This Week in Games

Not So Epic

Welcome back, folks! We picked up on some cool news over the weekend—Bandai Japan is making a new series of Digimon virtual pets: a reissue of the Digital Monster Pendulum toys, modified with updated rosters, LCD screens, and rechargeable batteries compatible with USB-C cables. I could go on about these; I'm very excited—I'm just waiting for the pre-orders to open so I can grab a Nature Spirits version of the device (and the Metal Empire-themed device once that gets announced next year). But special attention goes to Bandai, which announced the Pendulum Color devices with a peculiar commercial...

There's context behind this: the weird swimmer and the "Mon-Mon, Digimon~!" jingle is a reference to the original (zanier) commercial Bandai produced for the original Digital Monster Pendulum Vpets at the turn of the millennium. (Fun fact: the anime tied into the devices by virtue of the original four Dark Masters being the poster-monsters for the first four devices!). It's the kind of deep cut I live for, and it got me wondering if they'll ever make new Pokémon commercials that are throwbacks to the original "schoolbus" or "Pokémon are invading~!" ads. The newer ads seem to emphasize Pokémon as a generational thing that parents who grew up with it can share with their children, which is very sweet... but hey, I'm down for the '90s throwback!

Here's a bit of This Week in Gaming lore for you: back when our banner was still being drawn, the original idea was to have Nei from Phantasy Star II standing next to the Fire LEO-04 "Rynex." I love SEGA and Phantasy Star II is one of my favorite RPGs ever, and I'm very sweet on Nei. It's hard to hate a blue-haired cat-girl in a futuristic leotard, especially when her story is heart-wrenching. But as time went on, I figured, "I already have a lot of SEGA stuff in this banner, between the Rynex and the Daytona USA seagulls. And I do love Izuna; she could use the rep, especially since it's not likely they'll ever make a new game with her..." So that's how I possibly cemented my reputation as the Internet's biggest Izuna-defender, perennially logged onto all of my 70 alternative accounts, and likely manifested a new Izuna game into this mortal coil.

I still love Phantasy Star, though! I had a serious Phantasy Star phase in college, tracking down the Phantasy Star collection on GameBoy Advance and the PS2 Sega Genesis Collection so I could play through the entire series. I also had a very happy day where a mom at GameStop sold me both GameCube Phantasy Star Online games for $10 because GameStop wouldn't accept them for trade-in and she saw the way I lit up when I saw them on the counter. While Sega mostly maintains Phantasy Star through the current Phantasy Star Online 2 MMORPG (which they took almost a decade to bring to the U.S.), the original RPGs have a long legacy. The first Phantasy Star beat Final Fantasy I and the original Dragon Quest (back when it was called Dragon Warrior) to the U.S. market by several months. With its animated monster sprites in battles and its rudimentary first-person 3D dungeons, it certainly felt like a futuristic game—and with its novel sci-fi trappings set across three planets, there still isn't much like it. (I'm one of those guys who bemoans Star Ocean squandering its sci-fi setting with the endless medieval planets they inevitably take place on.) The Phantasy Star games also have much moodier stories than other RPGs; the late, great Rieko Kodama (alias, "Phoenix Rie") directed a woman's story of righteous vengeance over the death of her brother in the first game, and the subsequent games all followed suit. Between Nei's tragic and irreversible death in Phantasy Star II, the endless cycle of pain and loss in Phantasy Star III, and the borderline-Lovecraftian brushes with the Profound Darkness in Phantasy Star IV, the Phantasy Star grabs onto your emotions and sticks with you.

Possibly the most amazing thing about Phantasy Star is that... it ended. While its contemporaries Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy are still going, Phantasy Star IV marks an official, canonical "end" to the series. Chaz vanquishes the Profound Darkness sealed by the Algol star system (note: the Algol system actually exists). With the Profound Darkness gone, its fragments can no longer manifest in Algol as Dark Falz—originally "Dark Force," but the localization messed the name up. Phantasy Star IV even ends with Chaz and his technically-not-Nei-but-very-Nei-coded girlfriend, Rika, living peacefully. Of course, the Phantasy Star Online and Phantasy Star Portable games keep bringing Dark Falz back, but never mind those. It's not often a game gets a serious ending that sticks, and as much as I love Phantasy Star, I'm quite glad it hasn't been tirelessly brought back. Chaz defeatedly saying, "Somehow, Dark Falz returned," is something I'm glad I'll never have to live through. I mean, it would still be nice to see new Phantasy Star games, but that would require Sega to remember they have more franchises besides Sonic the Hedgehog and Like A Dragon, and that's haaaaard.

