HERO MYTHS IN JAPANESE ROLE-PLAYING GAMES

Kieran G. Blasingim

A Thesis

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

August 2006

Committee:

Dr. Marilyn Motz, Advisor

Dr. Jeremy Wallach

Dr. Andrew Mara ii

ABSTRACT

Dr. Marilyn Motz, Advisor

The Purpose of this text is to examine the cultural mythologies present in Japanese console role-playing games as they are transliterated for American audiences in an effort to understand how these texts might influence notions of identity in contemporary Western culture.

Specifically, this text is concerned with the way these games play out the conflict between traditional cultural values and posthumanity in a postmodern context; the narrative elements of

Japanese RPGs seem to be deployed in an effort to problematize any relationship between the posthuman and the heroic, and the gameworlds reflect this demonization and Othering of posthumanity. Specific texts will be examined in the context of the traditional narrative elements which they employ, including various Japanese myths, legends, and narratives, in hopes of exploring not only the loaded comparison these games make between traditional

Japanese heroism and posthumanism but also between Japanese and American notions of the heroic. Finally, this text will attempt to combine the theories of ludology, narratology, and folklore for the study of digital games, an approach uncommon in this highly factious discipline.

iii

I would like to dedicate this text to my parents, who bought me my first game console (a NES

cartridge deck) in the mid-80s against their own judgement, and who have despaired of my

unwavering interest in video games since that day. iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First, I must acknowledge Drs. Andrew Mara, Marilyn Motz, and Jeremy Wallach for their help and support throughout this project; it was a joy working with each of them, and I hope that they have had as much fun as I have these last two years. Secondly, I would like to extend some recognition to my fellow graduate students at Bowling Green State University, all of whom have helped to make this experience one that I will look back on fondly. Third, I should acknowledge Patrick Sanders and Shaun Edmonds, who helped me with the phrasing of my classification of J-RPGs. And, finally, I'd like to thank the many gamers with whom I've played over the years, and with whom I've had so much fun. v

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ABSTRACT ...... ii

DEDICATION ...... iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...... iv

PART I: TRADITION ...... 1

CHAPTER ONE: VIDEO GAMES AND VIDEO GAME THEORY...... 2

CHAPTER TWO: CONSOLE RPGS AS CULTURAL ARTIFACTS...... 13

PART II: FORMULATION ...... 22

CHAPTER THREE: THE JAPANESE HERO ...... 23

CHAPTER FOUR: THE HAKKENDEN AND THE J-RPG PARTY...... 32

PART III: DECONSTRUCTION ...... 42

CHAPTER FIVE: THE POSTHUMAN WORLD ...... 43

CHAPTER SIX: SCIENCE, MAGIC, AND THE POSTHUMAN HERO...... 51

PART IV: REMEDIATION ...... 62

CHAPTER SEVEN: “ACTION” ADVENTURES AND “REAL-TIME” COMBAT ...... 63

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE DEATH OF STORY...... 71

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 77

APPENDIX A: TEXTS EXAMINED ...... 82 PART I TRADITION 2

CHAPTER ONE

VIDEO GAMES AND VIDEO GAME THEORY

The critical study of console video games as cultural works is a relatively recent development in academia, and like most branches taking their first breaths its theories have, for the most part, been brought from other disciplines and reapplied in this context. Insofar as they are games, the theories of ludology seem to be a natural choice for their evaluation; insofar as they allow a player to inhabit another being in a world bound by different physical, moral, and social rules they beg for psychoanalysis; insofar as they attempt to tell stories – to portray narrative movement – literary analysis seems to be an obvious choice; and insofar as they attempt to define that nebulous concept, heroism, through performance, they seem to have ready within them a room for the application of folklore theory. And so, for the last few years, the field of game studies has been racked by a battle between academics of various disciplines attempting to lay claim to this fertile – insofar as video games account for a rather large amount of youth 3 leisure time – terrain for their own theories1. The one thing that is known – and known definitively – is that elements of each of these disciplines apply in different ways to different game genres.

Perhaps it is the fundamentally different nature of mediations within the context of video games that gives rise to the difficulty of examining it within any existing framework. Unlike television and other traditional forms of mediation, video games encompass a spectrum of configurative genres – immersive first-person shooters, puzzle-solving adventures, and narratively-structured role-playing games, to name a few. Control and interaction are much more variable between these genres than between genres of TV and other forms of standard mediation – player-character relationships are multi-leveled and may vary depending on the genre in question. Moreover, control and interaction necessitate mechanics and rules – the building blocks of all games – and this leads to an assumption that digital games should be seen first and only as remediations of board games.

Individual video game genres may find themselves more or less easily encompassed within various schools of critical study: folklore, narratology, psychoanalysis, etc., or within the newly-defined (and militantly policed) school of ludology, which defines itself as the study of games and game systems. The truth, however, as notable critics have pointed out2, is that aspects of all of these theories are more or less applicable – and, thus, should be incorporated into a larger discourse on the study of digital games. It is with that approach in mind that this text intends to examine a specific genre of digital games using various tools and conceptualizations from several of these fields. Specifically, the object of study shall be console role-playing games created in Japan and transmitted (via translation and transculturation) to Western audiences. My

1 See, particularly, Gonzalo Frasca’s “Simulation Versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology” and James Newman’s “The Myth of the Ergodic Videogame.” 2 Henry Jenkins is a particularly good example. 4 purpose here is not to provide a comprehensive examination of all aspects of the genre, but to investigate the ways in which these games transmit alternate notions of gender (particularly masculinity), heroism, and life within a postmodern or technocratic world, as well as alien cultural information, to their new audiences.

Each of these aspects of digital gaming seems particularly relevant given the current discourses on the role of digital games in influencing the behavior and identifications of

American youths and on the role of digital culture in general in producing a postmodern, cybernetic revolution in the construction of society and self in the 21st Century. Setting aside first-person shooters and action adventure games; the genres of digital games most commonly discussed by ludologists and psychoanalysts3, this work will deal primarily with one of the more overlooked genres within the medium: Japanese console role-playing games. This subset of the larger category of digital games can be identified as those games which include the following:

1. An overwhelming4, predefined narrative arc or story that is told through the

play experience.

2. Characterizations which problematize the relationship between player and

avatar by, at the least, establishing a persona which cannot be meaningfully5

manipulated by the player and, at most, which may result in the player distancing

herself from the narrative’s “primary” character.

3. A lack of a singular, directly corresponding avatar – which is replaced by a

“party” of characters with different skills, motivations, and visual representations,

3 See Alison McMahan’s “Immersion, Engagement, and Presence: A Method for Analyzing 3-D Video Games,” Bob Rehak’s “Playing at Being: Psychoanalysis and the Avatar,” and Mark Wolf’s “Abstraction in the Video Game,” 4 By which I mean that the narrative provides all motivations and characterizations, and serves to limit the play experience by ordering the actions of the player. 5 A loaded term, by which I mean that the player’s actions cannot deviate from those that are “appropriate” for the character as determined by the designer. 5

from whom are selected the “active” party that takes part in the configurative

portions of the game.

4. Systemic breaks in the experience of play to allow the game’s narrative arc to

be advanced by static, prerendered scenes which serve to establish or advance

characterization, character relations, motivations and goals, and other aspects of

the player’s relation to the gameworld.

5. A set course of play which discourages deviation by not advancing the player

towards the completion of the game unless she completes the narratively

significant events defined by the designers.

6. Said games are designed or produced for use on a dedicated gaming console

(XBOX, PlayStation 2, etc.).

Working within these limitations, then, it will be the purpose of this text to analyze using various theoretical tools the ways in which heroism is used as a canvas upon which to explore questions of tradition, humanity, posthumanity, technocratic culture, and masculinity. The selection of

Japanese console role-playing games (hereafter J-RPGs) is based on their unique approach to each of these issues and the ways in which that approach has begun to spread into American culture through fan-based and subcultural productions; primarily webcomics and other online productions of gaming culture. In short, the project has grown from a desire to examine the ways in which these games teach young adults to construct their own identities – in relation to and against the dominant paradigms of American culture as presented in digital games.

This leads to a certain disconnect between the goals of this text and those of the most common strains of ludology. To accurately apply most theories of ludology to the study of a given game, it must be provable that the game in question presents as its primary form of 6 interaction that between the player and the game’s mechanics. To quote Gonzalo Frasca, who first applied the term “ludology” to the study of digital games, “the central argument ... is that, unlike traditional media, video games are not just based on representation but on an alternative semiotical [sic] structure known as simulation” (221-222). However, Frasca does go on to point to the fact that a purely mechanical understanding of the game elements would be insufficient for the study of digital games:

Of course, we need a better understanding of the elements that games do share

with stories, such as characters, settings, and events. Ludology does not disdain

this dimension of video games but claims that they are not held together by a

narrative structure. Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that ludology’s

ultimate goal is not a capricious attempt to unveil the technical inaccuracy of the

narrative paradigm. (222)

Despite Frasca’s claim that “ludology does not disdain this dimension of video games,” however, many ludologists do exactly that. Espen Aarseth, whose Cybertext served as the point of genesis for ludology, claims that

Unlike in music, where a national anthem played on electric guitar takes on a

whole new meaning, the value system of a game is strictly internal, determined

unambivalently by the rules. Among the many differences between games and

stories, one of the most obvious is that of ambiguity. In Tetris, I do not stop to

ponder what those bricks are really supposed to be made of. In Doom, there is no

moral dilemma resulting from the killing of probably innocent monsters. The

pleasure of games is quite different from the pleasures of the novel: for a chess or

Tetris player, replaying is the norm, while most novels are read only once. You 7

can be an expert chess player without playing any other game, but to understand

even a single novel you will need to have studied numerous others. (Genre

Trouble 48)

In response, Stuart Moulthrop – another noted advocate of ludology – points out that

If these claims seem indisputable at face value it is only because they are

alarmingly narrow. Mink takes chevrolet6 may contain no reference to chivalric

hierarchy but it does assert a logic of territorial domination and unequal privilege.

No doubt one can play the game without connecting this logic to European

history, but such an approach reduces chess to a series of abstract transactions,

which may work well enough for mathematics but seems far too narrow for any

serious cultural critique. Tomb Raider shows even more clearly this artificial

restriction of focus. Certainly one could swap Lara Croft for a digitized Rowan

Atkinson without technically changing the feedback loop between player and

program. It seems unlikely, though, that Mr. Bean: Tomb Raider would sell

nearly as well to its primary audience. Lara Croft’s physique may consist of raw

data but it cannot be treated as such for critical purposes. While one may look

past or through the avatar body during play, the significance of games as cultural

forms goes beyond the player’s time in the loop. (Ibid 47-48)

Aarseth’s final word on this issue is that “the polygonal significance of Lara Croft’s physique goes beyond the gameplay. But that doesn’t mean it tells us much, if anything, about the gameplay, does it?” (Ibid 49). He seems to ignore the point of Moulthrop’s argument – that

6 Moulthrop had previously likened Aarseth’s argument to a claim that chess would be the same game “if the pieces were replaced with bottle caps and called minks, warts, and chevrolets instead of bishops, knights, and pawns” (47) 8 there is more to studying games as cultural artifacts than analyzing their gameplay – in order to glibly defend his assertion that ludology need not bother with any literary theory, as it only describes unessential elements of the game.

For the purposes of this study, embracing that element of ludology would seem counter- productive; the goal of this text, after all, is to explore the construction of characters and worlds within digital games. To do this, some narrative theory is, by definition, needed. On the other hand, certain other elements of ludology can be deployed in this discussion of RPGs, and some are actually implicit in the framing of these thoughts. Aarseth, despite eventually giving in to an urge to reject all theory before his own, does provide a useful tool for examining cybertexts as distinct from traditional (or, as he claims, any) narrative forms. The tool seems more useful, however, as revised by Marie-Laure Ryan in her “Beyond Myth and Metaphor: The Case of

Narrative in Digital Media.” Here she describes two binaries at work in notions of interactivity as present in digital media: internal/external and exploratory/ontological7. The combination of these two binaries creates four “groups” of interactive media, in two of which she claims digital games can be placed. In Ryan’s work, digital games can be separated into those which present the player with a “god-like” perspective (external) and those which seek to connect the player to a specific character or avatar (internal). In both cases, however, digital games are ontological – by which Ryan means that “the decisions of the user send the history of the virtual world on different forking paths. These decisions are ontological in the sense that they determine which possible world, and consequently which story will develop from the situation in which the choice presents itself” (7). This serves to establish RPGs as internal/ontological structures, despite the fact that they contain a great deal of what James Newman calls “Off-Line” state time. In short,

“videogames do not present a singularly ergodic experience. They are highly structured and

7 6-12. 9 comprise episodes of intense ergodic engagement. However, these sequences are punctuated and usually framed by periods of far more limited ergodicity and very often, apparently none at all”

(Myth 3). These two notions seem to point towards a function of video games in more narrative- inspired genres: an ability to vacillate between a highly ergodic8 and an entirely non-interactive state (in the sense Ryan means; Newman points out that players still interact with the game during off-line periods, they just don’t do it ergodically). The question becomes, then, how relevant are these non-interactive periods? Aarseth and Ryan would claim that they are entirely irrelevant to the study of the game, as they do not permit interaction – Aarseth, himself, points out that “in more dramatic adventure games, the characters’ behavior is entirely prescripted, with a few lines repeated endlessly and brainlessly. The dramatic ambitions of these games remain unfulfilled and seem as unreachable as ever” (Genre Trouble 51). In fact, Aarseth even goes so far as to claim that “we could say that this genre is really only one and the same game, the same rule system repeated over and over with variable cultural conventions and increasingly better technology” (Ibid 51). But I would argue that those “variable cultural conventions” are one of the most important aspects to be examined in the cultural study of digital games. Without understanding or investigating the cultural assumptions and ideologies built into these games, ludology falls into the trap implied by Moulthrop: a criticism so superficial that it fails to understand its own purpose and settles, instead, on studying pure mathematics.

