Category Archives: Back To The Future

Ib – The Rise Of The Stardom

You loved it, it brought you closer than any other game to the HOR-RPG current , a game that has had the most imaginative transpositions by fans in the audiovisual field, school musicals, one billion fan arts and more; broke more than 1,150,000 downloads in Japan only: folks, we’re talking about Ib!

You have no idea of how much thinking about this article has scared us in the past few days. Yes. Because in addition to having to manage the academic commitments and the production of TROFA (we are lonely and sad people, therefore we produce everything by ourselves, forgive us), we already knew that a giant was waiting for us here on the Archives, with which we will open this new season of Back to the future…

A very important piece of HOR-RPG history, something that started to scratch a deep wound inside what was the old definition not only of RPG Horror, but of independent indie horror.

We intended to prepare an interview with kouri who, alas, revealed to us that he did not have enough time for such a project. It would have been very interesting to listen to his version of the facts, since as we will see in the Product History , he would have offered an interesting point of view from an independent author, in fact, who found himself struggling with a fast-coming success that they certainly did not expect to have.

Product History

The first release date of this now “masterpiece” of the HOR-RPG field is, compared to others of the genre, rather well known: February 27, 2012. It is unknown to us whether to promote the title Kouri wrote in forums, but it is very likely that the first distribution channels of the game were the author’s website and vector.co.jp, at first glance a portal like others that we have seen here in Back to the Future.
Vector, however, is a truly peculiar distribution channel for an indie game, because the site is not just about video games… But about software in the more general concept (even if it has a special section for games). In fact, if you go to the main page of the site you can find a lot of different products.

A legitimate question may be: “How did people find Ib?” This phenomenon has sparked perplexity in us too.
Realize the situation: even in such a vast portal, the game ranked third in the Vector.jp download record for several years, and won the most consensus (270) in the user voting event “Popular Vote 2012”

It can be said that this title was destined to grow!

Reviews range from four to five stars. Later on here and in the Trump Card paragraph this discussion will be deepened, and above all the reasons for these enthusiastic reviews.

So, for now, let’s see how far the game went from Vector.

It didn’t even have time to switch to other distribution portals, the gameplays on the game were already spreading in Japan.
In addition, the game was so successful that it earned an article on the famous online videogame-news site Famitsu, where Kouri also gave an interview (which we will talk about in the Author-Work Relationship).

(In the photos a part of the article on Ib by Famitsu, and part of the transcript of the interview with Kouri)

And also, as mentioned in the introduction, only in Japan the game gained the most imaginative transpositions from the fans (we believe it is necessary to mention again the case of the school musical based on Ib) and, prick up your ears…
A lot of merchandise (albeit limited to certain periods of time)!
Mini figures sold in “Animated” stores in Japan in early 2014; a calendar for 2013 sold in Comiket 83; Ib, Garry and Mary plushies in late January 2013 at Taito station as arcade awards; a tote bag and a glass sold at the “Guertena Shop”..

The game was therefore increasingly known …
Until it arrived to VgPerson (or Kate, for friends) who came forward to translate Ib into English and bring this small videogame success to us peoples of the West.
Here, after so much popularity in Japan the stage of a great step has approached …

The arrival in the West.
By now, after a full season of Back to the Future, you have learned well what it means to export an HOR-RPG in English … Ib is no exception.

Here too, the game gained good popularity, earning other articles in other online newspapers (some also prominent), as well as obviously a lot of gameplays on Youtube …

But from a wider audience, however, how was the game received (both in the East and in the West)?

Despite being many years later compared to them, the game seems on one hand back from Generation 0, in fact …

The sculptures and paintings in the gallery are truly beautiful. You can enjoy a strange and slightly frightening atmosphere, I recommend this game to those who like these moods. […]

(Review on Vector.com.jp)

(Review on Metacritic.com)

But why we consider Ib a “character drama” then, if it has many elements that can create a good “horror experience”?
We take various excerpts from other reviews regarding the game, including reviews and, this time, comments on Youtube …

“I need to recover… It was a shock, I’m not joking. I’ll be depressed for like a week, like when Akise Aru and Alois Trancy died.”

Here, this last comment is a good reason to start the discussion on a particular ending of Ib, to which the person who wrote refers to: Sacrifice

Over time, when the game gained popularity in the West, two unofficial versions of the game came out: the Green Version and the Hardcore Version.
The Hardcore adds just a few features of the Green Version and precisely increased difficulty with just one petal and no place to heal.
The Green Version is the most particular case (having also been courageous to have been published without Kouri’s consent, and therefore eventually canceled …), because it was characterized by this ending in particular.

This additional ending is based on the choice you have with Mary as to who you would choose if two people could leave the Gallery. In that choice there is the option “I would sacrifice myself”. In this ending Ib actually sacrifices herself, if in this scene (obviously added in this version) the option highlighted on the screen is chosen.

Subsequently Ib tears the petals from her rose, sacrificing herself and making Garry and Mary return to the real world, and as in the final “Forgotten Painting” from the original game…

Here, this slightly tearful ending in the Ib community has made a lot of talk about itself.
But why this?
We saw it in the previous comment: because the characters mainly interact with each other, “the drama is fully concentrated on them” and above all on the nobility of mind of Ib who made her sacrifice in this finale.

In short, there is a more character-centered discourse.

But we will talk more about this phenomenon in the following paragraph …

And in fact here I am! Ele has left me place to talk, and here I am, Pao, ready to rack my brains with you!
So, as usual, before we get to the topic, let’s start with a preamble.

Maybe someone will remember this phenomenon …

 

Which then went on in the same period like this…

From theories on characterizations, dedicated pages, lyrics of musical pieces that apparently seem to accompany only an effective staging (about the relationship and difference that there can be between a good direction and good characters: it was a theme that we have already covered in Corpse Party), they become the main topic of discussion by fans of these products: the characters.

These youngsters begin to emerge from their contexts of origin, absorbing almost all the attention of the players and spectators who come across their stories.

In fact: they begin to replace the player, there starts to be one of them, the questions asked begin to be “what would X have done instead of Y?”
For this field of games it was an unprecedented turn (always leaving aside the anomalous case of Corpse Party, of course) in which the general public began to ask questions about the “actors on stage”, to create myths.

For this topic I want for a moment to borrow a topic that during my course of study on the history of Hollywood I had the opportunity to address …

“No God please no”.

…Gimme one sec, I’ll grab one thing.

“No no. Why Hollywood…?”

One seeeec.

“No, what does she want to prove? I don’t give a damn that you studied this stuff! “

Found it!

“Wha? What’s this?”

Please, I swear it is useful. It is a book, which is called The Star System by Paul McDonald which I recommend among other things and talks about this phenomenon in the Hollywood industry, very interesting…

“Would you stop?”.

Okay okay, now we’re getting there.

First I should explain to you what the heck is this “star system” and what is meant by the concept of stardom that I will explain shortly. It has to do with the actors, the stars to put it better, and the public.
Try to understand me, this is the era of character drama, isn’t it? What better way to introduce the topic with Ib, since we are talking about it now … Well, in some ways we have started to see this phenomenon in a minimal part, or the bond that is created between spectators and characters, also with Corpse- Party.

In this particular particular time band the phenomenon with HOR-RPG has exploded among fans, perhaps for more multifaceted characterizations (take for example Mary, who has a facade and depending on the contexts shows a different side of her personality), or you want for the creation of real imaginary interactions by fans between the characters of the titles, in this way making them “come out of the frame”, that is, get out of the frame of their narrative contexts to start surviving as “stars” of the current HOR -RPG.

(If you look up “RPG Horror” on Google Images these types of results appear.)

So … Maybe already with this brief introduction you could have understood roughly what kind of topic we are dealing with when we talk about Star System.

In reality there are two terms (Star System and stardom) that reveal a fairly complex industrial apparatus.
It is based on a system that was born with Hollywood but which has not been abandoned today.

Let’s take a few steps back.

So talking about the dawn of Hollywood means first of all taking us to the 1920s, when a new type of industry was taking shape.
The film industry has always been full of risks, in which methods had to be found to be able to compensate for the expenses.

Over time, to sum it up in a nutshell because we are here to talk about HOR-RPG and not, obviously, about the history of cinema, new ways have been tried to create guarantees of earnings, and those guarantees were the stars.

A star stands out from a common actor: it does not lend itself only to staging to perform an action and make an imaginary story true, no, a star brings a face, an attitude, a gesture, a look that the spectators will love.

A look that will continue to be sold, creating a monetary circle influencing the rights to the image even beyond the film itself: interviews, newspaper covers, later with modern marketing methods also gadgets.

Stardom is the myth. In other words, it is an actor’s “portfolio”, of the roles he has played and which contribute to defining their icon in a specific way.

… And maybe you are thinking that all the more reason that here we are talking about real actors, of an industry, which is the cinema industry, which has nothing to do with the context we are analyzing here on the Archives. Agree. You are right because as I said, here we are talking about market systems and methods applied to real people, so obviously it cannot be exactly the same with respect to fantasy characters.

But … There is though. We can find a similar mechanism also in fictional characters, if we want.

Then. I suppose many of the boys and girls who read these articles are passionate, or at least know about anime. What do you say? You say no? Oh yeah?

Why don’t we think, very trivially, of the types of character design that are given to characters destined for these types of products, or a video game that seems to maintain these types of styles and methods of representation? We seek the exaggeration of representation, the extravagance so that the character can become an icon, and obviously not being able to rely on an actor, they throw everything they can do on the character to make it unforgettable in the eyes of the public, and this even before you can see it on stage for the actions it does, it is something that begins with its appearance.

The search for extravagance in the design of the characters that we have, with the advance of a ruthless industry and multiple offers that this type of market offers nowadays, which fortunately for them responds to a very large demand for consumers has led to certain types of pre-established schemes on the one hand to ensure the consent of the spectators, but on the other hand always has to deal with the vast competition and must find a method to ensure a way to emerge and then a loyalty, and here too one of the first methods that you choose as a guarantee of gain is in the characters and in their eccentricities.

Does an example come to mind for what concerns our field of study? Like… This?!

Okay, so back to HOR-RPG: do you know what the difference is? Obviously so far we have talked about well-established industries, a type of working and perceptive environment that the HOR-RPG is not, but which has managed to achieve these types of results albeit in a (almost) completely natural way.

Obviously it will have happened in other types of “fandom born from independent products” of any kind on the Internet, but the point is this: here we are talking about a game-engine like RPG Maker (or its similar competitors in the case of Wolf-RPG Editor), a simple and affordable tool. Really everyone. All it takes is a computer and a lot of willpower to produce a type of product that will never be like … Who knows … A book, which in any case cannot offer such a direct experience to a reader and which constantly requires an effort of imagination , or a short film (speaking at the level of independent productions), in a universe that is the cinematographic one in which to go on alone and as independent authors is truly, truly complex if you don’t have someone to turn to.

Trying to retrace our steps therefore and the main speech Ib before being a game for us is a phenomenon to be analyzed, a complex phenomenon such as Corpse-Party was.

And yet … Maybe I’m forgetting something.

Maybe I’m forgetting the importance of the Gallery in all this: Ib was not remembered only for its characters.

Ib is a truly special, singular case which, like Akemi-tan – of which we discussed in the previous article – rests on the edge of a razor. Here are two videogame cases therefore with a double nature between trying to tell us something and the priority of making us explore a place.
Unlike its main successors such as The Witch’s House and Mad Father, it has perhaps maintained a more balanced relationship with its environment …
Yet there is to think about something.

From the way the Gallery is shown this shows us first of all compared to a character, Weiss Guertena, to whom the names of his works, the dates, the events told about this figure are linked. “Yeah, a character you never see … “you could tell me disappointed, claiming that the Gallery has its own depth and that this name, Weiss Guertena, is quite insignificant. Well it’s true. You never see it.
…That’s the point! The fact that the character never enters the scene is even more important to make room for his environment. Think about it, if we had seen him as a finished and finished character we would have connected the whole story and the emotions felt to him and not to a defined space.
Think about Ellen, Viola and The Witch’s House for example. We like the house we explore, it fascinates us, but after approaching the end, we cannot help making the two girls the beating heart of the game and of our memories connected to it.
The same could be said for Aya and her father in Mad Father.
And here we come to the main talk about the environments of the HOR-RPG, which before were the real ones responsible for making their games unique.

Here everything is concentrated on the figure of a person: the environment changes its identity according to the subject that lives in it, it is no longer as in Yume Nikki where you explored an environment of which you had no concrete clue about the girl who created it and the nature of his dreams (having to open up to free interpretations), and we are not even in Ao Oni or Akemi – Tan in which we explore homes trying to overcome puzzles while escaping from a foreign, external and completely de- contextualized to what the “normality of that environment” would entail. Not even in Corpse-Party, which has had a complex background construction over time, the Heavenly Host has become what it is because of the souls that have given it in its current aspect and with which the characters are constantly confronted.

Always starting from the assumption that without a good starting environment, which is highly personalized or realistic, a good product does not come out. And this is true for classic narration, for anti-narrative schemes, for experimental products and so on, as we have already said all the while talking about Generation 0.
However, something is changing here.
To begin with, it is extravagant and you never know what to expect from the various areas, justifying this choice because it is linked to the “figure of an artist”, and then there are many characters who interact with the player.
This happens until Mary completely takes the space on stage by transporting us to her Album of drawings (speaking of this, not by chance it is an environment that is remembered for Mary precisely, during this final act “the Gallery leaves the scene”) .
In short, the real trump card lies in kouri’s ability, in this very subtle and delicate operation, to have made the space of the staging move hand in hand with the main characters giving it full justice.

Without forgetting the atmosphere of course (with a quote to the suspense created by the doll scene that we have already discussed in the Midnight Train review: “See the famous scene of the giant blue doll in the doll room, there is a construction of remarkable suspense: the key is not found and you have to tear up rag dolls while one of them emerges from the light, accompanied by death bells that only waits for the player to fail. It was a random system by the way: where you had found the key it once wasn’t said you found it the second time.”)

The classification of the areas by colors, the puzzles built in order to offer space and personality to the creatures we meet, the information on the works of art and the recurring enemies such as rag dolls or mannequins and the various Lady are all clues that should make us understand that the Gallery is a character, and this would represent for me the only reason why it is held in high regard today.

 

Welcome, gentlemen, to the era of character drama.

Professionality Meter

Yes, you have seen clearly: once again we have a thermometer of professionalism low or at least … Which reaches almost half.

