Golf Story - 29/52

     I don’t like sports.  I feel like that’s unsurprising considering I’m a huge nerd writing a video game blog but I feel like it deserves an actual confirmation.  I don’t click with various sports for numerous reasons, lack of coordination, asthma, general lack of interest in anything that doesn’t feature a minimum seven chances for me to come out as weeb trash.  Sports games are usually not any better for me.  I have distinct memories of an unsuccessful attempt to get involved in a PS2 era Madden game that I sort of inherited from my brother that I just did not get at all.  That is until the Wii era of games introduced me to two sports I could actually work with.  One of which was golf.  Wii Sports Resort is probably my third most played game for the Wii just because of how often I would play Golf with my friends.  Golf being as slow as it is probably keyed into my RPG background and that’s why I clicked with it like I did.  In fact, it’s very surprising in hindsight that it took this long for us to get a full-fledged, well-known golf RPG.  This is Golf Story.

Pictured, the beginning of every RPG ever made.

     So, stop me if you’ve heard this one before, future people who can’t actually stop me.  A scrappy, down-on-his-luck golfer decides to quit his job and pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a professional golfer.  But everywhere he goes, he’s faced with adversity from his peers, his trainers, his family and, most importantly, himself.  But somehow, in spite of it all, he manages to gain the glory and become the golfer his father always believed him to be.  Along the way he’ll make some friends, make some enemies, build rivalries and hone his skills until he finally wins the world championship and more than likely gives all his money to the one kid who believed in him along the way which was just him as nobody actually believes in him at any point in this game.  It’s the tried and true sports story formula.

     I wasn’t overly wowed by this game’s story.  It feels more like a proof of concept that a Golf RPG could work rather than a serious attempt at making one.  It’s just so generic.  Even though I didn’t grow up with a love of sports, I did end up watching a lot of sports movies and they basically all play like this.  I may have expected too much, admittedly.  I heard the words ‘Golf RPG’ and thought I was going to be getting a full on fantasy epic but instead of battles, I had to go nine holes with some evil clown who wants to ascend to godhood.  But I can’t help but feel like I would’ve been disappointed with Golf Story’s story either way.

     Golf Story subscribes to the traditional three-click system of golf games.  Each swing is set to three phases and, subsequently, three clicks, one to aim, one to select power and one to select accuracy, with the latter two being timing based.  It is a simple and tried formula for golf games and, while I prefer the Wii style of simulation where you’re attempting an approximation of what it’s like to actually golf, there’s still a lot of charm to the traditional ways.  And to Golf Story’s credit, it’s one of the best examples of this style I’ve seen in a long time.  The golfing in this is super intuitive and really fun, with a surprising amount of options on how to navigate each course based on your club setup.  Make no mistake, regardless of any criticism I might hold against Golf Story, the golfing itself is very good.


     Speaking of club setup, this is the part of Golf Story that is most clearly reminiscent of the RPG genre.  Rather than having all your clubs just be standard for each course, your golfer has an equipment screen where you can mix and match your own set of Woods, Irons, Wedges, and Putters that you collect over the course of the game.  There are shops to buy them, side quests to do where you get them and it seems like there are 3-5 kinds of each club for you to find and use.  Some of them even have a number of special abilities unique to them, such as the Skimming Woods allowing you to bounce your ball across water traps or the Whirly Putter allowing you to curve your putts.  It gives you a lot of different options to find the setup that’s right for you.  Unfortunately, it isn’t a fully customizable equipment setup, which is understandable given the general simple, user-friendly design of the game but is a huge disappointment for fully establishing your own unique style.  I found often that I would’ve preferred to only have, say, one of the super powerful pro woods for distance, a skimming wood for technique, the sand wedge for trap scenarios, the 68-degree wedge for specialized shots, etc.

Apparently, Mini-Golf isn't just what teenagers and drunk adults do on double dates.

