I don’t like video games. I like to read, a lot, and I like to think about what I’m reading. I think, in theory, there are a lot of people like me out there, people who would jump to pay good money for Analogue: A Hate Story if they realized what it was. But it’s a type of work that slips outside the usual categories of book and game, so getting people to realize that it’s something they should be looking for should be hard. I’ll do my best.

[Note: This review contains no spoilers, but figuring out what exactly is going on when you start up Analogue is a bit of a fun challenge in itself so if you want to play the free demo first you should go ahead and do that.]

Christine Love ought to be a familiar name in the world of interactive fiction, OEL visual novels, and really just indie gaming generally, but I have a feeling that she does not have the fame that she ought to have, because she puts a lot of time into each work and it is an unfortunate fact that this is an age of tweets rushing by us at fifty a second. In Love’s first story-game, Digital, a delicious sci-fi romance unfolds itself as you gain access to hidden nooks of the 1980s BBS world. It was noticed by bloggers writing for The Economist and The A.V. Club. Her next work, entitled “Don’t take it personally, babe, it just ain’t your story”, was picked up by The Daily Telegraph but it suffered a bit for having been written entirely within the month of March 2010.

Analogue is much closer to Digital in spirit than “Don’t take…”, but in fact when you launch the game you discover the format is completely unique. Digital was revolutionary in its own way, but the author kind of played a trick on her readers with that game. Enticed by the promise of a BBS world adventure, something with puzzle game elements like Uplink, typical readers don’t realize that most enjoyable part of the work is not playing the game but reading its story until they’ve been swept up in the narrative.

With Analogue there is no such deception, which makes it a bitter pill for gamers. You’re dispatched to an abandoned spaceship, break your way into their computers, and… suddenly you’re presented with a database of diary entries left by some kind of medieval Korean civilization. And that’s it, that’s all the game you’re going to get. What?? How do I click out of this?! Who do I shoot? It perhaps lands somewhere in the accepted range of interactive fiction, but in this case the fiction is its own, segregated body stuck inside the interaction.

Someone who is told Analogue is like an e-book will be similarly puzzled, but in a slowly delightful way. For you don’t have very much to read at the start. You have to ask the computer to tell you more, and the computer is not totally cooperative. Why not? That’s what you have to find out.

No, what you’ve stumbled into is magical and exciting at the same time: to the extent that this interactive fiction is a game, it is a game about sitting in a library managed by unreliable librarians. An unreliable narrator is someone who can’t be trusted to tell the story properly because of other interests in their head that compete with the truth. The use of this distrust to make a novel better was perfected about 60 years ago, and I would argue that nobody has really radically evolved that model before this game. Here, we introduce the concept of the unreliable librarian, someone whose job it is to simply supply you with a completed text, but for some reason is holding it back, and won’t tell you why for reasons of their own. The relationship between you and the library’s AI is meant to be maddening, and if you start falling in love with the obstinate archivists, well, that’s really your own fault because, as they keep reminding you, they’re only AI programs.

For a bibliophile, this is the perfect game: the object is simply to acquire information, and the driving structure that makes it a game is a literary device! And the more I think about it, the more devices reveal themselves. Because of the structure of the game, the only human characters are the dead Korean noblefolk whose letters you read. The interaction that goes on in the game portion is between you and a computer, and the intro screen gets some potshots in at that (“It should be asocial enough for you”).

Looking at the content of the text and the librarians’ reactions to it, we see a well-planned and grand narrative, too. Before anyone asks, no, this is not the sort of template period drama that clogs up Korean TV. Not to spoil too much of your reading, but in the text we witness a clash of cultures, between medieval and modern Korea. Love has not decided for us whether one has to be better than the other, but allows us to think about that for ourselves. Although her depictions aren’t perfect (come on, this is Korea in a spaceship), you start to see how the triumphs and failures of families are a beautiful reflection of the values of a nation.

The AIs are well-written as well. Hyun-ae is quicker to (over)share what she’d like you to do, and you might end up getting her route first, but you’ll also eventually realize how her selfishness is the root of trouble and reflects her modern upbringing. Mute, the medievalist, is the more difficult character: she focuses on duty first and foremost, and tries to recede into the background and “let you work”, forcing you to come to her and help clarify her duty. As a modern, you’ll see her flaws first but eventually realize how they form part of a coherent whole. And as an AI whose personal longings conflict with her duty, she makes an excellent tsundere.

