Japanuary III: COM

I. -bat

Maybe the (officially) most populous city on the planet is not the worst place to think about scale. And because said city is also one of the most influential players in the 21st century's entertainment industry, why not think about it in gaming?

I mean, there are probably a lot of reasons why not, but I am going to ignore them, and also, what I find interesting is perhaps not even a phenomenon of scale after all. 

Of course, gaming features various phenomena of size, inherently related to scale. Different numbers of entities controlled (a single individual, a 'party' as common in RPGs, a team, an army, a whole civilization, a whole species), different viewpoints resulting in different notions of 'size' (a two-storey-house might be something very large in one game, something very small in another, say, Sim City). These can be scaled against each other. But I am interested in two other phenomena that seem related to scale, yet not (directly) to size. 

The first is what I call "Katana for scale", after the memeable expression "indicating that a banana has been placed in the frame of a photograph to reveal the true-to-life size of another object on display in relative scale". The game I would illustrate this with, and where I take the Katana-motif from, is Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, published 2019 by FromSoft. As with other titles from the same developer – especially the famous Dark Souls series – Sekiro is famous for its extreme difficulty. Within a little subculture, this difficulty has been celebrated on its own, as a type of sportive challenge. But in my opinion, this difficulty is a powerful instrument with regards to a sense of scale – in Sekiro, that is. For Sekiro fulfils conditions other FromSoft titles do not, and thus they fascinate me a lot less. Difficulty on its own is not very intriguing, I find, neither in games nor in other types of text.

Moreover, Dark Souls (and its open world offspring, Elden Ring) remains pretty tightly bound to the dark fantasy seinen manga strand epitomized by the seminal Berserk (jap. ベルセルク), in which spectacular technical prowess – nobody could claim Berserk is a badly drawn manga or Dark Souls are badly designed games – and an indubitably rich imagination when it comes to character design are married to a very limited inventiveness when it comes to plotting (plump hero arcs), world-building (worlds created by and stagnating within and offering nothing but combat), political imagination ('morally gray' conservatism), gender roles (go figure), and audience targeting (relatively young adult men). All of this is really a bit tiring, and it is something of a shame to see so much talent poured into so little.

Sekiro still features a lot of this (in fact, the protagonist's prosthetic arm might be a pretty direct Berserk-quote, but I'm getting ahead of myself). It's portrayal of gender roles is once again hapless at best, and doubtlessly, the targeting of young adult men above all else remains undefeated. Similarly, the game is about combat and nothing else. These are the boring parts. On the side of plotting and world-building, however (in a good game, these two aspects are completely intertwined, I'd argue), there is something interesting going on, something with regards to scale. People taking offense at my above description of the Dark Souls franchise will say that nobody plays those titles for their story – and I would answer that I do play Sekiro for its story, that it warrants and rewards doing so, and that all of this is the case because story and gameplay are not organized in a way that they can be fully disentangled.

Sekiro takes place towards the very end of the Sengoku period (or, arguably, right after); after an epoch of different warlord clans battling for local supremacies in Japan, the island is slowly being unified again, with only a few warlords still defending their territories. One of these territories is Sekiro's locale: the realm of the Ashina clan, governed by Isshin Ashina, a former master swordsman who is now, at the beginning of the game, an old man of bad health, with the power pretty much transitioned to his adoptive grandson and top general, Genichiro. The Ashina realm is besieged by the troops of the Interior Ministry of newly-founded Japan, striving to fully unify the state, with the Ashina clan holding on to a thread.

The protagonist, a nameless shinobi tasked with protecting a child named Kuro, fails at precisely this task: Genichiro Ashina defeats the shinobi and kidnaps the child. The reason? Basically, Kuro's great-grandparent was a dragon, which endows Kuro with the gift/curse of immortality, a gift that he can bestow upon others as well. Genichiro's plan is to make Kuro turn the Ashina soldiers immortal, thus turning the tides of war in definite favor of the Ashinas. Kuro refuses, because the immortality comes with a problem: dragon rot, a lethal and painful epidemic that befalls people who come into contact with immortals. Kuro thus remains prisoner within Ashina Castle, and our protagonist's task is to get him out.

