plot by detailing Yuna’s search for
Tidus. It is Tidus, not Yuna, who is hindered by his problematic relationship to his father and is
thus incapable of forming a solid relationship. His own insecurity, lingering years after his
father has “abandoned” him, often pushes him away not only from Yuna but also from the other
characters in this tale. However, their relationship is, in many ways, the most masculine aspect
of Tidus’s characterization. His passive-aggression towards Auron – a friend of his father who is
responsible for Tidus’s appearance in Yuna’s time – and his coldness towards many of the other
characters in the game are all representative of an aloofness which returns, repeatedly, to his
inability to find closure in his relationship with his father.
Tidus’s visual representation is, by Western standards, a feminization of traditionally
masculine semiotic texts. As an athlete2, he is constantly depicted in his uniform – a sort of
combination wetsuit and martial arts gi. In addition, his left pant leg is cut short as a reference to
hip hop culture at the time. He wears athletic sneakers and gloves – one of which is a large,
segmented gauntlet – which means that, in the end, the vast majority of his body is covered.
Within this suit, however, is a body laden with signifiers of feminization; his hair, face, build,
and accessories all undermine the rigid notion of masculinity associated with athleticism in
America – which, as Connell points out, has become the leading definer of masculinity in
American mass culture3. His pale blond hair is heavily styled, even during action scenes
underwater, and has a textured, messy look more common with rock musicianship and
1
Final Fantasy X-2 is infamous within the fan community for its regression to a highly sexualized and derogatory
stance towards women. It has been referred to as the “Charlie’s Angels Final Fantasy.”
2
Tidus plays “blitzball,” a sort of underwater conflation of soccer and rugby.
3
Connell makes this point explicitly in his Masculinities.
26
contemporary Japanese comics than professional sports. His face, with its narrow jaw and
overall roundness, is easily portrayed by female cosplayers4 – some of the most convincing
portrayals of Tidus are, in fact, done by women5.
Particularly compared to the Western image of heroic masculinity portrayed by actors
like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Clint Eastwood, Tidus’s child-like face
seems out of place. While his build is muscular, his shoulders are quite narrow, adding to the
overall feminization of his appearance. Finally, Tidus’s several earrings and his silver necklace
– which would, one supposes, present a risk of injury in a highly physical sport played without
helmets – are, if not feminine, at least not stereotypically masculine in a Western context. His
large pendant is perhaps reminiscent of tribal jewelry, but his most significant earring is a
dangling teardrop nearly as large as the one he wears on his chest. While this jewelry may
present as part of formulating American blackness, Tidus is white – very white, as evidenced by
his blond hair and blue eyes. Moreover, Tidus’s body becomes a site of some ambiguity as it is
discovered during the game that he does not really exist; his presence is through a magical
circumlocution of the rules of time and space perpetrated by Auron and Tidus’s father, Jecht. A
memory of Yuna’s civilization’s past kept alive by Sin, Tidus vanishes when that entity is
destroyed, his body dissolving as the magical power which made him corporeal fades away.
To explore a bit more fully, FFX’s representation of masculinity through Tidus fits within
a larger context of using a contextually more feminine masculine image in the primary role of
heroism and then adding as supporting characters more traditional images of the masculine. This
is not to say, however, that the character is meant to be effeminate; rather, Asian notions of
4
“Cosplay” is a contraction of “costume play,” a common practice at conventions and gatherings focusing on media
fandom in which various attendees dress as their favorite characters from various shows, games, etc.
5
The more convincing male portrayals are done by Asian men whose facial structures are quite feminine by
Western standards.
27
masculinity and femininity do not match up with those of America, and the result is that in
American mass culture, as Frank Chin, the editor of Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American
Writers, points out, “the stereotypical Asian is nothing as a man. At worst, the Asian-American
is contemptible because he is womanly, effeminate, devoid of all the traditionally masculine
qualities of originality, daring, physical courage, and creativity” (Quoted in Cheung 263). The
problem according to Connell, then, is that “[Western] mass culture generally assumes there is a
fixed, true masculinity beneath the ebb and flow of daily life. We hear of ‘real men’, natural
man’, the ‘deep masculine’” (45). Connell goes on to point out that “true masculinity is almost
always thought to proceed from men’s bodies – to be inherent in a male body or to express
something about a male body” (Ibid). What makes Asian-American males so problematic for
American masculinity – and Tidus, as well, by extension – is that their bodies do not conform to
American notions of “deep masculinity” or “natural” manliness.
This is not to say that all heroic characters in J-RPGs occupy a problematic masculine
space; in the case of FFX, more acceptably masculine characters like Auron, the knight who
protected Yuna’s father and knew Tidus’s, draw an even sharper focus on Tidus. Both Auron
and Wakka, the other male party member, carry far more visual signifiers of masculinity than
Tidus; Auron, in particular, serves to highlight the ways in which Japanese images of masculinity
can converge with those of Americans. His dress and the large sake bottle that Auron carries
serve as signifiers of his status as ronin – a former samurai who, either through disgrace or
failure, is left without a master. Although modernized for the more futuristic fantasy world of
Spira, Auron’s clothing is clearly reminiscent of the kimono worn by traditional samurai – a
visual signifier driven home by his keeping one arm under the chest of his coat instead of
through the arm, a representation which refers to the several forms of kimono and happi or haroi
28
coats, worn as outer garments and not unlike capes, which can be seen in other representations of
more traditionally-robed ronin6. The sake bottle is a reference to drunkenness, a common failing
of samurai and a cause for their dismissal as well a traditional visual element of presenting a
ronin7. In relation to Tidus, Auron is more squarely built and has a more masculine facial
structure, not unlike that of Stallone and Eastwood. His graying hair and scarred face act as
signifiers of distinction, showing both that he has a great deal of experience and that he has
survived in his role for some time. Auron’s sunglasses are reminiscent of those worn by
traditional Western action characters such as the Terminator and Blade, and his greater physical
strength is made tangible by his ability to strike creatures no matter how heavily they are
armored. This can be seen as directly in opposition to Tidus, who has the lowest attacking power
of the three male characters in the party.
It is, therefore, problematic to make a blanket assertion that all masculine representations
in J-RPGs are more feminine than those of their Western counterparts; the genre is rife with
counter-examples, and one exists in nearly every game in the series. Instead, it can be said that
every J-RPG has, at its core, a character like Tidus; one whose visual representation and
behavior invalidate Western norms of masculinity and whose role within the party problematizes
notions of masculine authority. Be it Sora of Kingdom Hearts, Cloud, Squall, or Vaan of Final
Fantasy VII, VIII, and XII, respectively, Serph of Shin Megumi Tensai: Digital Devil Saga, or
any of the myriad of other male leads in these games, the representations are always problematic
from a Western standpoint. This, then, can be seen as the first element of variant discourse
within J-RPGs.
6
See Urahara Kisuke of the manga and anime “Bleach,” as well as Abarai Renji and Kyouraku Shunsui from the
same title, along with Hiko Soujiro and Kagebusha from “Rurouni Kenshin” and much of the cast of “Kaze Hikaru.”
7
See, again, Hiko Soujiro and Kyouraku Shunsui, as well as the cast of “Kaze Hikaru.”
29
In relation to traditional Western ideas of heroism, primarily as presented by Propp and
Campbell, Tidus is a much less active character. He is drawn into his adventure against his will,
which can be seen as a sort of “setting out,” but is a more passive and reactionary method of
doing so than is accounted for in Propp’s work. Propp, in fact, argues that a hero sets out for one
of two reasons: to right a wrong, or to fill a need of some sort. Neither of these drives exists
within Tidus, who wants nothing more than to return home for the first half of the game’s
narrative. This leads to a larger break with Propp’s theory: generally, the goals of J-RPG
protagonists can be split into two categories: to develop an understanding of a situation, or to
return to a vanished homeland. It is Yuna, the female lead, who has set out on a quest to win
peace for the people of her world. This, too, carries across the genre; the hero is generally given
impetus by another character who is on a journey and travels with that character until the
objective is revealed to be significant to the protagonist, as well. To complete the collapse of
Propp’s model as applicable to this genre of games, the heroes of these games – in contrast to
Propp’s descriptions of the hero becoming the king – are rarely recognized as such by the
masses: consider Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, a film set two years after Cloud and his
companions defeat Sephiroth and save their world from annihilation. Cloud, at the opening of
the film, is an out-of-work courier who rents a room from Tifa, another member of the player’s
party in Final Fantasy VII, who still owns and operates the bar that she is tending when the
player first sees her in that game.
Indeed, Tidus and other J-RPG heroes bear a closer resemblance in their problematic
masculinity and reactive heroism to the Japanese hero Genji, son of an Emperor and his
concubine. Commonly considered the first novel written in any language, The Tale of Genji has
been the subject of a great deal of derivative artistic production. Numerous Japanese artists have
30
painted, written, and adapted the tale in various ways since its creation, including two anime
versions and a budding videogame franchise. Although The Tale of Genji is a romantic novel,
and thus lacks many of the elements of a heroic adventure, Genji himself has been revisioned in
many ways as a warrior – most notably in the digital action game released in America in 2005.
Genji, as he was originally presented in the novel, was both beautiful and sensitive. In several
passages of the tale’s first chapter, he is referred to as “beautiful,” a “jewel beyond compare” and
when he was seven years old, his father’s first wife and Genji’s primary threat at court, is
described as having “two daughters, but neither could compare with him in beauty” (1.64).
Moreover, Genji is, like Tidus, caught up in a tale defined more by his parents than by himself.
It is Genji’s father, the Emperor of Japan, who is the cause of many of Genji’s initial difficulties
– the man’s love for Genji’s mother has created for the boy several powerful enemies at court,
and it is to navigate these dangerous waters that Genji is in many ways forced to act.
