diary: contact (2006/grasshopper manufacture)

Note! This writeup contains spoilers! I love this game to death, so I implore you to play this game and experience it yourself before reading.

On a random night enveloped by the choking humidity of the August heat, at approximately 3AM, my friend offhandedly asked "What game should I stream next week?", and for whatever reason, I blurted out "Contact."

I'm unsure what inspired this answer. I had never played Contact. I barely even knew of it's contents, my only exposure to it weeks ago being a slight glance of a friend's stream. I became quickly aware that it was a "Love-de-Lic" game in the specific context of it having old staff on the project, along with it being a Grasshopper Manufacturer game. (Which makes sense, considering the overlap of staff of these two companies.) I knew I loved the pixel art, and I knew I loved the music. (Soundtrack by Masafumi Takada and Jun Fukuda, of course.)

Akira Ueda led as the director and designer, and their primary role existed in previous games as a map designer and background artist. Atsuko Fukushima as the lead artist (keyframe animator on iconic works such as Akira, Magnetic Rose & Kiki's Delivery Service and character designer of PoPoLoCrois). Suda 51 is listed in the game itself as the producer, while Wikipedia claims Takeshi Ogura, so I'm unsure of any specific contribution from Suda on this front.

My friend booted up the game, and the title screen immediately held a charming aesthetic that only the DS is able to capture in this century. No music, just three keys, F1, F2, F3. It made me laugh that it was my immediate instinct to click one of these keys on my keyboard to select the "new game" prompt, until I remembered this was a DS game. Obviously the way forward was tapping the key with your stylus.

The game opens with a professor that looks suspiciously similar to Jeff's father from Earthbound, and a rambunctious cat (dog?) named Mochi. To get his attention, you have to tap him with your stylus to make him aware of your omniscient presence. He is eager to share with you his communication device that he created in order to make contact (contact!!!!) with you from the "other side." The professor asks you many questions about yourself. Your name, your birthday, what you like, what you hate, what's important to you. Immediately the game is making it very clear that this professor character is speaking to you, and you as a person playing a video game. I hadn't expected this specific work to be centered around a meta-narrative, but this sort of interaction perfectly fits the DS when you think about it. With the ability to directly interact with the materials of the gaming world with your motion and stylus, something like Cooking Mama or Nintendogs could also be considered meta-narrative experiences due to characters directly reacting to your interactions with their virtual world, with no main character to act as a vessel for your actions.

After making your pact with the Professor, the game introduces you to the main character of the adventure, Terry. You find him within the grasp of a dream, and then subsequently kidnapped by the Professor to avoid assault from a foreign space ship. However the duo is shot down together from the sky, and Terry awakes on the shores of a beach, in a far away land, marking the proper beginning of his and your story.

The game establishes itself as an RPG, comparable to something alike Final Fantasy 2. You run around the map and select enemies you wish to battle by activating your "battle stance" in their proximity. Abilities are upgraded by actively using them. For example your attack is raised by attacking, and your defense is raised by tanking hits. If you open your menu, you'll find a giant list of your stats that you can level up through grinding, all the way up to level 99. It has all the usual suspects, attack, defense, blunt damage, slash damage, elemental attacks, elemental resistance. Then there are stats that imply the existence of job systems such as fishing, cooking and lock picking.
And then there's...more offbeat ones. Courage, Fame, and Karma. Quite honestly, I never figured out what these did, outside of impressing the many beautiful women that you encounter on your travels. And even more so, I didn't figure out what was the point of courting these beautiful women either. If you gave one enough gifts or raised her specific affinity high enough, she would join you on your ship. This was an obscure mechanic that spurred my mounting obsession with this game and its decisions.

It's also worth mentioning that Contact makes good work of the Top-Down screen configuration. While you run around the world and make Terry do your little tasks, the Professor holds a constant top-screen presence where he's always working on his machines and saying little quips to you. The Professor and Mochi are in a bold lined, brightly colored, Mother-esque pixel style, while Terry, whom you control, is in a more Moon/Mario RPG painterly sprite style. It's a clever way to make it clear to the player that you are interacting and talking to what is functionally an alien, despite his human appearance.

My mind particularly latches on to the idea that this game is proposing, is that all games where you essentially control a character and decide whether he lives or dies, could be thought of as a raising sim or virtual pet. Meta-narratives weren't invented by either Moon RPG or Undertale, but this was the first game I personally encountered that asked you about the relationship between your ego and your avatar. Instead of guilting you for mindlessly viewing all monsters in a game as resource farms to grow more powerful and make your numbers higher, it asked you to view the character that you're controlling as an entity that lives in that world too. The act of projecting and self inserting the player often does when controlling an avatar in a video game. Putting aside the idea that some people enjoy engaging in a power fantasy controlling someone like Master Chief, or even life-sims such as Animal Crossing asking you to pretend for a moment you yourself are moving to a wonderful new town, most people subconsciously can't help but think of protagonists of games as empty vessels for most of their time playing it. Even in an instance where the main character has their own motivations and personality, we are immediately reminded they have their own free will in the narrative the moment they open their mouth or make a decision outside of the player's control. But in this sort of proxy based storytelling, when you're thinking of the best spell to cast in a battle or weighing the pros and cons of spending all your gold on the next best armor in a town, you often override that feeling with your own needs and impulses. You never think of the danger or harm you're accruing upon your avatar in a game, because it's happening to you, and you'll handle the consequences afterwards. But maybe Terry doesn't want to charge into a battle with 10HP. Maybe Terry doesn't want to murder innocent, mindless, respawning otaku in Akihabara for 2 hours straight. Maybe Terry wants to eat something else besides meat and health potions.

There are so many lovely little ways the game reminds you the player, aren't Terry. When Terry leaves the domain of the bottom screen, you lose all control. He becomes his own lost, confused, clumsy pre-teen. He becomes overtaken with delusion by the role that you've given him as the player. The auto-battling is a subtle reminder you can't directly influence his strength or timing, but you become so entrenched in the rhythmic back and forth you just accept it in your mind as game mechanics. When you need to save or sleep you have to spend tangible time doing something else, playing with Mochi or getting up to use the bathroom. Despite all these constant reminders, it remains so powerful when he turns and speaks to you in the conclusion. The one thing in a video game that all gamers can recognize as autonomy, stepping back from the role of a "silent protagonist". The proof of the existence of an inner world.

Contact didn't receive very favorable reviews. People found the combat a drag, the lack of engagement, the seeming helplessness of an encounter when your DPS isn't as high as the opponents, the bosses way too long, the giant open environments, the demanding nature of choosing which spells to grind and which are worth it. Many people even found the story's conclusion disappointing, what I and I'm sure many other people consider the 'reward' for playing it to begin with. Western gamers seem dissatisfied with ambiguity. Everything needs a point or an end. A bunch of characters are introduced and you barely learn anything about them. The ending doesn't conclude the internal issues either the professor or Terry were facing along their journey. It's just a snapshot, a small moment in time, and due to coincidence you the player were allowed the privilege to peak in on it. But now your role is over, and it's time to let the Professor and Terry figure out their own way. And isn't that life? Sometimes you don't get closure. Sometimes you don't get to see the rest of the story of somebody you care about. Life is full of goodbyes. And aren't a lot of those goodbyes characters in a screen...?