The instrument with which to accomplish this task is a sword: our shinobi's katana. Much has been said about Sekiro's combat system; and I think one puts it best by saying that it is a rhythm game. There is a button with which to attack and a button with which to parry. Parrying an opponent's attack right at the moment when his sword would otherwise hit you lowers the opponent's posture; parrying it earlier lowers yours, parrying it later means you lose health (and your health bar is tiny). If your own posture is low, you receive more damage; if the opponent's posture is down to zero, you kill the opponent with a single blow. So it is all about timing. And I mean: all. Unlike other games, Sekiro offers you no possibility to make your sword significantly stronger; all you can get in the shape of an 'upgrade' are some additional combat manoeuvres that help you with specific enemies, but never with all of them (and not with the really difficult ones; their attack patterns are so fast that the combat manoeuvres become comparatively cumbersome).

There is no other way to get through Sekiro, then, than to get acquainted with its swordplay. Your character never becomes significantly 'stronger' or 'better', our nameless shinobi will never 'level up'. You, the player, must become better at it. In this regard, Sekiro is less similar to Dark Souls than to Guitar Hero. The songs get harder, the guitar remains the same.

Within traditional Dark-Souls-fandom, this fact will be interpreted along the usual sportive axis, condensed in the near-slogan git gud (get good). This interpretation separates it almost completely from the world in which the action takes place (like a stadium is separate from the surrounding city), except perhaps for a minimal 'stuff is ruff'-muscularity. But I think the katana remaining the same is part and parcel of Sekiro's way of worldbuilding, because, unchanging, it becomes a benchmark with which to measure scale (and, unlike Berserk's trademark massive broadsword, not just the scale of an imagined, desired, and defended masculine virility).

What sort of world is built? Sekiro takes place in a fantastical interpretation of the snowy hills and craggy mountains of Japan's northeast, a landscape strewn over with Ashina fortifications and sprawling with enemies: Ashina soldiers and generals, lizards, armed monkeys, armed monks, a huge snake, onryōs of a mourning woman, a monstrous monk, and a headless warrior; onis such as an ogre, a massive kong-like monkey, and a demonic embodiment of hatred itself; and more. All of these are fought with the same weapon, and thus in roughly the same way.

A typical first playthrough will see you slowly fight towards Ashina Castle itself, beginning with combat against Ashina footsoldiers and their dogs, eventually encountering the first Ashina general. Fighting this general, you will most likely get defeated. You try again. You get better. You win. You enter the next encampment and are attacked from several sides at once; this is new, you will most likely get defeated. You try again. Beckett said something about this, but I forgot what it was.

Anyway, after having defeated four generals, an ogre, a bull, and the head of Ashina's anti-siege measures (a huge man on a huge stallion), you will make your way into Ashina Castle feeling somewhat at home in the game's swordplay system. You feel: I can do this, I have gotten a hold of how this works. On top of Ashina Castle, you will encounter and fight Genichiro, and you will realize that, in fact, you do not have a hold of how this works. Genichiro will wipe the floor with you, again, and again, and again. And because your sword has not gotten better at all and is still the same that you fought the Ashina generals with (and won, at some point maybe won easily), you realize why this guy is master swordsman Isshin's master student and head of Ashina's forces.

Once you manage to win against Genichiro, he will take flight and the second and third acts of the game begin, in which you make your path further and deeper into Ashina, coming through an enchanted village, a hilltop monastery, a mountaintop Buddhist temple, and more, in order to sever Kuro's immortality (according to Kuro's own wish). Some of the enemies you encounter here might pose more of a challenge than Genichiro (personally, I have very bad memories of aforementioned monstrous monk, which is of course also the boss that you have to fight twice). But you feel that you can imagine who would win if you pitched two of these enemies against each other, because you know how they feel against your benchmark-like sword. If you realize that an enemy late in the third act takes more damage per hit than Genichiro, you know that this most likely means he is a more frail creature in the in-game world – your character hasn't gotten any stronger.