Additionally, those non-interactive passages can be – in this genre – more important than the ergodic portions of the text. As Greg M. Smith points out, “games ... do not need to remind us continually of the moment’s plot goal because they can depend on the moment’s battle to keep us involved ... The interactive combat sequences scattered throughout the game’s narrative serve

8 “Ergodic” is a term coined to refer to the ability of a player to configure and interact with a given game. “Highly ergodic” means that the player has a great deal of control within the game system. 10 a narrative function that in film is often entrusted to dialogue: keeping us moving forward urgently” (3). While the implicit assertion that games are a primarily narrative structure cannot be left unpacked, the fact remains that the ergodic, on-line portions of RPGs consist almost entirely of random battles, purchasing equipment, and moving from place to place. Interacting with important non-player characters (NPCs), learning vital plot information, and the development of character and motive are all handled within the off-line, non-interactive periods.

In short, then, it can be argued that the truly interactive portions do, as Smith claims, serve primarily to keep the player interested in the game between non-interactive sections. This, then, makes most of ludology inapplicable to the argument I wish to present.

On the other hand, approaches such as Smith’s serve to highlight another common misconception of digital games: that they are simply (if it can be called simple) remediations of existing narrative structures, and that they can be studied using a purely literary approach. This has the unfortunate effect of undermining the interplay between the interactive and narrative elements, the “on-line” and “off-line” interchangeability, that makes digital games such a fascinating medium. Therefore, it is my intention to complicate three notions prevalent9 in the study of digital games within a specific genre: that they can be studied solely as games, that they can be studied solely as narratives, and – more importantly – that they can be dismissed as narrative structures using Proppian folklore analysis. The first two will be handled implicitly by my implementation of a hybridized examination of both the technical and narrative aspects of digital games, but the third is an issue of some greater magnitude; Marie-Laure Ryan writes, after all, that

9 Espen Aarseth, Marie-Laure Ryan, Selmer Bringsjord, Markku Eskelinen, Jasper Juul, Michael Mateas, Alison McMahan, Janet Murray, Greg M. Smith, and Stuart Woods engage in either the first or second of these two implicit notions. Ryan and Aarseth are two of the most direct in their use of Propp and Campbell to dismiss narrative structures in video games. 11

Adventure and role-playing games implement the archetypal plot that has been

described by Joseph Campbell and Vladimir Propp: the quest of the hero across a land

filled with many dangers to defeat evil forces and conquer a desirable object. The

main deviance from the archetype is that the hero can lose, and that the adventure

never ends. In most action games, this archetype is further narrowed down to the

pattern that underlies all wars, sports competition, and religious myth, namely the

fight between good (me) and evil (the other) for dominance of the world. (12)

It is this which leads to Aarseth’s statement that these games can be considered “one” with only minor cultural differences; Propp and Campbell have established a way of reducing stories to component parts, and the narrative structures in video games use the same parts in – generally – the same order, which leads Ryan and Aarseth to the conclusion that exploring those elements is no longer necessary. Unfortunately, this approach ignores both the basis and stated goals of

Proppian research; to say that all stories of a certain culture draw from a pool of distinct formal elements is not to say that they are unworthy of study. Nothing in the work of Propp or

Campbell serves to dismiss further study of repetitive narratives; Campbell, in fact, begins with the notion developed by Propp and attempts to explore where those formal elements developed and what they suggest about the culture which has produced them. Ryan and Aarseth’s dismissal of RPG narratives is a perversion of the goals of archetypal research – a willful misappropriation meant to devalue narrative in video games as too traditional to be worthy of study. These games, however, do something that the narratives studied by Campbell and by Propp did not: they attempt to link traditional formal and stylistic elements to modern questions of cybernetics and posthumanity through a “present” setting which allows those ideas to interact with one another.

J-RPGs are exploring the disconnect between traditional cultural values and posthumanity; they 12 use elements of both in their examination of the ways in which identity and heroism are formed within the posthuman context. They are, to reference an intriguing project by three undergraduates at Brown University, a “digital Propp10” – a collection of formal and traditional elements which are mobilized in an effort to explore the future of digital culture.

10 This site by Celeste Lim, Laura Tam, and Nicole Wee examines the failure of a direct application of Propp to digital games and some of the inherent flaws in Proppian theory which led to that failure. 13

CHAPTER TWO

CONSOLE RPGS AS CULTURAL ARTIFACTS

Antonia Levi, in Samurai from Outer Space, spends some time discussing the success Japanese narratives have had among a certain group of American adolescents and young adults – in many ways, her work is a parallel to this text, insofar as it explores the characteristic elements of

Japanese anime and its impact on American audiences. “The new generations of both Japan and

America are sharing their youth,” she points out, “and in the long run, their future. However much their governments may argue about trade and security in the Pacific, America’s Generation

X and Japan’s shin jinrui will never again be complete strangers to one another” (2-3). She goes on to academically dub1 this group of American youths otaku, a Japanese colloquialism roughly equivalent to the English “geek.” “To say that an otaku is an anime fan doesn’t really describe the phenomenon,” according to Levi (2) – it refers to American consumers who are “obsessively interested” to the point that it affects not only their trends of consumption but also their

1 The group itself had appropriated the term some time before, as Levi herself points out. 14 interactions with others. “Some go even further, voluntarily spending hours in language labs learning the basics of a language that is far more difficult to learn than Spanish or German, namely Japanese” (2).

More importantly, Levi points to an interesting implication of this practice:

[Japanese culture’s] popularity with young Americans is probably one of the

biggest surprises of the nineties. For all the complaints about Generation X’s

“sound byte mentality,” and all the cracks about the “dumbing of America,” this

generation has chosen a form of entertainment that is uniquely difficult to

appreciate. It’s not just the language barrier. Subtitles and dubbing take care of

that. Culturally too, anime comes without an operator’s manual. (3)

It is, in other words, a demanding and difficult form of entertainment to consume – references to cultural information foreign to American consumers must be decoded either by an intermediary

(in the form of idiomatic language and socio-cultural signifiers) or by the consumer herself. “It’s simply not possible to watch anime without picking up a smattering of knowledge about

Japanese customs and beliefs” (ix).

Scott McCloud, a theorist dealing primarily with comics, describes the difference between Eastern and Western storytelling as the goal against the journey. To him, Western comics are focused on “things happening” – a form of storytelling which acts as a “connected series of events” (76). As he notes, the most common transitions among Western comics are action-to-action, subject-to-subject, and scene-to-scene2 – with the overwhelming majority of transitions being action-to-action (74-77). This conceptualization of story as connected actions makes more reasonable the focus on action genres in academic research on video games – they

2 For descriptions of these and the other forms of visual transition in comics, see McCloud’s Understanding Comics. 15 are those games most obvious in their emphasis on the action taking place, creating narrative only as a means of linking actions together.

However, as McCloud writes, Japanese storytelling introduces moment-to-moment transitions, reduces the emphasis on action-to-action by increasing the number of subject-to- subject transitions, and incorporates aspect-to-aspect transitions – in which nothing “happens” at all, but the focus of the panel shifts to different visual objects3. This, McCloud argues, shifts the overall emphasis in Japanese comics from action to experience and on “being there over getting there” (81). Also, McCloud points out that this is not an isolated incident; “traditional Western art and literature don’t wander much. On the whole, we’re a pretty goal-oriented culture. But, in the East, there’s a rich tradition of cyclical and labyrinthine works of art” (81).

While this sort of essentialist view is problematic even in the specific field McCloud’s attention is focused upon, his statement does point towards a fundamental difference in the way that traditional – or, to use a slightly more charged term, folk – stories are constructed in these two paradigms. Examining what could be considered some of the most fundamental of cultural stories – the respective creation myths of Western Christian society and Shinto Japan, this distinction between detailing the action and dwelling in the moment is already prevalent.

Consider this passage of Genesis, in which the world is created:

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a

formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God

swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there

was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from

the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And

there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

3 McCloud 77-80. 16

And God said, Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate

the waters from the waters.” So God made the dome and separated the waters that

were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so.

God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the

second day.

And God said, “Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place,

and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and

the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was

good. Then God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed,

and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” And it

was so. The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind,

and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was

good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day. (Genesis 1.1-

1.13)

The Japanese Shinto origin myth “Takamagahara,” on the other hand, runs thus:

Of old, there was nothing in the universe but thick, sluggish matter. It was

shapeless and formless and stretched to infinity. All was chaotic. Heaven and

Earth were mingled like the white and yolk of an egg that had been stirred

through countless ages. Aeon followed aeon without change. Then, suddenly, a

great upheaval began to take place and strange noises filled the boundless, silent

universe, and out of the chaotic mass the light and purer part rose up and spread 17

thinly outwards, while the heavier and grosser elements gradually came together

and fell, until there was a distinct cleavage between the two.

The light mass moved steadily upwards. It spread and extended until it

completely overhung the solid mass below. Parts of it, as if hesitant and uncertain

what to do, still clung together and formed many clouds. But the great expanse

around and over them formed a paradise, and it was called Takamagahara – The

High Plain of Heaven.

All this while, the heavier mass was still sinking and seemed to have great

difficulty in taking shape. Another aeon passed. From the heavenly heights the

mass looked huge and black, and it was called Earth.

In this way the Heaven of Takamagahara and the Earth came into being, and with

them the legend of the birth of Japan. (Tales from Japan 4)

Notice the heavy emphasis on action and active voice in the passage from Genesis – every verb, in fact, is active. More importantly, each action is engendered by an acting God – the ultimate hero of the Western world, whose voice alone can cause inanimate objects to take on actions.

Compare this to the origin of Takamagahara, in which the majority of the verb forms are still active (at least in translation), but the fact that “Heaven and Earth were mingled” (emphasis mine) points to a notable absence in this story: there is no central actor directing the creation of this world. Instead, the separation of Earth and Heaven takes place organically as aeons pass.

More importantly, notice the prevalence in “Takamagahara” of metaphorical language – the

Earth and Heaven “were mingled together like the white and yolk of an egg ...” while the light 18 mass destined to become heaven rose up and “parts of it, as if hesitant and uncertain what to do, still clung together and formed many clouds.”

This contrasts sharply with the words of Genesis, in which all language is direct and expository – there are no metaphors, and the personifications of the natural elements as they follow God’s will are meant to be taken literally (ignoring the question of whether the entire text might be seen as a cultural metaphor). This, arguably, carries out McCloud’s assertion – the

Japanese “Takamagahara” deploys metaphoric language to expand the moment and to add texture to the experience of the creation of Heaven and Earth in a way that the Western Genesis text does not. While the latter focuses primarily (almost solely) on the active account of creation as a call and response between God and his creation, the Japanese myth removes the singular agent of creation and instead focuses on the experience – by employing the language it does and by glossing the passage of time, “Takamagahara” instead focuses on what it would have been like to be there at the moment of the creation of Earth and Heaven.

While working with translations makes the argument a bit more complicated, the similar metaphoric elements at work in other traditional stories from both cultures (also in translation) makes these statements fruitful. As Campbell has argued4, religious myths serve to underscore the cultural ideals and mythologies of their contextualizing societies. Thus, in a discussion of

American culture, using the versions of these myths available to the audience seems natural.

These two stories and others like them, then, point to a difference in the fundamental conceptualization of agency (which translates to a difference in representations of the heroic) in each culture. In American English, for example, passive voice is considered a weaker form of argumentation than the active, and rhetorical devices are deployed to retain agency for a given

4 This is not only the primary lens of his Myths to Live By, but also the point of departure for his Hero with a Thousand Faces. 19 subject. In Japanese, however, unambiguous uses of active voice are considered immodest and, thus, improper. The Japanese have a term, aiwa, for an intentional ambiguity meant to avoid offense, and their notions of agency are built around this value and others, such as heavy notions of filial piety, duty, courtesy, and wisdom which translate to a sense of the hero as self-effacing servant of her society. These translate, in additions, to notions of heroic which embody self- sufficiency for Western stories and community for Eastern stories. Perhaps it is because of the different cultural experiences of expansion versus overpopulation, but Japanese myths tend to emphasize working with others to preserve harmony and to accomplish more difficult tasks.

This can be seen most transparently in “The Peach Boy,” the story of a young prince who is sent to conquer a group of kami threatening the lands and does so with the help of retainers he gains along the way: a dog, a monkey, and a pheasant, each of whom add different abilities to the group as a whole. This bears some similarity to the land or airship stories of western culture5, and those stories are knowingly referenced in the Final Fantasy franchise, but “The Peach Boy” predates them by several hundred years.

Due to these cultural divergences, I will continue for this discussion to employ

McCloud’s notion of the Winding Path situated against the Noble Goal6 – the emphasis on experience or destination, respectively, that seems to characterize the structure of traditional stories within each culture. Within the role-playing genre, this dichotomy is readily visible, as one of the most distinct differences between games produced in Japan and those produced by

Western publishers is the relative emphasis on narrative structures involving resolution and continuation. In fact, it is this distinction which makes obvious the other distinctions between the two forms of “role-playing” – the difference in storytelling focus between the two cultures

5 For a recent film example, see The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. 6 These terms are evocative of the visual elements of McCloud’s portrayal of Eastern and Western storytelling; his text is a metacomic, as opposed to pure exposition. 20 produces, along with a visible issue of dramatics, a different understanding of the relationships between characters, places, and even the player and the character or characters she controls.