In a larger sense, Genji serves as a frame upon which the heroes of J-RPGs are built; the
notions of beauty, sincerity, and sensitivity which he embodies (and which run counter to
Western notions of masculinity) stand behind representations of characters like Tidus, Serph,
Cloud, and Squall – each of whom must, for American audiences, overcome their problematic
masculinity by displaying their physical prowess. Thus we have Tidus, the athlete, who is not
only the most sensitive member of FFX’s cast, but also the least masculine of the male
characters. His relationship with his father is conflicted by his father’s existence as a posthuman
entity whose presence destroys the world of Spira, and the legend of Jecht, Tidus’s father,
prefigures Tidus’s relationships with not only the rest of the party, but also with various nonplayer characters throughout the text. While this association is not so negative as Genji’s, Tidus
still finds himself expected to act in certain ways and to believe in certain ideals that his father
31
supported. Because their fathers traveled together, Tidus is expected to travel with Yuna, and
because his father sacrificed his life to defeat and replace Sin, Tidus is expected to do the same.
That he refuses to do this final task, it is not because he refuses to accept filial piety, but rather
because he rejects the posthuman ideology at work behind the mechanism for defeating Sin.
Genji’s eventual decline also seems to prefigure that of J-RPG heroes; it is not because of
some failing in himself or because of some terrible mistake on his part but simply because he
ages and his beauty fades – and with it, his importance at court. In fact, Genji is recognized for
his many successes with a high imperial title – bestowed by his own unacknowledged son (who
has inherited the imperial throne). Thus, unlike Cloud in Advent Children, Genji is given all he
could hope for – and, unlike Propp’s heroes, he does not lose it. Instead, he passes on his fame
and beauty to the next generation and quietly fades away – much like Tidus, after the defeat of
Sin. Having saved the world, Genji – and the J-RPG hero – has fulfilled his duty and must pass
on the mantle of hero to another. This is supported not only in Advent Children, but also in Final
Fantasy X-2, the sequel to Tidus’s story; in X-2, Yuna must deal with her reduced status after the
final destruction of Sin – her role as a summoner has been stripped away with the destruction of
the Fayth, and Yuna must learn new skills and overcome the dismissive attitudes of those who
believe that, without her powers, she can no longer make a difference in the world. In this sense,
these heroes are similar to Beowulf setting out to battle the dragon; they have passed their prime,
and there is doubt about the ability of the former hero to overcome this new adversary. In JRPGs, however, the hero is not consumed by this final act of heroism; she is saved by the party
and by her reliance on traditional models of heroism which allow her to overcome, with help,
any adversity.
32
CHAPTER FOUR
THE HAKKENDEN AND THE J-RPG PARTY
To return, yet again, to Marie-Laure Ryan’s depiction of RPGs as following fundamentally
Proppian trajectories, this chapter will seek to undermine the notions of “the hero” as a singular
entity in J-RPGs. Instead of the traditional Western hero of solitude, it will be argued, this genre
of games represents an uniquely Eastern notion of strength through unity – one in which
differing and complimentary skills combine to allow characters to exercise greater strength than
they might without the support of their comrades. The argument, specifically, will focus on how
these games borrow more heavily from tales such as The Hakkenden than those like Beowulf,
particularly in their notion of how the hero functions. Moreover, the argument will be made that
these games tend to subsume the character who acts as the player’s avatar, using narrative
devices to constantly draw attention to the other characters in the text.
33
The Hakkenden1, not unlike Beowulf, is an early epic exploring notions of heroism,
redemption, and paranormal creatures. Unlike Beowulf, however, it is the heroes of The
Hakkenden whose origins lie in the supernatural, not the villains – hakkenden translates roughly
to “the legend of the eight dog warriors,” a direct reference to the origin of these spirits. A
Japanese princess, Fuse, is offered as a prize to the warrior who brings back the head of the Awa
clan’s most hated enemy. And, after some daring attempts, it is a great hound that finally
succeeds – and, thus, must be granted the right to marry her. She becomes supernaturally
pregnant and is killed by a former lover, who had attempted to defeat the warlord but who had
been defeated – and was thought dead. But, at her death, eight crystal beads from her Buddhist
rosary rise up into the air and are scattered across Japan – each bearing a character signifying one
of the virtues of Confucianism: benevolence, brotherhood, filial piety, wisdom, duty, courtesy,
faith, and loyalty. Each of these crystal beads represents one of the children that Fuse would
have had, and who are later reincarnated as samurai who do not recognize one another. The
majority of the narrative in Hakkenden is concerned with the meeting and recognition of these
brothers and with their various exploits against the ancient enemies of their clan. Finally, they
are awarded Imperial titles and castles for their service, and settle down to live peacefully in their
ancestral homeland. The symbols on the beads fade away, as do the hakkenden, over time. Once
they have passed away the idyllic period over which they ruled ends abruptly, and the clans are
once again at war in Awa province.
This can be most fruitfully compared to the Western epic Beowulf, which was composed
between 600 and 1100 AD in what would eventually become England. The work of an unknown
poet, the legend of Beowulf is one of adventure and heroism – much like The Hakkenden – but
1
The full title of this work is Nansō Satomi Hakkenden, which translates as The Legend of the Eight Dog Warriors
of Awa and Satomi, the lord of Awa. It will be referred to as The Hakkenden, translating as The Legend of the Eight
Dog Warriors.
34
highlights the difference in notions of heroism between these two cultures. Beowulf, the
protagonist of the epic, is a mighty warrior from a distant land who comes to aid Hrothgar and
his people when they are besieged by the monstrous Grendel, who is said to be a descendent of
Cain. Comparing this to the dog warriors, who are supernatural entities fighting against human
corruption, it becomes a clear representation between fundamental belief systems in these two
civilizations: Beowulf, no matter how problematically, embraces Christianity, while Hakkenden
embraces the Shinto tradition. Along with larger implications, this distinction is highlighted by
the juxtaposition of the Christian belief in the supernatural as inherently Other – there is only one
God, and aside from his angels there should be no supernatural creatures – and the Shinto belief
that there can be powerful spirits in all things – kami – which are a form of god. Thus, in
Christian traditions, the only “son of God” is Christ – any other child of a supernatural union
must, by definition, be a child of devils. Shinto, on the other hand, embraces a notion of
godhood that covers a large spectrum of ethical and moral viewpoints; there are good kami, evil
kami, indifferent kami, and even kami who mean no harm but cause a great deal of trouble with
their practical jokes. Many of these kami have children who go on to become heroes and,
according to the Japanese myths of creation, all humans are descended from the same kami that
gave birth to the spirits of the world.
Another point of correlation between Beowulf and The Hakkenden is in the rise to and fall
from power – the heroes of both tales eventually come to rule lands of their own and finally fall
from power for some reason. The difference here is in both how the heroes fall from grace and
how that affects the world around them. In the case of Beowulf, it is due to the greed of a man
who steals from the hoard of a great dragon that Beowulf must then defeat in combat – which he
does, taking his own mortal wound in the process. At this time, he passes his authority on to one
35
of his followers, whom the reader can assume will carry on the rule of Beowulf either well or
poorly. Either way, however, it is clear that Beowulf is exculpated of any guilt for the eventual
(historical) decline of his people. The dog warriors, on the other hand, simply fade away – they
age, have children, and finally die. As this happens, the symbols on their crystal beads – which
originally signified not only their individual characteristics but also their duty to their clan – fade
as well. Their purpose has been fulfilled, and they have been granted a respite from strife for the
rest of their lives, which extends to those they rule. Thus, after their death, the natural state of
strife between clans arises again – implying that it was only the presence of the dog warriors
which led to that idyllic period of peace. The tale becomes cyclical, as a new group of heroes
will be forced to arise and reclaim that peace for their generation, after which it will again fade
and the duty will fall to the next generation.
However interesting these distinctions are, the one most visibly highlighted by RPGs
produced by Japanese studios is that between the solitary hero and the group. Beowulf is the tale
of one hero – the title makes that explicit – while The Hakkenden is the tale of eight brothers of
spirit who work together to avenge their clan. This falls well within the tradition of Japanese
epic literature, as tales such as The Peach Boy, Shui hu Zhuan, and the more contemporary
Saiyuki, Rurouni Kenshin, Bleach, and Flame of Recca all emphasize the strength of the party
over that of the individual. In these and other cases, a singular “hero” is subsumed by the
companions with whom he travels – all of whom contribute to the success of the adventure in
meaningful ways and all of whom become, at least temporarily, dominant within the narrative
arc. Compare this to the tradition of Western Christian epics, which focus primarily on the
questing hero overcoming obstacles through his own strength or magical gifts from helpers who
do not then join the company. It is perhaps notably relevant that the most successful
36
contemporary fantasy epic, The Lord of the Rings, establishes a party and then breaks it within
the first third of the text – establishing, instead, individual tales of valor for Frodo and Aragorn
primarily, with smaller arcs dealing with the other characters of the “fellowship.” This fits
snugly within the tradition established by narratives such as those of the Arthurian and
Charlemagne's knights. Despite acting within the context of Arthur’s Round Table, throughout
the tales of Lancelot, Arthur, Gawain, and their brethren, the nearly exclusive focus is on one
knight’s travels at any one point. Thus, we have “Gawain and the Green Knight” and Percival
and Galahad’s independent but parallel pursuits of the grail. As Campbell points out,
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural
wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the
hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on
his fellow man. (30)
It is fruitful to point out that few Japanese myths fall within this frame. This is because, as
Campbell notes, Western heroes are “symbolic carriers of the destiny of Everyman” (36), a
conception impossible in a tradition which favors multiple heroes. In addition, both Campbell
and Propp point out the importance of a secret heritage for heroes – that they reach the age of
departure quite frequently with no knowledge of their own mythic import. In Japanese myth, as
was shown in the case of Genji, this is rarely the case. More frequently, it is because of some
sublime gift of birth that Japanese heroes become so very powerful, and they are raised to that
power and with the knowledge of it from an early age.