Anyway, this massive digression involving the Phantasy Star series is brought on by 2023 being the Phantasy Star series' 35th anniversary! Sega already kicked the year off with a sweet concert back in January, but last week, they also confirmed that Phantasy Star Online II would also get into the festivities with a special event!

It's a musical event! Starting October 11, fans can check out Phantasy Star Online II's social media accounts to enjoy remixes of classic Phantasy Star Online II songs, complete with snazzy illustrations! Some of the artists included are Jen Sonoue, best known for the shredding guitar riffs from Sonic Adventure... as well as longtime SEGA collaborators and patron saints of Sonic the Hedgehog butt-rock, Crush40! Fans who log into PSOII can also get in-game music disks with the remixes. While ostensibly part of Phantasy Star's 35th Anniversary, this is also meant to celebrate Phantasy Star Online II's tenth anniversary. This... feels a bit iffy, considering it wasn't available in the U.S. for much of those ten years. But hey, Crush40, I'll take it!

Also, shout-out to artist Aurahack for her phenomenal art getting featured in the anniversary celebration! You might recognize Aurahack's art from the cover art LimitedRun Games produced for their VA-11 Hall-A release, as well as the in-game artwork for the spooky Lovecraftian cult simulator The Shrouded Isles. I'm personally a big fan of Aurahack and her work; it's always great to see her turn up in games like these. And as a VA-11 Hall-A fan, I appreciate that Aurahack was very careful to stick to Jill's canonical in-game proportions. I don't think anyone but her would've gotten Jill's legs right.

As for Phantasy Star? Well, there doesn't seem to be a new game on the horizon. The PS2 era saw several budget remakes of the original Phantasy Star games in Japan with some fun updates, including a way to resurrect Nei in Phantasy Star II! While there were at one point plans to localize these in the U.S., those plans sadly fell through. Most of the Phantasy Star cast has thus been relegated to cameo appearances, like the intros to the SEGA AGES games where Nei, Neifirst, and Rika can be seen holding up placards in the intros like they're race queens. In an alternate world, Nega-Jean-Karlo stuck with Nei in his This Week in Games banner and is likely chomping at the bit at that newly-announced Phantasy Star game starring Nei while wishing Izuna got some love... You keep dreaming, other-me. In the meantime, the original four Phantasy Star games are all regularly compiled into Sega Genesis collections, even with the original Master System Phantasy Star for completion's sake. They're not too hard to track down. Another alternative is the Sega Classics Collection on Steam; it's only got the Genesis/Mega Drive Phantasy Star games (i.e., not the first one), but they're usually on sale so you can get them for dirt cheap. You can also pick up the SEGA AGES version of Phantasy Star on the Switch, which comes with a ton of much-needed features like a dungeon automap.

Lastly, let me leave you with the Japanese Phantasy Star IV trailer because it's seriously badass in ways I wish more trailers were. It just hits differently, man...

Back in our July 2 column, I talked a bit about the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive classic Landstalker. I mentioned the great Japanese art for the game, courtesy of beloved artist Yoshitaka Tamaki. This past week, fans worldwide were shocked to learn that Tamaki died on July 13 from lung cancer. He was 55 years old. His funeral was attended exclusively by close family.

Tamaki has a long, storied career in Japanese RPGs, lending his unique art design to classic games of various stripes and solidifying the look and aesthetic of classic RPGs for an entire generation of fans. Early in his career, he had served as an assistant to mangaka Kenichi Kotani. Later, he would collaborate on the Enix title, Fangs. During his time at Enix, Tamaki met Hiroyuki Takashi, who would later found the studio Camelot. Tamaki would design the cast and cover art for many of Camelot's titles; besides Landstalker, Tamaki had also worked on classics like Shining in the Darkness, Shining Force, and Ladystalker. Tamaki would also spend time as a freelancer, working on Feda and the PS1 cult-classic Alundra.

