genji
a game by sony computer entertainment
developed by game republic
for the playstation2
a review by tim rogers
1/2

The first thing I want to tell you about Genji for PlayStation2, which will be called Genji: Dawn of the Samurai when it's released outside Japan later this year, is that it has nothing to do with Murasaki Shikibu's eleventh-century novel The Tale of Genji. Sony's press releases indicate that it does, so every preview running on every major videogame website takes it a little too far. They talk about how it's apparent the game is based on literature, and how it's a literary game, and how such-and-such a character is quite evidently literate. We can forgive their mistake; after all, The Tale of Genji is a novel that most people only ever pretend they've read, anyway. I've read the novel some eight times, twice for a Chinese poetry class (in its original, primitive Sino-Japanese, it is quite the arduous, slow task to read), twice in a "translation" to modern Japanese, and four times in English (once for Mr. Arthur Waley's translation, twice for Dr. Edward Seidensticker's, and once for Dr. Royall Tyler's). I am neither proud of these facts nor encouraging you, dear reader, to follow in my footsteps. I am merely trying to tell you that The Tale of Genji is a horrible, dry book, one that people read widely because it might possibly be the first "novel" written in human history. Were it to be made into a videogame and backed by a huge marketing campaign, unsuspecting players would thereafter be subjected to a Japanese-style dating simulation that is impossible to win, wherein the invisible hero is said to look like a girl, can have sex with anyone without conflict, and dies three quarters of the way through. The final sixteen hours would consist of his poofy, upstart young distant relation whining about politics; at the final menu selection, just as you're about to press a button to choose either "Huh?" or "Wha?" the game would sharply fade to black and the disc would eject from your system.

I think I'll send an email pitching this to Hideo Kojima.

No, no, Genji the game is about Yoshitsune, ninth-generation son of the Minamoto family. "Genji," you see, is Japanese for "The name of Minamoto." (It makes perfect sense.) The Minamoto clan was the family that owned most of Kyoto, and most of Kyoto's women, during the Heian Era. "Hei" means "peace" and "an" means security. So it was the era of peace and security. It was also Japan's renaissance, its golden age. The author of The Tale of Genji -- a woman, yes, "named" Murasaki Shikibu -- contended, and the literary types, for the most part, agreed with her, that the Heian Era, being regarded as the golden, gorgeous time that it was, would live on in the people's memory in such a skewed way so as to render all that followed it a slippery slope of endless cultural decline. As her novel is still read today, and as it still takes up long, dry hours of many Chinese students' lifetimes, we may well be on the way to proving her right.

Yoshitsune is the ninth son of the Minamoto nobles, the rightful heir to the country, and a man with a purpose. Yoshitsune Minamoto, the historical figure and distant descendant of the literary figure Hikaru Genji (amazing how history works out that way) lives in a time when Murasaki's prophecy of cultural decline is coming true -- the year is 1129. The golden Heian Era, in all its splendor, is falling apart most spectacularly by way of natural disasters, famine, disease, and the total invention of the samurai sword. Warlords are clashing; in a fit of sudden militaristic glee, the leader of the Heike clan usurps Kyoto and stamps out the refined Minamoto, signifying that swords are mightier than pens after all. Yoshitsune escapes into hiding for a long time; at this point in his life, he's just a confused kid. After years of meditation, he rises up as the man who would drive the Heike out in a show of heroism that the Japan revere even today. As with all historical things the Japanese revere, there is a potent and very sad fact lying in the background, that being that Yoshitsune's doings, however heroic, and however rightful, did not bring about peace so much as they sparked future rebellions and future conflicts that would eventually snowball into a total civil war which wouldn't resolve itself for nearly five hundred years. Japan would then suffer nearly three hundred years under the boot of a dictator; the capitalized West would visit, threaten them, and then leave. They would grow up, accept the ways of the West, and sadly choose to admire the Germans a little too much, which would result in them getting the hell bombed out of their countryside in the 1940s. They would power through this, conveniently forgetting about the rebellious, vengeant spirit of Yoshitsune, and instead turning their eyes toward laying economic foundations; like the Forty-seven Ronin, who witnessed their master's murder and disbanded, only to reunite as per a secret pact decades later, sneak into the murderer's house, and kill him in a terrific display of fealty, suicide, and swordplay, the Japanese would eventually put a Toyota Camry and two Sony Walkmen in every house in America. Flash forward to the present, where posters tacked over a video arcade in Akihabara tell passersby that Genji is coming to PlayStation2, on June 30th, and that it's going to have a golden jacket and a transparent DVD case. This poster is superimposed atop an ever-changing wallpaper of posters in which girls the size of toddlers, with hair red, blue, yellow, or green, with breasts larger than human heads, are being raped by invisible monsters and madmen. Cultural decline, indeed.