Oh yeah, and underneath this entire story, and game, is an engine that Love wrote herself, based on RenPy. It’s definitely beyond anything I could program myself at this point and I’m much impressed by what she’s done as a one-woman production house.

I have to head off to bed now and I don’t have time to add any additional thoughts on this game, but I hope to read more reviews in the days to come, and I hope I’ve encouraged anyone on the fence to check it out already.

Here is a 2004 game by ALCHEMIST. But enough about that, >>1. Hear me out for a second.

In 1949, a Japanese writer named Kōgetsu Narasaki was contacted by a man named Tōji Hira, head priest of a mysterious shrine deep in the 六甲 mountains called Katakamuna Shrine. Mr. Hira’s family had run the shrine for generations, handing down a set of unintelligible documents in a strange script from father to son. Narasaki had heard of rumors of an ancient race in Japan, which developed iron and used an eight-directional symmetric script, and had reached various high stages of civilization. He saw that the priest’s manuscript had not only powerful physical but also spiritual meanings, and published it in a book entitled “The Ancient Civilization of Japan”. It became known as the Katakamuna Documents.

Narasaki was playing into a centuries-old theme in Japanese esotericism called kamiyo moji (神代文字), the script of the age of kami. When we think of “kami” the English translation that comes to mind is “gods”, but both kamiyo moji and the game Katakamuna may help you dispel this inaccurate equivocation. The idea got started during medieval commentaries on the Nihon Shoki, a Japanese history text from 720. The text claims that Izanagi and Izanami, the two kami who founded the Japanese continent, performed scapula divination, which is indeed something Japanese people did in the Yayoi period. The commentators concluded that they must have written something on the bones like Chinese people did with their oracle bones. (This is actually wrong because scapula divination, unlike oracle bone reading, did not use writing, but archaeology was not invented until 600 years later.) But the Chinese script was not brought to Japan until the Asuka period. Therefore, Izanami and Izanagi must have had their own system of writing! This historical analysis isn’t really something you expect to read about gods, but if they were just heroes of early Japan, it sort of makes sense.

So, all you have to do is discover some ancient texts you had lying around in your shrine, and you’ve got conclusive proof that your favorite kami had their own script that, like, totally predated the arrival of Chinese script. In the 18th century many syllabaries like the one above appeared in shrines or were shopped around to various scholars. Alternatively, combine them with Kokugaku (Japanese nation-building theory) and you have proof of Japanese supremacy: they had the first writing system in the world. The Kokugaku scholars had some semblance of self-respect, though, and most of them rejected the kamiyo moji as frivolous hoaxes. The most damning evidence is that they all matched one-to-one with katakana. This was part of the theory, not a lack of imagination, but when scholars realized that Japanese had seven vowels in the Asuka period, it was a mortal blow.

After the Occupation, kamiyo moji theories came to their resting place in the wonderful world of New Age theosophy. For example, Ando Kensetsu believes that kamiyo moji are the origin of all languages and were brought to Japan 230,000 years ago from a UFO. Saji Yoshihiko believes that kamiyo moji were created 12,000 years ago. And so forth. Katakamuna settled in nicely besides these, so now it is literally compared to crop circles.

Now we come to Katakamuna the video game (cleverly written 片神名, utilizing several old kanji including an ancient pronounciation of kami). In this game a high school boy and his girlfriend are transported back in time to the civilization of Katakamuna during the age of kami. Izanami herself is a dateable character in this game (the seiyuu is Mamiko Noto, of Marimite and “Noto kawaii yo Noto” fame). Here again we see Western translations of Shinto terms dashed against the rocks. If “kami” was equivalent to “god”, to portray Izanami in a visual novel would be blasphemous and nobody would want to buy the game. But instead she seems to be cast as a powerful but shy and altogether human miko, a sort of Homeric hero who battles the horrible worm of humanity’s racial memory in the screenshot shown above.