     Golf Story is packed with cool content.  For as uninteresting as the main story was, I found a lot of the sidequests in this game to be super cool and incredibly creative.  For every simple, easy starting quest like ‘get a certain distance on the driving range’ you have tons of interesting challenges like ‘play an entire golf course made up of different parts of different holes’ or ‘get under a certain score on a course using only your putter’.  I spent a majority of my playthrough trying to complete as many of these challenges as I could just because of how much fun I was having with them.  Not to mention the alternate golfing modes that are in this game, such as disc golf, mini golf, and lawn bowling.  Not only do most of these work super well and are just as fun as the actual golfing, they’re arguably more fun.  I gained a brand new respect for Disc Golf that I’ve never had previously just because of how much fun it seemed in this game.  And the mini golf course in this thing is excellent.  It’s really very unfortunate that once you beat these three alternate modes, you don’t get to play them again, they’re super fun.

This wizard you engage in the only real boss fight in the game with is the most relatable character.

     One of the more potentially divisive elements of Golf Story is its humor.  At this point, you basically can’t make an RPG without it being super jokey unless your name is Square Enix.  Golf Story attempts to use its humor as a way to get you engrossed in the game, with a lot of characters personalities being defined entirely by a combination of their humor and their specific stereotype.  Humor is tricky, though.  What everyone thinks is funny is entirely dependant on the person of course.  And, yeah, I think Golf Story was more obnoxious than anything.  Don’t get me wrong, some jokes, characters and funny settings did click with me.  I’m quite partial to this section near the middle of the game where you investigate a murder mystery that may involve a werewolf only for there to not have been a murder or a werewolf and it was just some guy trying to cover up that he isn’t playing golf entirely by the rules.  And the spooky Halloween course is full to brim with funny characters and scenarios.  But, for the most part, Golf Story’s sense of humor leans very heavily into the mean-spirited.  The majority of jokes are done at the main character and, by extension, the player’s expense, constantly berating and belittling him without him necessarily realizing because he’s a lovable idiot.  It’s very similar to the kind of humor that the dynamic of Strong Bad and Homestar was built on in Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People, and much like that game, I just didn’t click with it.  I think I fully tuned out about halfway in when two characters stop the game dead in its tracks to have a full four-minute long rap battle of just golf puns and the player is just held hostage while it’s happening.

Literal course design.

      Golf Story had a difficult paradox to work through in terms of course design.  Golf Story in total has eight courses of nine holes for you to play through of increasing difficulty.  Normally golf courses are designed with a heavy emphasis on fair but difficult design, which would seemingly be beneficial for a progression-based RPG.  But golf courses largely don’t have especially strong theming and usually can look very samey.  So you have this conflict present here between fair course design and theming for a progress-based RPG.  So I don’t necessarily fault Golf Story for its decision to focus more on theming courses instead of wasting its time attempting to find a balance that might not be there  I just feel like, as a result of this decision, the actual appeal of Golf Story, the golfing, ends up wearing thin.

   Golf Story initially isn’t too bad.  The first course, Wellworn Grove, is your standard golf course.  Nice balance of fairway to rough, quick holes without too much hassle, it’s a solid if easy course.  The second course, Lurker Valley, isn’t too bad either.  It hits heavier on the traps and has more rough, but it’s a nice, fair step up in difficulty from Wellworn Grove.  It’s about the third course that I personally feel Golf Story starts losing its magic.  Cheekybeak Peak isn’t too terrible when you get down to it, but this is where Golf Story stops being about playing golf and starts being about training you for playing golf.  Cheekybeak Peak serves as basically one long tutorial on how to play against the wind.  Admittedly a necessary skill to have, but one that derails the game to learn.  Similarly, the next new course, Bermuda Isles, is just a long tutorial on how to play against sand and water traps.  The fact that these two courses are basically themed to be tutorials for skills the game doesn’t need to teach you as overbearingly as they do just absolutely destroys the pacing of the first half of the story and gives you two not entirely fun courses to play in doing so.

To give you an idea of how miserable Blue Moon Dunes was for me, I totally forgot this fairy existed.

     But the second half of the game is worse.  At this point your golfer is on the road to being a real pro and to do so, he needs to take off to schmooze the old guard at Tidy Park.  Tidy Park is the worst thing ever.  The theme of Tidy Park is that the old guard is so into keeping things as they are without major changes that they’ve let their course overgrow.  Rough is now Deep Rough, Fairway is now Rough and the Green is usually now Fairway.  I think I get what the game was going for here, a severe ramp up in difficulty in course design to show that it’s no longer playing.  But it’s also not especially fun.  The sixth course, Oak Manor, is honestly the last fun course in my opinion.  It’s the spooky course I’ve mentioned previously and while it’s not necessarily the strongest course in the world, it has absolutely wonderful theming and some interesting hole setups testing all your previously learned golfing skills.  After that it’s just a boring snow course and Blue Moon Dunes, which is the final course before the end and I spent 13 hours on it before beating it because I was always one stroke off and I cannot fairly discuss how is it as a course because it made me never want to look at a golf game again.