The thing is, every Japanese person knows Yoshitsune; Genji sold terrifically well to Japanese consumers for the same reasons a movie like "Pearl Harbor" did well over Memorial Day weekend when it was released in America. In early summer, when cicadas begin screaming and the first fireflies show their bioluminescent asses, people all over the world become patriotic. As with Americans who know that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and killed people, the Japanese typically don't know the particulars of Yoshitsune's rollicking adventure, only that he had to fight some people, and his enemies were of the Heike clan. Last year saw a revival of the Yoshitsune legend in the form of manga and videogame -- the game, Yoshitsune Eiyuuden ("The Legend of Hero Yoshitsune"), by the makers of Armored Core, was actually pretty good. Just recently, a new twenty-six-episode television drama series, called simply "Yoshitsune," began showing on Fuji TV. It stars white-hot pop-idol Tackey (not making that name up, no) in a horror-movie wig as Yoshitsune, and Ken Matsudaira -- actor of hardboiled detectives and shoguns for years, and openly homosexual singer of pop-sensation "Matsuken Samba," which one could not escape last year, and still can't escape this year (another remix CD just came out, with eighteen new remixes of it) -- as Yoshitsune's stalwart, wise, tough-as-nails sworn-brother Benkei.

This is important to note: the Japanese, old and majestic as their history might be, brilliantly as their ancient pavilions might gleam in the sunlight of an early summer morning, taken as they are to enjoying tea ceremonies (usually just for kicks) and wearing kimonos while composing haiku and staring at flowers blowing in the wind (yes, I am being facetious), are not above being educated about their history by comic books, videogames, and television shows shot on shoestring budgets starring pop-idols with fake, huge hair. Just as most Japanese kids are forgetting the strokes of Chinese characters because word processors and cellular phones make it so easy to never write by hand again, the average consumer never really minds if the particulars of these historical retellings are purely accurate or not.

This is crucial: the Japanese recognize historical videogames and dramas for their entertainment value. Though in Genji Yoshitsune wears a white suit of armor with an attachment that looks something like futuristic football shoulderpads, and though he has magic powers to freeze his enemies, and spends most of his training time hunting down little crystals to feed to his magic egg, which improves his magical powers, the Japanese are able to let historical inaccuracy and even blatant lies slide as long as the contents are arranged in an entertaining manner.

To wit: Yoshitsune fights enemies with two swords. According to the American press release, the motion-capture actor for Yoshitsune was Ken Watanabe's stunt double and swordplay choreographer in "The Last Samurai." However, there is a problem, and that problem is the two swords. Yoshitsune would never have fought with two swords. Though warriors were keen on carrying two swords, to use both of them at once was unheard of. Now, yeah, we have gun experts telling us all the time that it's impossible for Chow Yun-Fat to fire two .45s without sacrificing his aim and/or breaking his wrists because of recoil. However, John Woo's imagination as visible in "The Killer" doesn't exactly qualify as historical inaccuracy. It is more of a poetic license, absorbed into the moment. See, it was Musashi Miyamoto, the legendary ronin who cut his teeth in the battle of Sekigahara in 1600, who came to develop the two-sword fighting style and was, at first, utterly despised for it. This is a widely known fact; Musashi was able to make himself effectively invincible in a field of a thousand angry opponents because of his fighting style, which bewildered, shocked, and stunned any man who could only use one sword halfway well. So it's impossible for Yoshitsune to be using two swords; history would have written it down somewhere, and Musashi would no doubt have read about it during his long incarceration in a room full of books, and then, he'd just be a copycat. However, none of this is important in the realm of Genji the videogame, because when Yoshitsune swings those two swords, it's because we're pressing buttons, making him swing those swords, and damned if he don't look good doing it.