While Tamaki would eventually part ways with Camelot, his work was nevertheless beloved by many. Fans across the world rendered tribute to Tamaki, the worlds he helped create—and his beloved Yogurt, one of his loveable mascot characters from Shining Force. Fun fact: Yogurt was rather useless in Shining Force and couldn't gain any stats. But beating monsters with him lets you get a Yogurt Ring... which turns other characters into characters wearing a Yogurt costume. This is just one of the many delightful secrets in Shining Force.

I have a lot of love for the aesthetic of the old early-'90s era Japanese RPGs; the old days of heroic elves, noble beast-men, and centaurs, heroines in high-cut bodysuits with mile-wide pauldrons and bizarre ancient technology have always been a nostalgic aesthetic. Tamaki was one of many artists who brought that special magic alive to a generation of fans. While many of his games featured new artwork for American markets, the in-game designs still stuck with us. Nobody did it like Tamaki, and his loss is a tragic one. Rest easy, buddy; you did good work.

Let me preface this one with one of my trademark anecdotes. Way back in the '90s, when Toren Smith was localizing Ah! My Goddess for the first time, he hit upon a problem. The Goddesses—Belldandy, Urd, and Skuld—were named after the Norse Norn, a trio of goddesses that watched over the past, present, and future. Consulting with an Old English scholar (because Toren Smith used to do that kind of thing), he came upon a problem: the classic Old English pronunciations for these names were along the lines of "Verthandi," "Urthr" and "Skadi," but the manga had anglicized them more along the lines of "Belldandy, Urd, and Skuld." So which would've been more appropriate: the Old English spellings that the names were based on or the way Kosuke Fujishima had spelled them in Japanese? Smith would detail these in a series of author's notes that Dark Horse Studios reprinted in the special editions of the Ah! My Goddess manga. This is all foreshadowing for later!

So, with that out of the way, Square Enix chose violence with the Gaelic language.

Many names in video games can be points of contention within fandoms concerning their pronunciation—a tricky thing, considering so many games have Japanese titles and your average Joe Q. Gamer doesn't speak Japanese. The schoolyard fights over how Ninja Gaiden was supposed to be pronounced got so heated that Nintendo had to step in to correct kids nationwide in the 1980s film The Wizard. Certain fans to this day are (somehow) convinced that the protagonist from Street Fighter is named "Rye-yoo" and not "Ryu" (not helped by the much-maligned animated series featuring everyone's favorite Canadian, Scott McNeil). It doesn't help when you have a Japanese game that borrows so much nomenclature from cultures worldwide... like Final Fantasy. So many of the figures in the game series are borrowed from folklore and mythology worldwide. It's easy for some stuff to get lost in translation. Cait Sith was one of them. Now, the Gaelic language is already a tricky one for most people who speak English; imagine my surprise when I watched Secret of Kells and saw that the name of the character "Ashley" was spelled "Aisling." (It's a regular "ghoti"/"fish" moment.) This means that a lot of people look at the name of the Final Fantasy VII cat character named after a cat fae of Gaelic folklore and presume it's pronounced as it's spelled "Kayte Sith." In truth, it's pronounced more like "ket shee" (similar to how the figures we know as "banshees" were originally spelled "bean sídhe").

Folks have not taken to this well; while many are quick to wave this off as more internet drama, many have pointed out that Cait Sith being based on an actual Gaelic name means S.E. should stick with the Gaelic pronunciation. These also point to Gaelic erasure, which is already a significant issue: Gaelic has historically been stifled as a language by the United Kingdom, and many people from Scotland and Ireland today are very defensive of the language, especially since there has been so much misinformation surrounding it (apparently, Wikipedia is a terrible resource for it all). Many have countered that Final Fantasy VII being set in a fantasy world that doesn't have an Ireland or Scotland means that Square Enix can handle it however they want. Interestingly, though, the Japanese script pronounces "Cait Sith" closer to the original Gaelic pronunciation.