In many ways, this translates directly to J-RPGs; the most striking difference is that
games within this genre often feature heroes who, unlike the characters of Japanese myth, are
unaware of their origins in some meaningful way – a factor which will be discussed in more
37
detail in the sixth chapter. On the other hand, these videogames almost without exception
include the concept of group over solitary hero. In the marketing blitz prior to the Japanese
release of Final Fantasy IX, for example, character designs for the members of the party were
closely guarded and carefully leaked – one or two each month – until the game was finally
released. The single most visible example of the relationship between J-RPGs and the heroic
tradition of The Hakkenden is in Shin Megumi Tensai: Digital Devil Saga, in which each
character is marked with a symbol meant to reflect the powers and nature of the creature into
which he or she can transform. These marks are not deliberate, but appear spontaneously after
the characters develop “Atma” – a sort of spiritual power which enables them to take on the
aspects of various creatures from world mythological traditions – primarily Hindu, Buddhism,
and Confucianism. In the game’s narrative, this is the releasing of their primal urges and desires
– which are built upon their descent from demons.
Prior to the development of Atma, the Embryon tribe is considered the weakest of the
tribes who subsist within the Junkyard, a bounded space defined by highly developed bases and
strategic gunfights over territorial dominance. They are ruled over by the Karma Temple, which
claims that the first tribe to successfully dominate all others will be allowed to ascend to Nirvana
– as presented in the text, a sort of wishing world where every inhabitant is blissfully happy and
misfortune is unknown. The beginning of this system’s downfall is the introduction of Sera, a
hacker who had been imprisoned by Angel – the not-so-angelic force behind the Karma Temple
– and who had broken free in order to help the denizens of the Junkyard cope with the changes
wrought by Angel’s virus, which causes the devolution of humans to their demonic origins.
Digital Devil Saga2’s party consists of six characters: Serph, the voiceless leader of the
Embryon and the player’s interface with the world of DDS, Heat, the easily-angered demolitions
2
Hereafter DDS.
38
expert, Gale, the strategist of the tribe, Cielo, the dreadlock-wearing would-be islander, and
Argilla, the sharpshooter and conservative voice. Sera, who is potentially the most significant
character in relation to the narrative, is not playable – but her interactions with the other
characters, particularly Heat and Serph, are responsible for much of their development. After
they receive their Atma, each of the characters develops a demonic form representative of one of
the Aryan gods: Serph becomes Varna, the god who created the Three Worlds and master of the
sea and seasons, Heat becomes Agni, god of the sun and the holy fire, Gale is Vayu, god of the
wind, Cielo becomes Dyaus, god of the heavens and father of several other gods, and Argilla
becomes Prithivi, goddess of earth and mother of the gods. Their appearances are monstrous, as
are their actions in their demonic forms – the first act of the Embryon after transformation is to
slaughter and devour the majority of the opposing Vanguard tribe.
In keeping with the tradition of the hero as the central character of a larger group, Serph’s
Varna is both quite powerful and quite vulnerable; despite having the most latitude in
development, Varna is still an ice demon, rendering him particularly weak to enemies associated
with fire and – for at least the first portions of the game – limiting him to attacks based on water
or ice. As there are several elements in the world of DDS, Varna alone would be unable to
defeat all enemies; it is only by adding Agni’s fire, Prithivi’s earth, and the elements of wind and
thunder which are associated with Gale and Cielo’s avatars, respectively, that Serph can hope to
defeat the various enemies he faces. Beyond gameplay, it is generally the other members of the
Embryon who develop the plans necessary to conquer the other tribes and ascend to Nirvana.
Gale, particularly, is responsible for most of the action which takes place proactively while Heat
prompts many of the Embryon’s responses to their enemies’ actions. The narrative, as well,
emphasizes early and heavily the importance of all members of the team, as the player is
39
confronted with Argilla’s moral dilemma concerning devouring her once-human enemies or
going mad and losing what shreds of humanity she has attained.
DDS is not the journey of Serph or Sera, but the journey of the Embryon as group as they
struggle to overcome the shifting power dynamics of a world thrown into chaos. Although he is
directly controlled by the player, Serph takes little part in the dialogue and action of cutscenes,
and his passivity serves to foreground the actions of the other characters. In the earliest action
sequences of the game – a cut scene depicting the moment of transformation – the Embryon are
waging a pitched battle against the Vanguard over a mysterious artifact which has fallen to earth
between their territories. As the scene opens, Argilla is evaluating the enemy’s presence through
her rifle’s scope and describing their strength to Serph, who sits next to her. Finished, she passes
the scope to him and the player is shown the Vanguard warriors in partial cover across the
battlefield. Argilla informs Serph that the Vanguard leader, Harley, is present, and Serph focuses
the scope’s zoom on him. After some examination of the mysterious object, Serph signals the
other Embryon to move out. Argilla stop Serph as he begins to move, however, warning him
that “We can always find new recruits. A leader is irreplaceable.” Serph continues, and is
attacked by the Vanguard. After a short action sequence, the mysterious object explodes and the
fighters are all transformed by their Atma.
This short passage is indicative of the way in which most cutscenes in DDS work: the
other Embryon have emotions, goals, and personalities, while Serph is a solely active character.
He never speaks – unless prompted on rare occasions to do so by the player – and his part in
narrative exposition is generally an active, unemotional one. When the characters’ eyes begin to
40
gain color to show their growing emotions3, it is difficult to establish whether Serph’s grey-blue
eyes have actually changed from grey at all. He is most clearly set against Heat, who in the first
cutscene after the discovery of Sera explains that he wants to know more about her and that he’s
“sure [Serph does], too.” This creates an interesting triangulation within the game’s narrative, as
other characters tell the player what Serph, the player’s avatar, wants and thinks. This is
somewhat unique within the genre, as most J-RPGs have very vocal protagonists – much like
Tidus, who was discussed in the previous chapter. DDS, however, subsumes that protagonist to
near-extinction, reaching a point where the other characters are necessary simply to establish a
connection between the player and her avatar.
The larger implication of this transfer of agency from the player-character to those who
surround Serph is that their stories become more important to the player in the absence of his.
This is intuitively obvious; the game features a strong narrative element, and it would be
incomprehensible without some characterization and emotional development. Since, then, Serph
does not offer this the player finds herself connecting more closely with Serph’s companions,
reinforcing the party as collective hero and undermining any attempt to claim that Serph, like a
Western hero, sets out alone into the wilderness. Instead, DDS invokes strength through unity of
purpose and the combination of various skills – each of which is attached to certain elements of
personality which the individual characters possess. In many ways, the characters of DDS
represent their demonic avatars far more than those avatars represent them: Heat’s rage and envy
ignite the fires of his spirit, Agni, while Argilla’s hatred of needless killing vocalizes the will to
foster life that her avatar is meant to represent. Gale, who develops the strongest sense of honor
and dignity of the Embryon once his emotions wake, portrays the majesty of Vayu in his golden
3
Each of the characters experiences a sudden burst of emotion at some point during the game, activating his or her
humanity. Previous to this, their eyes are all mute grey and have no pupils; afterwards, they shift to a color which
coordinates with the character’s hair.
41
chariot. Cielo, who longs for peace within his family, expresses the fatherly – or, in this case,
brotherly – sentiments of Dyaus. What, then, does Serph’s silence and inaction imply about
Varna, creator of the heavens?
PART III
DECONSTRUCTION
43
CHAPTER FIVE
THE POSTHUMAN WORLD
This chapter will return to a discussion of DDS, because while the topic covered here is clearly
present in those games, it is most easily and fruitfully examined in the larger series from which
DDS springs, Shin Megumi Tensai1. Specifically, this chapter will address the postmodern world
of simulation within DDS – one of the newer entries in the series – released in the United States
in 2005. This title differs from the Final Fantasy RPGs primarily in its foregrounding of
personal and social ethics over the more common themes of fellowship and the protection of the
world. In DDS, both the characters and the other inhabitants of their world become infected with
a strange virus which causes them to mutate into various monstrous creatures. This
transformation – and the associated transition to a mindless animal – is only controllable through
1
A literal, word-for-world translation of this is “True Blessing Calamity,” which seems to imply that the calamities
which begin these games are truly blessing – or that, at least, blessings are born from them.
44
the devouring of other humans-turned-monsters. Thus, every battle fought becomes an act of
cannibalism that is necessary simply to survive.
To situate this chapter within the larger framework of Ryan’s remark2, this chapter will
seek to complicate the notion of “good (me) versus evil (the Other)” by examining a game
context in which the player’s characters embody the Other in the same way that their enemies do,
and in which being victorious involves actions which seriously problematize any notion of
“good” which can be associated with the characters. In a larger context, this chapter will also
examine the fundamentally postmodern nature of a game in which the world is – both inside and
outside the context of the narrative – artificially constructed. It is a simulation of the fourth
order, twice, to use Baudrillard’s methodology; the space of the game does not exist in our
world, and the player comes to learn that it does not exist within the game’s world, either, but is
a digital construction meant to hold the souls of a group of repressed humans.
One of the primary concerns of DDS as a text is how to differentiate Self and Other when
one can embody both. The character most concerned with this is Argilla, whose refusal to accept
the inescapable fact that, possessing an Atma, she must consume others in order to live and to
maintain her humanity – which she has only recently discovered – nearly causes her to lose
control of herself and enter – as is shown by many of the other, less focal characters in the game
– a state of subhuman rage in which her need to feed overpowers her self-control and her moral
principles. For the other characters in DDS, this is considered a given; when the Embryon seek
to forge an alliance with a rival tribe, Jinana – that tribe’s leader – tells them that it will only be
done if they can fight their way through her tribe to her headquarters. Bluntly explaining her
actions, she says, “My people are hungry.” Mick the Slug, another tribe leader, describes how
“sweet” his own men were “on the way down” his throat. Nor are the Embryon exempt from
2
See chapter 3.