Genji's story is as much based on one novel as "Pearl Harbor" is based on one radio news broadcast; the things we know about Yoshitsune have been collected painstakingly, and many books written about him, though, at the end of the day, he lived so long ago, what the hell do we really know? When Tackey plays Yoshitsune on television, we aren't weighing his performance against a historical figure like FDR of George W. Bush, whose every spoken word is written down (for better or for hilarious); rather, we're weighing him against the actor who played Yoshitsune in "that one movie" we can't really remember, from "a couple of years ago." Furthermore, and most optimistically, we weigh Tackey's performance against the composition of the material. Is it laid-out well? Is it organized right? And -- most importantly, the most popular question to ask of Japanese media producers these days -- if we subtitled this in English, would American people enjoy it? In the case of the recent Yoshitsune television drama, the answer to that latter question is an emphatic hell no. The drama assumes we already know a hell of a lot about Yoshitsune, or else that we've seen a hundred other dramas about him.

Genji, a videogame published by Sony Computer Entertainment Japan and developed by Game Republic, is just another mediocre interpretation of the Yoshitsune legend, which might (still waiting for word from the scholars holed up in Kyoto deliberating), actually, be kind of a mediocre legend. So the guy was great with a bow and arrow. How great? Did he ever split an arrow, like Kevin Costner in "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves"? Did he ever do something that cool and immediately accessible to Western audiences who will watch it, love it, and then buy the CD single of a song Bryan Adams wrote in twenty minutes? Game Republic says: We don't know! Don't look at us! Probably, the producers of that Robin Hood flick, and every other Robin Hood flick, including that great one starring Errol Flynn, which might have been the first "flick" of all time, while we're on it, made up the thing about the arrow-splitting. Yes -- the producers of the Errol Flynn flick made up the arrow-splitting, and then Kevin Costner's men gave it a nifty three-dimensional setup. The problem with Genji is that, while it takes liberties with its source material, its liberties are shackled and restrained by utter lack of Hollywood creativity. Am I glorifying Hollywood here? Certainly not -- though really, could a little Hollywoodism hurt a game like Genji? I don't think so. Instead, what we get is characters grounded in the twelfth century, styled like Japanese animation idols from the twentieth, wearing armor like athletes in the twenty-third, fighting like samurais in the seventeenth. Where the game has a virtuoso opportunity to throw in some wonder and awe, it instead stuffs in some mystical mumbo-jumbo cutscene where we stand talking to a stone idol with a reverberating voice about our inner spirit and how we can press the L1 button to slow the enemy down. In other words, where Game Republic could have turned a historical tale into a piece of thrilling entertainment, they instead opted to make it a videogame.

I suppose, though, as a videogame, it's kind of fun. Yoshitsune moves quickly. His swords slash quickly. Every time you hit an enemy, the screen freezes for the tiniest instant, and the weaker right motor of your Dual Shock 2 thumps once. There is no lingering, sophomoric vibrating. It thumps once for each connected hit. The pause of the screen lends weight to Yoshitsune's attacks. The sound effects -- we're dealing with Dolby 5.1, here, if you can handle it -- clash in a million different ways. Using the "kamui" magic -- we'll get to that in a minute -- results in a bright flash and the sound of strings, pipes, flutes, and drums crashing all at once as the music drops away and the background fades to white. It's satisfying. In its sensory moments, the game is utterly satisfying. The graphics are amazing, and it's a wonder they got them to work on PlayStation2 -- it looks like an Xbox game, almost, with ridiculous attention to detail, flowing streams, shining wooden floors of lived-in-looking old Japanese houses, individual leaves in trees. Indeed the game is so in love with its graphics that it trips over the storyline's feet in dozens of ways that turn out pretty amusing to count. When Yoshitsune is banished by the Heishi from Kyoto, the cherry blossoms are blooming in Gojou. A week later, he's in Hiraizumi, where the snow is white and the river flow is obstructed by these gorgeous, near-black, shining ice fragments. The cherry blossoms are famous for blooming only for one week of the year, and that week is usually in April. Why, then, is it snowing in Hiraizumi? Either way, it doesn't matter. Genji's theme is, after all, that even the discerning eye looks the other way if there's something shiny in that other direction. The "something shiny" is sometimes a floating garden with crystalline waterfalls and beautiful flowers, in which a battle is taking place between a flying samurai and a four-armed, ice-breathing statue of the Boddhisatva Kuan-Yin.