     So, I didn’t like Golf Story.  Unlike, say, Brutal Legend though, I can totally see why people really dig this game.  It has really good golfing and if the course design and humor don't bug you, yeah, go for it.  Me, I’m just blah on it.  I was so done with Golf Story after spending 13 hours of my life on a single course that I uninstalled it the moment I was done without sticking around for the credits.  I really want this whole Golf RPG thing to work though and I’d definitely be down for a sequel for reasons other than my obligation to do it since I played the original.  As always, thanks for reading and we’ll be back next time with the most innovative shooter of all time.  See you guys then.

Rakuen - 28/52

     I got into PC gaming pretty late all things considered.  For many years I was very vocally against PC gaming as a whole, largely due to my less than stellar experiences with the very vocal and very toxic subsection of PC gamers that swear they are the master race in terms of gaming.  Good luck with that guys, if you’re still out there and reading this.  I didn’t even have a Steam account until 2012 and didn’t start using it regularly until I started getting into the Bundle market in 2016.  The only two games I owned before that were Huniepop, the popular dating sim/Bejeweled-style puzzle game about sleeping with as many females of various age, species and mythological status that was the hot meme game in 2015 and Plants vs. Zombies.  I’ve previously mentioned that Plants vs. Zombies is one of my favorite games of all time and that is certainly true.  And besides the obvious love of weird games and the amazing tower defense gameplay, a huge part of that was the music.  PvZ has this mellow, smooth jazz soundtrack that to this day is one of my favorite games soundtracks of all time, given to us by the supremely talented Laura Shigihara.  So you can imagine my excitement when I found out Laura Shigihara was designing her own game from the ground up.  Unfortunately, as I’ve previously stated, I’m awful so I lost track of this game and failed to pick it up on release.  But today we’re rectifying that.  This is Rakuen.

     Rakuen tells the tale of two characters, a boy with an origami hat who has been admitted into a hospital and his mother who frequently visits him, as they try to make the most of an awful situation.  Not only has this boy been admitted to the hospital with some unknown condition, but something major appears to have happened to said hospital.  The game doesn’t give you a solid answer as to what this major incident is, but the long and short of it is that there are a number of sick and injured people who seem to be stuck in this place for an indefinite amount of time.  The boy is, however, getting stir-crazy and is starting to slip into some manner of depression, so his mother has brought him a storybook to cheer up his mood.  The book in question is an old family heirloom called Rakuen, the tale of a hero in a fantasy world who takes on the trials of the forest spirit Morizora and gets granted passage to the land of Rakuen.  And wouldn’t you know it, the world of the hero is real and the boy and his mother have the unique ability to travel to it.  They mutually decide to go to this world and meet Morizora to get their own wish, only to find darkness plaguing the world and Morizora asleep.  Morizora’s handlers of sorts then give them their own quest, find the five parts of Morizora’s song, defeat the darkness surrounding each of them and awaken Morizora.  Along the way you’ll meet a lot of strange and colorful characters, travel between worlds to solve issues between the real world people and their fictional counterparts and right the wrongs of the worlds.  It’s like if Studio Ghibli made Earthbound.

     Rakuen is a rollercoaster of a game.  The story should’ve keyed you into that at some level considering that it involves both ‘magical fantasy world’ and ‘hospitalized children’ in the setup, but that is only the beginning of the tonal dissonance.  I mean, the title screen is all cute and storybook and has this charming, colorful selection screen and then, bam, immediately into a gray, dreary hospital room with a sick kid.  And, you know what?  I wouldn’t have it any other way.  Rakuen’s interesting setup only aids its theming.  The real world stuff seems so real and the fantasy stuff seems so fantastical as a result of this dissonance.   And then seeing them meld together as it goes on and you start dealing with the various issues of the characters in both was just fantastic.