Beyond its emphasis on the journey in game narratives, the RPG genre owes several other notable debts to Japanese culture, including its emphasis on the party dynamic – a successor to epic tales like The Hakkenden – its notion of the effeminate hero who is still mighty

– a paean to The Tale of Genji – and its problematic relationship to postmodernism and cyberculture. Each of these three elements will come to dominate a segment of the following text in some way, as the relationship between texts produced in Japan and America will be explored through the lens of the relevant cultural context surrounding those texts. In particular,

Hakkenden will be used as a lens to explain the Japanese party aesthetic as defined against the

American lone hero – presented in the theory of writers like Campbell and Propp – while Genji will be used as an antecedent for the feminized, sensitive male characters of Japanese games, notable in their difference from America’s hyper-masculinized heroic – particularly evident in examinations of film and other visual culture produced in that culture. In addition, the relationship between hero and villain will be explored; a distinction can be drawn between

Japanese games, in which the hero and villain follow parallel but oppositional paths, and their

American counterparts, in which the villain serves as the more stereotypical (in Western culture) catalyst. Finally, the apparent rejection of posthuman cyberculture in Japanese RPGs will be explored and situated against the predominant theories of New Media as presented by thinkers influenced by Donna Haraway. In the final pages of this text, some time will be spent exploring more recent, hybridized forms of these games – primarily in the form of Massively Multiplayer

Online RPGs (hereafter MMOs) and Action RPGs, in which an effort has been made to increase the ergodic elements of the texts in order to make them more intensely interactive. In the former 21 case, it can be argued that the inclusion of multiplayer elements undermines the basic goal of the

Japanese RPG – to immerse the player in the lives and relationships of the characters she controls – by destroying many of the connections commonly created in console versions of these games. In the latter, the argument will be presented that these games also undermine certain aspects of the traditional RPG, but do so in ways that serve an interesting purpose – that, in short, their hybridization may serve to combine two genre categories in a new way, which would lead to texts with different semiotic elements and relationships, thus allowing for the eventual development of a new genre.

Each of these chapters will emphasize depth of study as opposed to breadth, opting to focus more fully on a single text or semiotic presentation as opposed to a more cursory examination of multiple titles. This has been done for several reasons, most notably because a superficial semiotic reading serves primarily as an invitation for further study, as opposed to a true examination of a given text. Additionally, a deeper examination is made necessary by the additional goal of examining these texts as they are defined against Western productions, as the distinctions operate primarily at more recessed layers of meaning. Establishing a traditional context for each text also requires a more advanced description of the elements of study, in order to avoid such apparent essentialisms as “this character is wearing such, which obviously points to her role within this role, which can be explicated thus” – a cursory and uncomplicated assertion, in short, which does not fully explore the multiple traditions in which characters and texts may be produced. Finally, it is simply more fulfilling to explore the nooks and crannies of meaning within texts than to relate them on a superficial level to one another; true scholarship and criticism should have as its goal a complete, “deep” understanding of a given text rather than a simple, relational one. PART II FORMULATION 23

CHAPTER THREE

THE JAPANESE HERO

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the embodiment of both traditional and posthuman elements in the construction of J-RPG heroes. It will examine the nuanced and highly charged representations of heroism which are present in these games and which are dismissed by researchers like Marie-Laure Ryan:

Adventure and role-playing games implement the archetypal plot that has been

described by Joseph Campbell and Vladimir Propp: the quest of the hero across a land

filled with many dangers to defeat evil forces and conquer a desirable object. The main

deviance from the archetype is that the hero can lose, and that the adventure never ends.

In most action games, this archetype is further narrowed down to the pattern that

underlies all wars, sports competition, and religious myth, namely the fight between

good (me) and evil (the other) for dominance of the world. (12) 24

Later chapters will deal with other elements of Ryan’s dismissal, but the focus of this chapter will be the unspoken implications of “the hero” as a social construct; in borrowing from Propp and Campbell, Ryan also borrows their essentialist notion that all heroism can be boiled down to

Propp and Campbell’s Western interpretations of Western texts. What, then, is a hero? How is the hero constructed, both in body and in spirit? To claim, as Ryan does, that all heroes are the same – since all hero myths and all videogames in the role-playing genre are the same – ignores the cultural representations of heroism which define a society’s concepts of gender, class, and identity. This text, then, will seek to problematize Ryan’s statement by exploring the ways in which Tidus, the player’s avatar in Final Fantasy X, contradicts traditional Western notions of heroism.

Perhaps the single most transparent aspect of Tidus as a heroic character is his relation to the game’s female lead, Yuna. Their star-crossed romance – revisited in the game’s sequel – forms the core of the dramatic motivation for much of the later portion of Final Fantasy X

(hereafter FFX), including the decisions which lead them to fundamentally alter the nature of their world by destroying instead of suppressing Sin, a monolithic magical carapace which serves as armor and life support for a fading god bent on destruction of all living beings. This romance is fairly stereotypical in its combination of common conventions from various forms of Western romantic film and literature – the star-crossed lovers, the mistaken identities, the initial misunderstandings, and the secret which – when revealed – threatens to end their relationship abruptly. This plot is twisted, however, by the inversion of standard Western gender roles by these two characters. It is Tidus whose overly-emotional attitudes serve to problematize this relationship, while Yuna serves as the calm, rational cornerstone of the relationship – even when she’s contemplating her own inevitable death, she makes the decision to hide this from Tidus in 25 order to spare his feelings and to avoid fragmenting their developing love before it is even established. In fact, very nearly the only good thing that can be said of the sequel to this game1 is that it inverts the standard “kidnapped princess” fantasy plot by detailing Yuna’s search for

Tidus. It is Tidus, not Yuna, who is hindered by his problematic relationship to his father and is thus incapable of forming a solid relationship. His own insecurity, lingering years after his father has “abandoned” him, often pushes him away not only from Yuna but also from the other characters in this tale. However, their relationship is, in many ways, the most masculine aspect of Tidus’s characterization. His passive-aggression towards Auron – a friend of his father who is responsible for Tidus’s appearance in Yuna’s time – and his coldness towards many of the other characters in the game are all representative of an aloofness which returns, repeatedly, to his inability to find closure in his relationship with his father.

Tidus’s visual representation is, by Western standards, a feminization of traditionally masculine semiotic texts. As an athlete2, he is constantly depicted in his uniform – a sort of combination wetsuit and martial arts gi. In addition, his left pant leg is cut short as a reference to hip hop culture at the time. He wears athletic sneakers and gloves – one of which is a large, segmented gauntlet – which means that, in the end, the vast majority of his body is covered.

Within this suit, however, is a body laden with signifiers of feminization; his hair, face, build, and accessories all undermine the rigid notion of masculinity associated with athleticism in

America – which, as Connell points out, has become the leading definer of masculinity in

American mass culture3. His pale blond hair is heavily styled, even during action scenes underwater, and has a textured, messy look more common with rock musicianship and

1 Final Fantasy X-2 is infamous within the fan community for its regression to a highly sexualized and derogatory stance towards women. It has been referred to as the “Charlie’s Angels Final Fantasy.” 2 Tidus plays “blitzball,” a sort of underwater conflation of soccer and rugby. 3 Connell makes this point explicitly in his Masculinities. 26 contemporary Japanese comics than professional sports. His face, with its narrow jaw and overall roundness, is easily portrayed by female cosplayers4 – some of the most convincing portrayals of Tidus are, in fact, done by women5.

Particularly compared to the Western image of heroic masculinity portrayed by actors like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Clint Eastwood, Tidus’s child-like face seems out of place. While his build is muscular, his shoulders are quite narrow, adding to the overall feminization of his appearance. Finally, Tidus’s several earrings and his silver necklace

– which would, one supposes, present a risk of injury in a highly physical sport played without helmets – are, if not feminine, at least not stereotypically masculine in a Western context. His large pendant is perhaps reminiscent of tribal jewelry, but his most significant earring is a dangling teardrop nearly as large as the one he wears on his chest. While this jewelry may present as part of formulating American blackness, Tidus is white – very white, as evidenced by his blond hair and blue eyes. Moreover, Tidus’s body becomes a site of some ambiguity as it is discovered during the game that he does not really exist; his presence is through a magical circumlocution of the rules of time and space perpetrated by Auron and Tidus’s father, Jecht. A memory of Yuna’s civilization’s past kept alive by Sin, Tidus vanishes when that entity is destroyed, his body dissolving as the magical power which made him corporeal fades away.

To explore a bit more fully, FFX’s representation of masculinity through Tidus fits within a larger context of using a contextually more feminine masculine image in the primary role of heroism and then adding as supporting characters more traditional images of the masculine. This is not to say, however, that the character is meant to be effeminate; rather, Asian notions of

4 “Cosplay” is a contraction of “costume play,” a common practice at conventions and gatherings focusing on media fandom in which various attendees dress as their favorite characters from various shows, games, etc. 5 The more convincing male portrayals are done by Asian men whose facial structures are quite feminine by Western standards. 27 masculinity and femininity do not match up with those of America, and the result is that in

American mass culture, as Frank Chin, the editor of Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American

Writers, points out, “the stereotypical Asian is nothing as a man. At worst, the Asian-American is contemptible because he is womanly, effeminate, devoid of all the traditionally masculine qualities of originality, daring, physical courage, and creativity” (Quoted in Cheung 263). The problem according to Connell, then, is that “[Western] mass culture generally assumes there is a fixed, true masculinity beneath the ebb and flow of daily life. We hear of ‘real men’, natural man’, the ‘deep masculine’” (45). Connell goes on to point out that “true masculinity is almost always thought to proceed from men’s bodies – to be inherent in a male body or to express something about a male body” (Ibid). What makes Asian-American males so problematic for

American masculinity – and Tidus, as well, by extension – is that their bodies do not conform to

American notions of “deep masculinity” or “natural” manliness.

This is not to say that all heroic characters in J-RPGs occupy a problematic masculine space; in the case of FFX, more acceptably masculine characters like Auron, the knight who protected Yuna’s father and knew Tidus’s, draw an even sharper focus on Tidus. Both Auron and Wakka, the other male party member, carry far more visual signifiers of masculinity than

Tidus; Auron, in particular, serves to highlight the ways in which Japanese images of masculinity can converge with those of Americans. His dress and the large sake bottle that Auron carries serve as signifiers of his status as ronin – a former samurai who, either through disgrace or failure, is left without a master. Although modernized for the more futuristic fantasy world of

Spira, Auron’s clothing is clearly reminiscent of the kimono worn by traditional samurai – a visual signifier driven home by his keeping one arm under the chest of his coat instead of through the arm, a representation which refers to the several forms of kimono and happi or haroi 28 coats, worn as outer garments and not unlike capes, which can be seen in other representations of more traditionally-robed ronin6. The sake bottle is a reference to drunkenness, a common failing of samurai and a cause for their dismissal as well a traditional visual element of presenting a ronin7. In relation to Tidus, Auron is more squarely built and has a more masculine facial structure, not unlike that of Stallone and Eastwood. His graying hair and scarred face act as signifiers of distinction, showing both that he has a great deal of experience and that he has survived in his role for some time. Auron’s sunglasses are reminiscent of those worn by traditional Western action characters such as the Terminator and Blade, and his greater physical strength is made tangible by his ability to strike creatures no matter how heavily they are armored. This can be seen as directly in opposition to Tidus, who has the lowest attacking power of the three male characters in the party.

It is, therefore, problematic to make a blanket assertion that all masculine representations in J-RPGs are more feminine than those of their Western counterparts; the genre is rife with counter-examples, and one exists in nearly every game in the series. Instead, it can be said that every J-RPG has, at its core, a character like Tidus; one whose visual representation and behavior invalidate Western norms of masculinity and whose role within the party problematizes notions of masculine authority. Be it Sora of Kingdom Hearts, Cloud, Squall, or Vaan of Final

Fantasy VII, VIII, and XII, respectively, Serph of Shin Megumi Tensai: Digital Devil Saga, or any of the myriad of other male leads in these games, the representations are always problematic from a Western standpoint. This, then, can be seen as the first element of variant discourse within J-RPGs.

6 See Urahara Kisuke of the manga and anime “Bleach,” as well as Abarai Renji and Kyouraku Shunsui from the same title, along with Hiko Soujiro and Kagebusha from “Rurouni Kenshin” and much of the cast of “Kaze Hikaru.” 7 See, again, Hiko Soujiro and Kyouraku Shunsui, as well as the cast of “Kaze Hikaru.” 29

In relation to traditional Western ideas of heroism, primarily as presented by Propp and

Campbell, Tidus is a much less active character. He is drawn into his adventure against his will, which can be seen as a sort of “setting out,” but is a more passive and reactionary method of doing so than is accounted for in Propp’s work. Propp, in fact, argues that a hero sets out for one of two reasons: to right a wrong, or to fill a need of some sort. Neither of these drives exists within Tidus, who wants nothing more than to return home for the first half of the game’s narrative. This leads to a larger break with Propp’s theory: generally, the goals of J-RPG protagonists can be split into two categories: to develop an understanding of a situation, or to return to a vanished homeland. It is Yuna, the female lead, who has set out on a quest to win peace for the people of her world. This, too, carries across the genre; the hero is generally given impetus by another character who is on a journey and travels with that character until the objective is revealed to be significant to the protagonist, as well. To complete the collapse of

Propp’s model as applicable to this genre of games, the heroes of these games – in contrast to

Propp’s descriptions of the hero becoming the king – are rarely recognized as such by the masses: consider Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, a film set two years after Cloud and his companions defeat Sephiroth and save their world from annihilation. Cloud, at the opening of the film, is an out-of-work courier who rents a room from Tifa, another member of the player’s party in Final Fantasy VII, who still owns and operates the bar that she is tending when the player first sees her in that game.