“These two are annoying…” you are thinking “they don’t like anything.” Those who know us should already know how we think, while for those who instead this on Ib is the first article that reads and interfaces with the heading Back to the Future we invite reading the introduction to understand what are the criteria with which we move in the analysis of the titles of this section…

Even here, we try to be honest and confront our nostalgic feelings: as much as Ib was a subject with a truly remarkable potential if put in the hands of expert producers, this title remained only an authorial draft of a great ” rough project “.

I am saying this because of the defects that we will discuss better in the appropriate section, and perhaps, if you have had the opportunity to read our other articles in the column or the normal reviews, you should know how the relationship with writing is fundamental for the success of a product that works commercially. How?

… Adopting a linguistic code that is as universally recognizable as possible by viewers, with a clear and well-defined main plot.

And of course in the case of a video game we should never forget how this is tied with the gameplay, but this is not a defect that concerns this game.

Let’s go back to the analysis.

Packaging

So, before analyzing any stylistic operation: noticed something?

Let’s see if you understand where I want to go considering all the speech we have dealt with before …

 

 

 

…Yup. Exactly. This is the first to have a character on the screen.

Although it is “sketched” and whose design style is perfectly embodied and confused with the rest of the background (we do not see clean colors or well-defined traits, as in the production of an anime for example) for the first time the HOR-RPG carries a face: not an indefinite background, not a black background, not geometric shapes and not even a monster, but a human face. As will happen from now on for a whole series of HOR-RPG titles present, starting from Mad Father and so on with all the facets…

A face that, however, as I mentioned before, blends into the background: it is not put on display in any way within the image, unlike the covers above other titles. The colors are dull, not bright, transmitting a sense of static and quiet.

The style of this game has undoubtedly been appreciated by many users, due to its sophisticated nature and which seems to bring an environment like an art gallery very well on the screen, which already is a new and unusual concept for a horror title , who apparently only needed good skill in managing the gameplay and staging to bring it out.

What makes the title special is the personality shown even in the drawing style.
When you see the icons of the characters apparently it would seem a “sketchy” style of drawing, we had already had an example with the characters of Akemi-Tan (to whom, not being able to place it chronologically, it would also be remembered that he may have been the first to insert protraits drawn “by hand” by the same author with the intention of creating original subjects), yet as sketchy as the lines may seem, they work well in the visual balance with the maps that are explored.

We talked about the role of the music in the Trump Card paragraph, in which we referred to the main themes that certainly contributed to better define the nature of the characters (melancholic melody on the guitar; music box chosen as a stamp for the “lightness / innocence” of the girls and the two different melodies, one slower and the other more lively) and therefore the nature of the game. The ambience OSTs that did their job are not to be forgotten, even if they were mainly selected by free BGM sites.

Author-work relationship

Here could explain why Ib is a video game that survived the market thanks to external agents, instead of approaches directed by the same author (as instead preferred by his colleagues, Fummy –The Witch’s House– and Sen –Mad Father–, who preferred to work on remakes or light novels or other projects to work on commercial exploitation).

Well, on the page of the kouri site, the author of Ib for those who do not know his name, a special notice is written regarding the reception of emails.

In short they are indications regarding authorizations and permits. This confirms what we introduced at the beginning of the paragraph for the note, namely that the game in the “market” survived alone, thanks to its particular personality.

It has probably already happened to him / her to refuse contracts from producers, perhaps he did not want to stain the nature of the work. Perhaps the background of the Gallery would have been better explained as it happened for Corpse-Party (see the defects paragraph) but at the same time perhaps the characters would have been denaturalized (see the article on Corpse-Party).

In this fairly dated interview, the one we mentioned in the history of the product, we can see how the author has seen their work over time …

― NOTICE: THE INTERVIEW IS IN JAPANESE, IT HAS BEEN TRANSLATED WITH THE TRANSLATOR IN ENGLISH: THE CONCEPTS, HOWEVER, SEEM TO BE UNDERSTANDABLE ―

―What inspired you to make Ib?

kouri Since I had some time in my private life, I decided to try to create a game that I always had the intention of creating. The setting is an art gallery, because it was easier to try to create puzzles and mechanisms.

―How did the production go?

kouri First of all I asked myself this question: “What kind of game do I want to play?” I made that part clear, wrote a basic story, decided the main character and the whole setting and worked on it constantly. The “horror element” and the “mysterious element” were very important in “Ib”, so I thought about these two elements a lot. For the horror part, I simply put “elements that people are afraid of” into the game in a well balanced way, and for the part where the “mystery is solved”, I used the map structure to intertwine the use of works of art in the puzzles and make them interesting. In addition, I made sure that even those who are not good at video games can finish it as serenely as possible.

―What do you think are Ib’s strong points?

kouri I would be really happy that if the players felt the eerie atmosphere of the museum, and I also worked a lot on the sprites.

―How was the reaction of the users who played Ib?

kouri I am really happy to have received a generally positive reception in many parts of the world especially from the point of view of the characters: this convinced me to work every day on the subsequent versions of the game

―Finally, say one last sentence to the community.

kouri  Thanks for playing Ib! Even if you haven’t done it yet, Ib is free so if you have time, please try it. It’s not very difficult, you can play it safely. I’d be happy to know if you liked it when you finished it.

So here too we are faced with a phenomenon that has characterized Generation 0 for a long time: the carefree approach with HOR-RPG video games. Both from the public and from the players themselves, the times in which they tried new games and looked at productions with an experimental approach, environments that although niche managed in exceptional cases to reach the attention even of non-players.

This is the key to why the thermometer line with professionalism is so low for a game like this.

An innovative game of its kind but which is still anchored to the exploratory and experiential approaches for which its predecessors have distinguished themselves.

What is interesting to note in this interview is how one thing was stated: kouri already knew where he wanted to go. He first chose the context (i.e. the predominant environment) and then the genre. Choosing a genre in advance, or horror in this context, already means choosing a certain type of linguistic code. Probably the question that arose was: how can I make a museum unsettling?

Knowing where you want to go right from the start is one of the tips that professionals in the creative and audiovisual sector give and is often the key to working with quality products. Despite this, it can also be seen how he / she declared that he / she thought about the plot afterwards, and this can be seen in the final result …
… Which we will talk about shortly.

Defects

Finally, here we are. This is a sore point every time … Yeah …

So yes. The defects of Ib.

Let’s also say that as far as the positive aspects are concerned, we have only reached the same conclusions that many of us have arrived before, namely that the exploratory experience offered by the museum and the way of representing it have laid important foundations for the immense success of the title: that’s the trunk, the backbone of the game, let’s not forget that the two characters, Garry and Mary appear very late and you can interact and get more excited atmospheres only later. Above all the latter, which could be said to be useful only to close the narrative circle during the final acts.

So the point is to understand instead what is it that didn’t work.

Well, we could say that from the simple respect of the internal rules of this world, the world of the Gallery, there is something wrong.

I could start by talking about the rule of damaging paintings: many complaints for a lit lighter…

… And then when Mary’s picture was burned there didn’t seem to be any kind of repercussion.

Not to mention the myriad of information we don’t have about this place, namely: who wrote the two-person rule? Why? How does the relationship between the two worlds work? Why is the Gallery now “unattended”? How did Mary gain this sort of leadership among other art pieces? Why, about the latter, some attack the protagonists and others do not?

… And don’t try to find justification by some random theory because it is information that is not given to us in any way during the game. Yes, interacting with every possible object.

Maybe I’m exaggerating, maybe for some of these questions the answers are there because it was enough to read the descriptions of the works well, however most of the background of this “Fabricated World” remains in mystery and is ignored. It is so “because it is like this”, we have to imagine the rules.

Now you understand well how to make a certain background incomplete after certain types of information have been reported is complicated when you decide to try to bring a product to a more demanding level of narration.

I will repeat a phrase that I have already said in this article: in some ways it is not “different” from Akemi-Tan, both are on the edge. If the game had left a little more information, it probably would have betrayed itself and would have had to face a series of contradictions that would have broken the very thin balance on which the main plot was built (Ib and Garry want to leave the Gallery, Mary doesn’t want to – exposure of the conflict, final acts) and on which the award-winning atmospheres of the game were based.

A question may now arise spontaneously is …
Why Akemi-Tan, which has the same type of writing defect (especially the lack of a solid background) but which still maintains a state of very high tension, has not been taken into consideration as was Ib?
The answer has been brought up quite often in this article.
As I said before: there we were simply exploring haunted houses, probably the players and spectators did not care about investigating Akemi’s past: solved the problem of the curse, solved everything, we are satisfied with it. The lack of background on Akemi seems to have weighed little on the players: there was only an imbalance between one part of the game and the other with total change of atmosphere.

In Ib … There aren’t only the characters. In Ib there is the Gallery which becomes the main actor of the game and proposes certain rules.

Having said that, how do we put it? We take this game as it is?

Conclusions

…Drumroll…

Our answer can only be positive. This character drama is a very complicated branch of HOR-RPG history to observe, in which it takes just a few months to notice the abysmal changes in the relationship between exploration / gameplay and story-telling.
We have just entered the Golden Age, an age in which new rules begin to be defined and written for the creation of a Horror RPG that even the authors of today in some aspects don’t seem to want to give up, a period in which the HOR-RPG doesn’t know how what it is. It is not only an independent product, but it certainly is not even a commercial product produced by professionals.

They are not experimental titles, everyone wants to conquer their own identity, yet the various fans cannot associate the faces and names of those who produced these works, who prefer to remain as “hidden individuals”.
The characters begin to be seen as “stars”, as happens in the audiovisual and videogame products launched by the production companies, but on the other side it is very difficult to imagine their complete backgrounds, this until you will always define a type of writing more articulated.

So with our time machine we have just entered an era of vivid transformation! You will realize this for yourself: each title will be very different from the other by adding new features and rules for the definition of the HOR-RPG current that we are studying, this starting from the arrangement of narrative information proposed by The Witch’s House, that we will meet next time…

Akemi Tan – Struggling between two sides

Now, from 2004, let’s go forward of 10 years…
No, no. Take out two. Yes,exactly: 2012. The year the world was supposed to end.
The Costa Concordia Shipwrecked , Putin is re-elected, there is Expo 2012 in South Korea, the Montenegro tries to get into the EU…
In the field of RPG Horror this was a year of birth… Or to re-birth, having been there since 2005 a period of stalemate, to get to what we know today as the year of the boom of HOR-RPG: Ib, Mad Father, The Witch’s House, but also minor titles like The Crooked Man.

However, we will talk about those later: they are already part of Generation 1 of the HOR-RPG. Before going to these media phenomenons, we would like to consider a title that can represent a perfect transition between Generation 0, the Horror Experience, and Generation 1, the Character Drama.
So, while in London people were getting ready because there were only two days left before the thirtieth Olympic games, in Japan Akemi Tan was distributed for the first time.

Product history

Akemi Tan, or The Ballad of Akemi, does not have a development story full of events, evolutions or even particular controversies … Although it has a small peculiarity from the distribution point of view.

Akemi Tan was initially published in the “Horror Games” category of Freegame-mugen.jp, a still fairly active Japanese portal where free games of all kinds are distributed: from RPG Horror to bullet hell games in the style of Touhou Project, Akemi Tan was initially published on July 25, 2012, with a “score” of 65 points.

… But not only Japan.
Akemi Tan, in fact, can be found (even if this English version was published in 2014) on the well-known mainly English-American portal rpgmaker.net. And the game was not put on the site by some fans or someone who translated the game into English, but by the author himself, Kona Kona Kona Kona Kona, Kona5, or Outkataoka.

Exactly: Kona5 did everything alone from the distribution point of view, and the game was exported to America by himself.

The game has gained a good amount of comments in both countries, and there are also a lot of both Japanese and English gameplays, but the reception has been different from one community to another.

In the community of rpgmaker.net it was received with more enthusiasm, there are more positive comments to which the author himself replies (but we will talk about this in the author-work relationship), while on Freegame-mugen the opinions have been very mixed, also because it has been more widespread (perhaps also because the Japanese version has been around for more time) in Japan.

There are in fact many positive and negative reviews, ranging from five stars, to two stars, up to a single star.

Above all from the point of view of the plotthere were many users who found it unclear, even with the latest version (which seemed to partially fix these problems, according to what Kona5 himself said), others who instead understood it (and personally I, Ele, find myself among them) and they enjoyed the game together with its dramatic ending.

But on what triggered complaints or praise to the game, we will talk about it in the paragraph dedicated to the Trump Card.

Of this title, however, we can say that it was, as a phenomenon, a bit like a supernova: it had its period where many gameplayers played it, it grew for a while, but it never passed the niche like its colleagues who there will be in the next articles, or like the titles of the previous articles.

This is because the game did not have the appeal that would have attracted the general public due to its fairly simplistic plot (and, at times, which also expires in the so-called “wtf”), and which was mainly based on jumpscares and isolating atmosphere: such a game, unless it becomes a cult, in the HOR-RPG community does not last.

As has already been anticipated in the history of the product, we are facing a transition period.

It was impossible for us to ignore this title, finding ourselves faced with a product split in two between attempts to offer a plot with a background on one side, and on the other hand to make the player jump from the chair with its jumpscares.

Well, let’s try to understand together what is the trump card of this game.

The title screen shows us a deformed and brightly colored creature and a metallic sound as a background to the graphics.
It all starts outdoors, with a temple and a girl, Shimoko, who seems tempted to eat the offering of the village’s patron deity.

Only the sounds of the countryside are heard, just as following the introduction all our actions will be accompanied by an agonizing silence.

Silence is a way of expressing , a choice that will give us the constant presentiment of preparing ourselves for a disturbing sound or an ugly face that will present us on the screen.
The jumpscares, aimed directly at the player even before the character he plays, are not in this case the main ace of the title, although they are among the characteristics of the game most remembered and for which, among the public, it has spread by word of mouth. Not always the most prominent feature of a title, like we saw in Corpse Party, matches its trump card.
Akemi-Tan’s jumpscares are however interesting if you reflect on the historical context in which they are inserted, at least in the field of HOR-RPG, in which in the same year Ib came out which aimed at a totally different method to “frighten”, dramatizing the atmospheres according to the environment and following the narration.

These really seem like the latest cry that demons speak to the player willing to meet them, becoming less and less frequent as you change house.

I’ll probably be digressing for you now, so let’s get back to it.

What is Akemi-Tan’s trump card?

Here we are.

This is perhaps the best example to get closer to the topic.

Read here … From online dictionaries.