But the dramatically significant way in which scale comes into play with all of this is when, after having travelled Ashina's back country, you return to Ashina Castle and find it in flames (for this summary, I assume you play towards the so-called 'normal ending' or the 'good ending', because going for the 'bad ending' will shorten the game considerably), with the troops of the Interior Ministry having already conquered most of its levels and laying merciless siege to the remaining ones. For of course, your diminishing of the Ashina generals, killing of their head of anti-siege efforts, and chasing away of their de-facto-leader Genichiro meant that Ashina's defenses were massively weakened. It is now that you will first meet an average footsoldier of the Interior Ministry, clad in bright red, and realize that this average soldier is a massively more dangerous foe than the average Ashina footsoldier, and when you see them all the way in the distance, in the reddened night around Ashina Castle, bringing out the flamethrowers, everything you did so far is massively put into relation, into scale: You realize how very much your actions sculpted the developments within this world (you weakened the Ashina defenses), and how very much 'this world' was the helplessly provincial world of an out-of-date warlord-logic, comparatively small in its dimensions, and belonging to a period past. The first clang of the Interior Ministry's soldier's sword against your katana resounds with the full weight of a state. Simultaneously, it tells you how formidable the Ashina warriors you defeated must have been in their prime (the game goes a long way to tell you that you come up against already war-ravaged forces), warding off such an army, and it renders understandable why Genichiro Ashina (who still remains a far greater swordfighter than the Interior Ministry troops, but who is now more or less alone) would turn to dangerous and fantastical measures. As someone once put it, the war against a modern metropolitan state can only be fought in hell.

Consequently, what happens in this fourth act (or maybe epilogue) is not a fight, but a flight. A simple feat of environmental or rather instrumental storytelling – the fighting capacity of a single state soldier, measured by the benchmark of your sword – tells you that the Interior Ministry has already won. The castle crumbles, Isshin succumbs to his illness, his caretaker vanishes. Ashina, this last Sengoku remnant, is no more. You find a desperate Genichiro attempting to kill Kuro and fight him one last time. Just like Ashina, within the game world, represents something defended by the fantastical (how much defensive power did that castle actually derive purely from the huge snake dwelling in the ravines around it?), Genichiro, as the last member of the clan, pulls a fantastical feat and sacrifices himself in order to give some sort of metaphysical birth to Isshin Ashina (yes, the guy who just died, the head of Ashina and legendary swordfighter) in his prime. This is by far the hardest fight in the whole game, and again, it puts things into scale.

All of this scaling is related to the player's activity in the world, and thus it creates a feeling as if the player is able to sculpt the world – to co-build it, as it were, by playing through its plot, and to feel its texture by being able to measure the 'weight' of its actors, a quality even more important as some of its actors are completely fantastical (but 'grounded' through that measurable weight), and almost all of them have a slightly exaggerated, jidaigeki-meets-anime-bent.

Everything in Sekiro is to scale, the difficulty is an instrument to that, and it results in one of the most 'concrete' and tangible gaming worlds I've ever experienced. This tangibility results, for me, in an in-world scaling of entities: their agencies are comparable according to a wholly in-game grid, rather than to a grid that feels external (arithmetic scaling of damage points, health points, character levels, etc.). Does this make sense? In any case, it is my explanation why Sekiro feels like one of the most 'realistic' (I use huge scare quotes here, for reasons I've explained elsewhere at length) games I've ever played – far from any particulary strong mimetic force directed towards the external word (I know neither Japan, nor feudal Japan, nor dragons, well enough to see a representation thereof and think 'yeah, that's right'), similarity and difference become a wholly internal affair, thanks to a grid of comparability whose benchmark is the katana.