Indeed, Tidus and other J-RPG heroes bear a closer resemblance in their problematic masculinity and reactive heroism to the Japanese hero Genji, son of an Emperor and his concubine. Commonly considered the first novel written in any language, The Tale of Genji has been the subject of a great deal of derivative artistic production. Numerous Japanese artists have 30 painted, written, and adapted the tale in various ways since its creation, including two anime versions and a budding videogame franchise. Although The Tale of Genji is a romantic novel, and thus lacks many of the elements of a heroic adventure, Genji himself has been revisioned in many ways as a warrior – most notably in the digital action game released in America in 2005.

Genji, as he was originally presented in the novel, was both beautiful and sensitive. In several passages of the tale’s first chapter, he is referred to as “beautiful,” a “jewel beyond compare” and when he was seven years old, his father’s first wife and Genji’s primary threat at court, is described as having “two daughters, but neither could compare with him in beauty” (1.64).

Moreover, Genji is, like Tidus, caught up in a tale defined more by his parents than by himself.

It is Genji’s father, the Emperor of Japan, who is the cause of many of Genji’s initial difficulties

– the man’s love for Genji’s mother has created for the boy several powerful enemies at court, and it is to navigate these dangerous waters that Genji is in many ways forced to act.

In a larger sense, Genji serves as a frame upon which the heroes of J-RPGs are built; the notions of beauty, sincerity, and sensitivity which he embodies (and which run counter to

Western notions of masculinity) stand behind representations of characters like Tidus, Serph,

Cloud, and Squall – each of whom must, for American audiences, overcome their problematic masculinity by displaying their physical prowess. Thus we have Tidus, the athlete, who is not only the most sensitive member of FFX’s cast, but also the least masculine of the male characters. His relationship with his father is conflicted by his father’s existence as a posthuman entity whose presence destroys the world of Spira, and the legend of Jecht, Tidus’s father, prefigures Tidus’s relationships with not only the rest of the party, but also with various non- player characters throughout the text. While this association is not so negative as Genji’s, Tidus still finds himself expected to act in certain ways and to believe in certain ideals that his father 31 supported. Because their fathers traveled together, Tidus is expected to travel with Yuna, and because his father sacrificed his life to defeat and replace Sin, Tidus is expected to do the same.

That he refuses to do this final task, it is not because he refuses to accept filial piety, but rather because he rejects the posthuman ideology at work behind the mechanism for defeating Sin.

Genji’s eventual decline also seems to prefigure that of J-RPG heroes; it is not because of some failing in himself or because of some terrible mistake on his part but simply because he ages and his beauty fades – and with it, his importance at court. In fact, Genji is recognized for his many successes with a high imperial title – bestowed by his own unacknowledged son (who has inherited the imperial throne). Thus, unlike Cloud in Advent Children, Genji is given all he could hope for – and, unlike Propp’s heroes, he does not lose it. Instead, he passes on his fame and beauty to the next generation and quietly fades away – much like Tidus, after the defeat of

Sin. Having saved the world, Genji – and the J-RPG hero – has fulfilled his duty and must pass on the mantle of hero to another. This is supported not only in Advent Children, but also in Final

Fantasy X-2, the sequel to Tidus’s story; in X-2, Yuna must deal with her reduced status after the final destruction of Sin – her role as a summoner has been stripped away with the destruction of the Fayth, and Yuna must learn new skills and overcome the dismissive attitudes of those who believe that, without her powers, she can no longer make a difference in the world. In this sense, these heroes are similar to Beowulf setting out to battle the dragon; they have passed their prime, and there is doubt about the ability of the former hero to overcome this new adversary. In J-

RPGs, however, the hero is not consumed by this final act of heroism; she is saved by the party and by her reliance on traditional models of heroism which allow her to overcome, with help, any adversity. 32

CHAPTER FOUR

THE HAKKENDEN AND THE J-RPG PARTY

To return, yet again, to Marie-Laure Ryan’s depiction of RPGs as following fundamentally

Proppian trajectories, this chapter will seek to undermine the notions of “the hero” as a singular entity in J-RPGs. Instead of the traditional Western hero of solitude, it will be argued, this genre of games represents an uniquely Eastern notion of strength through unity – one in which differing and complimentary skills combine to allow characters to exercise greater strength than they might without the support of their comrades. The argument, specifically, will focus on how these games borrow more heavily from tales such as The Hakkenden than those like Beowulf, particularly in their notion of how the hero functions. Moreover, the argument will be made that these games tend to subsume the character who acts as the player’s avatar, using narrative devices to constantly draw attention to the other characters in the text. 33

The Hakkenden1, not unlike Beowulf, is an early epic exploring notions of heroism, redemption, and paranormal creatures. Unlike Beowulf, however, it is the heroes of The

Hakkenden whose origins lie in the supernatural, not the villains – hakkenden translates roughly to “the legend of the eight dog warriors,” a direct reference to the origin of these spirits. A

Japanese princess, Fuse, is offered as a prize to the warrior who brings back the head of the Awa clan’s most hated enemy. And, after some daring attempts, it is a great hound that finally succeeds – and, thus, must be granted the right to marry her. She becomes supernaturally pregnant and is killed by a former lover, who had attempted to defeat the warlord but who had been defeated – and was thought dead. But, at her death, eight crystal beads from her Buddhist rosary rise up into the air and are scattered across Japan – each bearing a character signifying one of the virtues of Confucianism: benevolence, brotherhood, filial piety, wisdom, duty, courtesy, faith, and loyalty. Each of these crystal beads represents one of the children that Fuse would have had, and who are later reincarnated as samurai who do not recognize one another. The majority of the narrative in Hakkenden is concerned with the meeting and recognition of these brothers and with their various exploits against the ancient enemies of their clan. Finally, they are awarded Imperial titles and castles for their service, and settle down to live peacefully in their ancestral homeland. The symbols on the beads fade away, as do the hakkenden, over time. Once they have passed away the idyllic period over which they ruled ends abruptly, and the clans are once again at war in Awa province.

This can be most fruitfully compared to the Western epic Beowulf, which was composed between 600 and 1100 AD in what would eventually become England. The work of an unknown poet, the legend of Beowulf is one of adventure and heroism – much like The Hakkenden – but

1 The full title of this work is Nansō Satomi Hakkenden, which translates as The Legend of the Eight Dog Warriors of Awa and Satomi, the lord of Awa. It will be referred to as The Hakkenden, translating as The Legend of the Eight Dog Warriors. 34 highlights the difference in notions of heroism between these two cultures. Beowulf, the protagonist of the epic, is a mighty warrior from a distant land who comes to aid Hrothgar and his people when they are besieged by the monstrous Grendel, who is said to be a descendent of

Cain. Comparing this to the dog warriors, who are supernatural entities fighting against human corruption, it becomes a clear representation between fundamental belief systems in these two civilizations: Beowulf, no matter how problematically, embraces Christianity, while Hakkenden embraces the Shinto tradition. Along with larger implications, this distinction is highlighted by the juxtaposition of the Christian belief in the supernatural as inherently Other – there is only one

God, and aside from his angels there should be no supernatural creatures – and the Shinto belief that there can be powerful spirits in all things – kami – which are a form of god. Thus, in

Christian traditions, the only “son of God” is Christ – any other child of a supernatural union must, by definition, be a child of devils. Shinto, on the other hand, embraces a notion of godhood that covers a large spectrum of ethical and moral viewpoints; there are good kami, evil kami, indifferent kami, and even kami who mean no harm but cause a great deal of trouble with their practical jokes. Many of these kami have children who go on to become heroes and, according to the Japanese myths of creation, all humans are descended from the same kami that gave birth to the spirits of the world.

Another point of correlation between Beowulf and The Hakkenden is in the rise to and fall from power – the heroes of both tales eventually come to rule lands of their own and finally fall from power for some reason. The difference here is in both how the heroes fall from grace and how that affects the world around them. In the case of Beowulf, it is due to the greed of a man who steals from the hoard of a great dragon that Beowulf must then defeat in combat – which he does, taking his own mortal wound in the process. At this time, he passes his authority on to one 35 of his followers, whom the reader can assume will carry on the rule of Beowulf either well or poorly. Either way, however, it is clear that Beowulf is exculpated of any guilt for the eventual

(historical) decline of his people. The dog warriors, on the other hand, simply fade away – they age, have children, and finally die. As this happens, the symbols on their crystal beads – which originally signified not only their individual characteristics but also their duty to their clan – fade as well. Their purpose has been fulfilled, and they have been granted a respite from strife for the rest of their lives, which extends to those they rule. Thus, after their death, the natural state of strife between clans arises again – implying that it was only the presence of the dog warriors which led to that idyllic period of peace. The tale becomes cyclical, as a new group of heroes will be forced to arise and reclaim that peace for their generation, after which it will again fade and the duty will fall to the next generation.

However interesting these distinctions are, the one most visibly highlighted by RPGs produced by Japanese studios is that between the solitary hero and the group. Beowulf is the tale of one hero – the title makes that explicit – while The Hakkenden is the tale of eight brothers of spirit who work together to avenge their clan. This falls well within the tradition of Japanese epic literature, as tales such as The Peach Boy, Shui hu Zhuan, and the more contemporary

Saiyuki, Rurouni Kenshin, Bleach, and Flame of Recca all emphasize the strength of the party over that of the individual. In these and other cases, a singular “hero” is subsumed by the companions with whom he travels – all of whom contribute to the success of the adventure in meaningful ways and all of whom become, at least temporarily, dominant within the narrative arc. Compare this to the tradition of Western Christian epics, which focus primarily on the questing hero overcoming obstacles through his own strength or magical gifts from helpers who do not then join the company. It is perhaps notably relevant that the most successful 36 contemporary fantasy epic, The Lord of the Rings, establishes a party and then breaks it within the first third of the text – establishing, instead, individual tales of valor for Frodo and Aragorn primarily, with smaller arcs dealing with the other characters of the “fellowship.” This fits snugly within the tradition established by narratives such as those of the Arthurian and

Charlemagne's knights. Despite acting within the context of Arthur’s Round Table, throughout the tales of Lancelot, Arthur, Gawain, and their brethren, the nearly exclusive focus is on one knight’s travels at any one point. Thus, we have “Gawain and the Green Knight” and Percival and Galahad’s independent but parallel pursuits of the grail. As Campbell points out,

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural

wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the

hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on

his fellow man. (30)

It is fruitful to point out that few Japanese myths fall within this frame. This is because, as

Campbell notes, Western heroes are “symbolic carriers of the destiny of Everyman” (36), a conception impossible in a tradition which favors multiple heroes. In addition, both Campbell and Propp point out the importance of a secret heritage for heroes – that they reach the age of departure quite frequently with no knowledge of their own mythic import. In Japanese myth, as was shown in the case of Genji, this is rarely the case. More frequently, it is because of some sublime gift of birth that Japanese heroes become so very powerful, and they are raised to that power and with the knowledge of it from an early age.

In many ways, this translates directly to J-RPGs; the most striking difference is that games within this genre often feature heroes who, unlike the characters of Japanese myth, are unaware of their origins in some meaningful way – a factor which will be discussed in more 37 detail in the sixth chapter. On the other hand, these videogames almost without exception include the concept of group over solitary hero. In the marketing blitz prior to the Japanese release of Final Fantasy IX, for example, character designs for the members of the party were closely guarded and carefully leaked – one or two each month – until the game was finally released. The single most visible example of the relationship between J-RPGs and the heroic tradition of The Hakkenden is in Shin Megumi Tensai: Digital Devil Saga, in which each character is marked with a symbol meant to reflect the powers and nature of the creature into which he or she can transform. These marks are not deliberate, but appear spontaneously after the characters develop “Atma” – a sort of spiritual power which enables them to take on the aspects of various creatures from world mythological traditions – primarily Hindu, Buddhism, and Confucianism. In the game’s narrative, this is the releasing of their primal urges and desires

– which are built upon their descent from demons.

Prior to the development of Atma, the Embryon tribe is considered the weakest of the tribes who subsist within the Junkyard, a bounded space defined by highly developed bases and strategic gunfights over territorial dominance. They are ruled over by the Karma Temple, which claims that the first tribe to successfully dominate all others will be allowed to ascend to Nirvana

– as presented in the text, a sort of wishing world where every inhabitant is blissfully happy and misfortune is unknown. The beginning of this system’s downfall is the introduction of Sera, a hacker who had been imprisoned by Angel – the not-so-angelic force behind the Karma Temple

– and who had broken free in order to help the denizens of the Junkyard cope with the changes wrought by Angel’s virus, which causes the devolution of humans to their demonic origins.