Only one thing holds true over every video game: improper key storage.

     It’s kind of funny that Rakuen is an RPG maker game because the genre it has more in common with is the SCUMM adventure games of yesteryear.  Games more like Maniac Mansion and Day of the Tentacle than, say, Final Fantasy.  Rakuen has no combat in it, which is definitely a thing for the modern RPG Maker genre, but it’s still notable.  Rakuen instead opts for collection quests and inventory puzzles.  I hesitate to also call it a ‘walking simulator’ since Rakuen is less of an interactive movie than the normal pillars of that genre, but it is definitely a narrative and emotionally driven experience with the player having somewhat limited freedom in terms of gameplay.  But the game works within its limitations and creates a rather engaging game gameplay wise.  The inventory puzzles are all very clever and thankfully never dip too far into the moon logic.  The game’s lack of combat creates for some very fun and surprisingly tense stealth sections.  The collection quests never seem overly tedious because they always keep you focused on the main path.  The game is very fun and very clever and compliments its brilliant, emotional story well.

     Speaking of complimenting well, let’s talk about the music.  As previously mentioned, Rakuen is a game designed by a composer.  Furthermore, music is a central part of the game’s story.  If any game would have an important and meaningful soundtrack, it would be this one.  Rakuen does not disappoint.  Laura Shigihara has a unique superpower when it comes to music, being able to accurately convert any possible emotion or mood into a song.  From the somber, dreary tones of the hospital to the punchy, upbeat tempos of a child’s excitement to even the still serenity of a forest meadow, she nails it every time.  How this woman isn’t composing the music to every game ever, I will never know.  Not to mention Morizora’s song, a beautiful five-part harmony of distinct but interlocking song fragments creating just this layered masterpiece.  As with every soundtrack I rave about, link below, but I urge you to play it for yourself before then to experience these songs in the settings they were meant for.  Also, potential spoilers for the game involved and I honestly don’t want you to do that to yourself.  This game is better served going in blind.

     Rakuen’s graphical style is definitely evocative of Studio Ghibli but I feel the actual stylistic inspiration was a little-known underground indie RPG for the Super Nintendo called Chrono Trigger.  Before you try to correct me in the comments, that’s what we call hyperbole.  It’s no secret that Laura Shigihara loves herself some Chrono Trigger.  I’ve been following Laura’s YouTube channel for years now and she’s done a number of Chrono Trigger piano and vocal covers in that time.  The way the sprites are designed in particular reminds me very heavily of the sprite design for Chrono Trigger, just super detailed full body well-proportioned sprites.  It's not a one-to-one match by any means, as Rakuen opts for more of a paper doll aesthetic rather than the Akira Toriyama inspired anime aesthetic of Chrono.  But there are definitely those similarities present.  The game is, of course, absolutely gorgeous as well and hits my bizarre, well-documented love of traditional pixel art.  I swear I need an absolutely gorgeous 3D game I can gush over at this point so it doesn’t seem like I’m just completely biased to pixel art.

      Rakuen’s characters are probably my favorite part of the game, which, if you couldn’t tell, is saying a lot.  Rakuen’s constant shift from light-hearted and fun to depressing and somber creates a lot of charm, a lot of personality and a lot of depth.  The incidental characters, for the most part, are where the game’s humor comes from.  The world of Rakuen is filled primarily with sentient plants who have very eccentric and oftentimes snooty personalities and in general are just so ridiculous and bombastic that you can’t help but love them.  In particular, Lil Budz was probably my favorite incidental character in the whole game due to just his over the top rebel personality and his sick bars which are just fire.  More down to Earth are the rabbit-like fairy denizens of Morizora’s forest which are less bombastic but, for the most part, have a solid reason for it.  This is where you’ll meet a lot of the parallels to the real world characters and, while they’re mostly a little on the nose, it’s fun to see how each character differs from their real-world counterparts quite a bit.  And then there are the characters that this game is actually set around and they are so well written and their arcs so well done that it’s almost an assault on your emotions.  A try not to cry challenge where the videos are all sad puppies.  It’s ridiculous and amazing.