45
this callous cannibalism; when Jinana is eventually killed – after going mad – Heat orders
Argilla to devour her, which she refuses to do. Serph, like Heat, has no difficulty in consuming
his slain opponents; directly after his initial transformation, he is shown in his Varna aspect
rending a dead enemy with his teeth.
This, quite frankly, does not seem to be within the context of “good” or “heroic”
behavior; it is, in fact, exactly the crime committed by Grendel in Beowulf – and Grendel has the
excuse of not having been human to begin with. The Embryon and other citizens of the
Junkyard, however, have no such escape from the ramifications of their actions. However, they
do not seem to need one; only Argilla has any particular moral quandary about this development,
and even she overcomes it after Jinana’s death. How, then, does this resolve within Ryan’s
claim that all digital games of the adventure and role-playing genres fit within Proppian folkloric
analysis? The argument could be made, perhaps, that Sigurd ate the flesh of his defeated enemy
to gain the knowledge of the dragon – but he was told to do so by the dragon, and told that it
would grant him great power, and even then did it only by accident. Heat, Serph, and the other
Embryon have no such excuse; for them, their enemies are merely food, and they eat a bit too
much to claim it was an accident.
Even before the transformation, the world of DDS is grounded firmly in lawlessness –
rival tribes battle for control of areas at the direction of the Karma Temple, a central
disembodied authority, for the sake of salvation. The group which dominates all others will be
allowed to ascend to “Nirvana,” a world without war and suffering. Unfortunately, no tribe has
succeeded in doing this when the game begins, and it is during a desperate gunfight between two
rival gangs – one of which is made up of the characters who will become the focus of the story –
that the strange virus sets in. From this point on, it becomes the player’s duty to guide this
46
group, the Embryon, to dominance over the others and to finally discover the truth about the
authority which has governed the lives of the characters for so long.
While not quite so obvious in its questions of simulation as games like Star Ocean III:
Till the End of Time and the .hack series, DDS still questions the fundamental reality of any
world in the way that it presents its own. The world of DDS is, the player learns, an artificially
constructed area meant to contain the memories of the survivors of a terrible accident – who are,
simultaneously, kept from an awareness of this fact. The virus itself is the result of the
interference of a hacker, who seeks to find a way to control the power represented by this world.
Also, the hacker implies that the situation has recurred several times already, with similar
results3. The end result of this line of narrative is that the Embryon, controlled by the player,
cease fighting for dominance of the Junkyard – the constructed site within which their digital
personas reside, which is also called Purgatory by Angel, the hacker who releases the virus – and
come to fight against the existence of the Junkyard as a construct. The conflict ceases to be Self
vs. Other – if it ever was – and becomes Self vs. Reality; a postmodern attempt at redefining
existence by reconstructing the technology through which it is initially produced.
The Junkyard and the Karma Temple both seem to represent a potential end result of
posthumanism – a techno-despotic future in which control of technology equates to control of
society. This is highlighted by Angel’s ability to overcome and subsume the Karma Temple, and
her subsequent ability to control the discourse of salvation for the Junkyard. It is Angel who,
using the Temple as her mouthpiece, commands the now-demonic humans of the world she calls
Purgatory to consume one another in an effort to establish complete dominance and thus to earn
the right to enter Nirvana. However, lest it seem that Angel should be seen as overtaking what
3
Before comparing this unfavorably to the Matrix trilogy, it is important to note that the development of this game
began before the release of that film, and that this game exists within a context of similar stories.
47
was originally a valid system, several of the characters within DDS point out that the new
injunction does not vary significantly from the previous commands of the Karma Temple. The
language has changed, the but the system remains the same: destroy or be destroyed, by the
authority of technology.
Technology is pervasive in DDS; stores, transportation, and even religion are performed
by network-based exchange, and the autocratic ruler of the Junkyard is a “Dissemination
Machine,” a gigantic computer decorated in the style of ancient Vedic scrolls. To purchase new
equipment, the player directs Serph to insert his Tag Ring – a digital device containing
identification and other data – into the shopping terminal, at which point the Karma Temple
informs the player how much macca – the currency of the junkyard – she has earned in combat
and by selling bits of aberrant code to the Temple. When the player wishes to save, another
terminal – using the game’s language – is engaged using the same device, and that option is
displayed along with the option to buy new mantras – which teach the characters skills and
powers – and to recover any damage or transport to other visited areas. The least technologically
advanced aspect of the game is combat, wherein most enemies use magic or physical attacks –
sometimes including ancient weapons – and the player’s party, in their avatar forms, do the
same. In their human forms, the party is able to access and use firearms, but these weapons are,
compared to the other technology present – decidedly archaic, being roughly equivalent to
modern weapons. They require ammunition, which must be purchased from the Karma Temple
or looted from enemies (who do not use firearms, which makes this construction a bit illogical),
and include sniper rifles, grenade launchers, handguns, and automatic rifles. This seems to
indicate that the balance of technological power is entirely on the side of the Karma Temple,
which chooses not to disseminate any information that might allow the tribes to challenge it and
48
its two laws: all must seek Nirvana, and all must pledge allegiance to a tribe which defeats their
own.
In DDS, then, technology is used as means for controlling and oppressing the populace; it
is, in fact, a means of hiding their very identities from them. When the game begins, the
characters are emotionless and interchangeable; their mute grey eyes and flat patterns of speech
along with their lack of concern for themselves, their fellows, and the other inhabitants of the
Junkyard all evoke the automaton which Adorno feared would be the end result of mass culture.
They have no memories of a time before the Junkyard, and no way of comprehending emotions
or abstract concepts such as honor or mercy; instead, they understand obedience, logic, and
strategy. Like machines, their first response to a given situation is to evaluate and develop a plan
of action, and then to carry it out. They have no friendships, only a hierarchy, and, as Argilla
points out in the opening sequence, they are essentially interchangeable.
The introduction of Sera marks the beginning of the failure of the technocratic system.
With the advent of emotion and the introduction of motive and personality, the citizens of the
Junkyard begin to question their lives and their blind obedience to the Karma Temple.
Eventually, as their memories return, they realize the manipulation and coercion that were an
essential part of the system which kept them imprisoned and focused on one another rather than
on the system which governed them. In the end, Sera leads Serph and the Embryon to attack the
Karma Temple itself and to force their way into Angel’s presence in order to demand the truth
about Nirvana and about themselves. This is the final heroism of DDS: to destroy an oppressive
system of government which seeks to turn one against another in order to hide its own
manipulative control of technology, identity, and all other knowledge – and, in many ways,
humanity.
49
To return to Ryan’s formulation, DDS highlights many of the ways in which Propp’s
construction of narratives cannot account for J-RPGs. There is no central hero, the final battle is
not Self vs. Other, and the goal of the party is neither domination nor, really, liberation – it is the
utter destruction of a reality established within the text. When DDS ends, the player is unsure
what the next step will be; it is the purpose of the sequel to examine what happens without the
Junkyard, when the Children of Purgatory are no longer caged by the Karma Temple’s
compulsive technologies. Which, of course, points towards the other explicit critique within the
text: that of posthumanism and cyberculture.
When Donna Haraway wrote in her “Cyborg Manifesto” that
The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this
time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of
Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. Perhaps that is
why I want to see if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in
the manic compulsion to name the Enemy. Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not
remember a cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection – they seem
to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The
main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of
militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. (517)
she could essentially be writing about the citizens of the Junkyard before their transformation.
At least, they are comparable until she enters the realm of politics. Serph and his companions,
prior to the reintroduction of emotions, do not dream of families, do not remember any of their
history or culture, are not made of mud but rather of raw data, are not reverent, and represent a
united front. They are also mindless, and their only goal is the one inscribed on them by the
50
system which has constructed them and which can, in a certain way, be linked to the “militarism
and state capitalism” which Haraway mentions above – but more closely resembles the way in
which those constructs might adapt to the introduction of Haraway’s cyborg. Most notably,
however, they have not escaped the “manic compulsion to name the Enemy” as Haraway hoped.
Indeed, it is their sole law to conquer their arbitrary enemies, and as cyborgs they pursue that
goal remorselessly – for cyborgs also know no pity and no mercy or empathy.
DDS, then, can be contextualized as a rebuff of the tradition of utopian, idyllic visions of
cyberculture as the potential liberator of humanity, both from oppression and from the body. As
digital demons, the Embryon have bodies which are real enough for them – they require food and
rest, and the implication of the initial sequences seems to be that a lack of emotion – of
reverence, family, and other concepts of the sort – points towards a decline of society rather than
a development. Additionally, even when technology liberates us from our bodies and the
oppression they must suffer, it provides a forum for new types and levels of oppression, as those
who control and master a technology are able to dominate those who do not. And, finally, DDS
seems to argue that when knowledge exists only as data and one entity or group controls that
data, that power is able to designate any enemy it desires and to command and program the
cyborg – whose weakness, in the end, is that her body is made of data, and data can be
manipulated both more easily and more completely than flesh.
