Revel in the Madness that is Capcom
Games that hit different hit hard
Oh, hello there. Thanks for bearing with me. Let’s talk about games for a bit.
Actually, we will do that, but give me just a moment. I’ve always had issues keeping up with regular writing, always. I started this substack as a way to share ideas and took the position that I didn’t need to post regularly, that I would post when I had an idea. But I have lots of ideas and don’t post, and August becomes November, and this becomes a three-to-four posts a year thing.
And I’ve decided that’s not what I want. I will write more. Hopefully you’ll enjoy it! And, honestly, I feel moved by recent events. Until this week I was busy, I was distracted, and I was battling my own demons. All of those things block me from writing. This year’s presidential election results have been hard to take. Frankly I don’t think an awful lot of people in this country understand the kind of impact we’re going to see from it.
I have spent a lot of this week disappointed and scared and worried. And although there is more for me to do in my life, one thing I need to do is to fight for the things I believe in. A big part of that fight is doing things I love and standing up for things I know are right and that have value. So, in a small way, writing this newsletter more consistently is an important part of that fight.
Meeting Bob Whitaker in grad school was a big deal for me, and not just because it was the start of a friendship I would value for the rest of my life. We encouraged each other, more or less from our first conversation, to talk and think about video games. To celebrate them, to critique them, to consider them the same way we considered our assigned readings for seminar. Bob created History Respawned in that spirit and it’s always been an honor for me to work with him.
This newsletter is in that same spirit. And if anything, I need to write about these things more than I have. There are very serious consequences to come from electing an unserious, corrupt, incompetent buffoon; but make no mistake, he is all those things and more. He adores and champions fascism. Fascists hate ideas, and they hate it when you talk about things they don’t want you to talk about, when you think about things they don’t want you to think about, and when you love things - and people - they don’t want you to love. In our weird moment, some of the most fascistic of the bunch think they love games. But they don’t love them for what they are. They want us to like and love games in very particular ways. There is more to do, but deepening my love of the things I love, and talking about them not just with enthusiasm but with respect and a desire to critique them: this is important stuff. It doesn’t have to feel important in every waking moment, and the tone of this newsletter will remain pretty light; but it’s important.
On to video games now.
I find myself playing a lot of Japanese games this autumn, though none of them are “Japanese” in the typical sense - or at least the sense I grew up with. I am playing Dragon’s Dogma 2 and trying to get back into Elden Ring (my son is really interested in Elden Ring and a good friend just finished the main game, so I am feeling motivated). Throw in Yakuza: Like a Dragon for some of the old Japanese/JRPG sensibility and Shogun Showdown for faux Japanese / actual Western fascination. And the Resident Evil 4 remake because it is fantastic and remains the absolute best.
It should work well for the book I have started writing in my head, even if it has been a fluke if I’m honest. Japanese visions of Western tropes - vaguely medievalist swords and sorcery for example - are more interesting for what I want to do than talking about why the Persona games spend so much time modeling social networks in public schools. Though now that I write that…
Let’s take Dragon’s Dogma first. The game itself in its title screen, which in keeping with some core aesthetics of the game is kind of a major experience in playing this thing, omits the 2/II/Two, almost as if Capcom are demanding a do-over. Though they’re surely not, as the first game was a hit and a profoundly weird triumph. The second game is also weird: bounteously, outrageously weird in ways that I think only a Capcom game can really manage, at least among the larger budget tranche of video games. Capcom games, particularly those that are genre-heavy and story-laden like the Resident Evil series, often feel like they are playing both sides. I play these games thinking “they know they’re weird, right"?” but I never quite believe it. The commitment to the world’s internal logic is always there, up to and including following diligently and with alacrity when that logic breaks.