     If I had to level any criticism onto Rakuen at all, it would be that the game is definitely too up front with its storytelling.  Part of the fun in this kind of story is figuring out as you go which characters in the fantasy world parallel those in the real world and sort of figuring out who you need to talk to and where you need to go as you do.  But Rakuen immediately tells you which characters are who by having all their names just be the same in either world and even have the same arcs in either world to a T.  For instance, the second song part in the game involves two characters named Tony, grumpy old men, one of whom is a bear, who is mad at the world and themselves for how they’ve failed.  In the real world, Tony’s arc is about fixing his music box and reuniting him with his daughter.  In the fantasy world, Tony’s arc is about fixing his music box and reuniting him with his daughter.  It just feels like a little-added subtlety would've gone a long way.

     This is officially the part where the review section of this game ends.  I feel like I’ve made it more than clear that this is a game you should most definitely buy.  It’s beautiful, heart-wrenching, charming, deep and just a lot of fun to play.  In fact, I recommend you do that now as, from here on out, we’ll be getting into some serious spoiler territory as I talk about the emotional impact Rakuen had on me.  So, here's the Steam link so you can go ahead and do just that, it’s not a super long game and I’m sure you’ll more than enjoy it.  Now then, onward to feelings.

     Rakuen is a very deceptive game.  That’s not really news, obviously, Rakuen combines serious subjects of child illness with fun fantasy questing.  But until you play it, you don’t really get a sense for how deceptive it can get.  The first two song parts lull you into a pattern.  You enter someone’s head, see their life story play out, find an important object, reunite them with their loved ones and get a song piece.  The game takes a pretty sudden shift when you get to the third part of Morizora’s song.  The past two have just been mostly about guilt but part three deals with the very serious subject of mental deterioration and how it affects your loved ones.  And it doesn’t pull any punches.  Some context.

     Throughout the first two parts of the game, you will hear about and possibly interact with an old man at the hospital named Kisaburo.  Kisaburo is always getting into trouble around the place, doing weird things like digging trenches outside the hospital with a spoon.  It becomes very clear that Kisaburo is deteriorating mentally, likely from his old age or possibly something related to whatever is happening that left the hospital overcrowded and busted.  Kisaburo, however, isn’t just a lonely old man.  His wife, Kazuko, sits outside his hospital room every single day, sobbing to herself about how Kisaburo doesn’t even recognize her anymore.  It’s absolutely heartbreaking already and we haven’t even gotten to Kisaburo’s story.

     We meet the fantasy Kisaburo for the first time while we’re doing the quest for Tony.  This Kisaburo isn’t losing his mental faculties like the other one, rather he has an incurable disease that makes him stay in an enchanted pool of water, waiting for the day that Morizora awakens and he can wish to be cured.  Kisaburo has accepted his fate but desperately wants you to tie his loose ends by making sure this world’s Kazuko is financially stable enough in her tea shop so that she can survive without him in the worst case scenario.  After doing what Kazuko asks, she wishes to take a moment away to see her husband and finds Kisaburo gone.  This is the point where the boy and his mother insert Kisaburo’s head.  In it, we get the story of how Kisaburo and Kazuko met, fell in love, got married, had children and inevitably how Kisaburo started losing his memories and how Kazuko desperately tried to take care of him before conceding that a hospital might be best.  And through your actions, Kisaburo gets better.  He has a solid moment of clarity where he embraces Kazuko and explains his seemingly crazy actions were an attempt to plant flowers for her like he did for years.  It’s touching and a beautiful end to a tragic tale.  Unfortunately, Kisaburo passes away that night.  It gets sadder.

Look, I know I play favorites to Morizora's Forest.  It's more visually intersting, I'm sorry.

     Kisaburo's tragedy is a very relatable one to a lot of people.  I feel like everyone has had to, at some point or another, deal with the deterioration of a loved one.  However, of the stories I'm going to tell in this section, Kisaburo's is the relatively least tragic.  Not to say that it's lacking in tragedy, far from it.  His entire life was erased from him and him alone, unable to recognize his own wife or kids.  His brain was basically operating on autopilot, attempting to do something nice for his wife without even knowing what he was doing.  And the game doesn’t even acknowledge Kisaburo’s death until the very end, only having it be implied by the fact that Kisaburo and Kazuko are just not there anymore.  It's more that, in comparison to the other stories I will tell in this section, Kisaburo at the very least lost a life he got to live and died with the one he loved.  Also, it's the least tragic because it's the one that didn't end with me bawling.