Satisfying visuals, sound, music -- digitally recorded shamisens and kotos and other traditional Japanese instruments, with delicate percussion -- and the game doesn't play too badly, too. It's amazing how refined all the play elements are. We owe that to Yoshiki Okamoto, Capcom super-producer of Street Fighter II, many old Megaman games, and the Onimusha series, who probably broke away from Capcom to start Game Republic because he was tired of being such an influential producer with a name no fanboys in America remember and whisper about on messageboards. His decision to break away and start Game Republic is interesting, and supported. I look forward to what he does in the future. Some have theorized that Genji is not gong to sell well, so that Okamoto might go on record saying that the game he's making for Xbox 360 is the real game to pay attention to. I don't know about that; I think Genji was something he did to make money. It's that kind of game. A friend at Sony Computer Entertainment Japan said that, in a meeting, the game was described as "for girls." This is because it's easy. Though the gameplay resembles Tomonobu Itagaki's Ninja Gaiden for Xbox more than it does Okamoto's own Onimusha, it is by no means difficult. You see, whenever you enter a town, you find the shop, and buy the newest weapons and armor, and stock up on healing herbs. I'm not sure where the money comes from; as I powered through the first chapter, by the second chapter, when things get a little hairy, I had more than enough money to stock up on all healiing and support items, and buy the newest armor and weapons. Further research reveals that killing enemies gives you money, although the numbers are kept hidden from you unless you specifically hunt them down on the status menu. This is all well and good; we don't need to be constantly told when we've picked up fifty gold, ere this will start to feel like a recent Zelda game with its "You picked up a heart! Your life is restored by one increment!" Genji does a good job, on some counts, of keeping its status as a videogame hidden from the player -- er, the consumer. This is wonderful when it works, and kind of amusing when it doesn't.

A major problem with Genji is neither the easy difficulty nor the gameplay -- it's how the two grate against each other, exposing bones and viscera. The melee fights are good enough -- when you've got a dozen thugs crowded around you, you really feel alive, a lot more than in Onimusha. Yoshitsune has this move you can do by jumping and pressing Triangle (the strong attack button), and it makes him dive like a hawk, using his swords as talons. He homes in and pounces of an enemy (the game is wonderful about always making you face who you want to face in a big brawl); he hits, and then bounces. Press Square (regular attack), and he'll start a combo on the enemy while they're in the air. Soon, the enemies start jumping, too, and sooner or later, everyone is wall-kicking and pouncing and flying around. It's like Dante's craziness in Devil May Cry, only less of a gimmick and more of a "this is how it must be" feeling. It's not just getting the flow and cadence of stylish swordplay right (forget Otogi) it gradually feels like classic-ish gameplay, like sliding and jumping and shooting in Megaman. No, the problem with the fighting is when you meet a boss. See, the best way to beat a boss is to run around in circles. Most every boss is vulnerable precisely the moment he finishes delivering his strong attack, leaving his sword buried in the ground or his shoulder against a wall, et cetera. This is when you strike. Yoshitsune darts around the screen like a goldfish in an aquarium -- the camera angles fix during every fight so that you're effectively fighting on one screen, and kick-jumping off its walls like Vega or Chun-li in Street Fighter II. So it's no problem to keep yourself away from the boss. When he finally does the attack -- directed at air, of course -- that you want him to do, you move in, and strike. Be sure not to deliver a complete combo, as this will give him time to attack you back. Get in three hits and run away. This is the strategy for most bosses, though damned if it doesn't take a long time. You'll probably prefer to, as I did, take on a riskier attitude and hang around longer than you're welcome, slashing and slashing and slashing until the boss kicks you to the wooden floor. This damages you a bit. Keep taking damage, and you'll need to heal. To heal, hit the start button, and go into the "item" menu. Use the herb! You're now healed! You can also carry these special medicinal pouches that revive you if you die! So virtually, there's no fear of really dying. If you get wiped out by a boss, reload your save, use the warp to go back to town, spend all of the money you made in the dungeon (you'll get more) on more herbs, and then see if that's not enough to give him hell. It probably will be enough. Progress to the next stage. This is how you kill bosses in Dororo, which mystifyingly doesn't provide you as many options for healing, meaning that every boss is going to be the slow way or no way. Makers of games like these need to think a little more about snuffing this problem out; I see it popping up too often. They should all play Ninja Gaiden on Xbox a little bit.