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CHAPTER SIX
SCIENCE, MAGIC, AND THE POSTHUMAN HERO
In the final analytic chapter of this thesis, the goal will be to continue the examination of
posthumanity and Self vs. Other on a smaller scale; having argued that the world itself in these
games seems to indict the concepts of cyberculture and posthuman culture, it will now be argued
that the relationship between hero and villain and even between hero and self serve to reaffirm
that problematization at the level of the avatar. The text for this chapter is Final Fantasy II – or
IV in the Japanese sequence – and that game’s protagonist, Cecil, and its villain, Golbeze. Cecil
begins the game a cyborg in the worst sense of Haraway’s definition (in that he truly “does not
dream of community on the model of the organic family” (517) but has replaced that concept
with loyalty to a liege): he is the commander of the “Red Wings,” a fleet of mechanized airships
used by the king of Baron to capture the magical crystals that become a larger focus later in the
game. His abilities as a Dark Knight are linked directly to his sword; he cannot function without
it; his special power, the “Dragon Wave” or “Dragon Sword” (depending upon the translation), is
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a sheet of dark energy that damages his opponents – released through his sword.
He has no
other magical abilities at this point in the game, and follows the orders of his leader above the
impulses of his own heart. Before his transformation sequence, he has become a brooding man
with no way of reconciling his role and his respect for the lives and humanity of others.
Although Haraway calls for the incorporation of machine and organism in her definition
of a cyborg, I believe that Cecil’s sword can be made to fit. Aside from the airships and other
forms of transportation, there is little evidence of industrial technology within the scope of Final
Fantasy IV – we know, as the player, that it exists – and is epitomized by Baron – but we see it
far less often than we do “magic” – a supernatural effect created by the characters and monsters
utilizing their “magic points.” One exception to this – a magical effect that is created without the
expenditure of magic points – is the Dragon Sword ability of Cecil Harvey, the Dark Knight.
Through his sword, Cecil is able to release some of his hit points – the essence of his life – in the
form of a powerful magical attack. My argument is that this necessary combination of man and
sword to accomplish the Dragon Sword is cybernetic in nature.
Magic in Final Fantasy IV is a way of doing elemental damage, protecting allies, and
healing damage done by enemies – things that can, in many cases, be accomplished as well by
the use of potions (medicine) and magical items (wizards’ rods or totemic focuses). This
argument hinges on these items, these pieces of magical technology, which allow a character to
activate an effect not available to humans – magic as a form of technology. Because the game
takes place in a fantasy setting which incorporates magic, and because that magic serves to
provide advanced effects that are, in reality, accessible only through the use of complex
machines – elemental attacks, explosions, transformations, transportations – I believe that it can
be argued that magic is the equivalent to technology in these games. More specifically, those
53
items which create magical effects – the rods that allow their users to cast spells, for example –
can be considered magical machines. In this way, Cecil’s sword becomes a machine: it allows
him access to a magical effect that is not accessible by normal humans. Thus, it becomes a
magical machine and his position as a Dark Knight is situated firmly on his dependence upon
that sword.
Because Cecil cannot use “magic” as a Dark Knight – his special ability Dragon Sword
does not fall within that category – his powers can be seen as particularly driven by his
equipment. Without his sword, Cecil’s Dragon Sword is unusable – it becomes grayed out in the
combat menu. It is only while holding one of the dark swords (Black, Dark, Hades, etc.) that
Cecil can fully utilize his potential. As a point of elaboration, The American Heritage
Dictionary defines a cyborg as “a human who has certain physiological processes aided or
controlled by mechanical or electronic devices,” and in a world where most things
(transportation, war, health services, communication, etc.) rely upon magic instead of
technology, it seems fair to append “aided or controlled by magical, mechanical, or electronic
devices.” Thus, if Cecil’s sword acts as a magical device which aids certain physiological
processes – his Dragon Sword, most notably – does that not make him a cyborg?
If Cecil (as Dark Knight) is a cyborg, several important avenues of exploration open in
reference to the semiotic consequences of his actions. If this is true, Final Fantasy IV can be
viewed as a metatext about post-humanity, where the visual representations of Cecil’s cyborg
self reflect cultural (or at least artistic) values concerning the value and nature of post-human
subjects. In addition, the choices and consequences of Cecil’s actions become resonant of the
choices of posthuman cyborgs - Cecil’s final attitude towards his cybernetic nature reflects a
cultural message about the relationship between humanity and post-humanity. Finally, Cecil’s
54
metamorphosis – the moment in the story when he ceases to be a cyborg - becomes a visual
metaphor for the reclamation of humanity.
If an avatar is a “bundle of semiotic resources,” it follows that each of those resources has
a meaning – a symbolic significance meant to serve as shorthand for character traits and
motivations. In practice, this denotes a metaphorical function – one in which a literal (or visual)
symbol is contextualized to represent a figurative (abstracted) meaning and where additional
transference can translate certain qualities of one sign to another (Chandler 127-128). As Laurel
has said, “the object of a dramatic representation is not character but action” – “the characters are
there because they are required in order to represent the action, and not the other way around”
(570).
Cecil, the hero of Final Fantasy IV, presents two such bundles as well as a bridge
between them; during the course of the game he transforms from one visual state to another.
Originally, he is a Dark Knight – a soldier of Baron and commander of the mechanized airship
fleet called the Redwings; a role that allows him great physical strength (high combat damage)
but no magic and a relatively low resistance to it. He also has no way (aside from the items
available to all characters) of assisting his party; he cannot heal or protect them, or himself, and
must be sheltered by other members of the group. Later, he becomes the Paladin – a white
knight out of legend, whose powers include healing magic and the ability to protect wounded
party members automatically. His costume changes not only in color but also in form; there is a
drastic difference in the visual representation of these two character roles.
As can be assumed from his denotation as a “dark” knight, Cecil’s first form is heavily
marked with blackness and shadows. His armor is black, covering his entire body, and
accentuates his physicality by having no extraneous parts. His eyes and face are obstructed,
55
giving him the impression of an empty suit of armor – not unlike the character Death’s Hand in
Jade Empire. The visual representations of the Paladin, however, rely upon white tones – white,
light grays, and hints of other pastels (most noticeably brown). His armor exposes his face and
hands, as well as his long effeminate hair, and he wears a cape and tiara to promote a regal
visage. The cape functions, as well, to mask his physicality and produce a more feminized form.
In both our culture and that of the game’s origin, white and black embody highly marked
concepts of “good” and “evil,” “hero” and villain,” and “life” and “death,” respectively. This
marked relationship is reinforced within the world of the game by the association of white with
those magical effects which heal or protect characters and black with those effects which cause
damage, death, and destruction. The spells “Life” and “Meteo,” the most powerful in their
respective disciplines, embody this difference in a dimorphic way: one revives fallen (slain)
party members, while the other is meant to operate as the ultimate doomsday attack – one so
powerful that it takes the life of its first caster.
Another visual distinction between Cecil’s forms is the demonic nature of many of the
visual elements of his costume as Dark Knight, including horns, exoskeletal structures, and a full
helmet which covers his face entirely and leaves only glowing white shapes where his eyes
should appear. In appearance, he is not unlike the later-exposed archvillain of the game, Golbeze
(who is actually Cecil’s half-brother). Golbeze, who has secretly been controlling the forces of
Baron since before the game’s start, is meant to represent the epitome of evil and self-centered
totalitarianism; a fact that makes the similarities between his costume and Cecil’s not only
important, but also ironic – the hero and the villain, at least at the outset, lack any visible
differentiation. Their in-battle representations are almost identical; the only notable difference is
Golbeze’s cape and the gold trim on his armor.
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As a paladin, Cecil’s armor exposes more (that is to say some) of his flesh – most
noticeably his face. His costume contrasts directly with Golbeze’s (red and white as opposites of
blue and black), and the lack of a helm to mask his face further sets him off from his own
previous guise. These elements combine to produce the impression (deservedly) that Cecil has
become more heroic, a fact which coincides with a change in his personal ideologies and
relationship to the dominant forces of his world. Just as the Dark Knight was associated with the
king of Baron, the Paladin is the legendary hero of the village of Mysidia, a land ruled by
mystics and wise men who seek to unite their world in opposition of the policies of Cecil’s late
employer.
During the course of his travels, Cecil comes to realize the wrongness of his posthuman
identity and of his role in building up the imperial power of Baron. He begins to question his
own complicity in the war brought about by Baron’s greed and aligns himself with those who
side against that kingdom. It is at this time that Cecil begins to realize that he cannot defeat his
former masters using their own methods – his power as a Dark Knight is useless against the
embodiment of evil that is Golbeze. Thus it becomes necessary for him to overcome the
darkness he keeps within himself before he can overcome the darkness that has infested the
world outside. To do this, he is forced to undergo a ritualized ordeal which involves facing –
literally – his own dark nature.
He is sent to Mt. Ordeal, which is populated by creatures that his Dragon Wave is useless
against, and must scale it with the help of his party in order to reach the chamber atop it that
contains the essence which will eventually transform him. After a series of difficult battles –
including a battle against a boss monster that cannot be significantly damaged by Cecil’s attacks
– the mountain is scaled and the party enters the chamber of mirrors that will convert Cecil’s
57
abilities to those of the Paladin. Inside, the voice of Cecil’s father welcomes him and grants him
the “Legendary Sword,” the Paladin’s weapon. Immediately afterward, Cecil transforms in a
flash of light and becomes the Paladin – but his reflection remains that of the Dark Knight. The
reflection steps down from the mirror and engages Cecil in battle, which can only be won by
refusing to attack. Cecil must endure the damage that he has done to himself as the Dark Knight
before he can fully become the Paladin.
This sequence begins as a sword descends from above the characters to rest in Cecil’s
hand – a visual representation of its being “passed down” from his father – and Cecil is
surrounded by white (holy) light. He is visually separated from his party – they stand, together,
at the entrance to the chamber and watch as he undergoes this rite of passage. Having now
entered the liminal stage, Cecil’s visual transformation follows shortly as the light converges on
Cecil and, after a flash of light, he is secure in his new form. One thing, however, has not
changed: his reflection. Cecil’s reflected self – still a Dark Knight – steps out of the mirror and
challenges him. His party takes a step forward to assist, but Cecil reinforces his liminal status by
insisting that this battle is his, alone.