Maybe it doesn’t break; in the world of Resident Evil for example the Umbrella Corporation and various actors that acquire their innovative products can create monsters. Ergo monsters exist. All kinds of monsters and any. Resident Evil 4 turns on a dime from having you manage zombies in terrifyingly (somewhat) human hordes to battling off a strange creature in the lake. And it works, incredibly well, twenty years later. Resident Evil 4 relishes in its changes of course: the “zombies” now run at you, which of course was a major cultural turn more broadly when the game came out in 2005 - Zach Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake came out the year before - and we are now in Spain. Anonymous, somewhat rustic and rural Spain, vague enough to survive some solid cultural essentialism because what culture are we even talking about, really? Some kind of vague early-to-mid twentieth century Old World Deliverance aesthetic?
Then there is the shift in the source of all this pain and agony and death, the switch from the T-Virus to “Las Plagas”, the bioweapon of the crazed and extremely megamaniacal Saddler, whose attempt to infect the daughter of the President of the United States (God, I love this game) sets the plot in motion. The T-Virus was the ultimate expression of corporate infection of the human population, clear commentary on end-of-twentieth-century Japan’s reliance on massive corporations for its continued status as an economic superpower. The era of high speed growth had completely rehabilitated the country during the Cold War, but throughout the 1980s the depth of corporate reach into Japanese civil governance had curdled and found itself exposed by scandals that created crises of confidence in their government among many Japanese and coincided with transition into a new economic era.
So, twentieth century concerns about corporate overreach morphed into cultural fears of ideological extremism and unhinged religiosity run amok, surely inspired to some extent by the 1995 Sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway perpetrated by millenarian cult Aum Shinrikyo. Prescient perhaps. Maybe it’s why the game has such longevity, too; though I suspect the fact the following couple of Resident Evil games were bad has more to do with it.
Dragon’s Dogma isn’t quite as obvious in its cultural representations, in part because it doesn’t have the B-Movie schtick and in part because it is just so weird. Yes, weirder than a Resident Evil game. I find it weirder in part because its weirdness is insidious. Resident Evil has plot twists and silly haircuts and the cheesiest dialogue imaginable, but Dragon’s Dogma does its best impression of a mid-budget medieval themed action-rpg, and so keeps its weirdness at bay. Just not for long.
The pawns, first of all. In-game, they basically function as a largely self-automating party member. You get one pawn that levels with you, and you can mess around with their gear. The other two do their own thing, and it’s usually best to just send them on their way and hire another. You meet pawns all the time, walking around as you travel the world, introducing themselves with a brief summary of their characteristics, likes and dislikes. You can also venture into intra-dimensional space to find one or two. And when you say goodbye you give them a gift. I tend to give them apples, because it feels sweet and I’m cheap. As a game mechanic, they’re fantastic. You can alter your party’s fighting style and feel pretty quickly, by switching the type of mage for example, or foregoing a mage altogether. And sometimes they high five you after you’ve teamed up to kill the lizard things that won’t leave you alone.
Of course, the entire concept is off-putting if you stop to think about it at any point. They exist to serve you, basically. In the game, this is explained as part of your standard avatar-is-god-kinda approach. Only the Arisen (that’s you) can effectively communicate with the pawns. But you’re a messiah type figure. What were the pawns doing before you showed up? Actually they were waiting for you, literally. I was not exaggerating about the messiah part.
It does feel like a meta-commentary on NPCs in games. The whole thing feels like a meta-commentary. In many ways Dragon’s Dogma is the best example of how Japanese developers like to play with European medieval motifs. The game is full of people of different ethnicities, as it should be, but it certainly feels like something we’ve seen many times before, and read about, and watched. I need to play more of it honestly, because I find myself grasping for what the main argument is here, what kind of weirdness, what kind of oddities are Capcom going for? Or maybe they’re not really. Maybe the journey is the point. Being weird is in itself enough.
I’ve written quite a bit here so maybe I’ll return to the topic in the future. But one little postscript: Shogun Showdown is fantastic and you should play it. I have put a ludicrous amount of hours into that game. It’s probably my favourite roguelike since the Spelunky. You should give it a long hard look.
Thanks for reading. Take care of yourself and the people around you.