Digital Devil Saga2’s party consists of six characters: Serph, the voiceless leader of the

Embryon and the player’s interface with the world of DDS, Heat, the easily-angered demolitions

2 Hereafter DDS. 38 expert, Gale, the strategist of the tribe, Cielo, the dreadlock-wearing would-be islander, and

Argilla, the sharpshooter and conservative voice. Sera, who is potentially the most significant character in relation to the narrative, is not playable – but her interactions with the other characters, particularly Heat and Serph, are responsible for much of their development. After they receive their Atma, each of the characters develops a demonic form representative of one of the Aryan gods: Serph becomes Varna, the god who created the Three Worlds and master of the sea and seasons, Heat becomes Agni, god of the sun and the holy fire, Gale is Vayu, god of the wind, Cielo becomes Dyaus, god of the heavens and father of several other gods, and Argilla becomes Prithivi, goddess of earth and mother of the gods. Their appearances are monstrous, as are their actions in their demonic forms – the first act of the Embryon after transformation is to slaughter and devour the majority of the opposing Vanguard tribe.

In keeping with the tradition of the hero as the central character of a larger group, Serph’s

Varna is both quite powerful and quite vulnerable; despite having the most latitude in development, Varna is still an ice demon, rendering him particularly weak to enemies associated with fire and – for at least the first portions of the game – limiting him to attacks based on water or ice. As there are several elements in the world of DDS, Varna alone would be unable to defeat all enemies; it is only by adding Agni’s fire, Prithivi’s earth, and the elements of wind and thunder which are associated with Gale and Cielo’s avatars, respectively, that Serph can hope to defeat the various enemies he faces. Beyond gameplay, it is generally the other members of the

Embryon who develop the plans necessary to conquer the other tribes and ascend to Nirvana.

Gale, particularly, is responsible for most of the action which takes place proactively while Heat prompts many of the Embryon’s responses to their enemies’ actions. The narrative, as well, emphasizes early and heavily the importance of all members of the team, as the player is 39 confronted with Argilla’s moral dilemma concerning devouring her once-human enemies or going mad and losing what shreds of humanity she has attained.

DDS is not the journey of Serph or Sera, but the journey of the Embryon as group as they struggle to overcome the shifting power dynamics of a world thrown into chaos. Although he is directly controlled by the player, Serph takes little part in the dialogue and action of cutscenes, and his passivity serves to foreground the actions of the other characters. In the earliest action sequences of the game – a cut scene depicting the moment of transformation – the Embryon are waging a pitched battle against the Vanguard over a mysterious artifact which has fallen to earth between their territories. As the scene opens, Argilla is evaluating the enemy’s presence through her rifle’s scope and describing their strength to Serph, who sits next to her. Finished, she passes the scope to him and the player is shown the Vanguard warriors in partial cover across the battlefield. Argilla informs Serph that the Vanguard leader, Harley, is present, and Serph focuses the scope’s zoom on him. After some examination of the mysterious object, Serph signals the other Embryon to move out. Argilla stop Serph as he begins to move, however, warning him that “We can always find new recruits. A leader is irreplaceable.” Serph continues, and is attacked by the Vanguard. After a short action sequence, the mysterious object explodes and the fighters are all transformed by their Atma.

This short passage is indicative of the way in which most cutscenes in DDS work: the other Embryon have emotions, goals, and personalities, while Serph is a solely active character.

He never speaks – unless prompted on rare occasions to do so by the player – and his part in narrative exposition is generally an active, unemotional one. When the characters’ eyes begin to 40 gain color to show their growing emotions3, it is difficult to establish whether Serph’s grey-blue eyes have actually changed from grey at all. He is most clearly set against Heat, who in the first cutscene after the discovery of Sera explains that he wants to know more about her and that he’s

“sure [Serph does], too.” This creates an interesting triangulation within the game’s narrative, as other characters tell the player what Serph, the player’s avatar, wants and thinks. This is somewhat unique within the genre, as most J-RPGs have very vocal protagonists – much like

Tidus, who was discussed in the previous chapter. DDS, however, subsumes that protagonist to near-extinction, reaching a point where the other characters are necessary simply to establish a connection between the player and her avatar.

The larger implication of this transfer of agency from the player-character to those who surround Serph is that their stories become more important to the player in the absence of his.

This is intuitively obvious; the game features a strong narrative element, and it would be incomprehensible without some characterization and emotional development. Since, then, Serph does not offer this the player finds herself connecting more closely with Serph’s companions, reinforcing the party as collective hero and undermining any attempt to claim that Serph, like a

Western hero, sets out alone into the wilderness. Instead, DDS invokes strength through unity of purpose and the combination of various skills – each of which is attached to certain elements of personality which the individual characters possess. In many ways, the characters of DDS represent their demonic avatars far more than those avatars represent them: Heat’s rage and envy ignite the fires of his spirit, Agni, while Argilla’s hatred of needless killing vocalizes the will to foster life that her avatar is meant to represent. Gale, who develops the strongest sense of honor and dignity of the Embryon once his emotions wake, portrays the majesty of Vayu in his golden

3 Each of the characters experiences a sudden burst of emotion at some point during the game, activating his or her humanity. Previous to this, their eyes are all mute grey and have no pupils; afterwards, they shift to a color which coordinates with the character’s hair. 41 chariot. Cielo, who longs for peace within his family, expresses the fatherly – or, in this case, brotherly – sentiments of Dyaus. What, then, does Serph’s silence and inaction imply about

Varna, creator of the heavens? PART III DECONSTRUCTION 43

CHAPTER FIVE

THE POSTHUMAN WORLD

This chapter will return to a discussion of DDS, because while the topic covered here is clearly present in those games, it is most easily and fruitfully examined in the larger series from which

DDS springs, Shin Megumi Tensai1. Specifically, this chapter will address the postmodern world of simulation within DDS – one of the newer entries in the series – released in the United States in 2005. This title differs from the Final Fantasy RPGs primarily in its foregrounding of personal and social ethics over the more common themes of fellowship and the protection of the world. In DDS, both the characters and the other inhabitants of their world become infected with a strange virus which causes them to mutate into various monstrous creatures. This transformation – and the associated transition to a mindless animal – is only controllable through

1 A literal, word-for-world translation of this is “True Blessing Calamity,” which seems to imply that the calamities which begin these games are truly blessing – or that, at least, blessings are born from them. 44 the devouring of other humans-turned-monsters. Thus, every battle fought becomes an act of cannibalism that is necessary simply to survive.

To situate this chapter within the larger framework of Ryan’s remark2, this chapter will seek to complicate the notion of “good (me) versus evil (the Other)” by examining a game context in which the player’s characters embody the Other in the same way that their enemies do, and in which being victorious involves actions which seriously problematize any notion of

“good” which can be associated with the characters. In a larger context, this chapter will also examine the fundamentally postmodern nature of a game in which the world is – both inside and outside the context of the narrative – artificially constructed. It is a simulation of the fourth order, twice, to use Baudrillard’s methodology; the space of the game does not exist in our world, and the player comes to learn that it does not exist within the game’s world, either, but is a digital construction meant to hold the souls of a group of repressed humans.

One of the primary concerns of DDS as a text is how to differentiate Self and Other when one can embody both. The character most concerned with this is Argilla, whose refusal to accept the inescapable fact that, possessing an Atma, she must consume others in order to live and to maintain her humanity – which she has only recently discovered – nearly causes her to lose control of herself and enter – as is shown by many of the other, less focal characters in the game

– a state of subhuman rage in which her need to feed overpowers her self-control and her moral principles. For the other characters in DDS, this is considered a given; when the Embryon seek to forge an alliance with a rival tribe, Jinana – that tribe’s leader – tells them that it will only be done if they can fight their way through her tribe to her headquarters. Bluntly explaining her actions, she says, “My people are hungry.” Mick the Slug, another tribe leader, describes how

“sweet” his own men were “on the way down” his throat. Nor are the Embryon exempt from

2 See chapter 3. 45 this callous cannibalism; when Jinana is eventually killed – after going mad – Heat orders

Argilla to devour her, which she refuses to do. Serph, like Heat, has no difficulty in consuming his slain opponents; directly after his initial transformation, he is shown in his Varna aspect rending a dead enemy with his teeth.

This, quite frankly, does not seem to be within the context of “good” or “heroic” behavior; it is, in fact, exactly the crime committed by Grendel in Beowulf – and Grendel has the excuse of not having been human to begin with. The Embryon and other citizens of the

Junkyard, however, have no such escape from the ramifications of their actions. However, they do not seem to need one; only Argilla has any particular moral quandary about this development, and even she overcomes it after Jinana’s death. How, then, does this resolve within Ryan’s claim that all digital games of the adventure and role-playing genres fit within Proppian folkloric analysis? The argument could be made, perhaps, that Sigurd ate the flesh of his defeated enemy to gain the knowledge of the dragon – but he was told to do so by the dragon, and told that it would grant him great power, and even then did it only by accident. Heat, Serph, and the other

Embryon have no such excuse; for them, their enemies are merely food, and they eat a bit too much to claim it was an accident.

Even before the transformation, the world of DDS is grounded firmly in lawlessness – rival tribes battle for control of areas at the direction of the Karma Temple, a central disembodied authority, for the sake of salvation. The group which dominates all others will be allowed to ascend to “Nirvana,” a world without war and suffering. Unfortunately, no tribe has succeeded in doing this when the game begins, and it is during a desperate gunfight between two rival gangs – one of which is made up of the characters who will become the focus of the story – that the strange virus sets in. From this point on, it becomes the player’s duty to guide this 46 group, the Embryon, to dominance over the others and to finally discover the truth about the authority which has governed the lives of the characters for so long.

While not quite so obvious in its questions of simulation as games like Star Ocean III:

Till the End of Time and the .hack series, DDS still questions the fundamental reality of any world in the way that it presents its own. The world of DDS is, the player learns, an artificially constructed area meant to contain the memories of the survivors of a terrible accident – who are, simultaneously, kept from an awareness of this fact. The virus itself is the result of the interference of a hacker, who seeks to find a way to control the power represented by this world.

Also, the hacker implies that the situation has recurred several times already, with similar results3. The end result of this line of narrative is that the Embryon, controlled by the player, cease fighting for dominance of the Junkyard – the constructed site within which their digital personas reside, which is also called Purgatory by Angel, the hacker who releases the virus – and come to fight against the existence of the Junkyard as a construct. The conflict ceases to be Self vs. Other – if it ever was – and becomes Self vs. Reality; a postmodern attempt at redefining existence by reconstructing the technology through which it is initially produced.

The Junkyard and the Karma Temple both seem to represent a potential end result of posthumanism – a techno-despotic future in which control of technology equates to control of society. This is highlighted by Angel’s ability to overcome and subsume the Karma Temple, and her subsequent ability to control the discourse of salvation for the Junkyard. It is Angel who, using the Temple as her mouthpiece, commands the now-demonic humans of the world she calls

Purgatory to consume one another in an effort to establish complete dominance and thus to earn the right to enter Nirvana. However, lest it seem that Angel should be seen as overtaking what

3 Before comparing this unfavorably to the Matrix trilogy, it is important to note that the development of this game began before the release of that film, and that this game exists within a context of similar stories. 47 was originally a valid system, several of the characters within DDS point out that the new injunction does not vary significantly from the previous commands of the Karma Temple. The language has changed, the but the system remains the same: destroy or be destroyed, by the authority of technology.

Technology is pervasive in DDS; stores, transportation, and even religion are performed by network-based exchange, and the autocratic ruler of the Junkyard is a “Dissemination

Machine,” a gigantic computer decorated in the style of ancient Vedic scrolls. To purchase new equipment, the player directs Serph to insert his Tag Ring – a digital device containing identification and other data – into the shopping terminal, at which point the Karma Temple informs the player how much macca – the currency of the junkyard – she has earned in combat and by selling bits of aberrant code to the Temple. When the player wishes to save, another terminal – using the game’s language – is engaged using the same device, and that option is displayed along with the option to buy new mantras – which teach the characters skills and powers – and to recover any damage or transport to other visited areas. The least technologically advanced aspect of the game is combat, wherein most enemies use magic or physical attacks – sometimes including ancient weapons – and the player’s party, in their avatar forms, do the same. In their human forms, the party is able to access and use firearms, but these weapons are, compared to the other technology present – decidedly archaic, being roughly equivalent to modern weapons. They require ammunition, which must be purchased from the Karma Temple or looted from enemies (who do not use firearms, which makes this construction a bit illogical), and include sniper rifles, grenade launchers, handguns, and automatic rifles. This seems to indicate that the balance of technological power is entirely on the side of the Karma Temple, which chooses not to disseminate any information that might allow the tribes to challenge it and 48 its two laws: all must seek Nirvana, and all must pledge allegiance to a tribe which defeats their own.

In DDS, then, technology is used as means for controlling and oppressing the populace; it is, in fact, a means of hiding their very identities from them. When the game begins, the characters are emotionless and interchangeable; their mute grey eyes and flat patterns of speech along with their lack of concern for themselves, their fellows, and the other inhabitants of the

Junkyard all evoke the automaton which Adorno feared would be the end result of mass culture.

They have no memories of a time before the Junkyard, and no way of comprehending emotions or abstract concepts such as honor or mercy; instead, they understand obedience, logic, and strategy. Like machines, their first response to a given situation is to evaluate and develop a plan of action, and then to carry it out. They have no friendships, only a hierarchy, and, as Argilla points out in the opening sequence, they are essentially interchangeable.

The introduction of Sera marks the beginning of the failure of the technocratic system.

With the advent of emotion and the introduction of motive and personality, the citizens of the

Junkyard begin to question their lives and their blind obedience to the Karma Temple.