The battle itself is both interesting and layered. On
the surface, Cecil is fighting his own reflection – a reference to the mirror stage? – in a battle to
determine whether it is better to be the Dark Knight (post-human) or the Paladin (human).
However, the only way to emerge victorious as the Paladin is to choose not to fight – to allow the
Dark Knight to cause as much damage as he wishes, after which he will cease to exist. This
seems to indicate that, while the past can both shape and harm us, it is not productive to expend
too much energy in an attempt to change what has already been done. Moving on and becoming
more aware of oneself as a part of the community is the lesson of the Paladin: serve others, and
put one’s past behind oneself. The player is given precious little guidance through this process;
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only one cryptic phrase to puzzle out the nature of the challenge facing Cecil. It is, as Joseph
Campbell points out, a mystical journey without aid or spiritual guidance:
The psychological dangers through which earlier generations were guided by the
symbols and spiritual exercises of their mythological and religious inheritance, we
today must face alone, or, at best, with only tentative, impromptu, and not often
very effective guidance. This is our problem as modern, “enlightened”
individuals, for whom all gods and devils have been rationalized out of existence.
Nevertheless, in the multitude of myths and legends that have been preserved to
us, or collected from the ends of the earth, we may yet see delineated something
of our still human course. To hear and profit, however, one may have to submit
somehow to purgation and surrender. (104-105)
“If Hell is the wasteland,” Campbell explains, “then purgatory would be the journey where you
leave the place of pain. You are still in pain, but you’re in quest with a sense of possible
realization” (Osbon 152).
As a Paladin, Cecil remains strongest when equipped with a sword – but his magical
abilities are no longer linked to it. He loses the ability to use Dragon Wave and gains “White”
support magic (the ability to heal, among other things) and is, in general, a more robust and
powerful character. His armor is now white, and features a cape and a circlet – no longer any
helmet – that shows both his long hair and his face. His role within the party is no longer that of
the solitary warrior, but instead he has become part of the group – he no longer has to be looked
after by the rest of the characters, but can now look after not only himself, but the others as well.
As his magic is no longer linked explicitly to his equipment, Cecil’s status as cyborg
seems to have been stripped away. His visual and ritual rejections of that role – which seems to
59
be directly associated, as Haraway would have it, with postmodern consciousness – serve to
implicate the player in his transition back to a stable member of the traditional social order. And,
because the visual representations alter in a way that marks the increased status and heroism of
his new form, it can be said that Cecil – and thus Final Fantasy IV – explicitly links
postmodernism (through the transference of meanings from colors and formal elements in
costume) with those forces which seek to destroy social order in order to create a “New World.”
Cecil’s final position on his cybernetic nature seems to be one of distance and rejection,
which implies that the game’s metatext is critical of the destructive nature of postmodern thought
– whether that means that it does, in the end, reinforce the dominant ideologies of our culture or
whether it represents a subcultural call for social unity. His role as the Paladin seems to directly
inscribe the values of tradition, family, and social awareness that Haraway claims the cyborg will
resist – eventually there is an opportunity for Cecil to revisit Baron Castle, where he meets the
spirit of the dead king he once served, and in that moment he is not only approved of but granted
additional power to help him in his attempt to stop those who would remake the world in their
own image.
Haraway’s belief is that the cyborg will serve a libratory function by destroying the
fabrics of community and tradition that hold us in a system of oppression. A cyborg, she claims,
has no father and no mother and knows no law of men (517). When we meet Cecil, we have no
idea who his family might be – the King of Baron treats him much like a son, but it is clear that
their relationship is based on loyalty, not familial ties. His sword is, in fact, a visual
representation of that link – a gift directly from the hands of his king and represents not only that
feudal link but also the doctrine of might as arbiter of right that is embodied in that land’s
policies. Moreover, it attaches him to the mechanization of the airship fleet called the Red
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Wings – of which he is the commander before he begins to doubt the motives of his king. It
signifies in various ways the link between Cecil and Baron – a link that is broken before Cecil
becomes the Paladin.
The sword of the Paladin, by contrast, is a gift from Cecil’s father – handed down both
literally and figuratively, as it descends from the top of the screen to rest in his outstretched
hand. During his transformation, the light that surrounds Cecil refers to him as its “son.” Later,
this connection is more clearly resolved and Cecil’s status as Paladin and defender of others is
linked to a family tradition. Cecil’s father, a powerful warrior sent from the moon to protect the
Earth, passes his powers and his mantle to his son along with his sword. It contrasts directly
with Haraway’s definition of the cyborg as one who does not dream of family – the power of the
Paladin is a direct link to Cecil’s father, and it is soon afterward that we learn he has a brother.
Instead, the Paladin is one who defends others – one who belongs to the community and serves it
instead of casting it aside for a “New World.” That role falls to the post-human character: the
villain.
It is interesting that Haraway discusses cyborgs as “illegitimate offspring of militarism
and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism” (517). In Cecil’s case as the Dark
Knight, this is essentially correct. But when Haraway points out that these cyborgs are “often
exceedingly unfaithful to their origins” because “their fathers, after all, are inessential” (ibid),
she draws the line between Dark Knight and Paladin: Cecil is unfaithful to the father of his
cyborg state – the king of Baron – but aligns himself closely with his human father – the source
of his powers as a Paladin. The argument that seems to be embodied, then, in Final Fantasy II,
is that becoming post-human requires too great a sacrifice – the total destruction of the social
“world” – and that choosing to return to humanity is the only truly heroic course of action. This
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rejection of postmodern thought seems to directly clash with the theories of writers like Haraway
and Murray, who believe that “the digital medium is the appropriate locus for enacting and
exploring the contests and puzzles of the new global community and the postmodern inner life”
(Muller 3).
One of the difficulties of video game theory is the constant pressure to use
psychoanalysis to deconstruct the relationship between player and avatar; as Mia Consalvo
points out, “there has been little, if any, research that systematically explores how gamers
themselves think about narrative, and more important, how gamers see games as part of their
larger lives or menu of media interests” (323) – in the case of RPG games, writers like Filiciak
argue that “identification is replaced by introjection – the subject is projected inward into an
‘other’” (91). He continues to argue that, while the player and the avatar are no longer on
opposite “sides” of the mirror, there is not much effort required to confuse Self and Other.
While Filiciak is dealing specifically with massively multiplayer online role-playing games, the
concept does transfer: we identify with the characters we manipulate on the screen. In the case
of Cecil, then, our interaction automatically reinforces the cultural values of family and
humanity. To surmount this obstacle in the game, the player must see and understand the
relationship between the Paladin and the Dark Knight – he or she must not only realize the
solution but implement it. In a game built around combat and conquest, the player must choose
not to attack.
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PART IV
REMEDIATION
63
CHAPTER SEVEN
“ACTION” ADVENTURES AND “REAL-TIME” COMBAT
There is a growing trend in RPGs towards the removal of as many forms of mediation between
the player and the combat scenario as possible – in the past, these games have been characterized
by menu-based and often turn-based combat, drawing out and making battles a more mechanical
experience. Traditionally, these games feature a world map on which the player roams using the
party’s current “leader” as an icon until a subroutine activates a “random encounter” –
sometimes more or less staged by the designers of the game. At this point, there is typically a
major transition of some form between the world map and the “battle screen,” a more cinematic
view – often with rotating and manipulable cameras – which presents the active party and the
monsters against which they are ranged. With the advent of games such as Legend of Mana,
Secret of Mana, Parasite Eve, Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, and Final
Fantasy XII, however, the move has been towards a more seamless integration of battle within
the world of the RPG itself. Instead of appearing at random – and often inconvenient times – to
bedevil the players, monsters are animated on the global map and must be interacted with on that
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screen – no transitions are needed, for the most part, to move the party from “exploration” to
“battle” mode. In addition, the entire active party appears on the map and, in Final Fantasy XII,
the characters not directly controlled by the player (those other than the current leader) are often
given AI scripts to allow them to take independent action. Purely in the realm of gameplay, this
has great significance for the genre: if players can avoid combat at inopportune times, it becomes
less difficult to survive in the often deadly worlds of RPGs. On the other hand, this shift in
interface tends to push a single character more directly into alignment with the player – the
dynamic offered by the group is problematized by their ability to take action independent of the
player’s commands. In fact, this sometimes pits the player against those characters, as they take
actions which involve the party in battles that the player wished to avoid. While these games do
offer the player options to tweak the AI of other party members and to directly control them
through summoned menus, the removal of a turn-based system of combat makes the gameplay
demanding enough that it is often difficult to do so without sacrificing the actions of the party
leader – who, without the player, simply stands and waits.
For fans of traditional action-adventure games such as The Legend of Zelda and Chaos
Legion, this transition is generally a welcome relief. Because the characters are not controlled
through menus, the flow of the gameplay during battle begins to more closely resemble these
titles. The party is hypermediated by the introduction of additional scripts and variables, but
simultaneously the battle system itself is made to seem more transparent and immersive – a
perfect example of what Bolter and Grusin argue is the goal of all remediation. Reverseengineering the goals of the producers in this way, it seems to be the case that an attempt is being
made to make more interactive the portions of the game which serve to link – at least in this
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genre – the highly charged non-ergodic (or off-line) portions of the text. Arguably, however, this
sacrifices some of the defining characteristics of the J-RPG.
As has been mentioned previously, one of the greatest distinctions between the Japanese
and Western traditions in role-playing has been the relative focus, respectively, on the party and
the hero. By adjusting the gameplay to function more dynamically, however, Japanese
developers risk collapsing that distinction into meaninglessness. In the prerelease demo for
Final Fantasy XII, for example, the player is allowed to experience two modes of gameplay via
interactions with two parties constructed from players who will be available in the final release.
