Final Fantasy Record Keeper (DeNA, Square Enix, 2015)

(Updated on September 12, 2016)

About a year and a half on since I summed up Final Fantasy Record Keeper as “a good diversion for about a weekend,” I have logged more time in this game than in any other over the same span. As such, I thought it fair to revise my assessment.

The basic premise and mechanics remain much the same. Each numbered Final Fantasy game is featured as a realm in Record Keeper, and each realm offers “dungeons” reenacting sections from the original games. These dungeons consist typically of three-to-four stages of consecutive battles against basic enemies, usually finishing with a boss encounter at the end of the final stage. There is no overworld, no exploring, and not a lot of story.

What has changed is the breadth of content, as DeNA continues to add new dungeons at a steady rate. If you were to begin playing Final Fantasy Record Keeper today, there would be enough content to occupy you for probably a few months before you would be all caught up. Currently in the global release, no realm has yet been covered in full (although most are close, as of this writing). Sequel and spin-off titles, such as Final Fantasy X-2 and Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, have also proven fair game for inclusion, and even Final Fantasy Tactics has been featured, so there is potentially enough material to mine from to extend Record Keeper’s life another year at least. The impending release of Final Fantasy XV should also help.

Warriors of Light, Dark, and Everything in Between

The most appealing aspect of Final Fantasy Record Keeper is definitely the large quantity of playable characters you can unlock to rotate into your five-person party. Nearly every significant party member from a numbered non-MMO Final Fantasy is currently available, and even some villains and supporting characters have been enlisted into the Record Keeper army.

Considering it’s a free-to-play game, Final Fantasy Record Keeper is extraordinarily generous in how it distributes these unlockables. Characters are not walled behind moneyed barriers or any ridiculous “gacha” lottery; all of them can be acquired just by completing dungeons. These are not even the hard dungeons; the characters—that is, the most desirable spoils in the game—are the easiest things to acquire. As someone who has been playing since near the beginning, I now have well over 100 party members, including marquee characters of the PlayStation era, classic heroes from the 16-bit generation, and some really cool deep cuts.

They’re not just trophies. The developers have included an impressive amount of detail in adapting the characters to fit Record Keeper’s visuals and mechanics. For characters from the PlayStation era and on, part of the fun is in seeing these originally polygonal heroes rendered as charming 16-bit sprites. It’s even more exciting, however, to see DeNA and Square Enix try to faithfully represent each character’s individual strengths and skills while keeping everyone balanced within Record Keeper’s gameplay. The game incorporates abilities from all of the represented titles and adapts them into an Active Time Battle system based on that of the 16-bit installments, but it doesn’t play exactly like any of them, which means the developers have to take certain liberties in order to fit existing characters into new mechanics.

Take Celes from Final Fantasy VI, for example. The designers must have felt that her signature Runic ability would be a little too juiced as a normal command, since it completely shuts down many enemy spellcasters. Instead, in homage to her job class of Rune Knight—a sturdy, sword-wielding mage—they gave her the ability to use the Spellblade/Mystic Knight’s elemental sword attacks. These are techniques that didn’t even exist in Final Fantasy VI! It’s not strictly faithful to her original form, but her Record Keeper incarnation is an interesting interpretation and one of this game’s more awesome characters.

Gacha: A More Insidious Monster-in-a-Box

Next to the characters themselves, ”5-star” weapons and armors are the most enticing collectibles in the game. The few weapons and armors you can acquire through gameplay are mostly generic items with names like “Knife” and “Leather Armor.” Almost any weapon or armor with even the slightest bit of name recognition is elevated in Record Keeper to storied 5-star status. This includes weapons such as the Buster Sword and Hardedge, both originally among the weakest swords in Final Fantasy VII.

5-star relics are extremely powerful, especially those that have been additionally flagged as “unique.” A unique relic, when equipped by the specific character with whom the item is most closely associated, will bestow that user with a signature Soul Break technique (this game’s equivalent of Limit Breaks, Trance, Overdrive, etc.). These Soul Breaks include powerful attacks hitting for 9999 damage or more, party-wide healing spells, potent party-wide multi-buffs (e.g. both Protect and Haste on the entire party), and a few singular abilities that are mechanics unto themselves (e.g. Celes’s Runic). Unique 5-stars are so positively game-changing that, upon acquiring your first one, your entire strategy becomes likely to revolve around it, at least until you get an even better one.

5-star weapons and armors can only be acquired by chance via the Relic Draw gacha system, and this is where the game’s freemium scheme comes into play. Although every player gets one free draw per day, these “common” draws are not likely to yield even a 2-star item more than once a month. For any real shot at pulling anything better than a 3-star, you have to buy into the rare draws, which requires using either actual money ($2.99 per draw) or Mythril, the game’s virtual currency (with a conversion rate of roughly 5 Mythril = $3). Awarded for completing various tasks, Mythril is not exactly finite, but DeNA controls the supply; you cannot farm it.

Even with the enhanced odds offered in the rare draws, your chance of pulling a 5-star is probably only about 10 percent (there’s a distressing lack of transparency about the exact odds). And even if you do get one, it probably won’t be the specific one you were hoping for. Most purely free players, such as myself, will be glad for any 5-star, but whales with their hearts set on a specific favorite character’s item, such as Sephiroth’s One-Winged Angel katana, can potentially blow through hundreds of dollars before pulling it.

Like any gacha, the game is not above cruelly exploiting those with gambling addictions. That’s really the basis of its business model and a discussion beyond the scope of this post. I will say that I have not spent a single penny on this game, yet, over the year and a half I’ve been playing, I’ve managed to collect a couple dozen good 5-star relics just through spending Mythril. Luck plays a part, no doubt, but provided you have the self-control to resist spending all your money chasing shiny virtual weapons, Final Fantasy Record Keeper is much fairer than any other gacha I’ve encountered. Remember also that 5-star relics, while helpful, are not necessary to win any but the most difficult of optional battles.

A Game for Those Who Fight

As a numbers game, Final Fantasy Record Keeper is every bit as robust as a traditional Final Fantasy. Characters are rated across seven statistical attributes. There are seventeen different ability schools and counting, each providing access to diverse sets of magical or physical techniques divided into six ranks within each school. There are over fifteen weapon types and seven armor types. Each character can also equip an accessory and a passive skill. With minor exceptions, characters’ equipment and ability proficiency levels are set in stone, but you still have a ton of options in how you organize your team and outfit each party member.