II. - mitment

Meeting a friend in a Fukuoka bar, a cold wind blowing outside, he asks me what sort of value there could be at all in comparing literatures, as the notion of comparative literature studies implies. Comparing feels like the laziest act of thought, he says. I agree, comparing is a lazy and trivial act, cheap and stingy, shabby, and outworn. The dumbest people on this planet regularly commit it. In all of this, I feel, it is like language; and just like with language, it can awaken a feral commitment to use this most frequently debased of instruments in ways that feel fresh.

III. -munism (not really)

Meeting K.S. in his university office, a few basic trees outside, we talk about cars, Marxist traditions in Japan, organizing ecological protest in Tokyo, the enigma of 'planning' in communist thought, Schleiermacher, Noh, and a few other things as well. I ask him whether he sees any chance of dietary ecological activism such as vegetarianism and veganism finding a foothold in Japan (where reluctancy towards vegetarian diets – important role of tofu, soy, and mushrooms, as well as strong Buddhist influence notwithstanding – seems to remain strong; difficult to find a vegetarian menu in a standard Tokyo restaurant). He sees little chance, citing especially the enormous importance of the fishing industry for Japan's economy (and labour market). Having positively stuffed myself with extremely good seafood in the past days, I can't say I'm surprised (or disappointed).

IV. -merce

If I had a thousand yen for every time my favorite game of 2023 were a fishing game, I'd have two thousand yen, which is not a lot, but it's funny that it would be enough to buy some excellent sushi.

Not sure this joke worked out, but anyway, two of my favorite games of 2023 were about fishing, and one of them is called Dredge. In Dredge, you control a little fishing boat and you go out on the ocean and, well, try and catch fish.

Entertainment is kept high by a variety of fish to be caught, different biomes, a day/night-cycle, and a pretty rudimentary story that nevertheless does its job. 'Catching fish' itself consists of a minigame that represents the act of fishing itself, and then a second minigame in which you try to fit your catch within your boat's storage. The second minigame works like this: Your storage is modelled as a vaguely boat-shaped grid made up of squares. Your boat's equipment – motors, lamps, possibly a net or two – take up some of the squares. Caught fish is also modelled as squares, with the arrangement of the squares approximating the shapes of fish in the same way the storage-grid approximates the ship. See on the following image on the right:

Dredge gameplay then consists primarily of a circle of catching fish, stowing the catch away – involving careful considerations of size-to-value-ratio (is this fish worth the storage squares it will occupy until I get back to port and unload?) and a minimal tetris game when trying to find optimal placement for getting as many valuable fish (and sometimes a golden trinket or other small sea treasures) as possible onboard – and getting it back to one of the several harbors, selling it, and using the money to buy either better equipment with which to catch more valuable fish, or, you might have guessed it, more storage space.

To spice things up, night time is fright time: spending the night out at sea rather than in the safety of a port puts you at risk of being attacked by large sea monsters, but it also offers the possibility of catching smaller ones; mutated versions, that is, of the fish you catch by day.

These "aberrations", as the game calls them, are designed with great creativity and care, and discovering all of them was the major goal that kept me playing.

But what I eventually found a somehow even more intriguing design choice than the variety of eldritch shapes I kept hauling up from the depths, was that the aberrations had exactly the same 'square abstraction' as their healthy counterparts. The Vortex Interloper above, for example, shares his three-squares-in-a-row-shape with the Sergeant fish it is a mutation of. Similarly, the Cleft-mouth Shark below has the same pattern – square, square with one square below, square with one square above, and square – as the 'unmutated' Blacktip Reef Shark:

None of the aberrations, thus, ever truly broke with the ratio of their species. No matter how massively shaken up a fish's anatomy was, no matter whether they featured a multidimensional spiral within their body, they always squarely fit into the storage space of that small fishing ship and thus in the catch-them-store-them-sell-them-economy of the game.

Somehow, this alluded to something no longer associated with the depths at all (except by name), namely to an infrastructure, within which every fish, no matter its body, remains to scale.