SUSPENSE

“A state of mind of apprehension, of anxious uncertainty, of those who await the solution of dramatic events; in particular, in a film or a story, a moment or situation that induces in the spectator or in the reader a feeling of suspension, of anguished waiting: a film, a novel full of suspense

Etymology: ← English; from loc. fr. (en) suspens ‘pending’, which is from lat. suspēnsum, part. pass. suspendĕre neutral; cfr. suspend.”

We see a monster in the next room. So, as for the whole first part of the game before reaching the forest where this wait seems to diminish little by little, it is not the jumpscares that distress us, but the awareness that they will come at any moment.

Don’t believe me? Let’s look at two types of images for a moment and summarize the context in which they were used.

A)
Of course, the yellow face that opens the mouth seems to have exactly the intention of making us jump out of the chair and then immediately dispel the fright. Would it have been the same if we hadn’t wandered around the house for a long time, in silence? These are figures whose thoughts are that they could appear at any moment allows the player to remain in suspense, in an atmosphere where Shimoko’s daily reality is broken piece by piece.

The images used are only part of the tension that you feel, the tip of the iceberg that emerges from all the preparation behind it. See other remembered events that often occur on the maps themselves in addition to the images; from the giant starfish to the face that appears from the wall.

… And then we have this other example …

B) This instead appears in the forest. We have already faced many enemies and passed the exploration of three houses. Furthermore, we have already seen from the photos the deformed face of Ebiko, and met Akemi, and we defended ourselves from a floating head hitting it with a hammer. Above all, we have already run away from the demon once.

There is no longer even silence, but alongside these images there is a more dramatized sound accompaniment: it is the final confrontation, the face to face with the demon. We can observe that we have the desire on the part of the game to make us live the scene with a certain climax, unlike the first commented image.

So, after commenting on the use of images in different contexts, we can say with certainty that the suspense surrounding these images assign them a certain value.

Mind you, though, that this is a feature that stands undisturbed only in the first part of the game. The second, which would like to focus more on the background and starts when Ebiko is saved by Akemi in the forest, seems to totally change language and therefore we will not, unfortunately, talk about it in this paragraph.

We conclude these first observations on the trump card of the title with these two images in particular.

On the one hand, Ebiko’s mom, whom we see breaking apart piece by piece. On the other hand, we have a close-up on Akemi to show us the life drained from her eyes.

They look like two totally different images.
Certainly their emotional functions are. One should impress us, the other seeks our empathy and identification with the character.
Tuttavia c’è un motivo per cui ve ne sto parlando in un unico paragrafo…Ed è la vicinanza che si cerca con il giocatore.
Similarly to the function of the sequence of images that appear in the forest during the final confrontation and differentiating instead of the images of the various jumpscars, these really want to build a certain relationship of intimacy with the player.

The communication that the game seems to want to establish with us directly in person. It is a topic that we alredy treated in the Ao Oni article, but which applied in these contexts, especially for the second image, reveals enormous potential for the future.
The close contact with the player is not only sought to offer him “a hit of fright”, but also to increase the duration of his anguish, or even to push him to empathize with the young girl.

A type of use of images that the cinematographic language knows very well.

And I dare say, with the use that has been made of these images, the function has been perfectly successful compared to, for example, the CG of the close-ups in Midnight Train, that we already reviewed.

Just look at the difference:

On the left Akemi. We have a close-up, the blood, the expression on her face is exaggerated, even if the drawing style is in conflict with the images of his facesets (and this could be considered a technical awkwardness, added to the quality of the image). We can see her eyes go out, directly in contact with ours.

On the right Neil, from Midnight Train.

A half close-up, the face is only half turned towards us and the background is treated only with a tint of color. A type of image from which we viewers, emotionally, we can only distance themselves and consider the character in this case only as a “nice little figurine” that the title has decided to show off at this precise point in the plot to make us understand that the character had reached the stage of a psychological journey.

There would be an observation by the way, since with this title we will close the circle of Generation 0: it is curious how a title of this generation seems to make better use of the language of an audiovisual product to create emotions unlike a title belonging to that that we call Second Generation, which would seem to want to appear more shamelessly to the narrative code of cinematographic origin.

Professionality meter

Perhaps having the thermometer at this level will seem quite obvious to you. Let’s take a closer look at everything …

Packaging

An excellent idea. The use of warm colors and the image that seems to be the result of a brush stroke are a good presentation of the title in contrast to the black background. The sound sector helps the player to feel immediately estranged, promising almost higher graphic expectations than what will be seen later on the maps and the faces of the characters.

The title seems to have been distributed by the author himself in a friendly way, not with the intention of offering a specific product to an audience. He is a player who turns to other players, a developer who turns to his peers.

We will talk about this in the next paragraph.

author-work relationship

If you see it on its rpgmaker.net page, you can immediately see the difference between Kona5 and other authors already analyzed here in Back to the Future, but also those that will be examined in the future.

In the article on Yume Nikki we talked about the “myth of the author”, about how he is not a person, but an entity among the community, which if he has to answer he does it in a very professional and detached way.

Here, with Kona5 this concept does not apply.

If we think of other authors, for example placing Kikiyama and Makoto Kedouin on two different levels, we will see how they both share an estranged image of themselves towards their audience.

An authorial identity then hidden by a professional production company, or a “mythical” identity based on the aura of mystery that has been built, both authors seem to distance themselves from users to which they turn. Regardless of whether they are intentional or not, it is important to consider how the authors of goods in industries always try to build a certain image and representation of themselves. It is an image that can be fatal for the way the public then receives the product, because it will precisely associate it with that type of image that an author has built.

Kona5 unfortunately does not seem to have done this reasoning, since probably his intentions for this title was not precisely to address an audience, but to his peers.

Although in the market this is a type of concept that is sought to convey for certain types of goods and services (see advertisements for food products for example, especially those in which a sort of patriotism comes into play), there is to consider the way these advertisements are done: I guess you also understand that there are two different ways (compared to the attitudes of the author of Akemi-Tan) to convey the same concept: one comes from marketing experts, the other comes from a real user who is distributing a game. And the difference can be seen.

On the Japanese site I assume that the authors themselves cannot respond to the comments received, so the author of Akemi Tan showed his personality more on the American site.

In fact, he responds to the comments (with good English too) so that he demonstrates an extrovert and playful nature, as well as his profile with an equally playful bio, with many emoticons.

defects

Unfortunately, the game failed in the two key points that define the success of a video game: storytelling and gameplay.

NARRATION

I guess my intervention in this area is not needed to bring back to the memory of those who approached Akemi Tan a sense of inadequacy and incompleteness as the story is developed.

True, we have a resolution of the main plot: demonic danger, long part of the development in which this danger is addressed and resolution of the problem with what appears to be a voluntary quotation from the biblical event of the death and resurrection of Christ in the Christian context. Well yes, we have foreseen and guessed the date on which to release this article. Happy Easter to you too, guys.

Going back to us, we said that there is a main-plot resolution, it’s true, but what about the background?

Akemi who complains about her loneliness, who hints at her past without this being further investigated.
We are not saying that it should have been developed necessarily, because unfortunately the game seems to be suspended in a pit with one foot planted on the priority of the gaming experience, and the other foot on the desire to tell us a story.
Perhaps for what the intentions of the game were, it would have been more honest (although perhaps less attractive if the author wanted to attract the attention of simple passing spectators in a certain sense) remove the background on Akemi and leave her 100% in mystery.
Although she looks like a mature and very sweet girl (she is a character who has put a lot of tenderness on one side I admit it) it would have been better, having come to these conclusions, that she wouldn’t reveal so much about her or at least not in this way.

It’s like showing candy to a child and then devouring it whole under his disappointed eyes, or as the master Miyagi says in Karate Kid addressing his pupil:
“Walk on road, hm? Walk left side, safe. Walk right side, safe. Walk middle, sooner or later…Get squish just like grape.”.

An alternative would have been to fill the exploration phase with small clues about the village and the girl in order to leave more room for the background, but at this point one wonders if it would have been the same Akemi-Tan we know.

GAMEPLAY

Unfortunately this title suffers in many situations from an error that we have seen in the A Figment Of Discord review.
Do you once again expect a “Eeh ?!” like that of the first review?
Well, because you won’t have it … At least on those levels.

We can summarize this concept as follows: the error is the same, but in different fields, and at different levels of gravity.

Let’s take Akemi Tan first. In many, many moments of the game you have to find yourself doing one thing first and then making another happen.

Practical example (I took the worst case): Shimoko cannot put the offer to the Ou until the player goes up the stairs and the game tells you “This is the temple of the Ou, we have to make offers” etc.

In this case a solution could have been to put in another way, even more “forced”, the explanation of the temple and the Ou: for example those lines of text could be shown automatically, before the player could move .

Now I leave you with the old AFoD review, which complained much more … Angry way, an inability to manage the gameplay.

“Eeh?!

What is a cake doing in the kitchen now that I sifted to perfection ten minutes ago ?!

It is simple: first the riddle had not been solved, so the cake did not appear. All logical, everything runs smoothly, doesn’t it? It’s not true.

According to the game, that note about birds that love shiny things and desserts had to serve something … Yes, but actually… No.

The player remembers that in the kitchen there is nothing, and therefore it is normal not to control it anymore, so this damn cake can find it only in a raptus of desperation in which he searches again, for the seventieth time, in all the rooms … But has activated the pie switch, so it can go on. I’m sorry to be dramatic, but I’m freaking out. You don’t structure a gameplay this way…”

Well, the error described seems identical.

But I will tell you various reasons why in Akemi Tan these types of forcing are easier to fix and less serious in general as errors.

Before going to another moment of the game, let’s say why I don’t go crazy and I don’t fossilize on the initial scene. It is simply very easy to fix: it was enough to put the exact same lines of dialogue a few moments before, and it would have already been fixed: it is simply a lack of foresight, not a real incapacity.

Now let’s move on to another very particular moment of the game: Shimoko’s father’s drawer, the Nankin code and the shotgun.

Compared to the AFoD cake, here there is a not bad camouflage of the forcing, in part.
In fact, it is seen more easily by those who have already played the game, who knows that in the father’s drawer there is the rifle that will help the girl to escape from her home.

I will say that this part is also not perfect, but we go one step at a time, we will return later.

Since we are from Shimoko’s point of view, and that is her home, she probably knows that there is a rifle in her father’s drawer: when the house is still quiet, when she still does not know that “the village has become dangerous” through his mother, she probably found it unnecessary to have to take herfather’s rifle.

Before the call from Shimoko’s mother to her daughter, where she explicitly says “get out of the village, it has become a dangerous place” the game does not even give you the opportunity to enter a code in the father’s drawer for this reason.

At this point this thing had to be made more evident: in fact, before the mother’s call, the drawer does not even give a textbox that says “Dad’s drawer is blocked by a Nankin code”, or clearly say that there is a rifle , which Shimoko will find useful later.

At this point you simply had to add one or two textboxes that gave more relevance to the drawer, so that the player could also check it several times, in the worst case.

You see? Move the text a little earlier, make an important object a little more obvious … These are mostly communication problems. Communication problems are solved with little, simply by saying more, improving the focus of important objects, there are no flaws at the base.

Let’s still compare it to the AFoD cake, again quoting my part of the review.

“The player remembers that in the kitchen there is nothing, and therefore it is normal not to control it anymore”

Here, here comes another point in favor of the drawer we mentioned earlier.

In Akemi Tan, it was only meant to be more obvious, but it’s not like it never appeared in the room before. The player knows there is, the game simply had to make it clear that it was an important element.

For AFoD and its magic cake that appears out of nowhere … There is a real problem at the base, in fact.

The cake does not appear in any way until the player reads a ticket that mentions “sweet things”. The cake could have been there from the beginning, but the player connected it to something useful (and, from the point of view of the protagonist, it occurred to her to control it better) when they read the ticket, and therefore they can think “Ah, the sweets have something to do with this… The cake in the kitchen! ”

The game seems to make the player look foolish, as if they were unable to make connections between what they read and what they see, therefore as if they cannot instinctively remember a cake that they could see before and therefore everything in that puzzle is nauseating and meaningless .

Here, these are real flaws in gameplay that have problems right at the base.

Returning to Akemi-Tan, we also noticed that that’s not the only game who has difficulties communicating with the player: we have those problems even in Ao Oni. Here is a part of our article on Ao Oni:

“The riddles. We’re talking … About releasing the information.
Well, however ingenious they may be, many have failed to fully appreciate them, complaining of relative complexity.
This I believe is mainly given by the fact that often there is not enough communication of the game for the player, leaving it completely to himself without offering instructions that can make the user understand the nature of the puzzle.”

At this point we can assume that this is a real problem that characterizes Generation 0, because we have seen something similar in CORPSE-PARTY, but from a narrative point of view. Here is another part, this time of the article on Corpse Party, which talks about this:

“It goes from a frantic atmosphere, since Ayumi and Yoshiki have been reported in the real world until they discover that the parallel dimension is still behind them, at an incredibly slow one which is facing the accumulation of information that focuses all at one time. During the rest of the game, before this point we don’t even have clues that could have been left to assimilate gradually the with past events and that we are told in this scene.”

Conclusioni

And so, finally, we end the first part of our journey.

Perhaps not all readers will have known at first glance the titles we have proposed, but it must be considered that without these the characteristics of the Horror RPGs that we all know would not have developed.

The closeness that is sought with the player, the desire to offer an immersive experience, the spirit of wandering. This, ladies and gentlemen, was Generation 0.

Yume Nikki – A Surrealist success

The time machine does not move from 2004.
So much has happened in 2004. Only in the first two months, the Spirit probe from NASA gave the first images of Mars, then it was invented Facebook, at the cinema there was Mel Gibson’s The Passion and … Oh, right, in a month not well accurate Ao Oni was on some computers.

But a few months later to the summer of that year, the title silently as we mentioned previously here on Back to the Future, was released a game that would become a real cult of ” gaming abstractionism”.

In 2004, while some escaped from the blue monster, many players found themselves opening a disturbing and disorienting dream journal.

“This game, with a dark atmosphere, it allows you to explore the world within a dream. There isn’t a history or any special purpose. It is simply an exploration game “(Description of Yume Nikki on Kikiyama’s website)

A “simple exploratory game,” is how it is described by the author himself Yume Nikki. These are as simple premise, however, have given rise to what is almost 60% of the internet population knows or at least has had a taste, such as the strange creatures in the game.