With all the experience and gear I’ve accumulated, at this point I can auto-battle through most fights without much thought. The exceptions are the challenge battles that cap off the weekly limited-time events. The hardest of these are the hardest battles I’ve personally fought in any Final Fantasy game. They require serious preparation and planning because they cannot be brute-forced through. These are bosses that are so fast that you need Haste just to keep up. They have so much defense and HP that they can outlast all your ability uses. And they get stronger and more aggressive as they near death, which means they’re at their toughest right when you are at your most spent.

I’ll never forget my victory over the Archaeosaur (T-Rexaur from Final Fantasy VIII) in one of the earlier events. Archaeosaur was a beast that could KO any of my party members in two hits or less, and it had attacks that could target the entire party, meaning it could potentially wipe me out in a mere two turns. Although weak to ice, it would auto-counter any black magic, so nuking it would only expedite my own demise. My narrow path to victory lay through exploiting its many status vulnerabilities. I had to paralyze, blind, sleep, and poison it. The first three were to keep it from killing me, while the poison accounted for most of the damage I dealt, as it slowly ticked the dino’s health to zero. Keep in mind, this boss was also preceded by four stages of very difficult normal enemies that I could only get through by exploiting the janky “Retaliate meta” (a tactic that seemed an awful lot like cheating, except that it was described on the official strategy site!).

The best fights always require a level of ingenuity that I never had occasion to exercise in any of the core Final Fantasy games I played (which includes all numbered installments from I to X). I’ll mention again, however, that, although challenging, even the hardest fights are doable without spending any money—something that I don’t feel is true of most gacha-based games. I’ve managed to clear all content, save for one notoriously unfair event dungeon (the original Parade Float (Elite)), and I’ve achieved mastery rank on all but two other battles (Bahamut SIN (Ultimate) and Kuja (Ultimate +)).

Of course, if you're not interested in taking on these optional challenges, you could instead just have fun toying around with cool or funny team concepts. You can finally assemble the Tetsuya Nomura dream team of Cloud, Squall, Tidus, Yuna, and Lightning. Or how about a five-dragoon party, with Ricard, Kain, Cid (FFVII), Freya, and Kimahri all taking to the skies? My new favorite is the “helmeted villains” team, consisting of Garland, Golbez, Exdeath, and Gabranth. (No fifth member for that team yet, alas. I think there are a few good candidates from Final Fantasy XIV, but they’re not in Record Keeper as of this writing.)

Remembering When Final Fantasy Mattered

Final Fantasy Record Keeper does provide a framing narrative to tie together the dungeoning across different realms, but this is barely developed. The larger part of the exposition consists of text summaries that briefly recap plot progressions between boss fights from the original games.

As someone who dropped the series after Final Fantasy X, I was intrigued at the prospect of being able to experience the more recent stories through abridged “demakes” via Record Keeper. But a few looks at the plot summaries for Final Fantasy XIII and XIV quickly had me reaching for the Excedrin.

I don’t mean that as a knock on those later titles, whose plots I still don’t feel qualified to comment on. Record Keeper’s summaries even for the games I’ve played and adored are somehow both dull and hard to follow, missing far too many details and any of the storytelling craft the series was once known for. Final Fantasy Record Keeper is not built to do justice to the opera from Final Fantasy VI, the ballroom dance from Final Fantasy VIII, the lake scene from Final Fantasy X, or whatever other cutscene might be your personal favorite. But it does recreate almost every boss fight from every numbered Final Fantasy, which should give veteran fans plenty enough to reminisce about.

Because I played Final Fantasy IV and know the game well, I don't really need Record Keeper to explain to me who Rubicante was. When that towering boss sprite takes the field and begins by respectfully addressing an enraged Edge (if he's in the party), suddenly I remember everything as vividly as though it were yesterday—a testament to the original game's captivating power, as well as to Final Fantasy Record Keeper's painstaking attention to detail in faithfully recreating these boss fights.

DeNA and Square Enix certainly did their homework, making sure to include specific lines of in-battle dialogue from the original games (if not perhaps the specific translations you grew up with), the correct battle themes and fanfares (e.g. "Not Alone" playing unbroken across a key series of battles from Final Fantasy IX), and as many battle conditions and mechanics as could reasonably be preserved (use Fire on Rubicante, and he'll return the favor by resurrecting any of your fallen party members!).

There's no denying that Final Fantasy Record Keeper leans heavily on nostalgia—that life support of the franchise through the last several years of Final Fantasy XV delays. You'll get a lot more out of its little touches if you played the original games. I still find many of the Final Fantasy XIII boss fights exhilarating, though, despite never having any idea what the characters are going on about. However well or poorly the series has aged, the Active Time Battle engine remains, frankly, leagues ahead of every other mobile free-to-play game I've encountered.

If you've NEVER been a fan of Final Fantasy, then Record Keeper may not have much to hold your interest. But as character collecting games on mobile go, Final Fantasy Record Keeper is without peer. No other game in this genre offers so large an assortment of cool characters. No other is so generous as to make every one of these characters easily obtainable at zero cost. And no other possesses anywhere near its depth of mechanics once past the collecting. No other I've tried has been worth my time, frankly, but I don't regret any of the countless hours I've now sunk into Final Fantasy Record Keeper.

* * *

(Below, my original, outdated post from April 2, 2015 is kept for reference.)

DeNA's free-to-play mobile game Final Fantasy Record Keeper is a surprising good bit of fanservice. The premise is that the worlds and stories of the numbered Final Fantasy games exist as enchanted paintings, which the player, as some manner of royal record keeper, has been tasked with protecting against an unknown darkness seeking to erase them. The only way to do this is to dive into the paintings and basically live out the stories within.

For longtime fans of the series, this really is like walking through a museum of past adventures. Each game gets its own gallery, where players can relive the story in condensed form. Plot is doled out one dungeon at a time, in the form of just a screenshot from the original game, accompanied by a single-screen text summary. That aspect of the presentation is not likely to draw anyone not already deeply familiar with these stories. But fans should appreciate the trip down memory lane, complete with vintage 16-bit sprites. Not all of the graphics are taken directly from previous games; one of the best parts of Final Fantasy Record Keeper is seeing characters (and monsters) of the PlayStation era newly done in the retro style and fitting in charmingly with the SNES sprites. For better or worse, I don't think any of the 8-bit sprites are in there, and I'm personally a tad annoyed that the gallery for Final Fantasy IV features screenshots of the polygonal remake, rather than the SNES original. But the music is sure to fill any fan with nostalgia. It's all taken from previous games, and, as much as we may have heard some of these tracks almost too many times over the decades, Final Fantasy Record Keeper does contain a large enough selection of enduring classics, so that the sound doesn't get repetitive while you're playing. Indeed, follow up a Final Fantasy IV chapter with an episode out of Final Fantasy VII (as can happen in this game), and one comes to newly appreciate just how extensive was composer Nobuo Uematsu's oeuvre over the 15+ years that he spent on this series.