So to recap: killing bosses the skilled way is slow, and items exist, accessible through an obtrusive menu (which makes pretty Japanese chime sounds as you move the cursor), to heal you instantly and keep you fighting, so that you might, eventually, see that stage in the commercial, you know, where Yoshitsune is fighting guys on a big red castle rooftop. That's why we play games, as I have said again and again -- to see cool things.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Genji is its genre. Shinji Mikami became a superstar when he crafted Resident Evil and sold millions of copies around the world. Years later saw Koei inventing Dynasty Warriors, a three-dimensional war-themed melee brawler involving painstakingly spelled-out Chinese history. Yoshiki Okamoto blended survival horror and the 3D brawler into a game genre defined by Onimusha, where the hero uses a sword, so the edgy anxiety of finding ammunition for your one pistol so as to fight off the zombies is entirely removed. The "survival" in an Onimusha game is less connected to a real-world concept of not being chewed up by ravenous undead, and more tied down to the "if you want to see the next stage / computer-animated cutscene, you must survive this battle" mechanic that is all over videogames nowadays. Genji reveals the flaws of this, with its faux-historical story, its catering to beginning gamers, its healing items, its easy ways out, and the utter gorgeous quotient of its set-pieces and action stages. Yet it goes about making brash assumptions as to what we like and what we love to see (for one thing, I actually like the real-time rendering better than the CG -- it has more soul and personality, even if the characters don't blink (even Megaman blinked)), to the point where we almost get the impression it's treating us like a Japanese host: it doesn't like us, it thinks we smell, it doesn't want us walking barefoot on its tatami, yet it's going to smile, serve us tea, and keep asking us to stay the night because that's the "right" thing to do. And then all is over; the game wraps up in just under ten hours.

Here's where I tell you that there's something to keep advanced players coming back, some quirk of gameplay, some rock-solid piece of awesomeness that is addictive to enjoy again and again, so awesome to skip cutscenes for.

. . . Well, I'd like to do that. The problem is, there isn't this kind of thing. All we get is the "kamui" system. Early in the game, Yoshitsune receives an "amahagane" -- "Heaven's Steel" -- a magic egg-pendant which thumps the Dual Shock like a heartbeat if any power-up crystals are nearby. By appropriating crystals to the amahagane, Yoshitsune can increase his hit points, or even the power of his sword! This isn't all it's good for -- by pressing the L1 button, Yoshitsune holds the amahagane aloft, with a clash of awesome sound effects like when Mito-Komon shows the emperor's seal to the mystified, frightened bandit gangs in the rural village forty-two minutes into every episode of the show. The enemies drop their guards for an instant, and step back. Then, one at a time, they regain their composure, become angrier than before, and lash forward to attack. At this point, we can press the L1 button again, and everything clicks into slow-motion. The enemies bring their swords down at Yoshitsune (always "Yoshitsune"; we're not the one handling the sword here), and a little Square icon pops up for an instant. Should we hit the Square button at this instant, Yoshitsune will step aside and counter their attack in a mortal deathblow. This is the strongest move in the game. Missing a single attack snaps you out of kamui mode. Connecting a mortal attack allows kamui mode to continue on. If you're good enough, you can walk into any battle with a dozen thugs, activate kamui, and then proceed to take them all down one at a time, earning magnificent experience points and bonus items. However, it involves the timing of an autistic Street Fighter III parry-master to pull off. I imagine it will make for some interesting superplay videos, in the meantime, though really, what are superplay videos? Recordings of videogames that we watch. Recycled, stirred up media. I'd rather have my thrills fresh; this is why Drag-on Dragoon 2's approach to spicing up melee combat via a first-person-shooter-y right-analog-stick-controlled aimable blocking mechanism is infinitely more fascinating and player-pleasing. The guard deflects are not necessarily easier to pull off than kamui strikes so much as there are more opportunities to pull them off. This makes all the difference: Genji is about surviving to see what comes next, and then enjoying what you're seeing because it's beautiful. It's almost as though the game takes a backseat to watching the game in motion, and though this importance of style over substance has been balanced before in games like the original Shenmue, the problem is that Genji doesn't have enough substance in its style, and for that, it represents a failure in evolving the action videogame, fun as many of its moments might be.