In this regard we would like to mention one of those pages error that sometimes is seen in internet sites … Those who say, generally, “Error 404 Not Found” .here, Ele one day he saw one of these pages that had the background one of the OST game ( “Working, please wait …” or, in the original language, “ゆ め に っ き”), Even if the site was not in any way Yume Nikki related, judging by the address. Unfortunately this page no longer exists, even if we have evidence that there had been.

It must have been a deliberate choice because those who had the site previously knew the game? Or have found that music as well, hanging out in the internet?

In any case, Yume Nikki was one of those titles that he knew more than others and bring interest to the current even those who were not well versed on the RPG genre Horror. But this is because of what?

Let’s find out together.

 

Product History

Compared to Ao Oni, people have done more research about where Yume Nikki started.

The first proper forum in which it was published was 2Channel (at least, at the time, now has been renamed to 5Channel). Even just looking at Wikipedia, you can read that when the game just came out did not have much popularity, because when it was published the very first time it was also a rather incomplete game, which have followed many versions that were used primarily to fix bugs.

The latest version, in fact, dates back to 2005. After that year there were no more updates… But we’ll talk more in the section dedicated to the author-work relationship, because there is something more disturbing and complicated behind this lack of updates.

So, back to us, Yume Nikki became popular with time, also earning an English translation, which made it popular in the West.

And here, when it began to spread, we noticed a rather unusual phenomenon for the HOR-RPG current.

In a review of a fairly recent game we began a speech: that of the difference between “active spectators” and “passive.” We glue the definition here

“Those who watch an audiovisual product is obviously a passive spectator: can” sit there watching “and his actions do not affect the behavior of any of the characters, as well as the environment and so on, as opposed to video games: why a gamer we can consider an active viewer. “

Starting from here, in that review has been pulled out of the question that now the games considered HOR-RPG (but it will happen this right from the Generation 1 RPG Horror, The Character Drama) are followed and played mainly as passive spectators, given the lack of experience of active viewers, do not have a full understanding on the development of gameplay, and therefore tend to be many times also misconceptions about the titles they want to talk.

For example, Ao Oni has unfortunately suffered this treatment: some players born just as passive viewers have complained about the lack of narrative, instead who has always been an active spectator flew over, and he liked riddles, chases, etc.

Why Yume Nikki is a special case, then, from the point of view of the community?

The reason is that this gap between those who have actually tried it, and lived the 360-degree gaming experience; is because there is no history: Yume Nikki is much more to play than to see, there are very few passive spectators, if we look at the content published on the internet.

To indicate the type of community that generally has surrounded the HOR-RPG take two Italian YouTube channels, always one of the platforms that have caused the mouth of the genre.
The two channels are Rikkukun and Giulyagatta97.

Rikkukun has always treated and (I guess)will always treat video games. He will definitely had experiences as a passive spectator, but you can tell that its main industry, and the world which are the focus is gaming.

Quite classic games from gaming’s most iconic series: The Legend of Zelda, Dark Souls, Paper Mario, DOTA, although in the image we can see Lisa and Celeste, games with a bit more present narrative.

Let’s move on to Giulyagatta’s channel.

She already has a completely different channel. Yes, she also played some games (recently is carrying on a Dragon Age II series) along with creepypasta and other content-when she was starting her career on Youtube she was famous for AMVs, if you get the idea-but the games that she chose to treat have a particular criterion that departs types of video of a person born as an assiduous passive spectator, as a person born as a regular active viewer.

The importance and / or the preponderance of a narration.
I’m not saying that channels like Giulyagatta repudiate Zelda or those like Rikkukun repudiate a visual novel or a Telltale game, but just these channels have different selection criteria on what to bring on their channel.

Dragon Age II, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (there wasn’t however a real gameplay of this title, but only a fandub) Aria’s Story, various other RPG Horror belonging mainly to Generations 1, 2 and 3, and even among those the most narrative ones…

So massive plot and / or complicated, with characters that people would also become attached to “freak out” all together … It is what generally a criterion when choosing an audiovisual or literary work in many cases.

Here, channels like Rikkukun, for example, would not likely bring Aria’s Story. Simply because the criterion here I think is generally good gameplay. If there is a beautiful narrative,  that’s also nice.

And then? Aaaaaall this blah-blah-blah on Youtube what has to do with Yume Nikki?

Aaaall this blah-blah-blah was to bring this major question.

In your opinion, which channel brought Yume Nikki?

…

…

I don’t know what you said, but the solution is Rikkukun!

Giulyagatta first claimed to have read the manga of Yume Nikki instead, and then there’s just no video on her channel of any gameplay of this title.

Right now we talked about these two cases in the Italian community because they were more “extreme.” However, we can say that the cases of those who want a dominant narrative despite being a gamer are many. In the new decade, there are many examples even in the community of Youtube America: more and more channels, such as JackSepticEye and NicoB have expanded their entertainment at very narrative games (especially NicoB brought on his channel all Kingdom Hearts games, all Danganronpa games and i think also all Ace Attorney games) such as Life is Strange, Undertale, and a more recent case was Detroit Become Human, for a public often formed by many gamers, however … Those series had a lot of success.

Even in 2004 the situation was not too different: like, Metal Gear Solid 3 Snake Eater and Half Life 2 were out! Resounding successes because of the story, the characters and the narrative in general…

But on that year made its way into the hearts of many players also Yume Nikki, who awakened the nature of 360° players, that just simply acknowledge wisely, thanks to their experience, the experience of playing also something that has no dialogue, nor any kind of cut-scenes: if we want to overdo it, almost a curse for those who are born passive spectator.

So the thing is that the Yume Nikki community, compared to other games considered HOR-RPG, is very unique because it’s not mainly formed by passive spectators that in the 60% (indicative measures) of cases have followed the game from their favorite youtuber but as active viewers who continued to play not to get excited about other people’s experiences, but “live their own”.

But what made this so-called actually so special and mystical experience? Why it was so addictive? We will begin to list here some points, but everything will be detailed in the section of the Trump Card.

The atmospheres (Generation 0, what can we say?) have greatly helped the game and have been given by her mesmerizing loop, the condition of general isolation, creatures …

… Well, that are a good part of the oddities that you may very well see in a dream world and vast environments, often disturbing but mostly confusing.

“Confusing” One of the first adjectives that can give Yume Nikki and connects it with the style of the maps, both with the gameplay, but more about that in the section.

Even outside his native land for these reasons the game was praised by many critics gaming sites (which is quite unusual given that these sites generally do not often treat games of HOR-RPG current), the public and even by many developers independent, including the game designer Derek Yu (who worked for I’m O.K. and Acquaria with Alec Holowka), who appreciated very much the game of comparing graphic style even at Earthbound.

“I really like this game. The lack of dialogue or any kind of “action” gives me this strange sense of terror. I also like the contrast between the tiny apartment and the huge world of dreams. And visually, the game reminds me a lot Earthbound (especially Moonside!) And cactus, which is a really fantastic and terrifying mix. ” -Comment Derek Yu on Yume Nikki on site tigsource.com

This popularity both in East and West earned the game … We have to breathe deeply once again …

A manga, a light novel, an album by Vocaloid (Wow, that’s  new!), A soundtrack published in two volumes and it’s also on Amazon Music, arrangements of this same soundtrack, a reboot (which will be discussed later but, gosh, I have already chills), an application for Android and iOS from minigame of NASU and … Fangames.

Ah, here we go again! Kikiyama, like their companion noprops, had various titles inspired by their work. These include Yume 2kki and .flow

Yume Nikki, however, had more luck than Ao Oni: first of all, these games can’t be defined as clones or copies, but simply games inspired by the style, the gameplay of the game or its initial ideas because, returning to the community speech of before, they were made by gamers (and it has to be considered as a criterion, believe us).

Comparison of the two nexus: Yume Nikki (left) and Yume 2kki (right)

The main difference is that Yume Nikki is not an easy game to replicate as Ao Oni from the point of view of the atmosphere, for example, and this has somewhat ” forced ‘the authors of these games to man up and also have some original ideas that can deviate much more from what the original author had created.

Screenshot from .flow

The biggest problem of what came after Yume Nikki, surprisingly, were not in fact the fangames… Rather the ancillary works (we will talk mostly of the manga, as the light novel is specifically only an interpretation of the game by Akira, the writer, while the manga is official) and a really painful reboot (which will leave at the end of this long paragraph on product history) that were also approved by the author!

Let’s talk briefly about the manga. You may wonder everyone “How do you adapt Yume Nikki in a manga ?!”. We like to be blunt, then we say, “Badly!”

… But this is not just a thought, as even the community does not see this manga with a very good eye, in fact in the fandom is considered not more of a fanfiction.

“Apart from the story of Madotsuki, also we are told the stories of Poniko and Masada. Another change was that the story was told with dialogue, unlike the original pointing around the interpretation of the player. (From the official wiki)

Read the paragraph above at least three times.

…

Draw your own conclusions. We can only conclude that this adjustment if the community Yume Nikki would be greeted with more enthusiasm was mainly made up of passive spectators, and this hatred again demonstrates the origin of this fanbase.

Let’s go on talking briefly (because this is not a review of this title, if you want to know more of the game you can search Google for a review and any) of the so-called “Reboot” Yume Nikki: Yume Nikki – Dream Diary.

This title was released on Steam in 2018, then moved to PS4, Xbox One and Switch. And here I do a question: if deserved all these consoles? Alas, I think not.

It must be said that this Dream Diary also gave a lot of hype, because the development team has worked closely with Kikiyama … At least that’s what Kadokawa and Active Gaming Media say, but there is no real evidence of his collaboration in all this.

Dream Diary would not be a “remake” of some sort, it is called reboot by convention. It is defined by developers as a tribute to the work of Kikiyama, a modern reinterpretation.

This “re-interpretation” then, satisfied at the end gamers, or was a case like Duke Nukem Forever (but with less years of waiting)?

…If we want to continue on this way (because the case of Duke Nukem has its own peculiarities, such as the 11 years of production, we are talking primarily about not satisfied hype in general here), we can say that the game dedicated to little Madotsuki suffered the same fate of the game dedicated to the Duke: waiting with growing hype from fans because “the game (or the series, in the case of Duke Nukem) would be reborn” but eventually end up with something far below expectations.

Yup, with too flat textures, scripted chases like a classic horror game, puzzles that simply require a specific object and little logic, frustrating platform sections with not responding commands, most of the times and, above all, very linear paths in the different worlds in which Madotsuki enters , Yume Nikki: Dream Diary made by Kadokawa (which, personally, we always despised so… From a certain point of view, we already knew how it would have ended) was generally an almost total disappointment for the fans.

So, distancing from these… Things, the next section will analyze more carefully what Yume Nikki had to now become a cult.

With this title we live the gaming experience peak of anguish promise from Generation 0 of HOR-RPG.

Author’s intention or not, the environments in which the player decides to dive in and obscure the psyche of surrealist nature. I will personally determine how these maps could be linked to this artistic language of ‘900 (remember that of the twentieth century many artistic movements showed that -as well as all- artists were no longer able to rely on the old certainties, and so between Dadaism, Futurism, Expressionism and Surrealism attempted to distort and look for a new perception of reality).

From left: Totenklage (Max von Moos, 1936) and Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Salvador Dali, 1936)

Let’s try for a moment to compare them with screens of the game …

Let’s see what Wikipedia tells us about.

“Surrealism had as its main theoretician the poet André Breton, who channeled the destructive vitality of Dadaism. Breton was influenced by the reading of The Interpretation of Dreams Freud 1900; after reading it he came to the conclusion that it was unacceptable that the dream and the unconscious they had so little space in modern civilization, and then decided to found a new artistic and literary movement in which they had a key role. “

It’s still…

” Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express in words or writing or otherwise, theactual functioning of thought. Control of thought,in the absence of any control exercised by reason, outside of any aesthetic and moral concern. ”
Surrealism is therefore a psychic automatism, or the process in which the unconscious, that part of us that emerges in dreams, emerges when we are awake and allows us to associate clear words, thoughts and images without inhibitions and foreordained purposes. ” (The bolding is ours)

And here it revealed the heart of a game like Yume Nikki. This is not nothing but a wonderful manifestation of the unconscious journey that many, because of the different worlds, they interpreted in a pessimistic. This definitely comes looking bleak title and its dark colors. After all,with Ao Oni We have already introduced the theme of isolation of the player, recurring element in almost all kinds of horror games of Generation 0.

So what conclusions can we draw?

Certainly the horror and RPG videogame titles that have relied on these cornerstones of the genre between 2004 and 2012 had in common the exploration experiments in this Yume Nikki was only said the peak of exploration activity, but until at least some highlights of the First Generation (the Character Drama) environments used to play an important role in ensuring the recognition of their games online.

It is always the environment to triumph in these types of HOR-Japanese RPG titles; they are claustrophobic in appearance or widespread these always have the effect of making you feel poor and dispersed player depersonalized his subjectivity is the “outside world” to prevail on the individual. An unknown outside world that can hide dangers, but mostly scary because it goes beyond what we can know. Yume Nikki (as the Surrealists’ 900) there is suggesting that these mysterious environments reside in our unconscious together with all the thoughts that we put in and repress the social order view, perhaps giving us the pessimistic view that the first great environment that does not we know it is our brains, making us aware of our monstrous unpredictability.

Maybe we should not even be surprised that we have tried to revive the atmosphere of the game experiencing the 3D rendering techniques …

… Just as it happens today with many museums for which artistic currents develop new technologies to try to impress and at the same time to immerse the visitor to the maximum.

Photos from the museum “Getting Inside Van Gogh”

In conclusion, the language of the game, his authorial nature as a “product of the web” and the mystery that has been built around its author (we’ll talk about that later) when added contributed, together with the numerous theories that have been made and none seems to inscribe the title in a precise pattern, to build its own aura.

This is a concept we are stealing from the work of Walter Benjiamin ( “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”). I will try to explain here the best that I can, they speak essentially a concept that involves the personality of a work, the value of its uniqueness for which no other element or artistic product will equalize this work. Not randomly, as you can read from the title of the essay “technical reproducibility is appointed”, it is addressed in particular the issue of commodification and serialization that meets the cultural industry.

So yes, we are equating this game to a work of art.

I interrupt my ramblings here to measure with you the professionalism thermometer.

 

Professionalism Meter

And being left hanging with a reference to the aura speech on mechanical reproduction and the “depersonalization of art” we reflect for a moment again on the intent of “Back to the future“…

You are surprised to see, after all these accolades, the thermometer of professionalism with half liquid, aren’t you?

Here we are at the moment of truth.