The disc on the cover of Katakamuna is a supposedly ancient artifact with kamiyo moji on it, but unfortunately I don’t know much about it so I will stop blathering here.

I was sort of obsessing about how much of an improvement Katakamuna is over Utawarerumono this evening so I decided to write a post on it. I would like to read some novels set in the world of Katakamuna, which I imagine to be a mixture of Clan of the Cave Bear with Jomon period archaeology and the tales of the Nihongi. I haven’t actually played this game but it looks like fun. It doesn’t seem to have made much of a stir though.

Katakamuna Videos

The first few minutes of gameplay

OP theme featuring horrible 3D graphics and awful music

The main character is wildly immoral, but as he’s supplied with both a good reason (the apparently ever-present mansions full of child torturing rich people) and some actual self-awareness and intelligence, it’s certainly better than most other popular games I could mention. And I thought the moral was pretty obvious, though well meaning, but obviously otaku haven’t paid any attention to it. Maybe they didn’t play it.

It also seems to have completely confused some people, but I didn’t see anything difficult about it at all. But nobody I know has finished it yet, so I can’t discuss it. Come on, guys!

Tanaka Romeo, beyond the pen name and his constantly making off-topic jokes, is a pretty good writer, so I wish he’d move to some other format. Beyond my feeling kind of silly about discussing literary merit in porn, it seems like it’s nearly impossible to have a single ending to one of these stories without invoking time loops, and I’m getting tired of them. It’s almost as bad as how all mysteries have to start with long discussions about locked rooms, as if they’ve all only ever read the same Agatha Christie novel over there.

UPDATE: Tower of Friends is pretty real.

1. Tildes mandatory.
2. Tildes optional.

Now we will tell you the short detail about the reason why blocking you to this website, because of we, all Japanese EROGE makers were facing at the problem, the crisis of “Freedom of speech”.
Currently, The bill that allows to limiting the content (It is censorship. Isn’t it?) to all EROGEs is being discussed in the Diet because intellectuals and politicians said “Japanese EROGE were being problem and troubled with the foreign country.

Without a shred of evidence for this claim, they blocked all foreign access.
Meanwhile, VisualArt’s, who could use a foreign intern to fix the grammar of their name, posted the following message on their website (or it was hacked by an angry wotaku with the same intention):

PLEASE PLAY THE GAME OF YOUR COUNTRY IF YOU PRAY FOR THE WORLD PEACE!:-)?

Apparently dooming us to Leisure Suit Larry for the covert actions of the secret conspiracy of foreign politicians.
But over on Canned Dogs a link was posted to New Komeito’s English news website.
The news story is dated May 30 and reads: “New Komeito is actively pushing forward a ban on video games featuring sexual violence, consulting with police and inspecting Akihabara, the so-called mecca of electronic gaming in Tokyo.”
New Komeito (rhymes with “tomato”) is the political arm of Soka Gakkai, known as SGI in the United States.
Soka Gakkai is a “new religion” (新宗教) in Japan.
They believe in many bizarre things. They think they are the only true branch of Nichirenism, which is itself a diseased form of Buddhism.
They must believe that if they ban some kinds of ero games, then Japan will have a pure Western/Godly/Buddha culture.
Yes, the Diet in general is ineffective, but Japanese people cannot deny that new religions are quite effective in what they do.
So, do not turn your sights on foreign fans of your games, who eagerly translate your games into their own languages.
Instead, I demand that eroge makers target Soka Gakkai with the same ferocity they have targeted foreign audiences.
Oh, what’s that?
You only want to criticize people who are far away?
You’re too scared to talk about people who live close to you?
Well, how about that!

Higurashi’s character designs were always a little weird — exactly what kind of dress is Rena supposed to be wearing? — but I’ve just started Umineko on some guy‘s recommendation and it’s getting way far out there. Kyrie on the right there is wearing some kind of goth tie, a trenchcoat, and a tie clip. I’m pretty sure I met her at DragonCon once. Well, at least the men just have strangely colored suits.

The Rena clone/moe girl Maria’s design is so weird I assume he’s going to explain it – she seems to carry around a huge purse all day and she’s wearing a black crown(????) at a jaunty angle – but she’s also suffering from a new kind of anime age, where she’s claimed to be 9 but is actually written as a retarded 5 year old. She’s only said one complete sentence so far, and it was repeating someone else.