Benkei is the most intriguing thing about this game. A historically-accurate (if you don't count the bizzare, red, plastic-looking chinstrap rig) night-stalking, big hulking, Heike-crushing vigilante, Benkei attacks Yoshitsune because he believes Yoshitsune is one of the Heike. Yoshitsune bests him in a duel, and then proves he is one of the Minamoto, a rightful heir. Benkei swears fealty to Yoshitsune, and as many comic books have attested over the centuries, helps him fight many battles over the course of his long journey. In the game Genji, Benkei is giant, and swings a pillar of wood that might have once been a small tree. He is a fantastic character. Using him in battle feels a thousand times more bold and daring than using that Jean Reno character in Onimusha 3. I remember at the press conference for that game, the developers were saying, "Yeah, the Jean Reno character uses a whip, which is totally unlike anything ever seen in the genre, and will offer a new unrivalled gameplay experience." Well, it didn't do that, precisely. Benkei feels different. He is the king of large-weapon-wielding melee-brawling freaks. That little pause I mentioned, whenever you hit an enemy? Benkei's weapon is easily twelve feet long, so when the enemies come running and you bowl over a whole crowd of them, you get a whole sixteen-beat rhythm of thumps, crunches, and strobe-like pauses. Add to this the Megabuster Effect -- you can hold the attack button down, making Benkei hold that pillar up above his head, ready to let loose -- and you get a whole new layer of satisfaction. Hold down the strong attack button when enemies dash across a bridge, under cover of night, and let go at just the right moment to watch Benkei twirl around, swinging the pillar of justice twice, knocking over one wave of bad guys, and then the other. Then they get up and start attacking you. Here is where you have to block. Benkei's too big to run around, see. While blocking, Benkei has some attacks he can do -- strong attack sees him repositioning the pillar (hold it down to foooocus) and stabbing out with it like a pool cue, sending one enemy careening back into others. He's interesting.

It's a shame that Yoshitsune is so much easier to use, and can actually make jumps, and that the levels where they force us to use Benkei tend to just be screen-by-screen affairs where we walk from one darkly-lit cave room to another. Benkei is concept, not execution. Probably the designers crafted his attacks and then, realizing how little he fits into the rest of the game, left him for dead. "Try beating bosses as him for an extra challenge," they could put in the manual if they wanted to be cheeky. Fighting bosses as him is slow and dull. You yearn to be Yoshitsune, and just heal whenever you get near-killed.

It's worth noting that Benkei's motion-capture was done by none other than Kazu Kiyohara, first-baseman and resident tough guy of the Yomiuri Giants, Japan's most famous baseball team. (They play in the Tokyo Dome, you see. Yes, the Tokyo Dome is more than a venue for historical X Japan concerts.) He's in the commercial, swinging Benkei's pillar and grimacing charismatically at the audience. Think a Japanese Vin Diesel, and you get the idea of how he can grimace charismatically. Some general consumers question the use of Kiyohara, knowing full well that he has been involved, in the past, in scandals involving -- gasp! -- boozing and womanizing. Imagine that! A burly Japanese man in his late thirties, boozing and womanizing! Next thing you know, they'll be all over him for taking a shit.