Well, we told you in ‘Introduction that our intention was to understand how the HOR-RPG would move within a growing market …

… And the answer is that unfortunately Yume Nikki, no matter how well made, it is not a marketable product. That’s why the liquid is left on half of the meter; one half of “symbolic” in which one can recognize the maximum value of this work and its “confinement to authorial” nature.

We will explain it better in the following paragraphs …

Packaging

In its simplicity reveals an unparalleled elegance: the labyrinth as a logo and title of the game prevail over pink little frame that contains the start of the game functions, continuous and output.

I see these traits in a love for the gaming universe and its stylized and geometric shapes, as was the case for the identity of the first video games of the 90s.

There are many details that make the attractive title, as the circle that opens and closes on the character during rescue actions, animations and extra features (such as walking with the chair of the room) that make the gaming experience delicious.

Author-work relationship

As we promised by previous article, finally here’s the study on the issue concerning the relationship between Kikiyama and Yume Nikki.
Maybe it was not wanted, but not only the game itself had theories and speculation in general, but also the author / smoke (even its gender is unknown) of this surrealist cult is one of the most mysterious in the current, and for a long bit ‘of time, in the years between 2005 and 2014, it’s been topic of discussion.

There are in fact various oddities that surround the figure of Kikiyama and their behavior.

We begin by saying that it is unknown whether they worked hard to distribute the game properly. In “product history” it is written that the first forum on which it is spoken of Yume Nikki is 5Channel, but that post (also currently unavailable on the site) do not know whether it was done by Kikiyama themselves, since it seemed You only put on your site and did not seem to have or blog, or social profiles … And didn’t post on any forum. The only pseudo-distribution business was to put the game on their site … Maybe. Because it may be also promoted with another account but we don’t know anything.

So as we begin our own personal list of mysteries:

-Who really made Yume Nikki known?

Let’s go forward in years. The game has its English version, it became popular, Kikiyama continues to update and this is the only contact he has with the “outside world” of the web.
Eventually the game arrives at 0.09 version.

Kikiyama disappears into thin air. There are no game updates, and given the lack of any kind of other way to communicate with the user, and we assume that he had not even responded to any e-mail that were sent. Here we have the First Kikiyama Disappearance from the entire web … Until September 17, 2005, in which releases a version named 0.10, which fixed some bugs. Then we have the Second Kikiyama Disappearance after the fixed version 0.10, released around the same time, perhaps Kikiyama felt they had done their work and disappears for seven years.

In fact, in February 2012, the publisher Playism “took control of the game” and published on its distribution platforms (including Steam) a new version of Yume Nikki, version 0.10A, stating that it was created by Kikiyama on the same day he put on his website version 0.10. This version adds several points to the list:

-Why Kikiyama has not posted immediately version 0.10A ? Why make us wait seven years?
-How did Playism contact Kikiyama, if they don’t answer to any kind of email?
-And if exceptionally Kikiyama had answered Playism why Kikiyama, which seems to have not even put to put the game out of forum at the time when it came out, would have to worry about having a publisher and then transfer rights to companies?

Unfortunately even today these questions do not have answers. So we can only move forward.

From 2013 begins the mysterious, shoddy and commercial ancillary works dedicated to Yume Nikki, the manga and light novel … The companies involved in the publication of these works said that Kikiyama gave permission, but all we wonder why.

And… We don’t have any news of Kikiyama, not even game updates (because it seems that the game was still in need of updates), then we have the Third and final Kikiyama Disappearance (from the web, remember).

Their site became unavailable for an unattainable period in 2015 and the fans went into a panic: they also began to also assume their death because of an earthquake that in 2011 that hit Japan and made many victims, and then it was decided at a certain point that Kikiyama was among them. But the site came back in 2018 … But with one small difference.

The site in July 2008, which remained like this until 2018

The site 10 years later, March of 2018

You see that logo in the second image? Yes, it is the logo of the 20 EUR infamous reboot.

For the thousands of questions from fans about the state of Kikiyama, Kadokawa said they were fine, that they were alive and had actively contributed to the reboot … But no, we have the same questions that have been presented above, in the case of Playism. In fact, many have even suggested that Kikiyama is effectively dead and or (less likely theory, because it would be really risky for companies) Playism, Kadokawa and whoever is behind the manga and light novels, is lying on the rights given by Kikiyama; or (perhaps more plausible theory) if we assume that after their death the rights have passed to someone else.
Something that for some people has fueled the theory of Kikiyama’s death is the game itself. According to this other theory after having released the latest version Kikiyama did not die for the 2011 earthquake, but he committed suicide … Just like you see in the game’s ending, then according to this hypothesis Yume Nikki could also be the last wills of Kikiyama.

On one hand, this would answer the question of why Kikiyama has not posted immediately 0.10A version, and maybe it was found by Playism somehow (here could also join the theory of the rights given to someone, maybe one of Kikyama’s acquaintances)

And, on the other hand, since 2005 Kikiyama, if they really committed suicide, would not be the only case of suicide in the HOR-RPG current.

We would like to open a brief parenthesis on Re: Kinder, remake (made by the same author) of the game Kinder, originally came out in 2003, created by Horafuki Yokochou who takes the pseudonym of Parun.

Screenshots from Re: Kinder

On February 3, 2011 a post on Parun’s blog wrote by a distant friend announces the sad news: September 10, 2010 Yokochou jumped from the ninth floor of his house.

Given our ignorance of the Japanese language, and the crappy translation of Google Translate, we could not understand what the post meant, but if Parun jumped… Yes, it is very likely that he suffered from some problems too, although this could also be a conspiracy theory, in Kikiyama’s case.

Here, then, how they have developed a series of circumstances that favored the construction of theories, a path that led to only one certainty: in the HOR-RPG community the creator disappears definitely. They aren’t a user who creates content, but “abstract entity”, someone or something that shows us a hidden world that turns out some kind of sick revelation of his subconscious.

He often does not even look over to these people as professionals or aspiring. Unfortunately, many times this is part of the “social game” that these types of products are going. Consider the issue of the collective-social. For those who did not know what it is we are talking about images and recurrent themes in a society, in fact-that sometimes some call platitudes or urban myths, and this is a very expensive matter to the entertainment industry. Well, according to this idea we, as people, tend very often to work on imagination rather than seeking concrete data to observe the world around us.

 

-For the “development history” Yume Nikki: Podcast “Nelle storie” by Sara Gavioli,Kikiyama and the dream diary

Defects

Well, that was that we watched when we spoke of the professionalism thermometer. It is a thorny issue that we mentioned in the product’s history, when we appointed the many unsuccessful ancillary works that tried to revive Yume Nikki with completely different types of tones and languages.

This is not a product that can survive in the complex world of marketing, A world first that provides a broad line of communicability. In practice it uses a “plain language for all” which originated in the classical Hollywood narrative, an element that often characterizes these types of works “for the masses.”

The said commercial world is a complicated world, particularly in the entertainment industry. An industry that allows a viewer (or player, why not), by the partial identification with the characters, to exorcize the fears that haunt her daily life.

First of all, commercial work chooses a main theme and argues as clearly and legibly as possible, which is why often in danger of falling into the mainstream.

Often however, the aura of ‘ “art” has always been associated with a strong individualism thanks to which each, through interpretations same or realization of a work, you can feel the protagonist.

Yume Nikki, needless to say, fits perfectly in the second case. The estrangement of the title during the explorations (a completely opposite concept identification: Ao Oni even seemed to have had better luck with ancillary works), the subjectivity that every player feels call him when talking about their thoughts on the product and the nature of “creative entity” author contributed, again, on the one hand to build an important personality aura of the game but on the other hand have made it almost impossible to adapt, as it is in its nature, in a commercial manner.

Conclusion

We elect Yume Nikki pillar of individualism, a member of the melancholy memory of something that nowadays you might not realize (as has happened to other more recent works and which will be discussed, such as the strange case of Faust Alptraum and Pocket Mirror, a title that will be present in Back to the Future) because of constant social changes that change from year to year, from decade to decade and that also occur here, on the World Wide Web.

A change that is observed in the type of audience and the types of people we become. A change that will be observed from the next article, with the very first approaches to construction of the characters that will anticipate the Character Drama.

Ao Oni – The web creature

Ao Oni, or for real Romans Aoh! Oni (okay, we’re kidding) leads us to finally enter the world of amateur HOR-RPG games.

Welcome(…Or welcome back) in this new article of Back to the future…

AO ONI, CREATURE OF THE WEB

Our dear demon with an intense photoshopped gaze is the true protagonist of the series.
We are talking about a game that has grown slowly from unknown places on the web – as we will see later in the paragraph “Product history” – and then spread visibly.

And how could this have happened, if not with let’s plays? Youtube has always been an important channel for the diffusion of the HOR-RPG current, the most awaited reactions were the scares of the web stars.
Ao Oni perfectly reflects the characteristics of his generation.
We recall that Generation 0 presents a particular care for the atmospheres, especially by exploiting the sound plane (generally this is the “generation of ambient music”, compared to other Horror RPGs) as we will see by analyzing the game we are talking about.
The plots almost never dominate the gameplay made up of the total exploration which, alas, is sometimes also a defect that makes one ask “how should I understand that I had to do this?” in some situations. It focuses mainly on the puzzles that a developer goes to insert: if they are easy, too easy, difficult or too difficult and if the difficulty is justified or given by information management defects, and the originality of these was also very important.
And let’s not forget the chases: the tension they put to the player, the difficulty or even if there are various ways in the game to escape the creature in turn. In the trump card we will analyze just this: the puzzles in the context in which they are inserted, and the system of pursuits.

What exactly was the path that led the title to be so well known?

Product history

Compared to the first title we covered in this section, on Ao Oni there is not much information on the “background” of the game development.

We only know that the pseudonym used by the author is noprops, which published a first version of the game on its official website and if you probably guess it on Japanese forums, but we have no reliable sources on the latter statement.

noprops’s official site

Already from this little information … Have you noticed the dissonance with Corpse Party?

Unlike Makoto Kedouin, to whom we have been able to give a precise face and name, here the story of the HOR-RPG definitively begins, developed by authors who are almost all under pseudonyms …

Where do you use pseudonyms many times, or commonly usernames?
Here, with Ao Oni (and Yume Nikki) in fact  people of the Internet try to move in HOR-RPG production with this tool that meanwhile has grown over the years up to the 2003 version (of which, however, we will not talk about here) and XP version.
Then the further creation of online distribution platforms where everyone could publish their titles gave even more space to amateur developers precisely from the reality of the web.

In this environment Ao Oni was born, developed with RPG Maker XP and published for the first time on the official noprops website and perhaps distributed on other sites. There have been no other distribution jobs, no type of producer has ever touched the original game. Yes, there have been Ao Oni 2 and Ao Oni 3 taken by publishers to put them on Android, but … They have not made as much luck as the first one, even if they tried to do something more in the graphic and background fields.

Here, the first Ao Oni … In his homeland, the web, has made quite a lot of success: it has brought all kinds of youtubers to it almost all over the world.
This gave him various inspired external works: the aforementioned sequels, clones (which we will discuss later), a manga, an animated adaptation (however parodic) and a live action film.

We all ask ourselves at this point: how did this game, among all the indie HOR-RPG ( we don’t take it into consideration Corpse Party, as thrown on the gaming market) to have all these adaptations, these interpretations?

Usually in these cases these operations are done when something is successful and this fame makes it rise from the web. Well, let’s see what the web has to say about Ao Oni and let’s take notes.

“goddammitanxiety game”
Comment under FavijTV’s video

-Tension, anxiety

 


“When that guy popped out I let out a scream… I feel dumb.”
Comment under FavijTV’s video

-Well done jumpscares

Comment under PewDiePie’s video

Comment under PewDiePie’s video (the comment cites one of his lines): Pewds re-recorded a gameplay of Ao Oni, after playing it years before on his channel.

-Industrial quantity of puzzles

 

-The Oni, despite its appearance (which we will discuss later), manages to frighten

 

So in general Ao Oni, although part of the current RPG Horror gives the same sensations of Outlast, Slender and other games of the same genre.

And all this even if there is not even a particularly macabre plot, and that very little that is known is not very thorough. What does everything in the game is the management of the atmosphere (but we will talk about this in detail later). Let’s compare the two images, the one on the right from Slender: The Eight Pages, and the one on the right of the game we are talking about. Both games work on tension, even in Slender the Slenderman may appear at any moment, but in that game you can clearly see a more accurate lights than Ao Oni. This Horror RPG managed to recreate a tense atmosphere even with objectively very minimal tilesets and sprites and lights reduced to the minimum (in the main structure there are none, and in the attached structure there is only a slight darker screen tint) , and this is demonstrated by the comments.

Its popularity was also based on the imagination of both the producers together with the author himself (see the cases of Ao Oni 2 and 3, which we imagine have been approved by noprops) and fans of the game.

There were in fact several clones of Ao Oni. The main one was Nira Oni, although there were many others including Twilight Oni (which went viral for being ugly), Mura Oni and Heta Oni (based on the anime Hetalia). The most successful clone, however, was Nira Oni.

Screen shot of the title of Nira Oni, the best known and appreciated fangame of Ao Oni: you can immediately notice the lack of minimalism and approximation that the original game had.

These fangames have re-imagined the same context – abandoned structure (or, in the case of Mura Oni, a village), group of teens and, above all, the Oni – but with different characters, different structures or both. The meeting point was simply the blue demon.


“The game and the gamer”

As we previously mentioned, we’ll see the triad of features that make up the game.

  • Relationship between scenography and ambience
  • The intertwining of the puzzles
  • Randomization of the chase scenes

All enclosed in a single password chosen by the same author in his nickname (no props = no props needed): minimalism, which we have already mentioned.

Here the importance of contextualization comes into play, with regard to a small detail that we had talked about in an old review…

……FLASHBACK……

…….

………………

…….

….

Kill Bill Vol.1

……

Eh-Eh. We got there.
You will think… Who knows… Now they will have to piss off as if there was no tomorrow, right?

We know it … We know you are waiting for criticism… But do you know what?

If you expect it, it means that all the speeches we have made so far in the previous articles have been useless.

Okay guys, let’s look for a meeting point: Ao Oni by its nature, especially if compared to a predecessor like CORPSE-PARTY and a respectable successor like Yume Nikki, it can’t be called a title that shines, if not for the ingenuity of puzzles and chases. And with this I intend to conclude, in fact, that the maps do not enhance the scenography as many would like

In that review, however, we were talking about a game that had as its main objective to tell you a story, and from when it was created the classic narration always builds its foundations on the scenography, the environments and the context in which it chooses to represent itself.
Do you find any similarity with Ao Oni? Do you find in Ao Oni a promise of story telling by the game and the poor events that follow one another?