Now, as a game, Final Fantasy Record Keeper isn't so much the stuff of legend, but it can be fun for a while. The combat is a simplistic take on the Active Time Battle system, where you'll mostly be tapping "Attack" over and over again. You can unlock characters from the original games to add to your party, and this really is the best part of Final Fantasy Record Keeper—collecting all your favorites and putting together a dream team. (I found a five-man party consisting of Cloud, Kain, Wakka, White Mage, and record keeper Tyro to be most effective.) The game does a good job of making the characters feel distinct in their stats, abilities, and equipment. All the equipment is also taken from previous games. And the game cleverly encourages players to rotate party members in and out, because characters (and equipment) receive huge bonuses while in their own realms.

It can be a good diversion for about a weekend, which is fair for the starting price. But it rapidly becomes more grueling after that. Each dungeon consists of a few rounds of regular enemies, followed by a boss. The boss battles are probably the only legitimately exciting part of the gameplay, as many of them require a bit of care (remember to watch out for Antlion's counterattacks!). But they also seem to grow exponentially more difficult after about the fifteenth dungeon or so. And it's especially annoying that the regular enemies that precede them, fairly consistently pushovers throughout my experience, are never any indication of the difficulty of the level boss.

Since new equipment is rare—the only way to get anything good is usually randomly through the daily drawing—your only real recourse is to level-grind. Even if you were down for the tedium, however, this is where Final Fantasy Record Keeper's freemium aspects kick in and impede your attempts to just grind away. The player's ability to battle is limited by their "Stamina." It costs Stamina points even to enter any dungeon, and, once you've exhausted them, your only options are to either wait for them to recharge (at a rate of 1 point per 3 minutes), or spend real-world money to restore them instantly. As you progress through the game, later dungeons require increasingly greater amounts of Stamina to enter and complete, so there's gradually less and less for you to do, unless you're willing to pay up. Money is also used for other things, such as healing mid-dungeon, or getting more tickets for the daily drawing. There is a free alternative to money that can do the same things, Mythril, which can be earned in-game, but there is a finite amount of Mythril to be gotten.

I got bored of the game after about two days with it, not only because of the tedium, but because it just stopped incentivizing me after a while. It was exciting when I was unlocking new realms and especially new characters from the first three worlds—VII, X, and IV—but then I opened up the galleries for V and VI, and neither had any name characters for me to unlock. I don't think I've even come across a single piece of equipment from VI. Maybe they're holding these things back for now, saving them for special events, which are the online aspect. Right now, for example, there is a Final Fantasy VII event that runs until April 11, 2015—a lengthy dungeon, where you can unlock Tifa and Sephiroth to add to your party. Like the rest of the game, this event dungeon becomes quickly more difficult and costlier to your Stamina with each successive floor. And, even though the deadline, as of my writing, is more than a week away, this truly is a multiple-day undertaking. I think mathematically, if you can't manage to keep a certain pace, at some point you just won't be able to keep recharging your Stamina quickly enough to get through the whole thing without paying. What happens when the deadline passes? Will you miss your chance to unlock Tifa and Sephiroth? I have no idea, but, for sure, I'm not going to make it.

What's the matter with Star Wars canon?

From IGN, the new paperback edition of last year’s Star Wars Rebels prequel novel, A New Dawn, apparently includes a timeline listing the movies, TV shows, books, and video games presently acknowledged in Disney’s revised Star Wars canon. Compared to the full Expanded Universe of old, which contained hundreds of works, the revised canon is a pretty short list, including only sixteen items so far: the six George Lucas films, the Dave Filoni The Clone Wars animated series (which, I assume, includes the movie), the current Star Wars Rebels TV series, the upcoming Episode VII: The Force Awakens movie, six new novels (most of them not yet released), and one in-development video game.



When Disney announced last year that it was wiping the slate clean, officially removing the entirety of the Expanded Universe from continuity, many longtime Star Wars fanatics bemoaned the loss of so many years of beloved storylines. Now, personally, I never read any of the Expanded Universe books, I didn’t care about them, and I never regarded them as canon. Even so, Disney’s position on the revised canon stung for me too. But, in my case, what the new initiative meant was, not that the slate was being wiped clean, but rather that the canon was going to get a lot messier.

Taking all of the books, comics, toys, and video games into account, the old canon could admittedly be complicated and difficult to sort out, because of the somewhat noncommittal “levels of canon” system, wherein some Star Wars-branded works were officially more canon than others, and there were even some licensed products that were definitely not canon. Any time an intriguing new Star Wars story came out, you would have to consider, “Is this canon?” And the answer wasn’t always clear or constant. The marketing for the 2008 Star Wars: The Force Unleashed video game even explicitly called the story canon as a selling point, understanding that, for many fans, that distinction could determine whether they invested their time and money on the game. But, really, the better question, which they weren’t answering, was “How canon is this?” In the case of The Force Unleashed, it was “C-canon,” the same as all those many Expanded Universe novels, and two levels of legitimacy below “G-canon,” the highest level of canon that included only the stories directly from George Lucas himself (i.e. just the six movies).

The “levels of canon” could be a headache for anyone interested in figuring out how the larger Star Wars fiction fit together, but it was also shrewdly defined, once you familiarized yourself with the system, and it kept things simple and elegant for fans like myself, who followed the movies and absolutely did not care about the other stuff. I didn’t need to worry about anything other than G-canon, the system assured me, because George Lucas himself didn’t worry about the rest of it, and none of that stuff would ever be relevant to his films. At most, if Lucas liked a name or an idea from an Expanded Universe work, he might adopt it for use in a movie (e.g. the double-bladed lightsaber that was originally conceived by Tales of the Jedi comic artist Christian Gossett), but the films would never go so far as to reference Expanded Universe stories. The closest Lucas ever got to the Expanded Universe was probably the Genndy Tartakovsky Clone Wars series, which, while definitely not part of film continuity, was allowed to premiere some of Lucas’s original ideas (e.g. General Grievous) in advance of their film debuts. The point is, for me (and, I’d wager, for the vast majority of Star Wars fans), the “true” canon was just the six movies, and everything else could safely be ignored.

That has changed now under Disney’s watch. When Disney released its statement scratching all of those Expanded Universe novels, games, etc., it also announced that “all aspects of Star Wars storytelling moving forward will be connected,” meaning, in other words, that any stories released from then on would be part of a single revised continuity. The original and prequel trilogies, along with the CG The Clone Wars series, remained as “the immovable objects of Star Wars history, the characters and events to which all other tales must align.” But the Disney XD cartoon, Star Wars Rebels, and all novels, beginning with A New Dawn, would also be canon, period. There would be no more “levels of canon” (well, other than canon vs. non-canon).