     Let’s move on to the fourth chapter.  The only real friend that the boy makes throughout the game is a young girl on his floor named Sue.  Sue asks you to find her lost marbles throughout the game, which she explains are actually small planets with various different themes and events.  Along with this info, though, she starts revealing more about herself, revealing that her father was a drunk and a gambler and how she feels guilty for leaving her best friend behind when she and her mother moved to a place more suitable for her unexplained condition.  Unsurprisingly, someone with so many clear problems is your next song target.  You have to reunite the other world’s Sue with her lost friend and, maybe, her father.

That Puchi is one radical angel dog.  She's so in my face.  *Weeps profusely*

     Sue’s friend is actually a dog.  Sue had no other friends and, in fact, was bullied due to her marble thing.  But after saving a stray from being captured by the dog catchers, she formed a deep friendship with this dog and would tell her everything.  She took her to all her favorite spots and unloaded info about her father and how he gambled everything away.  When Sue has to move, she tries to convince her mom to take the ‘friend’ with her, or at least give her time to say goodbye, and the mom, of course, doesn’t agree, leaving Sue with a great deal of guilt.  The dog is implied to have pulled a full Hachiko and showed up to their meeting spot every day, hoping for Sue to come back.  And that’s not even the important part.

I was originally going to post a pic of my dog but I figured nobody wanted to see a dead pupper.

     Roughly one year before I played Rakuen, I had to put down the dog I had for nine years at that point.  I have a pretty serious dog allergy and for years I had wanted a dog.  One day my mom and I looked up hypoallergenic dog breeds and found a little white ball of floof in our area who I, in theory, wouldn’t have been allergic to.  His name was Sammy and he was a Bichon Frise, the worlds girliest sailing dog.  Sammy had a long history when we got him of abuse and neglect from previous owners, being bred essentially to be selling fodder and having been beaten by whoever had originally adopted him.  We were told ahead of time that Sammy is skittish and shy and anxious so to generally be calm and not to be super offended if he didn’t take to us right away when we went to meet him.  When the rescuer took him out to meet us though, he instantly ran up and jumped on me and we just immediately clicked.  He was the perfect dog for me, having almost the demeanor of a cat but the personality of a dog.  For nine years he was my best friend and a year and some change later since putting him down, I still miss him every single day.

     Throughout the game, you are somewhat guided by a homeless man named Uma.  Uma appears to also possess the unique ability to travel between worlds and seems to be attempting to partake in the same quest you are currently on.  I was sure Uma was going to end up being some sort of antagonist, but the truth is much more heartbreaking.  Uma is Sue’s father.  After losing everything, he became homeless and wandered the streets as a thief and a beggar.  He eventually grew to realize how much he screwed up and desperately wanted to reconnect with his wife and daughter.  But at that point, it had already been too late.  Uma spent a long time trying to find them but, before he could, he too passed away.  His ability to travel between worlds is simply his inability to let go, his need to gain the wish in a hope that Morizora can bring him back to life and he can make things right.  And Uma inevitably realizes that he can’t.  What he had done was permanent and it's too late to fix it.  He makes his peace with it and passes on, telling our hero to tell Sue that he loves her and that he’s sorry.  And it still gets sadder.

       One of the overarching subplots in Rakuen is Morizora’s Star Festival.  The citizens of Morizora’s forest have been prepping for this the entire time you’ve been in their company and about this point in the game, you can finally experience this festival they’ve been hyping up.  And it’s a blast.  You can buy some collectibles, eat some pancakes, watch Tony the bear drink someone under the table and then, in the end, take yourself a hit of that sweet, sweet Mr. Saturn coffee and have the best dream of your life.  In this dream, Sue, like, the real Sue, is in Morizora’s forest and then the two of you take off across the cosmos, visiting each and every one of the planets that Sue has described to you throughout your adventure as you’ve given her marbles.  You have a blast with the only real friend you’ve gained throughout this whole thing and you can see where this is going.  Sue passed away the night of the Star Festival after what appears to have been a long battle with some sort of cancer.  When the boy returns to the real world to tell her about his dream, he is told as much.  Sue is gone, but not forgotten.  Before she passed, she gave the boy one final thing.  Her very own galaxy.  Her marble collection.  Cue the tears.