No. Nothing like that: from the classic incipit and context of many works (even the most scarce) that want to call themselves “horror” the player understands that there will be no real storytelling: this gives less depth (and in some cases nothing of that) to plot, characters and environments and much more depth to the gameplay: if the game isn’t meant to make the player passionate, he must entertain them in the most primitive sense of the term.

The trump card is in fact the riddles: it is a game very coherent with itself.
Even the graphics defined by many … Questionable, they are simply functional to what they must do: there was no work of “eye-candy” because simply noprops didn’t feel the need, didn’t feel to give a certain “personality” to characters and environments, the intention was not to make the player become attached to them.

The only exception is the Oni that we will meet almost always during the game. He is the only one to have some kind of personalized sprites (because you can see that those of the boys are clearly made or with a generator, or any external program that creates them semi-automatically), with a grotesque and almost comic appearance, especially when it will have the hair of the characters who will gradually die by the hands of the “Ao Oni senior”.

Look at him: the face of an ordinary man is deformed. Giant eyes and nose, together with an external narrow face on the part of the chin and eyes. Not to mention the body: you can see it from a mile that is stylized to the improbable, and with a realistic face … It creates that dissonance that makes it bizarre and grotesque.

To “make an impression” these types of creatures are used a lot. Maybe it will be just my point of view (the article passed into Ele’s hands), but I think it is also a characteristic of Japanese culture. In this regard, I would like to offer you an image.

From “The Art of Spirited Away”, Viz Media, Studio Ghibli library

Do you recognize these beings? From the caption of the photo it is easy to understand what film I am talking about: “Spirited Away” by Hayao Miyazaki and Akira Kurosawa.

Do you see how they are aesthetically? They are fat and have wide eyes, and above all this last detail makes the viewer say “oh god, what is that ?!” even if they are simply ducks with some particular characteristics.

This film in fact gives a vast representation of the Japanese culture, made mainly by these strange entities with a deformed appearance.

With the Ao Oni the same work as the ducks was done: the normal was deformed (like the face of a man like many others) and became abnormal, giving a completely new image.

So the role of this creature has never been to “scare” with particularly disturbing details, but rather “make an impression” on the player with his monstrous appearance.

The fright stems from the jumpscare when the Oni appears and from the tension following it during chases.
The latter generally play a lot on the fear of killing our character, but above all that of not being able to go on and start again from a point not close to where you arrived or, especially in many retrogames, to start  everything over.

Ao Oni follows this very idea: if the Oni takes you you have to start from where you saved and, unless you are a compulsive “save-person”, you have to do a lot of actions before moving forward, and in the long run it becomes frustrating.

But we won’t talk about a particular complexity of the chase scenes.

In Ao Oni there is a constant tension during the game but not because there are chase scenes in general, we find them in many other HOR-RPG, but because this title introduces into the genre a mechanic present more than anything else in horror games such as Outlast or Slender: the random appearance of the chaser.

In the game there are few “scripted” scenes in which the Oni appears at the same time for each player: for the rest of the game it could appear at any moment, and due to this perennial randomness even the scripted scenes do not seem such, many times .

Also to escape the monster you can hide in closets.

Here, during this moment we feel the breath of … “Hiroshi”. Do we care about him? About his safety?

Not exactly. That breath is ours, it is our fear of being discovered. Here the game is experienced in the first person and we abandon every filter that wanted to present it to us in third: we don’t only see Hiroshi hiding in a closet, we don’t look as “omniscient players”. The point of view changes: we live the experience.

As we have already said, the “horror” does not lie in particularly macabre or disturbing textures or images, but in the tension that the player feels in the fear of jerking seeing the blue monster, being caught or seeing his beautiful face on the big screen.

So let’s draw conclusions for a moment.
We repeat that the title, although not the best of its time, remains true to its promises.
We have the weakening of the incipit if not a real cancellation; a feature that had instead distinguished Corpse Party.

You will notice that among this …

And this….

There is a big difference.
The three lines of introduction should speak clearly: Ao Oni leads the player to a total identification and immersion in the experience he is living.

Even if “RPG” indicates by acronym a third-person game now, the games seem to be closer to the use of the first person, letting the player let himself be totally carried away in the videogame experience not for the sake of being “amazed” ( see the needs of today on the quality of the graphics) but often to indulge in the exploration of places of which the game itself perhaps only becomes an excuse to repeatedly listen to the sound of the wind or rain their your headphones.

Here we have the highest expression of the HOR-RPG genre as a current devoted to individualism and isolation. There are only two subjects involved, the game and the player, so here is the paradox of inserting titles like this within a market that counted in the production of secondary works.
An operation, this, born from the hope of attracting an audience that has been able to transform, through the intervention of the web stars, anguish into laughter. The silence of the characters, the monster and the author has been replaced by the youtuber’s scream and entertainment for its users.

Professionality meter

PACKAGING

We certainly cannot say that the distribution of the game, as well as its packaging, has professional intent.

Yes, there isn’t even an image for the title.

The screen is all black, you can only decide whether to start the game, continue it or exit. We are asked to enter a name for the character and then the short incipit introduces us to the context in which we will move: a group of friends wants to explore a mysterious abandoned villa. The-End.
This is one of those games, as we once heard, beautiful to “discover from scratch” and experience them to experience the degree of tension they offer you and the ingenious tests they subject you to. A type of game, precisely, adopted and grown by the web. A game that even before belonging to some “producer” or “company of professionals” belongs first of all to its players who donate their imagination to build interpretations, theories that explain the events but first of all that feed the characters with characterizations. and they keep offering the game the characteristic of narration, a phenomenon that we will observe in particular in its first explosion with Yume Nikki in the same year.

Author-work relationship

As already said in the history of the product, this title is also left to itself by its author, but a true culture is born from him: that of the author without a precise identity, without a face and a first name to associate it with .

However, this phenomenon will be better discussed in the article dedicated to Yume Nikki and its author Kikiyama.

Defects

We will talk about two in particular.

  • First of all, the aforementioned lack of care for the scenography greatly penalizes the title which would otherwise have increased the quality and would certainly have given it more recognisability, unfortunately given only by its creature of which the other dedicated titles have lived off their income. Even if the author had wanted to be consistent with his “minimal” approach, he could have taken care of at least photography and added lights and shadows, or used particular colors. This is a serious flaw, if considered especially in the context of its generation, in which even if the development of a plot was not desired, the needs of the developers voted for the immersion of the environments.
    Although, as we said before, we do not feel like insisting too much on this point because we are talking about elements that go beyond what the game wanted to offer.
  • The second flaw, on the other hand, has to do precisely with the other side of his ace up his sleeve, which is perhaps why it affects him more.
    The riddles. We’re talking … About releasing the information.
    Well, however ingenious they may be, many have failed to fully appreciate them, complaining of relative complexity.
    This I believe is mainly given by the fact that often there is not enough communication of the game for the player, leaving it completely to himself without offering instructions that can make the user understand the nature of the puzzle.
    Let’s examine one of the most well-known puzzles … And the one that has more guides: the piano puzzle

    We present the solution. In the latest version of the game (6.23) the numbers that will appear on the piano after cleaning the blood stain on it are random and there are about 5 possible combinations for a nearby safe. Now, how to find this combination? To get the solution to this puzzle, you need to match the numbers on the piano keys to the shapes of the keys on the safe.

This is defined as one of the most difficult puzzles in the game, but not because of an actual difficulty, but because of the management of the information about it: it is not possible to understand that those signs on the safe (in the old versions it was even necessary to find a leaflet in another room) would be the shapes of the keys on the piano, they were not highlighted in any way.

This is unfortunately only an example. In short, the puzzles in Ao Oni are the most ingenious that we have seen so far among all the Horror RPGs we have played, but the management of the information on them makes them in certain situations even frustrating.

CONCLUSION

We also finished our stop on the second stop, finally entering the myth of the HOR-RPG as a “game of desolation, suspense and hours lost in exploration”. Ao Oni has only taken the first step in the construction of this definition, being therefore an excellent pioneering experiment but which will soon be passed…

Corpse Party, first HOR-RPG in the market

An happy day to you, person lost in the web you came to read this article! But maybe this could not be so happy if you went back in an abandoned school in which all kill each other.

Well, our time machine (click here to learn more about the “Back to the future”) has begun its journey and stopped for the moment to the years elapsing from 1996 to 2014.

Why such a long time slot? Gentlemen may want to applaud the longevity of this title: Corpse Party, the story of a varied and interesting production of which we will discuss.

Corpse Party, first HOR-RPG thrown in the market

We are talking about a series of games, and already from here is difficult to navigate the many titles that have come out, but we’re here for. A series curiously identified with the current RPG Horror, which since early 1996 has flourished in the first title of RPG Maker winning a prize in the second annual competition of ASCII Entertainment, the first in a long series of successes that has seen the wider audience and expand which is observed on the fangames phenomenon, which has continued to spread for the generation to come.

Why, though, take a date so far compared to the games that will be?

We chose this game as a “pioneer” Horror RPG not only for chronological accuracy (in fact, be advised that we do not always behave well when the articles will focus on other titles) but also on the characteristics of a type of game that fully reflect what characterize the games of Generation 0: horror-experience, which we will discuss when we will go towards the ‘ “trump card” of these securities.

But for now, how did Corpse Party … Or better CORPSE-PARTY? (We’re not screaming the name of the game, it’s the actual title).

Product History

To go back to really like the title of Kedouin was created and distributed, you have to go a bit ‘back: December 17, 1992.
In this date the ASCII Media Works, a Japanese publisher, released a program called “RPG Tsukuru Dante98”.

RPG Tsukuru… Sound familiar? This was indeed a primordial version of RPG Maker for a type of “computer” exclusively for the Rising Sun, the NEC PC-9801.

This has allowed people to develop their own role-playing games and so ASCII has seen fit to create a monthly magazine called LOGIN Sofcom, where developers candidates could submit their creations.

And here we come to the main event.

It was a rainy day just like this one, that of April 22, 1996…

On the day that the sixth volume of LOGIC Sofcom magazine had in its pages a section dedicated to adventure horror of Makoto developer Kedouin…

From the magazine he took the game more and more popularity and Makoto in 1997 was the winner of the second prize at the competition ASCII Entertainment, which earned him five million yen (about 40 Euros or so).

But the story of Corpse Party does not end with the one winning: The game was destined to go forward in Japanese and also foreign market future.

In fact, we had a remake in 2007 to Mobile, named Corpse Party – NewChapter (even forgettable, it abruptly stopped in chapter 4), it is passed from one computer to another with the title closer to what we know today, which is the first version of Corpse Party: Blood Covered, published in Japan since 2008 (though speaking of remakes is no mention also of a rebuilt ’96 game CORPSE-PARTY: Rebuilded).

Here in Kedouin they add other people to the development of the game: Team GrisGris who took charge of the overall development, and XSEED Games as publisher for the export of the West title.

Makoto entered definitely (although there were signs of this already NewChapter) in the international market: this version of the game was made available on GOG, Humble Store and especially the Steam portal.

Many new characters were added (namely Seiko Shinohara, Sakutaro Morishige, Mayu Suzumoto, Yui Shishido and Kizami Yuuya) a plot that tries to be more structured with a lot ‘of “wrong ends” (of the game over much longer and dramatized).

With distribution in the West had made XSEED center. The game had already a good part of the audience, and this PC version already inspired a manga dedicated to the game, designed by the same artist. and even the drama-cd (a type of popular audio CDs in Japan usually tied to successful manga or anime).

It’s not little!

But the real boom and just came with the next ported to PSP and iOS, in the August 12, 2010 in Janpan.

The game landing on the console from Sony gave a further boost to Corpse Party: Blood Covered… Repeated Fear, which had many improvements on an artistic level, from drawings up to the addition of the CG, ever been present in the PC version of the game, along a professional voice actors for almost all the scenes in-game.

You can imagine, with such artistic quality, a market already started in the West and in general a product that works well commercially.

There were, let me take a deep breath…
Light novel, evergreen doujinshi of any kind (yes, even of  that genre), web radio, an attraction at an amusement park, a live-action film, adapted from a 5-episode anime OVA and another ported to the 3DS as well as many sequels out of PSVITA the main game until you get to a Corpse Party 2!

From all these sauces in which it was proposed not hard to understand that now the saga of Corpse Party was a real media phenomenon as well as commercial: there were obviously a lot of videos on Youtube, in general much movement by the fandom and even when it comes time to Corpse Party in a period away than output per year still arouses interest.

–A comment under a video by the youtuber PewDiePie

–A comment under a video by the youtuber PewDiePie

All this because of elements highly palatable (often made such invention of the classic ’96) to the public:

A plot of the atmosphere and involving, Refined since the PC version…

–A comment under a video by the youtuber PewDiePie

…Together with the characters to which you easily grow fond.

“When I saw Seiko again I was going to burst into tears”

–A comment under a video by the italian youtuber Tsuhirito

The aforementioned improvement artistically with busts and CG vehicles in a much more “anime style”, which make it much more spectacular and splatter deaths of which are likely to die five protagonists and which perish several supporting characters.

“What ugly deaths… Poor Yoshiki- TwT”

–A comment under a video by the italian youtuber Tsuhirito about a Wrong End in the game

So in the following sections we analyze better these elements that have shaken many fans of the horror genre RPG and not putting even compare the latest version of the title with the winner of that prize ASCII in that distant 1997.

-Sources for the product’s history: Corpse Party WIKIA

We have two in particular, of aces up its sleeve. On the one hand, directed the other characters.
This is because to do a premise: in this article we will take the two different versions, CORPSE-PARTY ’96 (we played Rebuilt released in 2011) and his most significant revision commercial for PSP, Blood Covered Repeated Fear. They will be the two main chapters of the series on which we are going to make the comparison, deciding instead to ignore other securities as these are the two main hearts of the series on which the main plot is concentrated. The other titles can be considered only improvements (see the difference between the Blood and Blood Covered Covered Repeated Fear) sequel or spin-off, which give more space to the characters: the same relive a second time the same misfortunes to the abandoned school – or it will try to give more depth to the background of this supernatural place, changing the points of view and adding numerous sub-plots for new characters, especially secondary ones.

So here we are here, with CORPSE-PARTY (1996) and Corpse Party Blood Covered Repeated Fear (2011).