This brings up an interesting point, however: Genji is now officially the subject of controversey. As if Kiyohara's involvement wasn't crazy enough, the game has also been inexplicably slapped with a CERO 18+ rating. Why? Ten hours of research lead me to believe this is because the game has blood in it. Yes, blood! Like in Onimusha, which is deemed suitable for kids thirteen and up (though maybe that's because you're killing demons, I don't know). The CERO 18+ rating was created, in 2003, for the purpose of warning people off of Grand Theft Auto 3, which then sold a few hundred thousand copies. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City likewise was designated CERO 18+, and scored two tens and two nines from Famitsu. It sold well. Japanese game companies must have seen this as a fluke, because no one caught on to the power of the 18+ until just recently. It's a gamble, is what it is; Killer7 was the first 18+ game since Vice City, and it clearly deserves that rating for being outright horrific and senselessly insane, and it didn't sell too well at all. Genji does not deserve the 18+; however, one wonders if there weren't some political motives, if controversey isn't the new cool in Japanese entertainment. The Japanese have always been slow to catch up on things like this, after all: just last month, the authorities in Kanagawa prefecture (viewers of "The Last Samurai" know it as "Yokohama") banned sale of Grand Theft Auto games to consumers under eighteen. (Consumers under eighteen are now welcome to ride the Keihin-Tohoku Line express fifteen minutes to Shinagawa, Tokyo Prefecture, and buy the game there.) This put the game in the news, and probably ended up selling a few more copies to general consumers. Genji soon after received the 18+ distinction, probably because Game Republic thought it was a good idea. Maybe Okamoto thought and thought, maybe while sipping tea in a Japanese house and looking at snow falling into an icy pond in the middle of June, and realized that "18+" doesn't just mean those comic books at 7-Eleven where little girls get raped by octopi -- it can imply anything enjoyed by, say, people over eighteen! Let's go ahead and, then, slap an "18+" rating on those tame, boring, cloying Korean love dramas all over the television at the moment, because no one under eighteen sure as hell watches that shit. Hell, let's make it an "81+." Then again, my friend's aunt is only 77. She'll have to go to the cemetary in Nippori on a day where the clouds swirl like hibachi smoke, and beg her dead mother for permission to see if Bae Young Joon gets that eye surgery.

The Kiyohara Controversey reveals one of Genji's flimsiest weaknesses -- that it is willing to sacrifice execution for content. Once Benkei is in your party, all intrigue surrounding him is gone; he's the guy sitting in your headquarters, and every time you talk to him, all he says is, "Do you want me to go, Yoshitsune?" Say yes, and he's yours. The game pulls off this same laziness with every character introduced into the story. For example, there's a little girl in your benefactor's house, early in the game, who exists only so that when the Heike get ticked at the Minamotos they can send ninjas to capture her. Three times, you have to go rescue this girl from the ninjas. A princess who once existed in the real world is now relegated to the body of a squeak-talking white-haired dope-fiend-looking anime floozy who sits on a cushion in your headquarters and enters the story only when you've obtained a new magical artifact, which she then fuses into your magic egg via a stock full-motion-video scene. Here's a game that starts with a lovely full-motion video of a battlefield of clashing samurai beneath a golden sun, so colorful is their armor that I immediately thought of a bowl of Fruity Pebbles on a hot morning in an air-conditioned house, narrated in a stern, historically-accurate voice, and it quickly dissolves into a "rescue the girl, go into the temple, seek enlightenment in the magic monkey-inhabited gardens, hack the dungeon, infiltrate the fortress with red-painted wooden bridges, and get your ass handed to you by the sorceress" videogame. I feel disappointed anew just thinking about it; all the cool things I saw along the way, supremely cool as they were, were just biodegradable filler. The tiger-scorpion mononoke you fight early on is especially bitching, maybe because you can slash it in the asshole -- you'll see what I mean; the humongous flaming phoenix you fight on some heavenly plane high above the earth exhibits mastery over certain lighting effects, yet is such a pain to fight because his attacks are so easy to evade and he so rarely does the one that sets you up to hit him; and then the game is half over, and you're fighting a floating boulder with four rock pillars flying around it. Benkei starts the game with this amazing giant wooden pillar, which is fascinating because it looks so normal, like something you could make on your own with a good carving knife and a large enough tree; soon, he's getting new pillars, stone ones, ones three, four times stronger than his old pillar, and they're all . . . blest with magical elements, so that they . . . glow. You get one pillar that's constantly alive with flickering purple electricity, and by that point, you're just like, "Wh . . . whaaat?" The game begins with a "chapter one" that lasts about two hours, flows into a "chapter two" with about four hours, and then ends with a four-hour "chapter three." Why have chapters in a game, if there's only three of them? Why not just make it all go together?