This is a pain for me, because I still have no interest in reading any of these new novels. I’m still a huge Star Wars fan, however, and I expect I will continue to see any new movies. But it will be really annoying to me, if future films start referencing books that I haven’t read. Before, everything relevant to the movies was contained within the movies. Now, I have to worry that I might miss out on part of a film’s story because I didn’t read the tie-in novel or whatever—something that was never a concern under the old system.

I suppose, for fans of the Dave Filoni The Clone Wars TV series, the silver lining of this new dictate is that that show is now considered canon, period. Before, it was “T-canon,” a level of uncertain validity between G-canon and C-canon. It was not as canon as the films, but I don’t think it was ever referred to as part of the Expanded Universe either. Most Expanded Universe works were basically glorified fan fiction that Lucas signed off on (because fans were going to write their own Star Wars stories anyway, and he might as well cash in when they do) but otherwise kept a safe distance from creatively. The Clone Wars was different. By most accounts, Lucas was regularly involved with the show, attending meetings, leading story conferences, and approving scripts up to the very end of its run. If the show was not relevant to Lucas’s films, it might only have been because he didn’t make any more Star Wars movies after The Clone Wars began.

Personally, I thought The Clone Wars had some fun arcs (most notably, the episodes involving Savage Opress and his brother), but some of the liberties it took with the Star Wars mythology were a little too zany, and I also found the characterization of Anakin on the show to be wildly inconsistent with his portrayal in the prequel trilogy. (On the show, he’s an effective general, respected peer to members of the Jedi Council, and even a master to his own Padawan. The Anakin of Revenge of the Sith, meanwhile, is scorned by Mace Windu, and probably not someone you would ever want commanding men on the field of battle.) So I never took The Clone Wars as canon (G-canon being the only real canon to me).

Disney evidently feels otherwise, however, and its revised continuity, I suppose, opens the door for future films to mine The Clone Wars for story material, perhaps even bringing to the big screen characters that were created specifically for the show, potentially giving them greater relevance in the new canon than the series as a whole ever had in the old. I know The Clone Wars has many fans still who might be happy at that prospect.

Me, I think I’m just going to have to develop my own internal system, dividing Star Wars into levels of canon, according to how relevant they are to me personally.

The Wrong Side of 30

The following is fiction... maybe.

"How is it that I work fewer hours now than I ever have at any other point in my adult life, and at a job that is pretty easy, and which I enjoy probably more than any other job I've ever had, and yet, every day, once my shift is up, I feel completely drained, and all I want to do is go home and go to sleep in the middle of the day? I mean, I'd like to be more productive, but my body just wants to shut down. I just don't understand why it shuts down so much more quickly these days."

"Welcome to the wrong side of 30," they tell me.

It is true that this "affliction" seemed to begin right after I turned 31, which was also around when I started this job. And yet, that can't be the reason. It should not be the case that a man should become so useless so suddenly with still so many years left to go. I'm not even middle-aged yet! No, rather....

"I'm sorry," I say. "I zoned out there for a bit."

"You've been asleep for two hours."

Yes, it's a workday. That sounds about right.

The Walking Dead (TV) (Season 5, Part 1) (2014)

On a show that can be fairly routinely criticized for tedious plot twists that hinge on characters’ lack of common sense, The Walking Dead may have outdone itself with its Season 5 mid-season finale that many viewers found… perplexing, to put it lightly. Read critics’ reviews from around the web, and you’ll see the climactic death scene more harshly described variously as “nonsensical,” “inexplicable,” “random,” “manipulative,” and “hollow.” Discussion forums immediately following the episode’s original airing were awash with comments expressing not so much frustration as plain bewilderment at what viewers had just witnessed and why. Why did Beth stab Dawn? What was she thinking? Is it that she wasn’t thinking? Was there any point to her death? Was the whole moment purely for cheap shock value and nothing more? Were people supposed to be more angry or sad at how it all went down? Because they mostly seemed confused. For sure, The Walking Dead TV series has had some major logic issues over its four-and-a-half seasons so far, but, actually, I’m not sure this is one of them. Personally, I kind of get it.

First, before I go on, I should say that, on reason, I do not think it reasonable to evaluate the events of a scripted and finite genre show strictly literally. It does not do to judge the logic of a TV character’s decisions the same way that we would criticize, say, a sports team’s questionable play in the big game. That doesn’t mean it’s excusable for characters to act like idiots; it means that a character’s arc need not abide by the practical realities that rule our own lives, so long as it consistently observes a valid thematic truth. Beth’s death on The Walking Dead was, in my opinion, the fitting fulfillment of the theme to that half-season, and also true to her character as it had developed up to that point.

Second, I should also add that I think The Walking Dead is a series whose arcs are ideally consumed fully in marathon form, even though the show is not broadcast that way. The middle episodes of each half-season tend to be slow and uneventful. For as popular as this show has become, very rarely does a single episode live up to the preceding week of anticipation. As a result, it becomes very easy for viewers to drift and lose sight of the larger thematic whole across eight weeks.

The tagline for the first half of The Walking Dead Season 5 is “Hunt or be hunted,” ostensibly referring to the group’s conflict with the Terminus cannibals. The cannibals are out of the picture after three episodes, but their foundational ethos, as voiced by their society’s matriarch, Mary—”You’re the butcher or you’re the cattle”—haunts the protagonists throughout the remainder of the arc. Again and again, they are brutally shown that altruism, or even trust, toward others only endangers their own group, and, more and more, Rick especially, as their leader, begins to adopt a policy of basing decisions less on “the right thing to do” and more on “us first,” which is exactly how the Terminans operated.

The season opens with a flashback revealing that the cannibals were not always so. Once upon a time, their signs promising sanctuary were sincere. They were trying to do something good, until the signposts drew a group of marauders, who then proceeded to rape and kill the people of Terminus. Mary and her son, Gareth, eventually led their people to take back control, but not before learning the hard way the price for trying to be human beings in the new post-zombocalypse world. Thus, they decided thereafter that they would be the butchers and not the cattle.

The Terminans’ own treachery then impresses upon Rick’s group the same lesson, which is further driven home by subsequent experiences. After they are taken captive by the revealed cannibals, Rick and a few others break free first and go looking for their friends still held captive in some traincar. They pass other cars along the way, and Glenn suggests that those cars must also be full of prisoners in need of their help, which elicits an incredulous glare from Rick. “It’s still who we are,” Glenn insists. “It’s gotta be.” And so Rick relents, unlocking one of the cars, only to be met with the raving madman inside—one of the marauders who tormented Gareth’s people, we later find out via flashback.