Eventually, as their memories return, they realize the manipulation and coercion that were an essential part of the system which kept them imprisoned and focused on one another rather than on the system which governed them. In the end, Sera leads Serph and the Embryon to attack the

Karma Temple itself and to force their way into Angel’s presence in order to demand the truth about Nirvana and about themselves. This is the final heroism of DDS: to destroy an oppressive system of government which seeks to turn one against another in order to hide its own manipulative control of technology, identity, and all other knowledge – and, in many ways, humanity. 49

To return to Ryan’s formulation, DDS highlights many of the ways in which Propp’s construction of narratives cannot account for J-RPGs. There is no central hero, the final battle is not Self vs. Other, and the goal of the party is neither domination nor, really, liberation – it is the utter destruction of a reality established within the text. When DDS ends, the player is unsure what the next step will be; it is the purpose of the sequel to examine what happens without the

Junkyard, when the Children of Purgatory are no longer caged by the Karma Temple’s compulsive technologies. Which, of course, points towards the other explicit critique within the text: that of posthumanism and cyberculture.

When Donna Haraway wrote in her “Cyborg Manifesto” that

The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this

time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of

Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. Perhaps that is

why I want to see if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in

the manic compulsion to name the Enemy. Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not

remember a cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection – they seem

to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The

main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of

militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. (517) she could essentially be writing about the citizens of the Junkyard before their transformation.

At least, they are comparable until she enters the realm of politics. Serph and his companions, prior to the reintroduction of emotions, do not dream of families, do not remember any of their history or culture, are not made of mud but rather of raw data, are not reverent, and represent a united front. They are also mindless, and their only goal is the one inscribed on them by the 50 system which has constructed them and which can, in a certain way, be linked to the “militarism and state capitalism” which Haraway mentions above – but more closely resembles the way in which those constructs might adapt to the introduction of Haraway’s cyborg. Most notably, however, they have not escaped the “manic compulsion to name the Enemy” as Haraway hoped.

Indeed, it is their sole law to conquer their arbitrary enemies, and as cyborgs they pursue that goal remorselessly – for cyborgs also know no pity and no mercy or empathy.

DDS, then, can be contextualized as a rebuff of the tradition of utopian, idyllic visions of cyberculture as the potential liberator of humanity, both from oppression and from the body. As digital demons, the Embryon have bodies which are real enough for them – they require food and rest, and the implication of the initial sequences seems to be that a lack of emotion – of reverence, family, and other concepts of the sort – points towards a decline of society rather than a development. Additionally, even when technology liberates us from our bodies and the oppression they must suffer, it provides a forum for new types and levels of oppression, as those who control and master a technology are able to dominate those who do not. And, finally, DDS seems to argue that when knowledge exists only as data and one entity or group controls that data, that power is able to designate any enemy it desires and to command and program the cyborg – whose weakness, in the end, is that her body is made of data, and data can be manipulated both more easily and more completely than flesh. 51

CHAPTER SIX

SCIENCE, MAGIC, AND THE POSTHUMAN HERO

In the final analytic chapter of this thesis, the goal will be to continue the examination of posthumanity and Self vs. Other on a smaller scale; having argued that the world itself in these games seems to indict the concepts of cyberculture and posthuman culture, it will now be argued that the relationship between hero and villain and even between hero and self serve to reaffirm that problematization at the level of the avatar. The text for this chapter is Final Fantasy II – or

IV in the Japanese sequence – and that game’s protagonist, Cecil, and its villain, Golbeze. Cecil begins the game a cyborg in the worst sense of Haraway’s definition (in that he truly “does not dream of community on the model of the organic family” (517) but has replaced that concept with loyalty to a liege): he is the commander of the “Red Wings,” a fleet of mechanized airships used by the king of Baron to capture the magical crystals that become a larger focus later in the game. His abilities as a Dark Knight are linked directly to his sword; he cannot function without it; his special power, the “Dragon Wave” or “Dragon Sword” (depending upon the translation), is 52 a sheet of dark energy that damages his opponents – released through his sword. He has no other magical abilities at this point in the game, and follows the orders of his leader above the impulses of his own heart. Before his transformation sequence, he has become a brooding man with no way of reconciling his role and his respect for the lives and humanity of others.

Although Haraway calls for the incorporation of machine and organism in her definition of a cyborg, I believe that Cecil’s sword can be made to fit. Aside from the airships and other forms of transportation, there is little evidence of industrial technology within the scope of Final

Fantasy IV – we know, as the player, that it exists – and is epitomized by Baron – but we see it far less often than we do “magic” – a supernatural effect created by the characters and monsters utilizing their “magic points.” One exception to this – a magical effect that is created without the expenditure of magic points – is the Dragon Sword ability of Cecil Harvey, the Dark Knight.

Through his sword, Cecil is able to release some of his hit points – the essence of his life – in the form of a powerful magical attack. My argument is that this necessary combination of man and sword to accomplish the Dragon Sword is cybernetic in nature.

Magic in Final Fantasy IV is a way of doing elemental damage, protecting allies, and healing damage done by enemies – things that can, in many cases, be accomplished as well by the use of potions (medicine) and magical items (wizards’ rods or totemic focuses). This argument hinges on these items, these pieces of magical technology, which allow a character to activate an effect not available to humans – magic as a form of technology. Because the game takes place in a fantasy setting which incorporates magic, and because that magic serves to provide advanced effects that are, in reality, accessible only through the use of complex machines – elemental attacks, explosions, transformations, transportations – I believe that it can be argued that magic is the equivalent to technology in these games. More specifically, those 53 items which create magical effects – the rods that allow their users to cast spells, for example – can be considered magical machines. In this way, Cecil’s sword becomes a machine: it allows him access to a magical effect that is not accessible by normal humans. Thus, it becomes a magical machine and his position as a Dark Knight is situated firmly on his dependence upon that sword.

Because Cecil cannot use “magic” as a Dark Knight – his special ability Dragon Sword does not fall within that category – his powers can be seen as particularly driven by his equipment. Without his sword, Cecil’s Dragon Sword is unusable – it becomes grayed out in the combat menu. It is only while holding one of the dark swords (Black, Dark, Hades, etc.) that

Cecil can fully utilize his potential. As a point of elaboration, The American Heritage

Dictionary defines a cyborg as “a human who has certain physiological processes aided or controlled by mechanical or electronic devices,” and in a world where most things

(transportation, war, health services, communication, etc.) rely upon magic instead of technology, it seems fair to append “aided or controlled by magical, mechanical, or electronic devices.” Thus, if Cecil’s sword acts as a magical device which aids certain physiological processes – his Dragon Sword, most notably – does that not make him a cyborg?

If Cecil (as Dark Knight) is a cyborg, several important avenues of exploration open in reference to the semiotic consequences of his actions. If this is true, Final Fantasy IV can be viewed as a metatext about post-humanity, where the visual representations of Cecil’s cyborg self reflect cultural (or at least artistic) values concerning the value and nature of post-human subjects. In addition, the choices and consequences of Cecil’s actions become resonant of the choices of posthuman cyborgs - Cecil’s final attitude towards his cybernetic nature reflects a cultural message about the relationship between humanity and post-humanity. Finally, Cecil’s 54 metamorphosis – the moment in the story when he ceases to be a cyborg - becomes a visual metaphor for the reclamation of humanity.

If an avatar is a “bundle of semiotic resources,” it follows that each of those resources has a meaning – a symbolic significance meant to serve as shorthand for character traits and motivations. In practice, this denotes a metaphorical function – one in which a literal (or visual) symbol is contextualized to represent a figurative (abstracted) meaning and where additional transference can translate certain qualities of one sign to another (Chandler 127-128). As Laurel has said, “the object of a dramatic representation is not character but action” – “the characters are there because they are required in order to represent the action, and not the other way around”

(570).

Cecil, the hero of Final Fantasy IV, presents two such bundles as well as a bridge between them; during the course of the game he transforms from one visual state to another.

Originally, he is a Dark Knight – a soldier of Baron and commander of the mechanized airship fleet called the Redwings; a role that allows him great physical strength (high combat damage) but no magic and a relatively low resistance to it. He also has no way (aside from the items available to all characters) of assisting his party; he cannot heal or protect them, or himself, and must be sheltered by other members of the group. Later, he becomes the Paladin – a white knight out of legend, whose powers include healing magic and the ability to protect wounded party members automatically. His costume changes not only in color but also in form; there is a drastic difference in the visual representation of these two character roles.

As can be assumed from his denotation as a “dark” knight, Cecil’s first form is heavily marked with blackness and shadows. His armor is black, covering his entire body, and accentuates his physicality by having no extraneous parts. His eyes and face are obstructed, 55 giving him the impression of an empty suit of armor – not unlike the character Death’s Hand in

Jade Empire. The visual representations of the Paladin, however, rely upon white tones – white, light grays, and hints of other pastels (most noticeably brown). His armor exposes his face and hands, as well as his long effeminate hair, and he wears a cape and tiara to promote a regal visage. The cape functions, as well, to mask his physicality and produce a more feminized form.

In both our culture and that of the game’s origin, white and black embody highly marked concepts of “good” and “evil,” “hero” and villain,” and “life” and “death,” respectively. This marked relationship is reinforced within the world of the game by the association of white with those magical effects which heal or protect characters and black with those effects which cause damage, death, and destruction. The spells “Life” and “Meteo,” the most powerful in their respective disciplines, embody this difference in a dimorphic way: one revives fallen (slain) party members, while the other is meant to operate as the ultimate doomsday attack – one so powerful that it takes the life of its first caster.

Another visual distinction between Cecil’s forms is the demonic nature of many of the visual elements of his costume as Dark Knight, including horns, exoskeletal structures, and a full helmet which covers his face entirely and leaves only glowing white shapes where his eyes should appear. In appearance, he is not unlike the later-exposed archvillain of the game, Golbeze

(who is actually Cecil’s half-brother). Golbeze, who has secretly been controlling the forces of

Baron since before the game’s start, is meant to represent the epitome of evil and self-centered totalitarianism; a fact that makes the similarities between his costume and Cecil’s not only important, but also ironic – the hero and the villain, at least at the outset, lack any visible differentiation. Their in-battle representations are almost identical; the only notable difference is

Golbeze’s cape and the gold trim on his armor. 56

As a paladin, Cecil’s armor exposes more (that is to say some) of his flesh – most noticeably his face. His costume contrasts directly with Golbeze’s (red and white as opposites of blue and black), and the lack of a helm to mask his face further sets him off from his own previous guise. These elements combine to produce the impression (deservedly) that Cecil has become more heroic, a fact which coincides with a change in his personal ideologies and relationship to the dominant forces of his world. Just as the Dark Knight was associated with the king of Baron, the Paladin is the legendary hero of the village of Mysidia, a land ruled by mystics and wise men who seek to unite their world in opposition of the policies of Cecil’s late employer.

During the course of his travels, Cecil comes to realize the wrongness of his posthuman identity and of his role in building up the imperial power of Baron. He begins to question his own complicity in the war brought about by Baron’s greed and aligns himself with those who side against that kingdom. It is at this time that Cecil begins to realize that he cannot defeat his former masters using their own methods – his power as a Dark Knight is useless against the embodiment of evil that is Golbeze. Thus it becomes necessary for him to overcome the darkness he keeps within himself before he can overcome the darkness that has infested the world outside. To do this, he is forced to undergo a ritualized ordeal which involves facing – literally – his own dark nature.

He is sent to Mt. Ordeal, which is populated by creatures that his Dragon Wave is useless against, and must scale it with the help of his party in order to reach the chamber atop it that contains the essence which will eventually transform him. After a series of difficult battles – including a battle against a boss monster that cannot be significantly damaged by Cecil’s attacks

– the mountain is scaled and the party enters the chamber of mirrors that will convert Cecil’s 57 abilities to those of the Paladin. Inside, the voice of Cecil’s father welcomes him and grants him the “Legendary Sword,” the Paladin’s weapon. Immediately afterward, Cecil transforms in a flash of light and becomes the Paladin – but his reflection remains that of the Dark Knight. The reflection steps down from the mirror and engages Cecil in battle, which can only be won by refusing to attack. Cecil must endure the damage that he has done to himself as the Dark Knight before he can fully become the Paladin.

This sequence begins as a sword descends from above the characters to rest in Cecil’s hand – a visual representation of its being “passed down” from his father – and Cecil is surrounded by white (holy) light. He is visually separated from his party – they stand, together, at the entrance to the chamber and watch as he undergoes this rite of passage. Having now entered the liminal stage, Cecil’s visual transformation follows shortly as the light converges on

Cecil and, after a flash of light, he is secure in his new form. One thing, however, has not changed: his reflection. Cecil’s reflected self – still a Dark Knight – steps out of the mirror and challenges him. His party takes a step forward to assist, but Cecil reinforces his liminal status by insisting that this battle is his, alone. The battle itself is both interesting and layered. On the surface, Cecil is fighting his own reflection – a reference to the mirror stage? – in a battle to determine whether it is better to be the Dark Knight (post-human) or the Paladin (human).

However, the only way to emerge victorious as the Paladin is to choose not to fight – to allow the

Dark Knight to cause as much damage as he wishes, after which he will cease to exist. This seems to indicate that, while the past can both shape and harm us, it is not productive to expend too much energy in an attempt to change what has already been done. Moving on and becoming more aware of oneself as a part of the community is the lesson of the Paladin: serve others, and put one’s past behind oneself. The player is given precious little guidance through this process; 58 only one cryptic phrase to puzzle out the nature of the challenge facing Cecil. It is, as Joseph

Campbell points out, a mystical journey without aid or spiritual guidance:

The psychological dangers through which earlier generations were guided by the

symbols and spiritual exercises of their mythological and religious inheritance, we

today must face alone, or, at best, with only tentative, impromptu, and not often

very effective guidance. This is our problem as modern, “enlightened”

individuals, for whom all gods and devils have been rationalized out of existence.