In each case, the player controls a character capable of summoning gigantic “espers” into combat
– an ability not shared with the other four members of the two parties. In addition, summoning
these espers causes them to replace the two indirectly controlled party members with a single –
still indirectly controlled – magical creature. At all times during the demo the party leader – the
summoner – is playable and is the character with which the player is – functionally – most
closely tied. The gameplay of this demo implies that the final product will serve to complicate in
multiple ways the relationship between the player and the party, both by functionally
highlighting a single character – controlled by the player – with superior and overwhelming
powers and by – in a more general sense – presenting the game’s gameplay as a more important
element than its master narrative.
To begin, then, the demo encourages the player – through gameplay, which is the primary
form of interaction with the text – to identify with either Ashe or Vaan as the text’s primary
character as they take the role of party leader for each of the segments. Basch, Penelo, Fran, and
Balthier are almost nonexistent in their relative inability to be controlled and their presence
behind and following the character the player controls directly. When the leader is not
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stationary, they tend to fall a bit behind and sometimes even vanish from the screen – a notable
difference from earlier games, in which the characters and “monsters” are arrayed in parallel
lines against one another. In battle, the two supporting characters circle the selected enemy,
choosing appropriate skills from their own pool of powers. Should the player’s character – or
either of the others – receive two much damage, one of the support characters will switch to
using healing abilities to recover the character’s strength. These independent actions serve to
distance the player from the other two characters in each party, placing the focus firmly on the
leader in each case and – in the demo, at least – implying that those two characters are the
“heroes” who will be controlling the action in the game’s narrative, with a little help and support
from their friends. As noted above, this threatens to collapse one of the larger distinctions
between Japanese and Western RPGs by subtly shifting from a party to a single hero and his or
her (depending on which character the player controls) followers. Without a context for this
construction, meaning without examples of the narrative at work in the text, it is impossible to
tell whether this shift will carry over into the release version of this title.
Which brings us to the second of the implications of this particular text: the prioritizing
of the gameplay over the narrative. As a complex remediation of both narratives and games,
videogames are in many ways characterized by the ways in which they resolve these two
opposing forces; the balance of power between narrativity and interaction serve, in many ways,
to establish genre and tend to drag along other design elements as they go. It is virtually
impossible, by way of example, to create a game with a compelling master narrative that also
allows the player complete freedom to pursue various objectives in any order. In order to
establish a narrative arc, it is necessary to be able to predict when a player will reach a certain
point and what will have happened previously. In short, the interaction must be limited to those
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elements which do not scramble the larger predefined narrative of the text. Conversely, if the
goal is to create a game with nearly unlimited freedom for players to choose their own path and
even potentially to choose the side designated as “evil,” it becomes nearly impossible to establish
a narrative structure that can be both predefined and flexible enough to allow for the great
freedom of choice given to the player. Thus, the narrative is heavily downplayed if not removed
as a separate entity altogether. The balance is between immersion in the case of interactivity and
engagement in the case of narrative.
In the demo for Final Fantasy XII (FFXII), then, the essential absence of any narrative
elements combined with the heightened levels of immersion in the combat system of the game
seem to imply that the balance of power has shifted towards favoring interaction, although
perhaps not wholly; the demo disc does contain two trailers for the game which seem to
complicate this view by presenting the rich and engaging narrative elements which are expected
of this series. The gameplay, however, is entirely isolated from these trailers and is meant to
stand alone in an effort to foreshadow the eventual release of the game. Because of this, the
implied emphasis of immersion could conceivably carry over into the final product – and, if it
does not, the developers will need to change the discourse of the game experience, as this too
highlights an apparent emphasis on interaction over narrativity.
The designation of each demo scenario as a “level” carries with it the connotations of
such as presented in the tradition of action-adventure and first-person shooter videogames.
Namely, that each is an encapsulated experience playable – in a narrative sense – independent of
the others. “Levels” are a holdover from games in the arcade context, where the point of the
game is to rack up points before running out of lives. They seem out of place in a narrativelydriven game in which one has not, thus far, been able to replay a given segment if the results are
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unsatisfactory. Instead, the general mechanic for games in this genre has been the “save point,”
a designated place or object which allows the player to store her progress thus far in order to
restart there should she be defeated. Traditionally, games within this genre have not had clear
cut demarcations of progress which designate themselves using game terminology – there have
been no level-based J-RPGs thus far, even among the others listed as examples of this trend in
Japanese videogames the closest example is Parasite Eve, which separated its story into chapters
which were ostensibly based on the passage of time within the gameworld. More importantly,
the presence of save points in the vast majority of games and the implementation of save features
in all examples of the genre would undermine a level-based system by allowing the player to
restart during a level rather than at its beginning.
It may, perhaps, have been more fruitful to examine a completed game for this
discussion, but FFXII was selected to emphasize the developmental nature of this trend. As the
Final Fantasy series continues to be one of – if not the – most popular visions of the J-RPG
genre, it seemed fruitful to direct attention to the fact that even this cultural monolith – which
has, in the past, never deviated from its menu-based action sequences in one of its main line
products1 – has begun to shift its weight towards interactivity. That the oldest and most
venerated franchise within the genre has also begun to transition in this directions seems to imply
that, rather than an isolated incident, this shift may point towards one future of the J-RPG genre.
This is not to say that games produced with the traditional roles and relationship between
gameplay and narrativity will cease to be produced, but rather that the “new” frontiers for this
genre, which nears its twentieth year2, are to be found outside of the established tradition.
1
There have been examples of experimentation outside of the line of numbered releases, most notably in Final
Fantasy: Tactics, a turn-based strategy RPG, and Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, a game developed off-platform
of the other titles and designed to be a multiplayer experience in the vein of Gauntlet.
2
Final Fantasy, the progenitor of the franchise, was released to Japanese audiences in 1987.
69
That said, the future direction of these games has become unclear. Any increase in the
interactivity and immersion of the videogames will have an impact on the narrative aspects, and
the first casualty of the new combat systems seems to be the party. How this will affect and be
affected by the presence of a strong (in terms of its domination of the characters’ and thus
player’s actions) master narrative is still to be seen – if Kingdom Hearts, another Japanese
“action RPG” produced by the studio which produces Final Fantasy, is any example, it should
have little effect at all on the narrative. The characters, however, will move towards two poles
clearly visible in Western traditions: the hero and the followers. This is somewhat compromised
by the fact that Kingdom Hearts (KH) was co-produced by the American media giant Disney’s
videogame imprint, Disney Interactive, and was based heavily on the existing mythologies and
characters of the Disney universe. To be more explicit, the pitch for KH was that players would
control a decidedly Final Fantasy-inspired protagonist as he journeyed through the various
worlds of the Disney kingdom. The other game produced within this still ambiguous genre –
since the advent of technology which allowed the introduction of master narratives to these
games – which has had a party system is The Bouncer; all other entries have, for one reason or
another, chosen to focus on a single protagonist without active support and function, essentially,
as action-adventure games with a slightly more emphasized plot. The Bouncer, on the other
hand, features three characters without a specific focus. Players are encouraged – and, in fact,
forced – by the game’s mechanics to alternate their primary character from episode to episode, as
characters do not earn experience – and thus do not become stronger – unless they are actively
played. In addition, each character is given an independent story which is told to the player
between episodes based upon which character was selected – thus, to gain access to the entire
narrative, the player must unlock the different story elements of each character by playing them
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in turn. In addition, there are more story nodes than episodes, insuring that a player who wishes
to see the entirety of the master narrative will be forced to replay the game in order to unlock
scenes that she could not reach on the first play-through.
The Bouncer is a good frame for the conclusion of this discussion; it highlights the ways
in which an active, immersive gameplay experience can be incorporated into the traditional
narrative structure of J-RPGs. It is not without its flaws; most notably in the AI of the support
characters, but also in the necessity for replay to see the entire narrative and in the “choose your
hero” methodology which is inherent in its implementation of the three protagonists. The
game’s heroic focus shifts, then, from a solidified group of adventurers built around one or two
narratively central characters to a trio of independent heroes forced to work together in order to
save a kidnapped friend. However, it can be argued that as a work-in-progress this genre shows
marked potential in reclaiming the industry dominance which has recently been overtaken by
first-person shooters. By allowing a more immersive battle experience but maintaining the
stories which drew in and solidified the genre’s fan base, these games seem to point towards a
more interactive experience which does not sacrifice or relativize notions of heroism in order to
allow the player that immersion. In addition, the inherent narrativity of these games seems to
still point towards a notion of unity over individualism, the trait which originally defined the
genre.
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CHAPTER EIGHT
THE DEATH OF STORY
Most players of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games (MMOs) do not, initially,
consider the implications of the claim that these games are “epic adventures.” The advertisement
is so common in digital gaming that it has, in many ways, lost all currency. This is unfortunate,
as the developers of these games not only claim epic status for their creations but also seem to be
attempting to design their games in that light; failing to realize something that most of the
gaming community has accepted in stride: the fact that a persistent online gaming world cannot
act as a linear narrative. By attempting to incorporate the master narratives used in console
RPGs, the developers of MMOs have actually further problematized their products. As has
mentioned before, games must function based upon a balance of power between interactivity and
narrative structure – if one is dominant, the other will, by necessity, recede. In a persistent world
with highly customizable characters and an inability to permanently affect the world – only to
72
interact with it as it is – there is little or no potential for narrative structure on the order required
for the implementation of an RPG, particularly a J-RPG.