Next, after the group successfully escapes Terminus, which is at that point burning down and under zombie siege, Rick tells the others to take up sniping posts along the fence, so that they can pick off any surviving cannibals. “They don’t get to live,” he says. The others, appalled at the idea, dissuade him of it, reasoning that any cannibals the zombies might fail to finish off will be put to flight and no longer pose any threat. But they’re wrong. A small band of cannibals led by Gareth survives to stalk them, and Bob Stookey ends up paying the price with his leg for the group’s mercy. This time, nobody stops Rick, as he slaughters the last of the cannibals.

Not everyone in the group is entirely easy with the idea that they must be ruthless to survive, but Carol later seems to affirm Rick’s sentiments: “I don’t think we get to save people anymore.” Of course, she was the one who, last season, murdered two of the group's own simply because they might have been contagious with a deadly flu, and then also put down a little girl because apparently she was too crazy to take along but they also couldn’t leave her behind.

Meanwhile, this whole time, Beth is stuck in the city in a hospital run by a group of former police officers led by the clearly deranged and delusional Dawn. Although they are not literally eating people, the hospital operates, under Dawn, as a “cannibalistic” society, where, as Beth observes, “Everyone uses people to get what they want.” Dawn’s officers bring wounded into the hospital and give them treatment and shelter, but this is no altruism. No service is rendered without expectation of payment, which, for Beth and the other civilians in the hospital, basically means being slaves to the officers. Even the one doctor, who appears at first compassionate, is an adherent to the system in place, as the friendship he extends to Beth turns out to be only a ploy to manipulate her to his personal advantage within the hospital. Like everyone else, he’s looking out only for himself, and helping others only when it helps him.

This sort of manipulative ploy in the interest of self-preservation was exercised even within the main group by Eugene, who used the false hope of a cure to string along people to protect him, including many who died believing in him prior to his first appearance on the show. Again, the message seems to be that “right or wrong” is no longer meaningful in the new world, and surviving is all that matters.

As the mid-season finale begins, Rick’s group has captured a trio of Dawn’s officers, whom they plan to exchange for Beth and Carol, both being held at the hospital. (The prisoner exchange, by the way, was Tyreese’s idea. Rick’s original plan was to go in guns blazing and massacre the hospital gang.) When one of the officers escapes, after having feigned cooperation, Rick responds by running down the unarmed, fleeing man with a police car—a new level of cold-bloodedness for our hero. It’s clear that he is done suffering fools. In a chillingly ironic bit of symmetry, Rick’s words to the mangled officer even echo exactly those of Gareth to the captive group near the beginning of the season premiere: “Can’t go back, Bob.” In the premiere, it was Bob Stookey pleading that the group had a plan to set the world back the way it was. In the finale, it was Officer Bob begging to be taken back to the hospital. If the context was not precisely the same, nevertheless the point was made. Rick understood now, as Gareth did, that the old world was gone, its values obsolete.

Which brings us finally to the close of this arc and that fateful prisoner exchange. The two officers are returned to Dawn in trade for Beth and Carol, and everything seems okay, until Dawn asks that Rick’s group give up Noah, her former “ward” (i.e. slave), who had earlier escaped and provided the group with intel on the hospital. Rick and Daryl object, but only until Noah surrenders himself to avert a shootout. At that point, with the safety of their group of utmost concern, they’re probably relieved not to have to fight for Noah, since he was never really part of the group. But Beth is not okay with that.

Beth alone flatly rejects this new insane way of living. Like her father, Hershel, who ultimately remained an upright man in a fallen world (even when he had only one leg and was then forced to his knees to boot), she doesn’t just react to circumstance and fall in line, but rather has her own moral compass that isn’t open to compromise. She recognizes that it actually isn’t okay but is totally broken—this “us first” attitude of only looking out for your own, this nonsense of “butchers” and “cattle” and of subsisting by feeding off one’s fellow human, whether literally or figuratively. Where all those around her, concerned only with surviving, even at the expense of their humanity, have become “the walking dead,” she alone understands that there are things worth more than one’s own life. And so she gives up that life in a shockingly selfless act, sacrificing herself to remove the monster, Dawn—not just to save Noah, but to flip the script for everyone watching, to reach those that can still be reached, and show them that there is another way. Thus, in dying, Beth becomes the girl who lived.

Sure enough, her sacrifice at last shatters the binary “hunt or be hunted” paradigm that has defined the season up to this point. Where, a moment prior, we had essentially two armed gangs eyeing each other warily from opposite ends of the hallway, each hoping just to hold on to what was theirs, now suddenly each group, cleansed in the wake of Beth’s unthinkable sacrifice, is offering to take in the other.

Now, the natural question is, did she really have to let Dawn kill her, in order to get across this message? If Dawn had to go, couldn’t Rick or Daryl just have taken her out easily without Beth having to die first? Maybe. But everybody was already leery and on edge, anticipating that something might go wrong with the exchange. Even though Dawn’s own people hated her, they might, on reflex, have retaliated to such a direct attack in cold blood, and then all hell would have broken loose with both sides opening up on one another. No, Beth had to do it in such a way as to 1) stun everybody, Dawn included, and 2) set it up so that Daryl executing Dawn would have appeared, in that moment, completely justified even to the other side.

So I don’t think Beth’s actions were random or inexplicable. On the contrary, I think they were calculated. She understood that there would be a price to be paid for being a human being. That lesson was not lost on her. But where everybody else only made it that far, she alone graduated in choosing to pay the price fully herself, giving everything that she had or could ever have to give, knowing that she would never personally benefit. That’s when everybody else finally got it too—the real point of the lesson, which Beth wouldn't allow them to walk out without confronting. The paradigm was binary, but Beth’s sacrifice reframed it back to what it originally was: "right or wrong," the distinction still immutable even in the new world.

In summary, I do believe that there was a point to the way Beth died. Now, if this were real life, then what Beth did would be quite stupid, in my opinion, because I don’t generally believe, in the real world in this day and age, that the power of a gesture ever endures long enough to justify a life in exchange. In a more finite work of fiction, however, where every character is just an embodiment of the artists’ words and ideas, there is no higher pursuit for any character than to make a statement that can actually affect those of us in the real world. Because a fictional character doesn't truly have a life to lose, but, in saying something real, they can attain a life beyond what is fiction.

Alas, even within the fiction of The Walking Dead, Beth's sacrifice will likely be rendered hollow, probably quite soon, as future arcs will no doubt see the show going in circles (as it already has been) to contradict this arc's message and regress the group back to a "humanity is a liability" way of thinking. Although, as I argued, it’s preferable to marathon an arc in its entirety, I also think the show surely falls apart if you try to consume more than that at once.

Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014)

When I first heard the concept of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood described to me—chart a boy character’s coming of age through scenes shot across a twelve-year period using the same child actor—I was certainly curious about the process and intrigued at the audacity to take on such an impractical project. On the other hand, being apathetic toward coming-of-age boy stories, I was not so interested as to go out of my way to see Boyhood. At the Golden Globes this year, however, the film took home several awards, and that was when it really got my attention.

When Patricia Arquette got up to accept the first of Boyhood’s three Golden Globes (for “Best Supporting Actress”), I recognized her as “the lady from that Medium show.” I never watched Medium (2005-2011), but I understood it to be a typically uninspired Middle America-courting junk procedural. And so I was surprised to see Arquette even nominated for a major film award. I thought, she must have really turned things around, if she was now being honored as a legitimate film actress (notwithstanding that her work on Medium had earned her several Golden Globe nominations over the years in the TV category). Then I recalled the story behind Boyhood, and I quickly turned to the Internet to research the answer to a question that had struck me right then.

Sure enough, Patricia Arquette had already begun filming Boyhood a few years before she was cast in Medium, and she was still working on Boyhood a few years after Medium ended its run. That realization kind of blew my mind. The film’s production actually spanned three stages of Arquette’s career, from pulp B-lister to small-screen A-lister to post-prime Law & Order: SVU guest star (as a working girl, not a defense attorney, for what that’s worth). Now she has a Golden Globe and is the safe money to win the Oscar as well. The accolades earned through Boyhood may well elevate her career to a new stage, and yet an Oscar for Boyhood would not signify her late arrival, so much as it would affirm that she had been an award-caliber actress over the entire chunk of her career that her performance in the movie encompassed.

Boyhood is remarkable to watch for this way that it manages to put twelve years in perspective. The long, hard struggle that Arquette’s character goes through is given weight, not just by her acting, but by the real aging that the actress visibly undergoes over the course of the film—a dimension that no conventionally made movie could ever match. But even that dimension does not add so much to the experience as does the knowledge, external to the film, of how much of Patricia Arquette’s life is in this movie. I was awestruck as I watched Boyhood with the realization that the actress, like her character, was definitely not in the same place by the end of filming as she was at the outset. In nearly a literal sense, I was witnessing the performance of a lifetime. It certainly gave me pause and encouraged me to reflect and consider the passage of time in a different way than I normally process it.

When I was first told about Boyhood, it didn’t actually strike me that twelve years was such a long time. I operate with a warped sense of time, I now realize, which I mostly measure in terms of “distance to the next Avengers movie.” In 2008, when Iron Man first teased Avengers with a Nick Fury cameo, the latter movie was still four years off. But 2012 arrived in what felt like no time at all. I’m sure Avengers: Infinity War, Part 1, scheduled for 2018 (i.e. four years from now), will arrive just as quickly. So, twelve years, I figured, is just three of those—not such a big deal. It is only when I see twelve years presented as through Boyhood—flashing by from one defining moment to the next—that it really hits me.

A nice touch is the use of real cultural touchstones to frame scenes. Characters line up to catch the release of the latest Harry Potter book, for example, and they also speculate on where future Star Wars films can go post-Revenge of the Sith. Amusingly, both the characters and director Linklater evidently never anticipated the shock announcement, with two years to go before Boyhood’s release, that there would be a Star Wars sequel trilogy. (And I’d like to point out that that was incredibly naive on their part, considering that a new Star Wars movie, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, actually came out in the very year (2008) of that Boyhood scene, and, moreover, the scene was reportedly inspired by the boy actor’s experience playing the aggressively-marketed-as-“canon” Star Wars: The Force Unleashed video game (also from 2008), which indicated how increasingly open George Lucas was to high-profile direct sequels/prequels to his works by other creators, of which there were a never-ending number lining up with dreams of taking the reins. But I digress.) For those of us alive during the years covered, these elements add yet another layer to the experience of the passage of time, prompting us to revisit and reflect upon those years in our own lives. (Me, I remember, in 2008, I was having those exact conversations about Star Wars. Of course, I also had those conversations last week… and today. Ugh. Guess I know where the years went.)

For me, the most amazing moment in the entire movie was the baseball game that the boy and his father attended in 2006. Linklater and crew shot live game footage for this moment (although they actually collected footage from two separate Houston Astros games and spliced it together). A serendipitous home run makes for the perfect cinematic shot and the perfect father-son bonding moment, and the scene is several times more striking when you realize that the hit was real and not scripted. But the most real part is the father’s praise of Houston Astros pitcher Roger Clemens as an unhittable wizard. Clemens was absolutely a legend in his own time, but that time came to an abrupt and disgraceful halt once he was exposed as a cheat. Since around 2007, just a year after that scene in Boyhood, Clemens has been one of the most hated men in baseball. It’s hard to remember a time now when anybody had anything but venom for Clemens, but the naive sincerity of this scene in Boyhood innocently reminds us that we did indeed once feel quite differently. It struck me because I did not find myself laughing at these characters for being such fools, but rather I felt a little ashamed to remember that I was just as foolish. Mostly, it goes to show how swiftly and dramatically life can turn.

Other elements, notably the political talk (Boyhood spans both George W. Bush U.S. presidential terms and both Barack Obama terms), feel like a long time ago AND just yesterday. Hearing the father in the movie get all passionate with anti-Bush and later pro-Obama rhetoric, I again felt a bit of embarrassment at the foolishness on display—foolishness because, now that we can look back on those twelve years in hindsight, there is nothing so much to be gotten but the sense of one single era that never truly ended, or one that never truly began. The passion and the optimism, however—those surely do feel long gone.

So the political argument is actually still ongoing, as is the featured Star Wars discussion, while the Roger Clemens moment only somewhat accidentally ended up dating that scene. Ironically, the more deliberate “time capsule” moments in Boyhood are among the least effective. Linklater has the characters playing on different video game consoles and remarking on how ultimate the immediate technology is. It doesn’t take a lot of prescience on Linklater’s part to predict that those words will be proven very foolish by the next technological leap. He’s basically trying to manufacture the effect that the film accidentally achieved with the speculative “there can’t be any more Star Wars” moment. But the way he handles it here feels forced, inauthentic, and overly cute.