We begin to think about one thing: first, the first game in the series has all the hallmarks of the HOR-RPG Generation 0: intensive experience of the atmospheres.

As we will see in the future for the analyzes of the other games, during this period there was a very particular image and determining type for the production of horror titles was important to let the player by themselves and making sure that they lived on his own skin the gaming experience. Often the plot was only a starting point to give some context to what the end was more important: the immersion in the atmosphere.

Corpse Party, however, was already by that time a cutting edge title in its genre, for having made the most of the opening words that could launch from the impressive introduction that  was always reprised during all other games.

We can see in this screen extrapolated from “CORPSE-PARTY”, the suggestiveness of the image in which the characters are isolated from the background and are illuminated by the light of the candle, which together with the sound of rain helps to immediately immerse the player in the atmosphere.

What we did was immediately imprinted in Corpse Party is the directing, for both titles. The directing of Blood Covered Repeated Fear it’s slow, and that of CORPSE-PARTY (1996) in the context of general and increasing tension, agitated. Accomplices also the music (we speak about the first title) to do their work, accompanying the resolution of the puzzles. Small curiosity: a lot of music that is in Corpse Party: Blood Covered … They are reprises (or remixes) of the OSTs of the ’96 title!

One thing that surprised us in CORPSE PARTY-were its characters. They had realistic facets -unlike their colleagues of 2011, of which we will talk later- and complex, with characters and designs that approach dramatically to real students that you could find every day in our daily lives.

Screenshots are a Rebuild the game of 96 made on RPG Maker XP in 2011 because it translated into Italian and English (the version for PC-98, you can have it, but only in Japanese), but it is very faithful to the original.

Back to us…

“Damn, I can’t believe it… We still have a lot to do! And the time to go home has already passed!”

The normal anger of the student: they want to go home as soon as possible, but they can’t do it.

“Why everyone gave up this job? Why there’s only us?”
“Life lesson: people suck”

Very realistic representation of defeatist students.

You see all these little situations? Well, at least you have heard students that have to do a task that anyone wants to do, but are blocked to do it because everyone else managed to skip it. So of course they also want to go home.

After analyzing the situation better, we go to the character design. Let’s take as an example the character of Naomi (take both the design of the rebuilt to have a whole body, both that of the original version), and let’s put it in comparison with an image of a real Japanese student and its design in the PSP game.

The old game seems set in the late 90s, when it came out, and the photo is from 2007, so we are not too far from the timeline view.

Already comparing the two Naomis you may notice a difference in the attitude of their posture and expression that they have. Naomi in Repeated Fear seems more timid given the pose, if we confront her with the “tough girl” of 96. The problem is that they also wanted the Naomi of 2011 to be a “strong girl” (we are seen some dialogue that we will discuss in the future) … But the pose tells us the opposit.

Going to the physical design, Naomi’s appearance in the ‘96 title is certainly much more like that of the girl in the picture, very thin and with a few forms, unlike Repeated Fear. In addition, short and very dark hair are common in Japan, as in Germany blond ones.

(Yuka wants to help the class to clean up)

“Good! More man-force we have, the sooner we’ll get home! Let’s move!”

Even Naomi urges us to move forward. So without delay, we continue.

From their everyday, ordinary, are then transported to an “extraordinary” world, supernatural, wearing the robes of death on each tile: you often find bones and skulls in the classrooms by the brown hues, among the scenes that remember more there certainly one in which Ayumi and Yoshiki remain stuck in a corridor with a skull and scratched walls, and the player becomes a witness of their constant tension growth, feeling guilty for each object that clicks or detail that notice, seeing burst their quarrel that will get  Ayumi to stare into space.

Take for example this corpse. It will look like a normal prop, but examine it is inevitable despair of finding a way out of that room because “you’re stuck there with the characters.” You have the same informations as them, regarding how to get away from that place and as a player you are fully responsible for their actions experiencing a total identification.

“You will never get out”

Also consider this sheet. Why should someone click on it?

The setting is small, the impulse of the player is to analyze everything.

If you examine more than once the sheet you will have this small change but will trigger an interesting event.

“You will NEVER get out”

Now we analyze the bones that we had considered before, but after reading this even more bad intimidation.

Yoshiki has a different reaction, he’s more afraid: the sheet and seeing the corpse makes him think  that maybe they will end up like that pile of bones, maybe they will NEVER leave.

The player finds himself compulsively check (as would any human being in that situation) windows, bones, paper, boxes, bones, sheet … As long as this desperate examination did not terminate because the leaflet changes again.

This disturbs Ayumi and Yoshiki even more, who have already enough of that tiny place.

“We’re stuck! WHAT DO WE DO?!”

“SHUT UP! I’m thinking about it, goddammit!”

Yoshiki has an understandable rage shooting and especially given the nervousness.

“Don’t worry! We won’t die in this place!”

…Because you see that when he returnes to his senses, he tries to comfort Ayumi.

“BUT WE DON’T HAVE HOPE! WE TRIED EVERYTHING!”

Here returns theidentification: the player automatically says, “She’s right!” because he has controlled everything that was there.

“We’re just two other skeletons in this room!”

“And all this because we had to split! If the others were here, We could conclude something!”

“WHY?!”

“…Didn’t I tell you to SHUT UP?!”

If before Yoshiki felt (albeit poorly) to console Ayumi saying he would not die, now that he sees the same cry and complain and even blaming him for having split up (because the idea to split was Satoshi’s and Yoshiki’s) he still orders her to  shut up, because Shinozaki’s complaints aren’t helping him at all.

Heck, we understand Yoshiki here! And this “understanding” on our part is thanks to the dialogues in this scene.

And there’s more.

“Tell the truth…”

“Don’t tell me you’re sad just because you’re stuck here with me and not with your beloved Satoshi!”

Ouch, that burns!

This dialogue striking because… It’s true. It’s very natural. Yoshiki’s words seem random at first, but actually when we get angry with a person become more resentful than we are, and we can also bring out issues that have nothing to do with the main topic.

“Y…Yes! WHY?! Why am I here with someone like you?!”

And the scene ends as well, with her listening to what Yoshiki pulled out and we have a change of perspective introduced by “Meanwhile …”.

The game is still more or less at this pace succession: the scenes are not overly dramatized and leave instead of the player juggle the choices that have to be made (aspect that, contrary to what we expected, it was also maintained in his more commercial alter-ego). We don’t know which of these choices could lead to better end, giving the illusion continues to be active protagonists of the story along with the characters, and we can write our fate.

It goes something like this, at long intervals dedicated to solving puzzles precisely and ways to unlock new areas of the school to explore, with the general atmosphere that suggests taking agitated attitudes, not only by the conduct suggestions the characters but also by the music.

In summary, if we were talking about the trump card of this title, what do we conclude?

If the reader will allow us, we will close this part of the analysis with the following observation:

What distinguishes CORPSE-PARTY is the sum of the narrative incipit and its characters, which support the gameplay -so the player’s activity- that is always a constant background that determines the tone of the game.

But above all there is to recognize CORPSE PARTY-credited with being the pioneer of not only a series, but many features that have begun to characterize the HOR-RPG genre for every generation to come, joining the zero generation (the horror experience), the first (the character drama) and the second (storytelling-focus).

Well. How’s its colleague commercial, Blood Covered: Repeated Fear?

The differences are remarkable. This is because the years pass, the needs of gamers and their expectations change. We can see all the changes applied by a more substantial production team, including certainly a massive study of the background of the story, not to mention the graphical improvements and new material, thanks to the professionals who work for the realization of the game but also brings defects, of which, however, not discussed in this section.

Let’s start first on the context in which new characters are. The school that had the brown tones now has blue tones, approaching the idea of ​​an abandoned public facility, and the story gets longer, improving what was the main flaw of the first title: the speed with which they develop the last scenes of the story. Still remembering that the heart of that title was supposed to be the gameplay, even if it was to penalize the plot. It was not among the requirements then developing a narrative structure.

Everything changes, of course, with the title of 2011 for PSP. The scenes they take all their time to illustrate the situations, enhancing the moment of anguish that you are driving along with the characters. There have been many moments of which we could speak, including the time when it is revealed the past of Sachiko (the scenic which replaces the race of the victim and the executioner), or the discovery of the truth about the three children’s murders, slow and painful not only physically but especially emotional for the players, for them and for anyone living that scene. One of the best results of the plot between directing and gameplay, or talking about real gaming directing, is certainly the part devoted to Yuka and when left alone and slowly the player must figure out how to deal with Morishige photographing corpses, even if we make a special mention of Ayumi’s possession scene, who wanders around the structure by your side as her attitudes become increasingly unstable.

Anyway back to Yuka, and talk about this moment of pure tension dedicated only to the player.

We are with Yuka, in fact, a fourteen year old girl with serious infantile regression problems of mind and body. Okay joke, just the fault of fanservice that turned the original characters. Indeed, no … Maybe it really is a more serious problem than we think because even Ayumi occasionally behaves like a child, some strange virus … I dunno, The Brattite-Virus.

Anyhow…

You are just left alone in the second wing of the school -That, I will say, talking about scenografic level we have much liked rather than the main building, after being separated from her brother, in a place of death. Even the environment has the potential to put anxiety to the player.

This also helps the piano music that brings together all the sound design of the game to enhance the tension that you should feel masterfully. Talking about sound design, the sound of a camera will move us into the room where we will meet Morishige, and the music stops.

The boy explains some facts and then asks Yuka why she’s on her own. It looks like a normal conversation, but the pictures show us something different. You see Morishige’s sprite?

Even by itself, the glasses do a good job that prevents the player to see the eyes. His shirt is unbuttoned, in opposition to the composure that has characterized the character for his first appearances and during the flashbacks, and then he’s placed in front of a corpse. We know that he did something, because it is the staging to tell us. There is no forcing of dialogue, or expressive exaggerations or excessive dramatization that normally affect the direction of narrative works.

In the game, instead, if he catches you once, he only asks why you run away, with an apparently completely natural expression.

We can continue to do the comparison here, where after the student has set out to help Yuka decides to look for her brother alone. Well, there is no particular chase scene. Morishige moves towards the player, but walking.

We are tense like Yuka, we know that Morishige has done something unpleasant and being around him will not guarantee us security. The music, which has just started to play, to take the player on a new meaning, but especially … We have to decide how much time to spend together with the mentally unbalanced guy.

Exit from the room or less, or continuously wonder if we flew from the danger since the atmosphere continues to remain constant and homogeneous, predominantly tense. All this helps to make the player fully involved and responsible for their actions. He decides how much to let go, whether to control certain elements or less, practically everyone builds his own direction, advancing at their own pace and take its decisions that could ever come across or the Wrong End Bad End.

Unfortunately, the direction is not one of the elements that most impressed the general public. Following the more superficial approaches the fandom, to be left in the memory of the spectators are not scenes especially from the game-except of course the most iconic, such as the aforementioned reveal on Sachiko-, but its characters and deaths collections that they face.

 

 

However, having to talk about this game in the series could not ignore this aspect.

The direction of Corpse Party Repeated Fear was the mainstay of the game as well as his trump card that allowed players to become attached to the characters-  I venture to say that the characters lived off their income in this version–.

In it you have an important recognition line, making an unforgettable gaming experience and  filling defects caused -and probably to some readers this will be a surprise… Drums please… The writing! It turns out to be deficient in some places, there are some questions that are not answered not only volunteered to play other titles to fans, but also to involuntary level; not to mention the unnecessary presence of some characters who have not had enough screentime to have a development. Consider, for example, Prof. Yui Shishido, a character that appears only in the second and last chapter, left behind by writers, unlike her students.

Professionalism Meter

So here we come to the second part of the article. And here comes the fun!

Remember the introduction of this article? How do we tell if its games dress of  mantles of amateurish? How do ooze a professional line of a series of games so long-lived?!

So. To begin with we have accomplished a task of synthesis and took two reference samples, CORPSE-PARTY and Corpse Party:Blood Covered Repeated Fear. To make concrete observations would be taken then consider two related points: items such as packaging and the author-work ratio are all observations and deeply intertwined analysis, in the case of Corpse Party, with the history of the product that we have summarized in first part of the article. It may be difficult to talk about this because we have to keep the two titles both on the scales.

 

  • Packaging

Surely you can see that there was a great change also in the distribution and presentation of the game from ’96 to 2011, also because of the context in which both have been developed.

The title of ’96 had been created for a contest, So there was great commitment for sponsoring it and / or distribute it, because to do so was already LOGIC Sofcom, so it was only known by the public because of its successors.

It was so because the successors of CORPSE-PARTY was already picked up by majors, such as the aforementioned XSEED for the foreign market, a real development and production team with professionals manage the release on the market because the game was already thought to be distributed to the general public.
Because of this, the hand of the people in the industry can be seen from the point of view of distribution from Blood Covered until the last title (sequel) out of the series.

  • Author-work ratio

Like many authors of HOR-RPG genre, but also many personalities who work in the big production houses, Kedouin (we talk about it being the principal conductor of the series) also on social is a fairly aloof author, for example, prefers to re-tweet post updates to the one that works (not Corpse Party, moved to another) without post anything personal or even that it can outsource most of its personality. Even during the interviews he answers questions, says some background … But has never shown particular aspects or work attachments.

Because of this we can guess that, sadly, he has probably sold in a total way his story to the market, and unfortunately what we see, even given some flaws that will be listed below.

  • Defects

Well, in the end we even got to this point. We can say for sure that the defects of these two titles consistently reflect their production environment.

Both have to do with problems with narrative development. Similarly both they have in common, as positive points, their unique styles and the ability to better enjoy the atmosphere that we propose (a valid directing).

On the one hand we have a hasty and poor development of the events, which is seen especially with the approach of the final acts. All this in a period in which he played a video game when you were not there, by those who played, the same claims to have a complex narrative structure as there are nowadays.

Excluding the other endings, we can make a reference scene. The mid-point.

At this particular point in the game we can for example notice a considerable accumulation of information about the past of Sachiko and the reason that made her decide to bring the people in the other dimension. As director has tried to make an intense scene we must consider that the limit imposed by the writing is unfortunately too wide for it to be filled from the atmosphere.

It goes from frantic atmosphere, since Ayumi and Yoshiki have been reported in the real world until they discover that the parallel dimension is still behind them, at an incredibly slow one which is facing the accumulation of information that focuses all at one time. During the rest of the game, before this point we don’t even have clues that could have been left to assimilate gradually the with past events and that we are told in this scene

This defect was filled instead by his alter ego, Corpse Party Blood Covered Repeated Fear.

