Mochi and those damned vanilla skies
In this guest article on Grasshopper’s Contact, Jacob Hartman discusses the lunacy of game director Akura Ueda, the lovable puppy Mochi, and the unappreciated value in the offbeat RPG’s margins. Be warned that this article details key plot points from late in the game. You can see more of Jacob’s writing and art at Sketch Wales.
Akira Ueda set a new standard with Contact, though he fell below the bar for a good game in a rational thought process. One could say the game is an acquired taste, but you’ll never acquire it if you’re looking in the wrong place.
Contact doesn’t succeed or fail. Contact exists. It itself actually claims this. I want to discuss how Contact manages to exist when many other games only manage to succeed.
To start at the bottom, we have to look at where Contact was told to have failed. It’s an untraditional Japanese role-playing game — a boy named Terry is brought from his home world by a man named The Professor to help him gather items known as Element 117.
They are scattered across a foreign planet, a sort of parallel world to our own and possibly also parallel to Terry’s own. When Terry wanders across the world, in a top-down perspective, he encounters many creatures, and as videogame tradition dictates, these creatures lay down their lives for Terry to proceed. As the tedious and repetitive battles continue, Terry’s character defining stats increase and the collect-a-thon for Element 117 goes on.
That’s Contact in a nutshell. Sure, it has witty banter and pleasing aesthetics, but that didn’t please the judicial part of the video game industry. Unfortunately for us, most wouldn’t know a great work of *censored* if it hit them in the eye. And no, it isn’t the banter or charisma of Contact that has gone home unrewarded.
I think Akira Ueda thinks of video games as books. In both media, the creators and audiences forget how important the margins are. So, in Contact, Ueda decided to put the actual value in the margins. Though it’s hard to spot at first, eventually the main content and margins intertwine.
So while the main content starts with the Professor recruiting Terry, the margins initiate the story with Terry sleeping under a vanilla sky.
Note that we don’t name Terry. This is a Japanese RPG, and we don’t name the character. Something is odd. And for someone aware of their Tom Cruise lore, those skies are a damn omen if there ever was one.
In an interview with Shigesato Itoi about Mother 3, Itoi talks of how much time he wants players to spend naming their characters. Naming the main character after yourself, and the family members and friends after people you know is supposed to create a deep connection between you and the virtual world.
But in Contact, you don’t name Terry, the Professor, his dog, or any of the antagonists. You can name yourself, though, because you, the player, are a part of the game world. In fact, from the get-go, the Professor breaks the fourth wall and addresses the player, not as if they’re some fictional persona sitting in front of him, but the person holding the DS is addressed. The DS is a communication device to that world.
I mentioned the Professor has a dog. I think he’s a dog, but he looks more like a four-legged marshmallow. He’s named Mochi, and he’s really cute. He’s also the game’s only traditional instance of classic JRPG summons. You slide off a sticker in a menu, paste it on the touch screen and whoops, Mochi travels from the top-screen — which is always portraying the Professor and Mochi in their spaceship — unto the bottom-screen, where it will proceed to lick it’s crotch, causing 1 damage point to the sorry critters that Terry encounters in the game.
Once again you have to look in the margins. One of the many failures of Contact is that whenever you save, which you do by sleeping in an arbitrarily placed bed, you have to watch the Professor and Mochi frolic, now on the bottom screen, unless you click on an alarm clock in the corner.
But here’s what is in the margins, never expressed to the audience: if you fickle around with Mochi, using the stylus, you can caress him and make him happy. On the surface, this minigame, through a lot of time spent on it, makes Mochi more powerful. But in the margins, this builds the relationship between the player and Mochi.
In fact, in the final act of the game, there’s a scene in which a giant troll creature tortuers Terry on the top screen. By this point, the Professor and I had put the hero through a lot, so I emphasized him there. I felt sorry for Terry. But on the bottom screen, Mochi was scurrying to rescue him, and I was cheering the the adorable pet on: “Go Mochi, GO!”
That’s interactivity.
I mentioned I put Terry through a lot. Well, he thought so too. Eventually, he comes to realize I controlled him throughout the game. Guided by the Professor, I made sure Terry suffered many a beating. And this is where the main content and the margins intertwine. This is something that can only happen in video games (or oddly shaped books).
Terry tries to fight back, beating on the screen, making it turn blurry in the process. I was perplexed with his behavior. He was literally angry at me. Eventually, I pulled out the stylus out of its slot and prodded Terry a few times. He was defeated. He accepted he was a puppet to my will.
This scene was the reason why we as players aren’t allowed to name Terry: Because he is beneath us. We simply prod at him, and he succumbs. In his world, we are God. And may we have mercy on his soul if he tries to defy us.
I think Akira Ueda is a deviant, a defiant little brat. His former boss, Goichi Suda, noted that he himself was a very normal person and therefore could make crazy games. And he concluded, Contact being a rather traditional (gameplay-wise) RPG, Ueda would have to be totally nuts.
So how does that make him a deviant? Seeing how traditional Contact was, it still wasn’t a joy to interact with. Characters moved slowly, combat was tedious, and both statistics and menus were clumsily handled.
But Ueda damn well knew that. He knew how this would be received and still defied the arbiters of this industry, partly just to prove he could (because he’s nuts), and partly because the values that make Contact exist arguably needed these faults. And making a game with these values require a person who is nuts.
Contact is an impressive game. Ueda designed a vessel for an interactive experience, whose important bits needed a carriage that would fail in normally heralded standards. Not to succeed on its own terms, because it doesn’t try to succeed. Terry, the Professor, and Mochi only want to exist.
It might be worth looking upon the aspect of breaking through the fourth wall. Isn’t breaking the fourth wall commonly thought of as low-brow? Yes, I laughed while watching the Fresh Prince back in the day, as he would be embarrassed by his cousin and then look knowingly towards the audience. In retrospect, it’s a little too easy.
It wasn’t Contact though, that made me think differently about this way of telling a story. It was Mr. Dickens.Though I haven’t read an immense amount of his work, he does specifically address the reader in Hard Times, and it didn’t seem silly at all. It was a great help in establishing the satire of these sad characters and their world-views.
So when the Professor addresses me as the player, I laugh. But it goes beyond being witty. In Contact, it isn’t part of a social satire to shine a light on an injustice in our communities; it’s done to immerse us in the belief that the DS truly is something that is linking me to the actual person it is displaying.
Contact is a dreamscape, ultimate escapism. Those damned vanilla skies above Terry’s sleeping body in the game’s introduction weren’t just serenading him into the coming journey; they were sirening the player.
Right from the first released screenshots, I wanted to experience that game. Now I know why: it had a professor that made me laugh, a marshmallow dog that filled me with glee, and a boy that made me regret my actions and an acknowledge that in that world, I was God, a notion that made me rethink my actions far more than I had before.
The plot was linear, the game was not. But when the game ends and the credits rolled, a message appears from the Professor, claiming he’ll continue his life even when the DS is off, insisting that though he’s mere data on a cartridge, he still lived. I can’t look at the code, so if an intangible creature claims to exist, who am I to deny it the right?
Oh, right, I’m God. Contact isn’t ahead of the curve. It likey isn’t what video games will become one day. It just is. Other games can, and probably will, go there one day. They too will be lambasted and criticized for being who they are and for not being what they were never supposed to be.
See also: Ueda’s Thoughts on Contact 2
tags / contact / grasshopper manufacture / akira ueda / vanilla skies