Nevertheless, in the multitude of myths and legends that have been preserved to

us, or collected from the ends of the earth, we may yet see delineated something

of our still human course. To hear and profit, however, one may have to submit

somehow to purgation and surrender. (104-105)

“If Hell is the wasteland,” Campbell explains, “then purgatory would be the journey where you leave the place of pain. You are still in pain, but you’re in quest with a sense of possible realization” (Osbon 152).

As a Paladin, Cecil remains strongest when equipped with a sword – but his magical abilities are no longer linked to it. He loses the ability to use Dragon Wave and gains “White” support magic (the ability to heal, among other things) and is, in general, a more robust and powerful character. His armor is now white, and features a cape and a circlet – no longer any helmet – that shows both his long hair and his face. His role within the party is no longer that of the solitary warrior, but instead he has become part of the group – he no longer has to be looked after by the rest of the characters, but can now look after not only himself, but the others as well.

As his magic is no longer linked explicitly to his equipment, Cecil’s status as cyborg seems to have been stripped away. His visual and ritual rejections of that role – which seems to 59 be directly associated, as Haraway would have it, with postmodern consciousness – serve to implicate the player in his transition back to a stable member of the traditional social order. And, because the visual representations alter in a way that marks the increased status and heroism of his new form, it can be said that Cecil – and thus Final Fantasy IV – explicitly links postmodernism (through the transference of meanings from colors and formal elements in costume) with those forces which seek to destroy social order in order to create a “New World.”

Cecil’s final position on his cybernetic nature seems to be one of distance and rejection, which implies that the game’s metatext is critical of the destructive nature of postmodern thought

– whether that means that it does, in the end, reinforce the dominant ideologies of our culture or whether it represents a subcultural call for social unity. His role as the Paladin seems to directly inscribe the values of tradition, family, and social awareness that Haraway claims the cyborg will resist – eventually there is an opportunity for Cecil to revisit Baron Castle, where he meets the spirit of the dead king he once served, and in that moment he is not only approved of but granted additional power to help him in his attempt to stop those who would remake the world in their own image.

Haraway’s belief is that the cyborg will serve a libratory function by destroying the fabrics of community and tradition that hold us in a system of oppression. A cyborg, she claims, has no father and no mother and knows no law of men (517). When we meet Cecil, we have no idea who his family might be – the King of Baron treats him much like a son, but it is clear that their relationship is based on loyalty, not familial ties. His sword is, in fact, a visual representation of that link – a gift directly from the hands of his king and represents not only that feudal link but also the doctrine of might as arbiter of right that is embodied in that land’s policies. Moreover, it attaches him to the mechanization of the airship fleet called the Red 60

Wings – of which he is the commander before he begins to doubt the motives of his king. It signifies in various ways the link between Cecil and Baron – a link that is broken before Cecil becomes the Paladin.

The sword of the Paladin, by contrast, is a gift from Cecil’s father – handed down both literally and figuratively, as it descends from the top of the screen to rest in his outstretched hand. During his transformation, the light that surrounds Cecil refers to him as its “son.” Later, this connection is more clearly resolved and Cecil’s status as Paladin and defender of others is linked to a family tradition. Cecil’s father, a powerful warrior sent from the moon to protect the

Earth, passes his powers and his mantle to his son along with his sword. It contrasts directly with Haraway’s definition of the cyborg as one who does not dream of family – the power of the

Paladin is a direct link to Cecil’s father, and it is soon afterward that we learn he has a brother.

Instead, the Paladin is one who defends others – one who belongs to the community and serves it instead of casting it aside for a “New World.” That role falls to the post-human character: the villain.

It is interesting that Haraway discusses cyborgs as “illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism” (517). In Cecil’s case as the Dark

Knight, this is essentially correct. But when Haraway points out that these cyborgs are “often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins” because “their fathers, after all, are inessential” (ibid), she draws the line between Dark Knight and Paladin: Cecil is unfaithful to the father of his cyborg state – the king of Baron – but aligns himself closely with his human father – the source of his powers as a Paladin. The argument that seems to be embodied, then, in Final Fantasy II, is that becoming post-human requires too great a sacrifice – the total destruction of the social

“world” – and that choosing to return to humanity is the only truly heroic course of action. This 61 rejection of postmodern thought seems to directly clash with the theories of writers like Haraway and Murray, who believe that “the digital medium is the appropriate locus for enacting and exploring the contests and puzzles of the new global community and the postmodern inner life”

(Muller 3).

One of the difficulties of video game theory is the constant pressure to use psychoanalysis to deconstruct the relationship between player and avatar; as Mia Consalvo points out, “there has been little, if any, research that systematically explores how gamers themselves think about narrative, and more important, how gamers see games as part of their larger lives or menu of media interests” (323) – in the case of RPG games, writers like Filiciak argue that “identification is replaced by introjection – the subject is projected inward into an

‘other’” (91). He continues to argue that, while the player and the avatar are no longer on opposite “sides” of the mirror, there is not much effort required to confuse Self and Other.

While Filiciak is dealing specifically with massively multiplayer online role-playing games, the concept does transfer: we identify with the characters we manipulate on the screen. In the case of Cecil, then, our interaction automatically reinforces the cultural values of family and humanity. To surmount this obstacle in the game, the player must see and understand the relationship between the Paladin and the Dark Knight – he or she must not only realize the solution but implement it. In a game built around combat and conquest, the player must choose not to attack. 62

PART IV REMEDIATION 63

CHAPTER SEVEN

“ACTION” ADVENTURES AND “REAL-TIME” COMBAT

There is a growing trend in RPGs towards the removal of as many forms of mediation between the player and the combat scenario as possible – in the past, these games have been characterized by menu-based and often turn-based combat, drawing out and making battles a more mechanical experience. Traditionally, these games feature a world map on which the player roams using the party’s current “leader” as an icon until a subroutine activates a “random encounter” – sometimes more or less staged by the designers of the game. At this point, there is typically a major transition of some form between the world map and the “battle screen,” a more cinematic view – often with rotating and manipulable cameras – which presents the active party and the monsters against which they are ranged. With the advent of games such as Legend of Mana,

Secret of Mana, Parasite Eve, Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, and Final

Fantasy XII, however, the move has been towards a more seamless integration of battle within the world of the RPG itself. Instead of appearing at random – and often inconvenient times – to bedevil the players, monsters are animated on the global map and must be interacted with on that 64 screen – no transitions are needed, for the most part, to move the party from “exploration” to

“battle” mode. In addition, the entire active party appears on the map and, in Final Fantasy XII, the characters not directly controlled by the player (those other than the current leader) are often given AI scripts to allow them to take independent action. Purely in the realm of gameplay, this has great significance for the genre: if players can avoid combat at inopportune times, it becomes less difficult to survive in the often deadly worlds of RPGs. On the other hand, this shift in interface tends to push a single character more directly into alignment with the player – the dynamic offered by the group is problematized by their ability to take action independent of the player’s commands. In fact, this sometimes pits the player against those characters, as they take actions which involve the party in battles that the player wished to avoid. While these games do offer the player options to tweak the AI of other party members and to directly control them through summoned menus, the removal of a turn-based system of combat makes the gameplay demanding enough that it is often difficult to do so without sacrificing the actions of the party leader – who, without the player, simply stands and waits.

For fans of traditional action-adventure games such as The Legend of Zelda and Chaos

Legion, this transition is generally a welcome relief. Because the characters are not controlled through menus, the flow of the gameplay during battle begins to more closely resemble these titles. The party is hypermediated by the introduction of additional scripts and variables, but simultaneously the battle system itself is made to seem more transparent and immersive – a perfect example of what Bolter and Grusin argue is the goal of all remediation. Reverse- engineering the goals of the producers in this way, it seems to be the case that an attempt is being made to make more interactive the portions of the game which serve to link – at least in this 65 genre – the highly charged non-ergodic (or off-line) portions of the text. Arguably, however, this sacrifices some of the defining characteristics of the J-RPG.

As has been mentioned previously, one of the greatest distinctions between the Japanese and Western traditions in role-playing has been the relative focus, respectively, on the party and the hero. By adjusting the gameplay to function more dynamically, however, Japanese developers risk collapsing that distinction into meaninglessness. In the prerelease demo for

Final Fantasy XII, for example, the player is allowed to experience two modes of gameplay via interactions with two parties constructed from players who will be available in the final release.

In each case, the player controls a character capable of summoning gigantic “espers” into combat

– an ability not shared with the other four members of the two parties. In addition, summoning these espers causes them to replace the two indirectly controlled party members with a single – still indirectly controlled – magical creature. At all times during the demo the party leader – the summoner – is playable and is the character with which the player is – functionally – most closely tied. The gameplay of this demo implies that the final product will serve to complicate in multiple ways the relationship between the player and the party, both by functionally highlighting a single character – controlled by the player – with superior and overwhelming powers and by – in a more general sense – presenting the game’s gameplay as a more important element than its master narrative.

To begin, then, the demo encourages the player – through gameplay, which is the primary form of interaction with the text – to identify with either Ashe or Vaan as the text’s primary character as they take the role of party leader for each of the segments. Basch, Penelo, Fran, and

Balthier are almost nonexistent in their relative inability to be controlled and their presence behind and following the character the player controls directly. When the leader is not 66 stationary, they tend to fall a bit behind and sometimes even vanish from the screen – a notable difference from earlier games, in which the characters and “monsters” are arrayed in parallel lines against one another. In battle, the two supporting characters circle the selected enemy, choosing appropriate skills from their own pool of powers. Should the player’s character – or either of the others – receive two much damage, one of the support characters will switch to using healing abilities to recover the character’s strength. These independent actions serve to distance the player from the other two characters in each party, placing the focus firmly on the leader in each case and – in the demo, at least – implying that those two characters are the

“heroes” who will be controlling the action in the game’s narrative, with a little help and support from their friends. As noted above, this threatens to collapse one of the larger distinctions between Japanese and Western RPGs by subtly shifting from a party to a single hero and his or her (depending on which character the player controls) followers. Without a context for this construction, meaning without examples of the narrative at work in the text, it is impossible to tell whether this shift will carry over into the release version of this title.

Which brings us to the second of the implications of this particular text: the prioritizing of the gameplay over the narrative. As a complex remediation of both narratives and games, videogames are in many ways characterized by the ways in which they resolve these two opposing forces; the balance of power between narrativity and interaction serve, in many ways, to establish genre and tend to drag along other design elements as they go. It is virtually impossible, by way of example, to create a game with a compelling master narrative that also allows the player complete freedom to pursue various objectives in any order. In order to establish a narrative arc, it is necessary to be able to predict when a player will reach a certain point and what will have happened previously. In short, the interaction must be limited to those 67 elements which do not scramble the larger predefined narrative of the text. Conversely, if the goal is to create a game with nearly unlimited freedom for players to choose their own path and even potentially to choose the side designated as “evil,” it becomes nearly impossible to establish a narrative structure that can be both predefined and flexible enough to allow for the great freedom of choice given to the player. Thus, the narrative is heavily downplayed if not removed as a separate entity altogether. The balance is between immersion in the case of interactivity and engagement in the case of narrative.

In the demo for Final Fantasy XII (FFXII), then, the essential absence of any narrative elements combined with the heightened levels of immersion in the combat system of the game seem to imply that the balance of power has shifted towards favoring interaction, although perhaps not wholly; the demo disc does contain two trailers for the game which seem to complicate this view by presenting the rich and engaging narrative elements which are expected of this series. The gameplay, however, is entirely isolated from these trailers and is meant to stand alone in an effort to foreshadow the eventual release of the game. Because of this, the implied emphasis of immersion could conceivably carry over into the final product – and, if it does not, the developers will need to change the discourse of the game experience, as this too highlights an apparent emphasis on interaction over narrativity.

The designation of each demo scenario as a “level” carries with it the connotations of such as presented in the tradition of action-adventure and first-person shooter videogames.

Namely, that each is an encapsulated experience playable – in a narrative sense – independent of the others. “Levels” are a holdover from games in the arcade context, where the point of the game is to rack up points before running out of lives. They seem out of place in a narratively- driven game in which one has not, thus far, been able to replay a given segment if the results are 68 unsatisfactory. Instead, the general mechanic for games in this genre has been the “save point,” a designated place or object which allows the player to store her progress thus far in order to restart there should she be defeated. Traditionally, games within this genre have not had clear cut demarcations of progress which designate themselves using game terminology – there have been no level-based J-RPGs thus far, even among the others listed as examples of this trend in

Japanese videogames the closest example is Parasite Eve, which separated its story into chapters which were ostensibly based on the passage of time within the gameworld. More importantly, the presence of save points in the vast majority of games and the implementation of save features in all examples of the genre would undermine a level-based system by allowing the player to restart during a level rather than at its beginning.

It may, perhaps, have been more fruitful to examine a completed game for this discussion, but FFXII was selected to emphasize the developmental nature of this trend. As the

Final Fantasy series continues to be one of – if not the – most popular visions of the J-RPG genre, it seemed fruitful to direct attention to the fact that even this cultural monolith – which has, in the past, never deviated from its menu-based action sequences in one of its main line products1 – has begun to shift its weight towards interactivity. That the oldest and most venerated franchise within the genre has also begun to transition in this directions seems to imply that, rather than an isolated incident, this shift may point towards one future of the J-RPG genre.

This is not to say that games produced with the traditional roles and relationship between gameplay and narrativity will cease to be produced, but rather that the “new” frontiers for this genre, which nears its twentieth year2, are to be found outside of the established tradition.

