Calendar Girl, the next videogame by soon-to-be living legend Fumito Ueda, is probably the most important piece of videogame literature since Mother 2, or at least destined to be the top search result of hundreds for its title on Amazon.com. I’ve only played a little bit of it, and seen a little bit more – before E3, thanks to the fact that my old friend Victor Fucking Ireland is heading up the localization work – and I’m at least prepared to recommend the trailer over the 1993 Jason Priestley and 2003 Helen Mirren movies I’ve never seen.
Culminating in the most soaring, teary-eyed post-rock I’ve ever heard in my life, it begins with a blind child waking from a hospital bed in 2015, ten years after a train crash, and during the Second American Civil War. Kept alive by an intravenous fountain of youth, the rest of the world was plunged into famine, and there was a rationing of human life.
“Only now, with the world busier with ghosts than men, can you be born again,” says his nurse and former sweetheart. We see the locket held below her locks of blood-red rotini, and we know that they were both once young and in love on a very sunny day, captured in a tiny picture that may be the most colorful thing in the entire game. Today, delicate wrinkles when she speaks tell us she’s in her thirties, and that the boy’s age must have regressed considerably, enough to be her son. “We’ve been waiting so long. Watching your heart, submerged in its sleep, beating out little green waves. What did you dream about?”
He may still be dreaming. The world is surreal, lush with magical things. Its centerpiece is an enormous tsunami frozen in time, right on the coast. Seagulls fish from it during the day, and at night, thunderstorms reveal big whale-shaped blotches suspended in its gut. The PlayStation 3 lets us see miles toward the horizon, on which huge shells of giant hermit crabs stick out of forests. They’ve come out of the sea to feast on trees. The noise they make when they do this cannot be described, except to say that it is nightmare-inducing. Terrified at night, he puts his ear on his foster mother’s chest to drown out the scariness with thudding blood vessels.
Ireland, whose English script will be the default spoken language for every region but Japan on the Blu-ray disc, says this is how Ueda is representing the blindness of an overimaginative child, hearing things he can’t explain. Instead of drawing everything abstractly, or using refraction effects to simulate noise waves or something, the game simply shows the contents of his mind, in a straightforward, and quite beautiful, way.
On the beach at the base of the liquid mountain, the water is as still as ice. The redhead, named Mae, says it’s “invisibly busy,” like a petrie dish; this is where youth is made. All the trees surrounding it are mere saplings. The boy dares not wade, and soon comes to fear the water. He hates being young and dumb. He just wishes he was a grownup. This isn’t Kingdom Hearts II. She teaches him to chop firewood, the only heating construct still feasible. She places her hand on a loose log, holding it upright, fingers spread, and hands him an axe, telling him there is no way he can harm her, because she sees and lives the future, and will always know what is best for him.
“Yeah, she’s a psychic. The thing about writing for a psychic is, why would she ever have a conversation with anyone if she already knows what’s going to be said, right? Well, she’s raising a child, and wants to see him grow, become the greatest warrior that has ever lived, and this means helping his life unfold. She’s an actor in a movie who already knows the script. So her words are always really polished and rehearsed. In a way, it’s the ultimate dependency. A weak, blind child who relying on his clairvoyant mother.”
Sure enough, when you break apart the log, which falls to the ground with the proper physics, no fingers are lost. The axe is controlled by swinging the Sixaxis controller with one hand vertically. You can try it with two, but you really can’t build up the momentum. This usually means you’ll have to stop moving on the stick to do anything with your hands, so attacking is not something you do a hundred times a minute. You build up some force in your arms, and you give it your all. It’s very tactile, even without vibration. Running also feels really organic. It takes about ten seconds to work into a full sprint, at which point you hear nothing but your heart and echoed scuffles. Imagine Gears’ roadie run, but more desperate, more personal. This is all nothing compared to what is the game’s defining feature, though.
There is an old man, who, in World War II, scouted mines in Normandy. Today he combs the beach looking for metals to melt. When he holds this contraption, he says, feeling its pulse, it’s as though his buried brothers are calling back to him. Befriending the boy, they go along the riverbed, and he tells him about being a soldier, and what it means to spend one’s life for one’s country: “The only energy left in this world is human energy, and a person is the price that is paid. Like a penny in a soupcan.”
Just as he is about to reach in and pull something shiny out, there is a terrible gurgling of water and sand, and in an instant he is gone. Ueda, who understands the art of the cutscene, chooses not to show us the threat, keeping us in sync with our blind counterpart, closing in only on his face and the terror streaming down it. All he can hear is his heartbeat. He finds the metal detector and runs with it, the reflective particles in the road’s yellow lines beeping between his beats. It is soothing and familiar, just as he heard in his ten-year chrysalis. After finding his way home, and crying into arms, he vows to hunt the thing that ate that man; it found it once, and it will find it again. He owes it to him. Like a penny in a soupcan.
The game begins here. The use of the mine detector is probably the single greatest contribution to videogame camera and presentation since Z Targeting, and the best use of motion sensing on any console. Your avatar is positioned off-center, learning from RE4 and Gears, with the mine detector sticking out into the middle. It points very subtly at will, showing you things of interest as you walk by them, like a dog sniffing liquid messages, though its flat head can be repositioned simply by moving the controller. To make your view look up, simply tilt the controller up. As a camera, it is simple and stylish. As a narrative device, it excuses the blindness of a protagonist in a visual medium. Using it while chasing a beast, weaving cleanly between trees, hearing beeps and bumps beat in tandem, is like playing an Ikaruga level with nothing but Max Chains.