    I’m not ashamed to say that I openly wept at this point.  Sue was not just any character.  One of the game’s sidequests was themed around her.  She’s a character you see and visit all the time and her story was already heartbreaking enough.  Not to mention how much this game went from zero to 60 in 3.5.  Like, death is something that’s inevitable and so far, a lot of characters have died.  But they were either characters we didn’t know very well or characters at the back end of their lives you know died happily.  Sue is a child.  A very endearing, imaginative child who it was always fun to visit and hear about all the crazy, magical places she cooked up for herself.  It's heartbreaking in every imaginable way.  And for the player character and the Boy, the one friend who she had through it to listen to her and understand and engage with her own personal cosmos to find out she died off-screen while they were off partying is just.  Ugh.  It's so sad.  But even this wasn't the end.  There is still the final chapter.  The end of this grand journey we've been on.  The moment where I said, out loud, 'You can't do this to me, Laura Shigihara.'

     There’s a lot of necessary context for this final bit of emotional trauma, so let’s start by finally explaining what this mysterious incident is.  Throughout the game, there are a lot of newspaper clippings and articles giving dates and locations so you can slowly form the when/where of Rakuen.  Most of them just say ‘March 13th’ and ‘July 7th’ without any solid year given for a while.  One thing is made evidently clear from the get-go with them, Rakuen is set in Japan, likely the late summer or early fall.  As the game is reaching its conclusion, the year starts rearing its head as well.  Furthermore, the newspapers clippings give a lot of weight to a specific month in the year.  March of 2011.  On March 11th of 2011, a major tsunami followed by a magnitude 9.0-9.1 earthquake in the Fukushima Prefecture of Japan caused a major shutdown and subsequent three nuclear meltdowns and the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Okuma, Fukushima, Japan.  The resulting fallout created a 30-kilometer evacuation zone surrounding the plant which was subsequently marked as a no-go zone.  For years afterward, 300 tons of highly radioactive water was leaking from the power plant into the Pacific Ocean.  While no deaths were actually reported as a result of the radiation leakage, 34 people died as a result of the physical and mental strain of the evacuation process, with 37 sustaining physical injuries and 2 workers taken to the hospital with radiation burns.  To this day, 2,129 people have died due to the long-term displacement on top of the sickness and the old age, more than the number of people who died in the Fukushima Prefecture directly from the tsunami and the earthquake.  It was the largest nuclear disaster since the infamous Chernobyl disaster of 1986.  And this is why the world of Rakuen is the way it is.

     The final chapter throws you a curveball in that the final song piece belongs to the mom herself.  After the star festival, the Boy returns to his hospital room to rest after dealing with the blow that Sue passed away.  Throughout the game, the Boy has been visited on a nightly basis by a mysterious patient at the hospital, a young boy named Yami.  Yami’s visits take an increasingly more depressing tone throughout the game, as it becomes more apparent that he has seriously lost someone.  This final visit, however, reveals the truth.  Yami very recently lost his father and holds nothing but resentment for him as a result, saying that he should’ve put his family’s needs first no matter what the circumstances.  The boy, distraught over the loss of Sue, reveals that his father also passed recently and reveals that he, too, deeply resents his father, something that even he hasn’t realized yet.  Consumed by guilt, depression, and resentment, Yami and the boy give into the darkness and become the very creatures attacking Morizora’s forest.

     I have to applaud Rakuen here for its realistic depiction of depression and its unique depiction of childhood depression.  I myself struggle with depression and have for a very long time.  It’s killed a lot of my creativity and my will to just do anything at all.  Not enough games depict this at all and fewer depict it well.  But Rakuen nails it.  The feeling of emptiness present throughout the game is spot on.  The games portraits really convey the feelings of hopelessness and emptiness that I often have felt throughout my struggles.  And, again, Laura Shigihara’s brilliant composition work plays into this as the sad, melancholic tunes feel too real at points.  It is, in fact, so relatable and so real that I had to take a step back from my PC for a sec to breathe so I didn’t just break down.  Not that it helped in the end, but we’ll get to that.