There’s also the matter of the soundtrack to Boyhood. The songs featured in the film are not always taken from the year of the scene in which they appear. But it is interesting when, for example, 2011’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” kicks in. This is one of the most recent songs featured in the film, yet already, just a few years later, it is not on anybody’s rotation anymore, and most people no longer even know or care who Gotye is. Even so, the song is instantly recognizable, on account of how ubiquitous it was for that good year or so on the radio. To hear it now inspires an ambivalent mix of derisive "haha, remember when we used to know who sang this song?" along with a compulsion to sing along with that voice in your head. I suppose, as a commentary on the transient trendiness of pop music, it works, in a similar way as the Roger Clemens moment captures our embarrassing history, although I don’t know if this was Linklater’s intention.

The Beatles also feature prominently in Boyhood, and this is an element that now, in a post-1960’s context, practically exists outside of time. Indeed, as the film progresses, the later years have fewer date-specific real-world elements and take on more of a timeless quality. There is a legitimate reason for this—like a lot of youths, the boy grows a distaste for his own generation's culture as he enters his teen years—but I personally find it disappointing, because the movie consequently feels more generic as it goes on.

If you return to the foreground high concept of Boyhood, the grand technical achievement is the dramatized documentation of a real boy really growing up before audiences’ eyes. Six-year-old Mason, twelve-year-old Mason, and eighteen-year-old Mason are all played by the same actor, Ellar Coltrane, as are all the other ages. There can be no denying that this was quite a feat that the cast and crew were able to pull off. So much could have gone wrong—with everything in the movie, true, but especially with Coltrane. For example, what if he had grown up to become fat a la Haley Joel Osment? Surely, the teen years of Boyhood would consequently have had to go in a different direction. I must say, I think this high-wire act of a movie would actually have been made more interesting, if such an unanticipated turn had taken place to test Linklater's resourcefulness. Alas, when the boy instead develops into an artsy heartthrob, it feels sadly predictable, like it was all according to script—a script with nothing especially interesting to say. If you didn’t know or didn’t care how the movie was made, then I suppose this wouldn’t even matter to you. But then what you have left, when you remove considerations of how the movie was made, is a fairly unremarkable story—exactly the coming-of-age boy story that I initially thought Boyhood was going to be, and which I had little interest in going to the theater for.

Not strictly a movie of 2014, Boyhood was nevertheless a remarkable movie specifically for 2014. Its exploration of the passage of time has at least four layers, all of them quite novel: 1) the narrative structure presenting a story continuously from one year to the next, 2) the filmic process authentically capturing the actors as they visibly aged one year at a time, 3) the life experiences that the cast and crew brought with them as they grew alongside the production, and 4) the documentation of specific dates that resonate with audience members who lived through those years. The 4th point will become less effective as time goes on. It will still serve as a time capsule of the early 21st century, but I don’t know that it will as poignantly resonate with viewers as a twelve-year journey. Decades from now, the distinction between, say, 50 years ago versus 45 years ago won’t so much matter, and everything in the movie will just together be “a long-ass time ago”—not so different from any movie made and set in the 1960s today (all the more so for anyone born after the film's release). The 2nd and 3rd points are less impactful if you don’t know or don’t care how the movie was made (and why should audiences be expected to?). The 1st point remains but is not enough on its own to hold up Boyhood as purely a great story, as opposed to an achievement in filmmaking. Therefore, it is hard to rate Boyhood against films that may be more conventionally made but which tell more original stories. Still, it works for me in the here and now, and if the sum of it eventually ages as poorly as so many of the pieces it observes, then perhaps that is only fitting (and also reason to see it sooner rather than later).

Street Fighter vs. Street Fighter

 



shmuplations.com recently posted a translation of an old Japanese interview about the making of Street Fighter II. A vintage postmortem of sorts, the interview with designer Akira Nishitani dates back to 1991, the year that Street Fighter II: The World Warrior was released, and it’s full of interesting trivia about the seminal fighting game’s conception, bugs that plagued development (some of which infamously remained in the finished product), and ideas that didn’t make the cut.

Nishitani did not work on the original 1987 Street Fighter. He got the job on the sequel after first designing Final Fight (1989), which itself was at one point planned as a sequel to Street Fighter, beginning life in development as “Street Fighter ‘89,” before Capcom decided it had diverged too significantly from the original game. Many hardcore series fans have probably heard that story before. New to me, however, is the revelation that Nishitani was never much of a fan of the first Street Fighter:

After that some time passed, and I was relaxing, not doing much after having finished Final Fight. At that time management approached me and talked with me about doing a sequel to the original Street Fighter. I had all these ideas [...] but what management wanted was a straightforward sequel to Street Fighter I. They didn’t want me to change the basic elements of the game. [...]

I realized I had hardly played the first Street Fighter at all (maybe once or twice at the game center). Final Fight, though, I had played a lot of. Since I had so much Final Fight experience, I actually won the in-house Street Fighter I tournament at Capcom. It then occurred to me: why didn’t I play Street Fighter I at the game center? Because it wasn’t a very good game. “That’s it! I’m going to make a game so good, it will make the original Street Fighter look like a knockoff! I’m going to make a GOOD game that satisfies ME!” With that pledge in my heart, I began work on Street Fighter II.

Sure enough, Nishitani’s game far eclipsed its predecessor in design and influence. Despite being a sequel, Street Fighter II is widely regarded, much more than the original, as a landmark first in the fighting game genre. I remember, when Street Fighter II first landed, quickly becoming a phenomenon, many young gamers (those who started with Nintendo and not arcades) scratched their heads at that number in the title, because they could not recall ever having heard of a "Street Fighter I." Some even thought that Street Fighter II was the sequel to Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight (1990) for the Nintendo Entertainment System. That was how relatively insignificant the first arcade Street Fighter was—that even this obscure series sidebar for the NES was more readily recalled.

But the most interesting bits in the interview deal with the scrapped ideas. Dhalsim’s backwards drills are especially intriguing in hindsight. The forward drills have always been more useful for mobility than attack, and, while it had never occurred to me before, reverse drills now seem like an obvious tool that the character has been badly missing the last twenty-plus years (well, not really… but still it would be cool!).

Many ideas didn’t make the final cut due to time or technical limitations, but it’s curious that nobody ever thought to bring them back in later editions. The one that really caught my eye was M. Bison/Vega’s “Deadly Throw”:

Finally, there’s Vega’s Deadly Throw. Being the Evil Emperor and all, we wanted to have him grab your fist and say something like “is that all you’ve got?” before he threw you. I really wanted that to be in the game. But it proved too difficult to actually show all that in-game, so we abandoned the idea.