Well, at least the story seems interesting, though it also looks like it’s going to get unhealthily meta later on. And he only repeats everything twice, which I think puts him near the top of visual novel writing.

edit: And he thinks absinthe is bad for you or something? I thought everyone had gotten over that in the 90s?

I decided to take day 1 of Comiket relatively easy, since all I really wanted was the Type-Moon set from industry (really long line), things here and there from Toranoana (how long could it be??), and some stuff from schatzkiste, who managed to grab a small booth, and then stuff from some smaller booths down in the pits of the lower floors, like the booth that was selling the Daicon 7 opening movie, a guy that was purporting to sell a book with viewership numbers for tv anime from 1990-2004, a guy with a book about “politics within 00′s japanese otaku culture”, and some genre circles as well as a fair bit of stuff for friends such as my co-author on this here blog. In this case, “taking it easy” meant taking the 6:00 monorail from Shimbashi, which means arriving at the event at 6:30ish.

Unfortunately, I am incapable of not having something go wrong at a day of comiket. For those who haven’t been before, you can save your place in the line to get in the event (the event starts at 10am) once you get there and sit down, until 8:45, when they lock the line down and make everyone stand up. Normally I spend the whole time from whenever I arrive until 8:45 sitting down, listening to podcasts, and wondering what the hell I’m doing in Odaiba, but this time I made the very unwise choice to use the bathroom without a friend in the line. I left to the bathroom at 7:50, thinking that I’d have plenty of time to make it back. I left the bathroom at 8:40, after a line that rivaled a lot of shutter circle lines, only to find that basically everyone had already stood up, rendering me totally unable to find my spot, which I had tried to mark with my bag with my lunch and my hall maps inside. I tried to grab a spot in line roughly 30-50 feet behind where I thought I was, hoping to find my bag as everyone marched in, but I had no such luck, and I probably made a bunch of people think I was cutting in line in the process. oops.

Mapless, hungry, and frustrated, I sat in front of the Big Sight, watched the sun rise from behind the Washington Hotel, and tried not to lose too much body heat until the line finally started moving at around 10:25. This was actually the first time I’ve gone to a big industry line, since I normally either skip out on day 1, or just go at around 10 and browse kooky genre booths (A-Team x Night Rider yaoi, etc), so I was fairly surprised to see a special sign telling me that in order to line up for Type-Moon, I needed to leave the big crowd going into the event hall and follow the smaller trickle moving in the direction of the sign. This trickle lead me from the fourth floor of the Big Sight back down the opposite side of the building, away from the Big Sight by about 100 meters, through a parking lot, and then back into another queue that was vaguely near the building. I was fairly surprised to find that the line moved relatively quickly, and I managed to climb back up the Big Sight and finally get into the building to buy my 11,500 yen set of goodies by around 11:30.

Now, when I was browsing the Type-Moon website during pre-event planning, I wasn’t planning on buying everything that was on sale, specifically the Shiki “moe-moe bathtowel”, for reasons that I hopefully do not have to explain. However, after having a pretty miserable day so far (my ipod had also run out of batteries while in the T-M line, so no more AWO, no more Marxy vs Patrick Macias, no more Ira Glass, just the sound of a hundred thousand nerds buying porn), once I got shoved inside and suddenly found myself in front of a cash register, I just said “one of everything” and threw a ton of money at the lady behind the booth. So that’s why I have this “moe-moe bathtowel”.

The set: Bag, Neck Warmer, Concept, Clear Poster Set, Moe-Moe Bathtowel. Humping Dog not included.

Concept is an illustration book full of concept and promo art used throughout T-M’s years as an industry vendor, starting from C65, Winter 2003. 130 pages of color illustrations that act as a tribute to T-M’s own successes as well as the holiest of nerd battlegrounds, Comiket.