     At this point in the game, you take control of the mother.  She’s understandably very frightened when she wakes up in the morning and her son is no longer with her and nobody knows where he is, and decides to set off looking for him.  In order to find him, however, she needs to go through memories.  This time, though, these memories are her own.  While starting off innocuous enough, with just her daily routine and her getting calls from her husband, it quickly takes a turn.  She ends up in the waiting room of the very hospital that her son has been admitted, with everyone around her saying how much of a hero her husband was for what he did during the accident.  That accident was, of course, the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear disaster.  Her husband, the man who her son is currently off resenting, sacrificed himself to make sure everyone else got out.  And, to be honest, I get the impression she kind of resents him too.  She’s the kind of person who makes the best out of every situation and understands why her husband had to do what he did, but she also misses him dearly and secretly wishes that he had opted instead to go home to his family.  Probably exasperated by future reveals as to the state of her son.

     After her trip down depressing memory lane, she finds herself in an area of Morizora’s forest surrounded completely by the dark spirits.  And sitting amongst them is not her son, but rather Yami.  Yami starts echoing his resentment towards his father and trying to get the mother to admit her own resentment for her husband, to give in to the darkness within her and join him.  And this is when she sings her part of Morizora’s song.  At first, it seemingly has no effect, Yami interrupting it numerous times before, finally, the whole song is played.  A multi-layered, absolutely gorgeous five-part harmony.  The darkness starts to fade away, leaving only Yami in the center of the room.  Yami now has been reduced to a small, scared child, crying about how he just wants his family back.  And the mother goes to comfort him, revealing that Yami was never real and was, in fact, the boy.  Yami is the Japanese word for darkness.  To some people that might be familiar because of the prevalence of the word in the Yu-Gi-Oh! Series, myself included.  From the moment Yami showed up and the darkness was introduced as an antagonist, I knew right away that the two were somehow linked.  I didn’t expect until late, however, that Yami himself is simply the boy’s negative emotions manifesting themselves.  Related, I absolutely love how Rakuen handles the idea of darkness, being a representation of sadness and depression rather than just some powerful evil force that you need, like, a giant sword made out of a household item to defeat.

     It’s now time to reach the game’s ending.  You have at this point gathered all five parts of the song and Morizora, the great forest spirit, has been awakened.  The boy and his mother are now able to make their wish, to fulfill their desire to go to the land of Rakuen.  Immediately, the ship to Rakuen arrives at the dock and they prep to come aboard.  But right before they board, they stop and turn to each other.  The boy starts being hesitant about going, citing that he needs to stay.  Who will take care of his mother if he doesn’t?  And this, my friends, this was the point when I said, out loud, ‘you can’t do this to me, Laura Shigihara.’  The mother is not going with him.  She comforts him by saying that he is brave and strong and kind and that while it’ll be hard, she will never truly be without him as he will always be in her heart.  And in one last gesture of love, he takes his beloved origami hat and gives it to his mother, revealing that the boy is completely and totally bald.  This entire time, we’ve been playing as a cancer patient and his mother slowly coming to terms with his own mortality.  I broke down at this point.  It’s such a bittersweet ending.  The boy is passing on to his own personal heaven, the magical world he always wanted to be a part of.  This was our quest.  We did this.  And now that we’re here, I want to take it all back.  I don’t want them to be apart.  I don’t want him to die.  And as that thought crosses through my head, he boards the ship to Rakuen, and its revealed he’s not alone.  Kisaburo, the boy’s father, old man Uma and even Sue are there, going with him to Rakuen.  We end off with the credits song, one final punch at your heart, as the mother walks home crying.  An action repeated without question.

     Rakuen is not just a good game, or a great game or even a fantastic one.  It’s one of the best games I’ve ever played.  I hope that you took my advice and played through it yourself before getting here but even if you didn’t, please, do yourself a favor and play Rakuen.  It’s a masterpiece of a game.  No other game has ever managed to get this level of emotional response out of me and if the rest of the 52 ends up being an endless stream of terrible games, I don’t care because, at the very least, I got to play through Rakuen.  Rakuen is a game I wish I could forget so I could play it all over again for the first time.  I’d say top ten favorite games of all time, maybe even top five.  Thank you so so much for reading this, it means a lot to me, and we’ll be back next time with a very different kind of story.  See you guys then.

You can find Laura Shigihara's brilliant composition work here.