Oh, now I've crossed the line from nitpicking to being negative and mean. I'll finish here, then. Genji is a nice game. In Japan, its box art is fantastic and its manual is full of amazing photographs of Japanese gardens and cherry blossoms, writing brushes, and cups of tea. The font is amazing. The DVD case is clear, and the game sold well for equally clear reasons. Sony put this game on a pedestal, glad to have the distinguished Yoshiki Okamoto working for them. The graphics are amazing and the historical themes will draw in hundreds of thousands of Japanese consumers who have owned a PlayStation2 for the longest time yet never bought any games for it. When Sony has a destined hit on their hands, like Dragon Quest VIII, they sell it for 10,000 yen; when they have a sleeper hit, a word-of-mouth special, as we call them, like Katamari Damashii, they'll sell it for 4,000. When they have something they can position as a general-purpose piece of entertainment, like Genji, they'll sell it for 5,000. Genji's brother in pedigree, Fumito Ueda's Shadow of the Colossus, will no doubt be a more interesting videogame; Genji will no doubt sell more, thanks to its box art, its history, its surrouding controversies, and its public ad campaign. As a reinterpretation of the fragmentary Yoshitsune legend it is inaccurate in some ways that are entertaining just because they look cool (I'm certain Yoshitsune never slayed a hugeass phoenix, for example, though hell if it don't look nice) and in some ways that are offensive to history buffs (his use of Miyamoto Musashi's two-sword fighting style five hundred years before Musashi birthed it is especially wrong). In the end, as a piece of entertainment, it's kind of reassuring, in that it somewhat signals that something doesn't have to tell a story with letter-perfect accuracy to entertain people, and it's kind of funny, because it shows that the Japanese like to adapt and embellish their own history with magic and robots as much as they do to other people's (and I thought they were just being malicious in that case). Americans and Europeans will no doubt not pick up on all this nuance, and more power to them. Sony has already announced that the game's dialogue will be left in Japanese and subtitled in English, for "reasons of authenticity," and maybe it's nice if the players who've never taken a Japanese history class think Yoshitsune is a fictional character, like anyone crafted in anime or manga.

The choice to leave the voices in Japanese will, also, preserve the work of Akio Otsuka for the first time in an American-released game. Mr. Otsuka does the smart-tough-guy voice of Solid Snake in the Japanese Metal Gear Solid games (and the voice of the cyborg cop Batou in the "Ghost in the Shell" movies and TV shows and games, and the warrior Eugene in Namco's Tales of Rebirth), and he does a hell of a job at it. As Benkei, his lines are limited, though he delivers them all with power that leaves little doubt professional voice-actors are the way to go for Japanese videogames. (Lately, much like Disney movies, they've been putting celebrities who just sound wrong into all these big videogames.)

Though, as an entertainment, it is heaped with technicalities that bog down the storyline to the point of near dismal ruin, Genji never once gets stupid, or tries to be cute. Okamoto's previous games, the Onimusha series, were just starting to take some flack in the mainstream, non-game world for being historically inaccurate to the point of portraying wise general Oda Nobunaga as a crazed warlord who commanded demon- and zombie-samurai. Phoenixes, wizards, and flying ninjas be damned, Genji, telling a tale about a young warrior collecting the magic artifacts he needs to physically and mentally prepare him for the fight of his life, represents something of a settled-down maturation. Which is to say that, admirably, the game keeps a straight face. This is crucial, because as a game, it's keeping two faces -- the face it shows the general consumer, who buys healing items and powers through in six hours, and the twitchy Street Fighter III freak who tries to beat the whole game using only kamui mode. I can think of no other reason for half of the back of the box going into exhaustive detail on kamui mode, calling it a "new way to play." Is this the kind of thing we put on the back of a box nowadays? The game's ultimate failure is that, though intriguing, I personally would rather just practice parrying on a match-by-match, pick-up-and-play-purely basis in Street Fighter III than slog through Genji's story, which is to say that in the quest to make a game that appeals to the non-gamers and the hardcore simultaneously, the balance has not yet been found. What Genji represents is a nice try.

Make a sequel if you want, Okamoto; just please, Sony, don't encourage kids to read The Tale of Genji. Then I wouldn't be the only person around who's read it, and I wouldn't feel so cool anymore.

--tim rogers, 07072004, the seventh of july, a sunny day, the tanabata festival . . .

. . . and the release of katamari damashii 2 [working title] [heh.] . . .

!!!

discuss this article on the largeprimenumbers.com forums