I reject this notion; this is just a warmed-over Thermian Argument. For the uninitiated, the Thermian Argument is the illegitimate claim that any criticism of a text can be nullified by lore or in-universe explanations. I say "illegitimate" because learning that Quiet breathed through her skin didn't make her torn bikini any dumber of an idea for her costume and didn't make people "regret their thoughts and deeds" like Kojima claimed; it was just a lazy attempt at sticking a digitized Stefanie Joosten in a bikini. It's part of why it was so refreshing when Yoko Taro took to the stage and begged fans the world over to draw him getting his head crushed by 2B's 328-pound robot posterior; at least homeboy was being honest.

A lot of other people have claimed that words are "just words" and can mean anything or be done however the speaker wants, so there's no need to argue over them, but... that's just not how language works! That's extremely not how language works. Any linguist can tell you that! The very idea of language is predicated upon the basis that specific words mean something and that there are rules over how they're supposed to be spelled, read, or written. There are centuries of history where names and languages have been watered down or prohibited because of the idea that specific languages or names represent a threat to dominant power structures—again, this happened to Gaelic in the United Kingdom, but for further examples, you can look to any culture in America wherein Natives were adopted out and had their names changed. There are a lot of power structures involved with who gets to speak what and how, and with cases like how the Māori people sued The LEGO Group over the use of Māori words in the Bionicle toyline in 2001, the speakers of the language get a say in how their language should be used. This is also why there's more pushback towards Cait Sith's pronunciation than there is towards, say, how so much media decides to use or pronounce nomenclature from Judeo-Christianity; given how widespread it is, anything with a Judeo-Christian origin isn't really at the risk of being "lost." And with something as high profile as Final Fantasy dictating how an old name gets pronounced, this can contribute to language erasure—Google has been noted as reflecting Square Enix's decision for how to pronounce "Cait Sith" in general, not just for the character.

Going back to my Ah! My Goddess example from earlier: Toren Smith later wrote that he was at an impasse regarding how the Goddesses should have their names localized. The "Belldandy/Urd/Skuld" spelling was more authentic to the mangaka's spelling but misaimed and historically incorrect. "Verthandi/Urthr/Skadi" had historical backing as far as authenticity, but it wasn't how the mangaka did it. He still noted that this could go either way, and any other translator could justifiably have chosen the alternative.

I feel bad for people in Japan who make visual novels because the whole genre just gets shortchanged so badly in the U.S. Even once you get past the pre-existing prejudices about visual novels just being "dating simulators," many of the louder voices in the room when it comes to Japanese-inspired visual novels tend to claim that they're "fixing" the genre with really hackneyed takes that aren't even all that novel for anyone who's played VNs before. They're the one genre that gets it worse than Japanese RPGs because at least Japanese RPGs can point to Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy for some degree of credit; plenty in the U.S. haven't quite clued in that Phoenix Wright is a visual novel.

And now it seems we have some degree of malfeasance in the matter. If you don't know the name Hato Moa, you know the name of the visual novel she created: Hatoful Boyfriend, a zany visual novel where all love interests are presented as real-life pictures of pigeons. It's not a stylistic flourish: you play as a teenage girl going to a high school where everyone is just a massive, sized-up bird (as presented by big PNGs of actual pigeons). The title should be a dead giveaway, as "hato" is Japanese for "pigeon," and given Japanese pronunciation rules, the "H" is pronounced the same as "F." So it's literally just "Pigeon Boyfriend" as well as "Heartful Boyfriend." It's a pun, get it?

Hatoful Boyfriend got some attention a few years back for being such a waaaaacky Japanese dating sim about pigeons, maaaaan. But once you get past that, the game is funny without the pigeon PNGs; the characters all manage to represent some typical character archetypes while having some pretty brilliant subversions. Also, the humor doesn't depend on "doy-hoy-hoy, birds"; even the central character gets in on the fun with her desire to be the dark overlord of the world in one route. It's a fun farce of a game that lovingly pokes fun at visual novel archetypes and has a pretty smart sense of humor. The pigeons are a fun addition. Also, it got licensed, localized, and released in the U.S. by a small company named Mediatronic!