This title presents all the defects that a major (or just a production company formed by a group of professionals) could encounter during the production of a title.

We’re certainly talking about just the fanservice which affected considerably the characters, but the writing flaws that come out when you add too much meat to cook.

Actually writing this title is not to be thrown away at all. It appreciates the commitment to the story that was meant to build on the school. The writers wanted to ask the company to build a true world-building, demanding operation that is normally endeavored by writers for fantasy, in which you need to know before the story to tell the story of the places where the events are placed. All this certainly makes honor to the team of writers…

… If only not many outstanding issues had been left (as the “construction of the new Sachiko) just for pushing fans to play other games in the series! Not to mention some stories of secondary characters-as those of other schools- not thorough enough in the main storyline.

However, when you take into consideration the idea of ​​developing a plot so complex it must be very careful not to lose details in the street.

For this we will focus on two points in particular: the development of the characters, an issue that Ele will deepen better later, and the dissolution of the plot.

  • Interweaving

By this point we can talk about, for example, of these points:

A) The hierarchical system of spirits, undermined the narrative presence of Naho, unique spirit to be neither a fatuous and even a spirit with fluorescent body. We thought in fact that the only exception to the rule was Sachiko.

B) The relationship that objects have in various dimensions. The candles had to be only save points, but the idea of ​​being able to share some objects between the various dimensions could do to take the initiative to the characters to be able to connect? We take the luxury to consider this only as a distraction given by a need for gameplay on which we do not linger long.

Let us return instead to their own spirits, and look how the mid-point was treated in this version, the one in which Ayumi and Yoshiki discover the truth about the deaths of the three ghosts (in the ’96 version was directly on Sachiko’s death, while here they elongate the broth preferring tell hereinafter this part).

Well, we had to mention this scene. The whole story is told in poetic slowness, poetic, not only for text that is read but because of the tone with which a story is told in a so cruel manner: we have a great combination between music, reflection on the emotional state of those children and the parallel scene the other characters are listening to the tape and complete at the same time sums up the sad event. But we are not here to appreciate the direction, which we have already discussed in the previous section, but a small example that might expose the flaws of logic.

Here, Yuki says something very interesting about the spirit children who make a pivot to the closed spaces, we speak of the theme of double medalist ghost.

“And where is the problem?” you say. Yuki’s right, we see twice as Sachiko face.

“Exactly”, it’s my answer. “Sachiko’s double faces. And the three ghosts?”

Very trivially we are talking about an example in which the information exposed by the mouth of a character isn’t found in reality. Probably, the way the scene was structured, this was supposed to be a question that would have to put more anxiety to the player and the characters themselves. At that moment it had to be added an additional obstacle to overcome to make the success of the protagonists in their efforts to save everyone seemingly impossible.

The problem could have been avoided easily if, after having pacified the souls of children, we could have seen the bad sides of their spirits anyway, or if from the beginning of the game you could see two copies of the same children.
Maybe they mean that spirits returned vindictive whenever the structure was rebuilt after the pacification of Sachiko because Yuki remained a good spirit from then until the end of the game! It can be considered fatal error has already been implemented in exposing the information that way. Her words were: “I will return at any moment a vengeful spirit, run if you will see me.”

This could make more sense instead CORPSE-PARTY, where it was the same Sachiko-good to tell his own death and warn that the evil spirit of her alter-ego was getting stronger.
Unfortunately, for what concerns Repeated Fear and new features added to the whole background of the story, it is a detail forgotten by both writers and the player, who will leave by events that begin to occur one after another at the mercy the “ending climax.”

A special mention before concluding this part also goes to the tone in which the final ends and returns, thanks also to the photograph which prefers light tones and golden hues, hope and serenity to the player who has immersed for 9 hours in closed spaces, darkness and death.

  • Characters

The characters have more screentime available (stage presence time), and we have not been forgotten by the writers, maintain stable and homogeneous properties throughout the work. In fact, apart from a few minor exceptions, we can’t say that Corpse Party Repeated Fear present real development arcs of the characters.

Of course, some have their own peculiarities and it is a pleasure to discover their positive and negative sides, in fact, we see the difference in the mirror Ayumi / Yoshiki –the first regressed to infantile state in several parts of the game and each other that we rediscover a character very patiently and Naomi / Satoshi –the first “strong outside but inside fragile” and the other is rediscovering the total opposite-. However the facades in everyday life clashed with those of horror context are often too different and sudden changes from one context to another. Or again there is the case of Yuka, who got moments when he could have the opportunity to obtain a development that there has not been from the moment he has re-met her with the others.
Let’s talk about a particular case…

In fact, the brother of the little girl (which, remember, isn’t so “little”) has a big problem from the point of view of the characterization, but what makes the lack more visible is how the fandom has taken this character.

The boy fact it seems that in the course of the game has a double personality. Discounted Unfortunately Satoshi splits in “Class Satoshi” (during classroom situations, such as the introduction of the entire game) and the “supernatural Satoshi” (when he is in Heavenly Host).

During everyday situations he or comic gimmick, or a love interest. He’s a classic kind guy, wimp, what girls want because of their Nurse Syndrome, to keep it short.
…One thing that bothers even superficially are many ridiculous skits that especially with Naomi.

Unfortunately, because of these types of scenes, Satoshi is seen generally by the fandom just like this kind of character, and that makes disappear all of his efforts and the values ​​that he shows in Heavenly Host, where he is above all very patient (to keep a child like Yuka …), and he brings some common sense and not being tarnished from every horror that sees at Heavenly Host, without even cry (…for every little thing like someone).

Even in the most desperate situations like when he lost Yuka in the fourth chapter he has always rightly raised thinking: “If I mourn I don’t solve anything”, and that’s not a thing everyone thinks in this game.

But remember that while managing to get up, and then even help Naomi all the time, Satoshi had the perennial doubt that his sister had died at the hands of some ghost, some insane photographer , or someone who wants to replace Satoshi as a brother because Satoshi himself has left Yuka alone. In addition to the possibility that a loved one has been killed, the sense of guilt most likely comes from the fact that it is as if he “collaborated” in doing so.

He could use other phrases to comfort her, for example one of his classics “It’s all right”, or “Thank God you’re alive”, as Naomi says after …

Instead he apologizes. In this scene, he takes both weights off his shoulders, knowing that Yuka is alive and does not think that he is complicit in her hypothetical death. This reasoning arose more than anything else for the choice of words that has been made.

So, he has always shown a strong stomach and heart and that does him honor from a certain point of view, compared to other characters that we meet in the game.

For many it is definitely a boring character (some are a lot bothered by Satoshi although there is much, much worse out there) because let’s face it, he is also fairly flat, but even if it is not the real problem with him and the question of which I would like to talk.

Unfortunately, a good number of fans for this sees him only as a coward “good guy” in that we very, very dull everyday scenes because, unfortunately, is treated well in those scenes! It was like they didn’t knew where to end up with him, whether to go for the stereotypical “uneasy boy” or to “main strong character that saves everyone.”

The point is that his change, as we have mentioned before, does not seem to be gradual but very sudden. Since the introduction of the first chapter we see a person, then in the second chapter (where it appears for the first time to Heavenly Host) we have another one, and this “passage” is not caused by events that have made him change in some way , because Satoshi is strong right from the start as soon as he enters the school, so his is not even a character development … It is simply another personality not justified in any way.

So unfortunately Satoshi Mochida is an inconsistent character.

In short, the bilinearity of the characters (both in their natures and in the combinations of the couples that are seen in the various chapters) is useful to create a basic conflict for the staging, but we do not actually have a real awareness of their identity and the contexts in which they are inserted.

Conclusion…

This was the first time machine stop.  As the first article in here it proved difficult to deal with, given the numerous data that you have to research in order to speak to the best of a series that has had such a long history.

Corpse Party, a bunch of corpses but also good ideas, some successful and others scattered on the street. A series not yet abandoned by the producers (see the release date of Corpse Party 2: Dead Patient, April 2019), which probably will not have lost sight of their dream: that of a big commercial behemoth. And all this, started only by a HOR-RPG developed, in 1996, with RPG Maker (Dante98), affable tool for everyone, but not by everyone appreciated.

Introduction

“Great Scott!”

This was Doc’s reaction in “Back to the Future” when he saw his time machine working. This format is reminiscent of something similar… But we’re not going to talk about Martin McFly’s journey into the past in Zemeckis’s film, but about a journey into the past in the field of RPG Horror (a current that we’ll summarise, for convenience, HOR-RPG) by retracing their history that began, about a little less than ten years ago.

Why don’t we extend this talk to titles created on RPG Maker in general?

From the very first titles released, the RPG Maker Horror genre has very different from other games made with the same tool for types of textures, characters, styles, and general personality of the title so much that, seeing the tool, at times we did not believe that those atmospheres that we saw in those games had been developed with a tool made mainly for fantasy video games.

But let’s look back for a moment some periods of this tool, which has been around since 1997 in Japan.

For the analysis of more or less all periods we recommend first of all an article of the site pcgamer.com and if the reader is interested, Ele also had the opportunity to analyze the history of RPG Maker better.

Here, we “fly” directly to the period from 2007 until 2016.

In 2007 RPG Maker VX was released with Degica as publisher, which better shaping the community by giving forums, putting the entire series on Steam and other beautiful operations… But he also created RTPs. Degica’s intentions were purely dictated by necessity:in the early periods of RPG Maker up to VX they plundered resources from other games and adapted to the tool, but these “Run Time Packages” (default resources integrated in the program) created a real scourge in the VX period and also VX Ace, with out-of-control developers who put on the Steam Greenlight,also paid, games all the same with the same types of all the same.

For this reason RPG Maker began to have a visible bad reputation.

But, in our opinion, a current has always partly saved the program (especially at this critical stage) even before this wave of titles.
Since Yume Nikki back in 2004, the Japanese horror RPG has always had an extra edge and was almost always acclaimed by the general public,stimulating interest in the tool.

We ourselves, until we went into the community, we didn’t even know about RPG Maker’s bad reputation, and we just thought “wow, this program created X.”

In short, for us the current HOR-RPG was also important in the history of the program because it was able to create an imprint in the general gaming landscape using RPG Maker.

Well, all this will also help us in writing and comparing with normal reviews…

  • In the Back To The Future format will be present the games, analyzed differently from normal reviews, which have had a great influence in the current RPG Horror,helping to define an image-type. To give a quick example, beyond the now classic Ib, among the games of Uri the one that had the most influence in the current and therefore in the general public was “The Crooked Man”, not “Paranoiac” or “The Boogie Man”. This means that this title could appear in the address book, the others could not.

So how will we analyze these titles? How do we prioritize them like this?

  1. Product History

    – Sometimes it may include research and analysis of the history of the game since its creation to distribution, but in most cases it will be analyzed (often due to data deficiencies) the impact that it has had on the public – large public – and in what context it was launched . We talk about “big audiences” when we mean all those kinds of viewers or players who have nothing to do with the RPG Maker community, who often don’t even know what this tool is. The audience then becomes for us a measure of the impact of the work in the “external world”, analyze what types of fandom are born from the titles that have become an icon of the current, then become in some cases real media phenomenon, and in the next point we will try to understand also the reason.

  2. Trump Card

    – Or as you might define, the identification of a line of recognition

  3. Thermometer of professionalism

    a) Packaging – Distribution of the title. Was there a search for the target? From what you  can guess it?
    b) Author-work relationship – Is it possible to profile the author? Is it a single person or a team? How can you define your relationship with the work, is there an emotional connection or a complete detachment?
    c) Work defects – What kind are they? Can they be considered serious or not?

Ouch. Yes, yes, I see some of you twisting your nose on the third point. Yes, how do we judge the professionalism of others?

A self-goal on our part, a hypocritical move, since becoming active content producers we would make accusations that we could backfire perhaps more than the reviews.

Let us give you a good explanation: with “professionalism” we DO NOT intend to talk about the production capacity of the authors.

First of all, for a long time the current of HOR-RPG was nothing more than a small part of the larger production of indie games, often found randomly on the web (citing a post by a dedicated Facebook group: “The pleasure of descover”). With these types of games normally the exceptional cases that manage to actually achieve a wide impact at the media level are few (we mention the case “Undertale” or already mentioned in a review, “Doki Doki Literature Club”). Normally you play these titles for relaxation, you do not bother to develop meters of judgment because expectations are relatively low.

Yet nowadays we are seeing changes, and we are not only referring to the latest reboots (those could be reviewed but not covered in the heading) or the games that are becoming paid.

The possibilities that have opened up to some (such as the “Pocket Mirror” team that made their fortune from that game and now seems to be distributing a title on Playstation), or teams that produce titles with a certain assignment in order to sell them at a certain price and develop merchandising and high degree of distribution with other media and consoles (see case of Angels of Death) we seem the case to start to take stock of the situation: both titles come proudly introduced in the current “RPG Horror”, in which years ago Ib (but perhaps before Yume Nikki and Ao Oni) saw the introduction of the media boom and then with Fummy (author of The Witch’s House) and Sen (author of Misao and Mad Father) were thrown the characteristics that defined the genre.
We are talking about interesting possibilities born from the “simple production of RPG Maker titles”, considered among the easiest video game production tools to use.

You must know, dear reader, that the very first review we made was about a game developed on RPG Maker (it wasn’t the current horror) that you intended to bring to the shelves – as far as you could guess –. So the big question we’re going to look for answers to is this:

Is the RPG Maker universe really relegated to the phenomenon of authorship? Or could you invest in a new market?

From “Les cahiers du cinéma” to “Les quatre-cent coupes”

This might answer the question more generally: Why do you criticize and review other games?

In the history of cinema where the new criteria put by the French critics have contributed to the birth of a new way of looking at cinema: as art. Often the same critics have become film authors, this in a context in which cinema was seen as a mere industry, in which, according to some historians, it was not aimed at achieving a high level of expression.

Well, we are obviously not in a similar context, we know that we are talking about totally different realities. However, we want to find a similarity to the situation we are talking about: precisely because this current like others has worn for a long time the costume of amateurism – although we believe that it is the one that, of titles produced with this tool, has been closer to the general public–, now that costume is crumbling to make room for a market identity.

If a market is to be created in which to invest, what we hope is that we, as spectators and players, will all be ready to receive it.

 

– For our first review we payed homage to our sources of inspiration, among these we cannot fail to mention, given the different critical spirit that we try to implement, Flame88tongue, which develops excellent critical speeches on animated films.