Concept front cover

Concept back cover

poor quality sample page

part the second

The other goodies are pretty self explanatory, the neck warmer is a neck warmer bearing the AATM2 logo seen here, and the moe-moe bathtowel is a moe-moe bathtowel with a moe-moe picture of Shiki that you can see on the same page. There’s also a clear poster collection of tall, thin clear posters, all packaged in a neat box. There are 22 posters in all, illustrated by a bunch of different artists. Some I would not mind putting up somewhere, others, well,

Clear Poster Set box

HELLO, LADIES

To tell you the truth, I’m still wondering how Naasu, Takeuchi, and co. managed to extract that much money from me, but it probably has something to do with the fact that I still haven’t played Tsukihime or F/SN. At least I didn’t pay the 20,000 that second-hand retailers are charging!

I then proceeded to Toranoana’s booth, as it was the second of the three booths that I knew how to find, since it was directly down the hall from T-M. As an industry hall virgin, I was going by the advice of 西-4 vets and they said that Toranoana wouldn’t have that bad of a line.

Turns out they were wrong, since I ended up spending about a half hour longer in the Tora line than I spent in the T-M line, since they happened to be doing a Touhou New Year’s set and a Touhou calendar, and anything Touhou sells infinite copies. I was there for the Fate/Zero Tribute Arts limited edition box, so I wasn’t terribly heartbroken when they announced that all the Touhou stuff had sold out, especially since it meant that over half of the line cleared out. Fate/Zero Tribute Arts, as the name suggests, is a collection of outside artists doing Fate/Zero art. I mostly decided to buy this book when I found out that huke was contributing, and because I’m one of those people who will go from “considering a purchase, i guess” to “will line up for 2 hours to buy” if you dangle the word “limited edition” in front of me. The LE came with a slipcase and a 40-page black and white sketchbook (Rough Material), if you were wondering.

front view of set

back

LE sketchbook pages

2

Akibablog has a bunch of good pictures of the book, for those interested. On an amusing side note, Toranoana apparently sold out of their entire stock of Touhou and Fate/Zero goods on day 1, which seems kind of unusual (and possibly fan-enraging) for a large booth to do, but what do i know.

Dead tired, I shoved my way to Schatzkiste’s little industry booth and bought their cd-roms and 4-koma collection. For those not in the know, Schatzkiste is the best maid cafe. They’re also closing in 2 months. ;_;

schatzkiste cds, 4koma

Meido-cho smiled and let out a little laugh when she saw me at the booth, basically making my day.

After that, I got the hell out of the Big Sight, and like any sensible person would do, went to Akiba for reasons I don’t quite remember and ended up going to Go Go Curry and Try Amusement Tower with a friend and not buying anything while in Akiba. Went to sleep at 8, since the fight starts for real on day 2.

Zepy had a good post about Comiket circles doing Touhou stuff over the years back in August, and the folks who made that have updated for this year: 1356 circles doing Touhou, up from 885. Good lord.

The other thing that came up last night that I was too busy watching Rosario + Vampire on tv to post about was that some folks on 2ch apparently got the new Mahou Shoujo Ai game a few days early (1, 2, 3), and well, if they’re telling the truth, the game didn’t really get a look-over before going gold, or something. As was pointed out to me by irc last night, this would normally not be a problem, since who the hell looks at anything but tentacles and the various parts that said tentacles interact with, but the problem is that in some scenes, the tentacles are missing. More than the tentacles, actually, it’s that some scenes are missing any art at all, and even the paper dolls might be missing in some scenes.

This is compounded by the fact that the game is a third of the size of the previous installments (500mb on a dvd?!) They’ve also caught some flack for apparently using CG from previous games on their website and on the game box as promo art for the new game. Of course, this could all be a very elaborate, awesome troll (one of “epic” proportions, as i hear the kids say these days), or maybe they got the Doom 3 devs to make this new installment, but otherwise… Matsuri da!!

• Goth Heterochromia Agatha Christie – the main character
• Baron Münchhausen
• Bram Stoker
• Winston Churchill
• Sherlock Holmes
• Charlotte Brontë
• Genderswap August Derleth
• Josef Čapek

I went through a scene or two in the trial and the narration is doing its best to pretend to be Nasu, with everyone repeating everything six times for effect. I stopped after they spent half an hour of reading time drinking tea, but I’m sure optional gameplay and HP Lovecraft event CG await. No, not like that.

edit: i can’t spell