... And this is where the penny no doubt drops for you. You might better know Mediatronic as the company that made a fun little game named Fall Guys, a fun Most Extreme Elimination Challenge-esque game where you steer a clumsy little bean person (which might be a cute anime girl in a bean-shaped exosuit) through a series of obstacle challenges until one person stands atop all others. It was a surprise hit in the gaming industry, captured people's attention, and managed to survive and even expand once its fifteen minutes of fame wore out among VTubers everywhere. Fall Guys managed to get enough eyeballs on it that Epic decided to swoop in and buy out Mediatronic in March of 2021.

Epic was in the news this past week because of their massive layoffs; everyone in the industry made a lot of seriously unsustainable decisions. As a result, the chickens are now coming home to roost. I haven't dedicated more space to it because it was pretty much old news by the time of this publication. Like, Naughty Dog just announced their layoffs just a few days ago as of this writing. We know why this happens: executives make bad decisions and decide the best way to keep the line going up is to "cut the fat." We know the results: developers get screwed over, and their lives are upended, with no real security to their job that demands so much passion but gives so little in return. We know that all it takes for these not to happen is for more executives to take a cue from Satoru Iwata and cut their over-inflated profits, but that won't happen because you don't get rich by not being an absolute ghoul. I can copy and paste the same paragraphs every few months, and it wouldn't stop being relevant.

So yeah, Mediatronic was hit by the massive layoffs at Epic. Once the news hit Hato Moa, she had a bit of a bomb to drop: it's not enough that Epic had to go and axe hundreds of people out of a job, she claims they've stiffed Hato Moa out of her royalties for a few years now.

"It's been nearly two years since [Epic acquired Mediatronic], but I haven't received a single payment from Epic, and I can't get in touch with the accounting staff," Hato tweeted. (Note: I'm going off of Google translations.) "It's not an urgent matter of life and death, but it was Epic Games' own convenience that abruptly ended the distribution of the PlayStation Store and smartphone version."

It's likely that such an "unimportant" game easily slipped Epic's attention—after all, why would Epic pay attention to a little dating sim with pigeons when they have other games to hawk? (Pun not intended.)

This is one of many reasons big acquisitions are terrible for the industry. Phil Spencer can run his jaws all he wants about how consolidations are "better for everyone"; we have decades of proof they're not. EA has left an entire graveyard of studios by the wayside due to their acquisitions: Bullfrog, Visceral Games, and Origin. Heck, Bioware has managed to survive for a few years, but they had their layoffs just recently (although these guys are thankfully suing for the horrible severance packages). It's always the people on the ground floor who suffer from the greed of executives. It's wild that executives can constantly make such bad decisions but never lose their jobs.

Epic is allegedly looking into it (now that they've been publicly shamed on social media), but it's shameful that this kind of thing happened in the first place. Hato has taken the matter in stride; according to her, any purchases made on Hatoful Boyfriend's DLSite store still gives her royalties (and she gets the sales reports from them on a very regular basis, too). More than anything else, Hato Moa tells her fans that the best way to show your support is to pay it forward; "Be nice and kind to pigeons and wild birds in your town," she asked fans on Twitter.

That'll do it for this week, I think. A reminder to folks: I'm not flapping my gums when I ask that you be nice to each other. Please consider how you talk about other people and what you say about them. I don't stand for folks running their mouths about people or being intentionally venomous. Don't support it, won't tolerate it. On a happier note, while I haven't been able to play Xenoblade Chronicles 3, there was this fun thing folks were doing this past week where they listed their top 25 games. I figured I'd give you guys first dibs on seeing my list!

I doubt many of these will be much of a surprise to anyone who's been reading this column for any period of time, but that's my list. It's much more of an eclectic mix than I expected; I figured I'd have way more GBA games on my list, and while I have plenty of RPGs, I still only have seven turn-based RPGs in a list of 25. Feel free to share your lists in the comments; I'm interested in seeing them! Be good to each other; I'll see you in seven.