This immediately stuck out to me, because it sounds an awful lot like the “Atemi Nage” technique used by Geese Howard, the archvillain in SNK’s Fatal Fury games. This is the move where Geese blocks the opponent’s incoming punch or kick, then counters by grappling them to the ground in one fluid motion, traditionally accompanied by him shouting his signature line, “Predictable!” (or sometimes “Too easy!”). Similar “counterattack” moves did make their way into the Street Fighter series eventually, examples being Dudley’s “Cross Counter” and Gouken’s “Kongoshin,” and it’s just a commonly recognized type of technique across 2-D fighting games in general now. But Geese Howard’s was definitely the first and most memorable. Anybody who ever fought against the final boss version of Geese in any SNK fighting game surely remembers that first time having your jump attack intercepted by Geese throwing you to the mat.

When similar moves showed up later in Street Fighter, some fans considered that to have been one of the few cases where Street Fighter borrowed an idea from SNK and not the other way around. This interview suggests, however, that maybe Capcom did independently conceive of the idea way back before Street Fighter II even came out. But what makes it all so fascinating is that, although SNK’s many 2-D fighting games have often been considered among the most unabashedly derivative of Street Fighter II—what with their fireballs and uppercuts, their circle motions, and their similar Japanese manga aesthetic—the truth has always been more complicated than that.

The original Fatal Fury: King of Fighters (1991) for Neo Geo was actually in development at the same time as Street Fighter II: The World Warrior. And guess who designed Fatal Fury. It was none other than original Street Fighter co-creators Takashi Nishiyama and Hiroshi Matsumoto. So, all along, perhaps any similarities between Capcom and SNK’s games have not so much been due to the latter copying the former, but rather on account of both having a common ancestor in the first Street Fighter—a Capcom game that SNK could not rightly be said to have ripped off. Since Fatal Fury was just Street Fighter’s actual creators following up their own work, to call it a knockoff would be rather like calling Street Fighter I a knockoff of Street Fighter II! If you go back and play the first Fatal Fury, it’s even in many ways a lot closer to the original Street Fighter than is Street Fighter II. Fatal Fury has a similar stiff, floaty feel, and, like the first Street Fighter, it was clearly designed as principally a single-player game.

So, Street Fighter and Fatal Fury have always truly been brothers, in a way, though that does not make them rivals any less. From the beginning, as we saw in that earlier quote, Nishitani approached Street Fighter II with an attitude of wanting to outdo the original. Of course, many other designers have since presented their own takes on both Capcom and SNK’s fighting games. Street Fighter III was certainly its own beast, quite a bit different from the games by either Nishitani or Nishiyama and Matsumoto, none of whom are still at the same companies.

Akira Nishitani was minimally involved with the revisions to Street Fighter II and left Capcom before Street Fighter Alpha (1995) to found his own company, Arika. Arika developed Street Fighter EX (1996), arguably a not-so-graceful first attempt to translate Street Fighter II’s 2-D fighting gameplay to 3-D polygonal graphics. The Street Fighter EX games were not bad at all, although they were never as well-received as the contemporary and purely 2-D “main” Street Fighter Alpha and Street Fighter III titles. Again, here was a game that, although considered apocryphal to the series, was actually, in some ways, more directly related to Street Fighter II than were Capcom’s own sequels.

As for Takashi Nishiyama and Hiroshi Matsumoto of the original Street Fighter? They went on, sometimes together and sometimes separately, to create most of SNK’s celebrated fighting game series, including Art of Fighting, The King of Fighters, Samurai Shodown, and The Last Blade, before leaving to found Dimps in 2000. Dimps was the studio that, wouldn’t you know it, Capcom contracted to co-develop Street Fighter IV (2008), when the series was resurrected after a long dormancy. Thus, things came full circle, as it fell to the almost-forgotten creators of the original Street Fighter to help relaunch the series some twenty years later.

Fittingly, Matsumoto had this to say about the project in an interview for the SF25: The Art of Street Fighter book in 2012:

We had initially planned to create a sort of sequel to “Street Fighter I,” but since most fans considered “Street Fighter II” to be the series’ origin, it was decided that we would design a game that took its cues from “Street Fighter II.” As you know, “Street Fighter II” wasn’t our game, so there really wasn’t a lot of opportunity for us to be feeling nostalgic about anything. [...]

Personally, I wanted to evolve the series beyond what fighting games had accomplished up to that point. [...] Unfortunately, the rest of the team had grown up on “Street Fighter II,” and seemed less willing to make major changes. It took us a while to find a happy medium in terms of evolution and change.

Matsumoto and Nishiyama may not have been able to get out from under the shadow cast by Street Fighter II, but they did get to one-up Akira Nishitani in another way. Successfully marrying classic 2-D mechanics to modern 3-D graphics, Street Fighter IV was arguably the game Street Fighter EX was supposed to be, much in the same way that Street Fighter II fulfilled the promise of the original Street Fighter.

Call of Commercialism

http://youtu.be/TWQFuq7qCOw

This Chinese Call of Duty Online promo starring Chris Evans is nothing especially new or unusual—not as Call of Duty commercials go, nor in the realm of bizarre foreign ads utilizing American celebrities. Even so, I find it unsettling for a couple reasons:

1) It's Chris Evans—Captain America himself—shilling for a version of Call of Duty that is exclusive to China, the United States of America's greatest rival as a world power.

2) Actually, even though it's a China-exclusive release, it's still an American-produced game, which dramatizes a principally American conflict. I don't know if Chinese players will explicitly be taking on the roles of U.S. soldiers (and they certainly won't be fighting against Chinese villains), but still it brings to mind that awkward anecdote of the Japanese gamers who gleefully took to gunning down their ancestors in Medal of Honor: Rising Sun (or, for that matter, Capcom's 1942). It makes me wonder, when was the last time a video game asked Americans to play as representatives of a real-life present-day government agency of any nation other than the U.S. or UK? I don't know the answer, but I'm guessing it happens infrequently and, in any case, not with a lot of earnest eagerness.

3) All of the Chinese characters in the ad are in awe of the one white guy. Maybe if Chris Evans were actually appearing as himself, the Hollywood actor, this would be a perfectly understandable case of them being starstruck. But he's here playing some unnamed "foreigner" who randomly joins the Chinese team's session, and immediately it's just "understood," both by the characters and by the audience (via cues that I suspect are racial), that he is the badass in the room. We see how the skewed white American media colors perceptions of race even in foreign, fairly homogeneously non-white countries, such that the universal image now of the "badass soldier type" is a white guy.

4) Ultimately, the most unsettling aspect is that it's Call of Duty. As mass market as these games are, the series has long posed an ethical dilemma, not altogether intentionally. The games excel in all technical facets, and are not devoid of narrative ambition. Still, I don't think there's anybody who can play through the single-player campaign in a Call of Duty and not feel that there's something a little distasteful about the experience. Here, we see that it goes beyond jingoism, as the games really exist to serve not the U.S. but Activision, wherever they can find a market for their almost peerlessly mercenary glamorization of war.