In addition to developing this point, this chapter will speculate on the future of online
gaming as it works around this narrative barrier. Essentially, these games are attempting to
remediate RPGs – of both the Western and Japanese varieties – by combining them with
elements of Multiple User Dungeons (MUDs); they seek to implement the heroic journey in a
context in which every character is a hero – a situation which, itself, speaks to the contradiction
inherent in such a project. The argument can be made, of course, that these systems have been
effectively implemented. The games run smoothly, and they seem to generate enough usage to
warrant not only their survival but also to generate a steady increase in the number of available
titles. However, when the player has completed the available “quest” events and reached the
maximum allowed level for her character, there remains no further potential for development as
a hero. Essentially, the player can create another character and restart the game, or the player
can continue with the same character without any remaining goal, or the player can move on to
another MMO. While it is possible for a player to complete the “story” elements of a given
game, she is not allowed to finish the game. That is impossible; the game is persistent and
eternal, and cannot be “beaten.”
This highlights the first minimal requirement of story that persistent online games cannot
fulfill: a distinct beginning and end. To paraphrase Gerald Prince, a narrative must contain, at
the least, two states bridged by an action1. There must be a point of origin, a point of
completion, and a meaningful action that transforms the former into the latter. The Odyssey
would not have been a story had Odysseus never reached his home; the story of that epic is,
essentially, that of a man who undergoes extraordinary challenges in order to get from point A to
1
See, particularly, the chapter “The Minimal Story” in Prince's A Grammar of Stories.
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point B. In an MMO, however, this would be impossible. The concept of a persistent
gameworld necessitates that any player be able to start at any given moment. Thus, every state
must be equivalent to the starting state. An effective example would be entering a movie theater
where, at any given moment, the film must be able to be started for new customers, allowed to
keep running for those who were already there, and rewound after those who had already
finished were done watching it. Or, to quote Umberto Eco, these games exist “in an imaginary
universe in which, as opposed to ours, causal chains are not open (A provokes B, B provokes C,
C provokes D, and so on, ad infinitum), but closed (A provokes B, B provokes C, C provokes D,
D provokes A)” (873). There is no escape from this closed moment; defeated monsters always
reappear to threaten characters again and the “villains” of individual quests are always ready for
the next batch of would-be heroes.
Nor can an online RPG be designed in which this is not the case; the multiplicity of
protagonists demands that there be a steady supply of low-grade antagonism against which they
can try their mettle. In other words, as long as another character will require that experience in
order to achieve the next level, it must be available to her. Regardless of the number of times it
has occurred and the outcomes of those occurrences. This leads us to the next requirement
MMOs cannot fulfill: meaningful conflict. J. Hillis Miller writes that “the minimal personages
necessary for a narrative are three: a protagonist, an antagonist, and a witness who learns.
Sometimes the protagonist, the antagonist, or the reader may be the witness” (75). What is
essential, however, is that there be two conflicting forces that define themselves against one
another to create a single story. In The Odyssey, we have Odysseus striving to return to his home
against the wrath of Poseidon, whom he has offended. The story is defined not by Odysseus's
desire or by the desire of Poseidon to thwart the hero, but by the interaction of those two desires
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and the forms in which that conflict manifests itself. Thus we know, as readers, that The
Odyssey is closing when Poseidon ceases to act as Odysseus's foil; without that opposition, there
is no reason for the heroic to fail.
Returning to the online gameworld, however, it is clear that this sort of opposition would
be impossible. It would be ludicrous to assume that the developers could create an antagonist for
each and every player who created a character, and if a single, all-encompassing antagonist were
created when the world was generated – as in the online version of the game Diablo - the entire
game would have to end when that foe was defeated. Thus, opposition of the scale required to
shape a narrative cannot be expected from a persistent online game world. And, combining this
lack of meaningful opposition with the impossibility of linear narrative movement, it seems safe
to say that MMOs cannot act in an “epic” fashion. They cannot tell the tale of one lone hero
overcoming all obstacles to reach his destination because they have a multiplicity of heroes who
have no destination and no particular opposition to their getting where they want to go. If this is
the case, it becomes a little more difficult to map out a future for online role-playing. It is not the
stories that are developed for MMOs, but the worlds. And that is the future towards which these
games are pointed: the creation of an entirely virtual world designed, built, and maintained by
the players. Interaction between characters and the only permanent and changeable feature in
their game world – the environment itself – will result in games where the goal is not to build up
a character, but to build up a nation.
The Greeks, who have given so much to literary theory, proposed a notion of mundane
and sacred time. What this means is that there is always action in the world, but there are some
moments that possess such brilliance and clarity that they seem to belong to another order of
events. These moments are those that, when strung together, create the narrative of the epic or
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any other tale. We, as readers, do not see every moment between Odysseus’s departure from
Troy and his reunion with his family, but instead are offered glossed passages that relate a
condensed summary of those portions of his travel that were mundane and uneventful. So, too,
could online game worlds exist.
It is not necessary that every moment of play time in a game be gratifying of itself. In
fact, by establishing an even keel of the fantastic, developers undermine the value of even the
extraordinary. Why should gamers be impressed by the battles they’ve fought, when all they do
is fight battles? Even Odysseus had the lotus-eaters, whose tranquil ways made clear his own
burning passion. We, as individuals – and particularly Americans, define ourselves by
dichotomy. We are this, but not that. What fun would there be in a world without variety of
experience?
To this end, it seems productive to propose that while no persistent online game could
emulate The Odyssey, nearly any game world could become like heroic Greece. Characters
could serve within the kingdoms and empires as heroes or artisans, individuals noble or
villainous, and by their interactions with one another rewrite the mythology of the heroic age.
Imagine the Coliseum packed with watchers and competitors, all wanting to see which is the
strongest hero in the world. Imagine individuals who might travel from one end of the world to
the other, seeing and experiencing things that others might never find. In short, imagine players
fashioning those sacred moments from the mundane and creating stories of their own.
To some extent, the groundwork has begun. Shadowbane introduced the idea of creating
cities and nations, but the economy of their virtual world was still based solely on the destruction
of randomly generated monsters. Players who wanted to maintain homes or cities were forced to
farm – to perpetuate a loop of fighting, looting, and selling – in order to support their structures
76
and pay the wages of their workers. Star Wars Galaxies added mining and farming as well as
creating an economy in which musicians, artisans, and medical professionals could all prosper
without actually taking part in combat, but it lacks the possibility of creating real cities. The
primary mode of transportation on planets – the shuttle – only flies between predefined nonplayer character cities.
What these games lack is a meaningful implementation of sociological or economic
models that might allow for the creation of a culture within the game that is not dependent or
even related to any culture outside the game. It is unlikely that it will ever be the case that
players will want to play through every mundane aspect of a character's daily life, but the RPG
tradition has established that “adventures” are only possible and meaningful when placed
alongside the down time that is played out between them. Role-playing is the creation of
meaningful stories, as a group, and given an opportunity to define not only their own groups but
also their own stories, it seems possible that players could transform online games into online
cultures.
77
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82
APPENDIX A
TEXTS EXAMINED
Activision, Inc. Alundra 2. Los Angeles: 2000.
Atlus U.S.A. Disgaea: Hour of Darkness. Irvine, CA: 2003.
---. Magna Carta: Tears of Blood. Irvine, CA: 2005.
---. Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga. Irvine, CA: 2004.
---. Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne. Irvine, CA: 2004.
---. Stella Deus: The Gate of Eternity. Irvine, CA: 2005.
Bandai America Inc. .hack//INFECTION. Cypress, CA: 2001.
---. .hack//MUTATION. Cypress, CA: 2001.
Enix America Inc. Grandia Xtreme. Seattle: 2002.
LucasArts. Star Wars Galaxies San Rafael, CA: 2003.
---. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. San Rafael, CA: 2003.
83
Microsoft Corp. Fable. Redmond, WA: 2004.
---. Jade Empire. Redmond, WA: 2005.
Namco Hometek Inc. Xenosaga Episode 1: Der Wille zur Macht. San Jose: 2001.
---. Xenosaga Episode 2: Jenseits von Gut und Böse. San Jose: 2001.
Namco LTD. Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean. San Jose: 2003.
---. Tales of Symphonia. San Jose: 2003.
Nintendo of America Inc. Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles. Redmond, WA:
2003.
NIS America, Inc. Phantom Brave. Anaheim, CA: 2004.
SEGA of America, Inc. Shining Tears. San Francisco: 2004.
SEGA of America Dreamcast, Inc. Grandia II. San Francisco: 2000.
Sony Computer Entertainment America. Okage: Shadow King. Foster City, CA:
2001.
---. Final Fantasy VII. Foster City, CA: 1997.
---. Final Fantasy Tactics. Foster City, CA: 2001.
---. Legend of Dragoon. Foster City, CA: 2000.
Square Electronic Arts L.L.C. Chrono Cross. Costa Mesa, CA: 2000.
---. The Bouncer. Los Angeles: 2000.
---. Final Fantasy X. Los Angeles: 2001.
---. Kingdom Hearts. Los Angeles: 2002.
---. Legend of Mana. Los Angeles: 2000.
84
Square Enix Co., Ltd. Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King. Los
Angeles: 2005.
---. Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. Culver City, CA: 2005.
---. Final Fantasy XII: Demo Disc. Los Angeles: 2005.
---. Radiata Stories. Los Angeles: 2005.
Square Enix, Inc. Final Fantasy IX. Los Angeles, CA: 2000.
Square Enix U.S.A., Inc. Final Fantasy VIII. Los Angeles: 1999.
---. Final Fantasy X-2. Los Angeles: 2003.
---. Final Fantasy Chronicles. Los Angeles: 2000.
---. Final Fantasy Origins. Los Angeles: 2003.
---. Parasite Eve. Los Angeles: 1998.
---. Star Ocean: Till the End of Time. Los Angeles: 2003.
---. Xenosaga. Los Angeles: 1998.
SquareSoft, Ltd. Secret of Mana. Los Angeles: 1993.