The game of course has much in common with Shadow of the Colossus, but everything feels more open. The fights aren’t as fixed, and finding out where to go isn’t as simple as following a light beam. You can cut trees to a lean in a forest, and run up them to the canopy to get a view of everything. You can hang with the axe. There are neat little touches, like how you can use the mine detector to create ripples in the water and attract fish and melt ice. The sense of exploration in this rich world makes you feel like a child exploring the woods behind your country home. It feels like there are still mysteries in the woods and under the sea and over on foggy islands. You can’t actually kill any of the giants; the object is to draw them back through the veil of water that Victor Ireland calls “the seawall,” because the translation is tricky. Sometimes this is quite a trek. Sometimes you come across people defending their little shingled cottages. Sometimes you get into a hopeless situation that you accidentally solve. It’s kind of clever.
So the blind boy goes on many adventures chasing terrible giants, their shells laced with coppers and barnacles. They have stolen the fountain wishes of children and men. He delivers them to their watery prison one by one, mine detector in one hand, hot blood in another. His scrapes and cuts decorate him, small bronze scars like tiny medals passed down from the beach-combing colonel. His new mother, nurses among nurses, bandages him up very cutely and safely. He returns again, and grows up just a little more. The device hounds the faintest whiff of the pennied Abraham Lincoln, the ender of all American civil wars. It gets closer and closer, still, until the tentacled tank’s wet, briny breath is felt on his skin, and his two heartbeats compete: one in chest, and one in palm.
I have described for you half the game. It is divided into twelve alternating chapters, see, one named for each month. (Level 1 is January. Level 2 is July. Level 3 is February. And so on.) From January to June, this little boy-versus-crab saga will play out, and from July to December is . . . almost a completely different game. More than pacing, more than feel, says Ireland, we think of games as perfect if they have excellent structure. Ocarina of Time has excellent structure. Three and five. Small and big. Each temple is associated with a character, a theme, and a piece of music. You always know how far you are in the game, and how much is left. As the seasons change, so does the world. The two realities will play off and explain each other, he promises.
That second world. Man. I haven’t played any of it, but the second half of the trailer is dedicated to it, and you almost can’t believe you’re seeing what you’re seeing. It is more Superflat than Takashi Murakami, more Killer 7 than Suda 51, more pastiche than Hideo Kojima. It’s the hardboiled wonderland to this end of the world.
It’s a neon city, built under the sea, from what I can tell. There is in-game advertising everywhere. It follows the officer of private police in this “Brand City.” I suppose the remaining municipalities on earth are all corporately owned. Everyone dresses like they’re in an iPod shuffle commercial, and no one is over 25. No one but the protagonist and his police buddy, who are older because having fogey buzzkill law enforcement is part of the brand. The police, and everyone else, operate on a system of textual telepathy, because no one has time for talk when they’re all wearing white earbuds. Actual textboxes pop up and physically exist in the world, and manifest themselves into cigarette smoke and the like. There’s one scene that shows him following a bloody trail of textual agony. It’s a lonely, noisy world, characterized by an overabundance of meaningless digital information that muscles through every human sense; in the other, the only feed you subscribe to is dinnertime.
The police officer stands with a girl on the roof of her apartment building. She is posh and young, and his old knees are frail in the cold. The ocean, an aquatic aurora, blankets the sky; the moon shimmers through, sometimes eclipsed by creatures of the deep. The ripples’ shadows paint wrinkles on her smooth, tight skin. The city gives him his job. The city gives her her toys. But both know something is amiss, both feel emptiness in their hearts. She wants him to share his mind with her, as is common for a couple these days. During lovemaking, at least. How will she know he’s not thinking of another girl?
“There is no truth out there,” he says, overlooking the scape of blinking pegs, “or anywhere but here in this space between our lips, fogged with our breath.” He asks her to trust him. He is who he says he is, and means what he says he means. He is a man of his word. His words aren’t worth much, he admits. They are everywhere. At that very moment, “19:00, showers” appears floating before them, the viscous heavens open up, and, right on schedule, a hard rain begins to fall.
Maybe the best part is that the city is governed by identical hiveminded, readheaded duodecaplets, all female, all named after months – the game’s titular calendar girls – who dress up in like death incarnate and take the law into their own hands. This is real, bonafide Tetsuya Nomura-caliber shlock. Two are conjoined twins (June and July), who have “two heads, two arms, two spinal cords, three lungs, two hearts, and one liver – a grocery list of a girl.” At one point they’re assassinated by being split down the middle when their psychic impulses make them try to dodge in opposite directions, leaving them open to cleaving; they drift apart in a body of water, reaching out to each other with their one arms.
The final scene shows the cop, well past retirement, stumbling up an escalator which is cascading with water, pouring in from cracks. It will end on December 31, 2015, atop a skyscraper, as a ball drops, through a storm of confetti and snow, toward the end of all existence. On his chest is a locket. It might be the most colorful thing in the game.
No date or year of release is implied. Ireland says, with complete seriousness, that he hopes the game is delayed until 12.12.12. He always was one for the little things. I told him if he waits until 2013 to put it up on Amazon, he has a deal.