1 There have been examples of experimentation outside of the line of numbered releases, most notably in Final Fantasy: Tactics, a turn-based strategy RPG, and Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, a game developed off-platform of the other titles and designed to be a multiplayer experience in the vein of Gauntlet. 2 Final Fantasy, the progenitor of the franchise, was released to Japanese audiences in 1987. 69

That said, the future direction of these games has become unclear. Any increase in the interactivity and immersion of the videogames will have an impact on the narrative aspects, and the first casualty of the new combat systems seems to be the party. How this will affect and be affected by the presence of a strong (in terms of its domination of the characters’ and thus player’s actions) master narrative is still to be seen – if Kingdom Hearts, another Japanese

“action RPG” produced by the studio which produces Final Fantasy, is any example, it should have little effect at all on the narrative. The characters, however, will move towards two poles clearly visible in Western traditions: the hero and the followers. This is somewhat compromised by the fact that Kingdom Hearts (KH) was co-produced by the American media giant Disney’s videogame imprint, Disney Interactive, and was based heavily on the existing mythologies and characters of the Disney universe. To be more explicit, the pitch for KH was that players would control a decidedly Final Fantasy-inspired protagonist as he journeyed through the various worlds of the Disney kingdom. The other game produced within this still ambiguous genre – since the advent of technology which allowed the introduction of master narratives to these games – which has had a party system is The Bouncer; all other entries have, for one reason or another, chosen to focus on a single protagonist without active support and function, essentially, as action-adventure games with a slightly more emphasized plot. The Bouncer, on the other hand, features three characters without a specific focus. Players are encouraged – and, in fact, forced – by the game’s mechanics to alternate their primary character from episode to episode, as characters do not earn experience – and thus do not become stronger – unless they are actively played. In addition, each character is given an independent story which is told to the player between episodes based upon which character was selected – thus, to gain access to the entire narrative, the player must unlock the different story elements of each character by playing them 70 in turn. In addition, there are more story nodes than episodes, insuring that a player who wishes to see the entirety of the master narrative will be forced to replay the game in order to unlock scenes that she could not reach on the first play-through.

The Bouncer is a good frame for the conclusion of this discussion; it highlights the ways in which an active, immersive gameplay experience can be incorporated into the traditional narrative structure of J-RPGs. It is not without its flaws; most notably in the AI of the support characters, but also in the necessity for replay to see the entire narrative and in the “choose your hero” methodology which is inherent in its implementation of the three protagonists. The game’s heroic focus shifts, then, from a solidified group of adventurers built around one or two narratively central characters to a trio of independent heroes forced to work together in order to save a kidnapped friend. However, it can be argued that as a work-in-progress this genre shows marked potential in reclaiming the industry dominance which has recently been overtaken by first-person shooters. By allowing a more immersive battle experience but maintaining the stories which drew in and solidified the genre’s fan base, these games seem to point towards a more interactive experience which does not sacrifice or relativize notions of heroism in order to allow the player that immersion. In addition, the inherent narrativity of these games seems to still point towards a notion of unity over individualism, the trait which originally defined the genre. 71

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE DEATH OF STORY

Most players of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games (MMOs) do not, initially, consider the implications of the claim that these games are “epic adventures.” The advertisement is so common in digital gaming that it has, in many ways, lost all currency. This is unfortunate, as the developers of these games not only claim epic status for their creations but also seem to be attempting to design their games in that light; failing to realize something that most of the gaming community has accepted in stride: the fact that a persistent online gaming world cannot act as a linear narrative. By attempting to incorporate the master narratives used in console

RPGs, the developers of MMOs have actually further problematized their products. As has mentioned before, games must function based upon a balance of power between interactivity and narrative structure – if one is dominant, the other will, by necessity, recede. In a persistent world with highly customizable characters and an inability to permanently affect the world – only to 72 interact with it as it is – there is little or no potential for narrative structure on the order required for the implementation of an RPG, particularly a J-RPG.

In addition to developing this point, this chapter will speculate on the future of online gaming as it works around this narrative barrier. Essentially, these games are attempting to remediate RPGs – of both the Western and Japanese varieties – by combining them with elements of Multiple User Dungeons (MUDs); they seek to implement the heroic journey in a context in which every character is a hero – a situation which, itself, speaks to the contradiction inherent in such a project. The argument can be made, of course, that these systems have been effectively implemented. The games run smoothly, and they seem to generate enough usage to warrant not only their survival but also to generate a steady increase in the number of available titles. However, when the player has completed the available “quest” events and reached the maximum allowed level for her character, there remains no further potential for development as a hero. Essentially, the player can create another character and restart the game, or the player can continue with the same character without any remaining goal, or the player can move on to another MMO. While it is possible for a player to complete the “story” elements of a given game, she is not allowed to finish the game. That is impossible; the game is persistent and eternal, and cannot be “beaten.”

This highlights the first minimal requirement of story that persistent online games cannot fulfill: a distinct beginning and end. To paraphrase Gerald Prince, a narrative must contain, at the least, two states bridged by an action1. There must be a point of origin, a point of completion, and a meaningful action that transforms the former into the latter. The Odyssey would not have been a story had Odysseus never reached his home; the story of that epic is, essentially, that of a man who undergoes extraordinary challenges in order to get from point A to

1See, particularly, the chapter “The Minimal Story” in Prince's A Grammar of Stories. 73 point B. In an MMO, however, this would be impossible. The concept of a persistent gameworld necessitates that any player be able to start at any given moment. Thus, every state must be equivalent to the starting state. An effective example would be entering a movie theater where, at any given moment, the film must be able to be started for new customers, allowed to keep running for those who were already there, and rewound after those who had already finished were done watching it. Or, to quote Umberto Eco, these games exist “in an imaginary universe in which, as opposed to ours, causal chains are not open (A provokes B, B provokes C,

C provokes D, and so on, ad infinitum), but closed (A provokes B, B provokes C, C provokes D,

D provokes A)” (873). There is no escape from this closed moment; defeated monsters always reappear to threaten characters again and the “villains” of individual quests are always ready for the next batch of would-be heroes.

Nor can an online RPG be designed in which this is not the case; the multiplicity of protagonists demands that there be a steady supply of low-grade antagonism against which they can try their mettle. In other words, as long as another character will require that experience in order to achieve the next level, it must be available to her. Regardless of the number of times it has occurred and the outcomes of those occurrences. This leads us to the next requirement

MMOs cannot fulfill: meaningful conflict. J. Hillis Miller writes that “the minimal personages necessary for a narrative are three: a protagonist, an antagonist, and a witness who learns.

Sometimes the protagonist, the antagonist, or the reader may be the witness” (75). What is essential, however, is that there be two conflicting forces that define themselves against one another to create a single story. In The Odyssey, we have Odysseus striving to return to his home against the wrath of Poseidon, whom he has offended. The story is defined not by Odysseus's desire or by the desire of Poseidon to thwart the hero, but by the interaction of those two desires 74 and the forms in which that conflict manifests itself. Thus we know, as readers, that The

Odyssey is closing when Poseidon ceases to act as Odysseus's foil; without that opposition, there is no reason for the heroic to fail.

Returning to the online gameworld, however, it is clear that this sort of opposition would be impossible. It would be ludicrous to assume that the developers could create an antagonist for each and every player who created a character, and if a single, all-encompassing antagonist were created when the world was generated – as in the online version of the game Diablo - the entire game would have to end when that foe was defeated. Thus, opposition of the scale required to shape a narrative cannot be expected from a persistent online game world. And, combining this lack of meaningful opposition with the impossibility of linear narrative movement, it seems safe to say that MMOs cannot act in an “epic” fashion. They cannot tell the tale of one lone hero overcoming all obstacles to reach his destination because they have a multiplicity of heroes who have no destination and no particular opposition to their getting where they want to go. If this is the case, it becomes a little more difficult to map out a future for online role-playing. It is not the stories that are developed for MMOs, but the worlds. And that is the future towards which these games are pointed: the creation of an entirely virtual world designed, built, and maintained by the players. Interaction between characters and the only permanent and changeable feature in their game world – the environment itself – will result in games where the goal is not to build up a character, but to build up a nation.

The Greeks, who have given so much to literary theory, proposed a notion of mundane and sacred time. What this means is that there is always action in the world, but there are some moments that possess such brilliance and clarity that they seem to belong to another order of events. These moments are those that, when strung together, create the narrative of the epic or 75 any other tale. We, as readers, do not see every moment between Odysseus’s departure from

Troy and his reunion with his family, but instead are offered glossed passages that relate a condensed summary of those portions of his travel that were mundane and uneventful. So, too, could online game worlds exist.

It is not necessary that every moment of play time in a game be gratifying of itself. In fact, by establishing an even keel of the fantastic, developers undermine the value of even the extraordinary. Why should gamers be impressed by the battles they’ve fought, when all they do is fight battles? Even Odysseus had the lotus-eaters, whose tranquil ways made clear his own burning passion. We, as individuals – and particularly Americans, define ourselves by dichotomy. We are this, but not that. What fun would there be in a world without variety of experience?

To this end, it seems productive to propose that while no persistent online game could emulate The Odyssey, nearly any game world could become like heroic Greece. Characters could serve within the kingdoms and empires as heroes or artisans, individuals noble or villainous, and by their interactions with one another rewrite the mythology of the heroic age.

Imagine the Coliseum packed with watchers and competitors, all wanting to see which is the strongest hero in the world. Imagine individuals who might travel from one end of the world to the other, seeing and experiencing things that others might never find. In short, imagine players fashioning those sacred moments from the mundane and creating stories of their own.

To some extent, the groundwork has begun. Shadowbane introduced the idea of creating cities and nations, but the economy of their virtual world was still based solely on the destruction of randomly generated monsters. Players who wanted to maintain homes or cities were forced to farm – to perpetuate a loop of fighting, looting, and selling – in order to support their structures 76 and pay the wages of their workers. Star Wars Galaxies added mining and farming as well as creating an economy in which musicians, artisans, and medical professionals could all prosper without actually taking part in combat, but it lacks the possibility of creating real cities. The primary mode of transportation on planets – the shuttle – only flies between predefined non- player character cities.

What these games lack is a meaningful implementation of sociological or economic models that might allow for the creation of a culture within the game that is not dependent or even related to any culture outside the game. It is unlikely that it will ever be the case that players will want to play through every mundane aspect of a character's daily life, but the RPG tradition has established that “adventures” are only possible and meaningful when placed alongside the down time that is played out between them. Role-playing is the creation of meaningful stories, as a group, and given an opportunity to define not only their own groups but also their own stories, it seems possible that players could transform online games into online cultures. 77

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APPENDIX A

TEXTS EXAMINED

Activision, Inc. Alundra 2. Los Angeles: 2000.

Atlus U.S.A. Disgaea: Hour of Darkness. Irvine, CA: 2003.

---. Magna Carta: Tears of Blood. Irvine, CA: 2005.

---. Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga. Irvine, CA: 2004.

---. Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne. Irvine, CA: 2004.

---. Stella Deus: The Gate of Eternity. Irvine, CA: 2005.

Bandai America Inc. .hack//INFECTION. Cypress, CA: 2001.

---. .hack//MUTATION. Cypress, CA: 2001.

Enix America Inc. Grandia Xtreme. Seattle: 2002.

LucasArts. Star Wars Galaxies San Rafael, CA: 2003.

---. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. San Rafael, CA: 2003. 83

Microsoft Corp. Fable. Redmond, WA: 2004. ---. Jade Empire. Redmond, WA: 2005.

Namco Hometek Inc. Xenosaga Episode 1: Der Wille zur Macht. San Jose: 2001.

---. Xenosaga Episode 2: Jenseits von Gut und Böse. San Jose: 2001.

Namco LTD. Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean. San Jose: 2003.

---. Tales of Symphonia. San Jose: 2003.

Nintendo of America Inc. Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles. Redmond, WA: 2003.

NIS America, Inc. Phantom Brave. Anaheim, CA: 2004.

SEGA of America, Inc. Shining Tears. San Francisco: 2004.

SEGA of America Dreamcast, Inc. Grandia II. San Francisco: 2000.

Sony Computer Entertainment America. Okage: Shadow King. Foster City, CA: 2001.

---. Final Fantasy VII. Foster City, CA: 1997.

---. Final Fantasy Tactics. Foster City, CA: 2001.

---. Legend of Dragoon. Foster City, CA: 2000.

Square Electronic Arts L.L.C. Chrono Cross. Costa Mesa, CA: 2000.

---. The Bouncer. Los Angeles: 2000.

---. Final Fantasy X. Los Angeles: 2001.

---. Kingdom Hearts. Los Angeles: 2002.

---. Legend of Mana. Los Angeles: 2000. 84

Square Enix Co., Ltd. Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King. Los Angeles: 2005.

---. Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. Culver City, CA: 2005.

---. Final Fantasy XII: Demo Disc. Los Angeles: 2005.

---. Radiata Stories. Los Angeles: 2005.

Square Enix, Inc. Final Fantasy IX. Los Angeles, CA: 2000.

Square Enix U.S.A., Inc. Final Fantasy VIII. Los Angeles: 1999.

---. Final Fantasy X-2. Los Angeles: 2003.

---. Final Fantasy Chronicles. Los Angeles: 2000.

---. Final Fantasy Origins. Los Angeles: 2003.

---. Parasite Eve. Los Angeles: 1998.

---. Star Ocean: Till the End of Time. Los Angeles: 2003.

---. Xenosaga. Los Angeles: 1998.

SquareSoft, Ltd. Secret of Mana. Los Angeles: 1993.