Social Link is The Stereogram’s games podcast, featuring our staffers yammering about the latest video game news and releases. Check back every Monday for new episodes! Sometimes we’ll even be on time!

It’s been an eventful week, and the cast brings their A-game to get through all of it. We still get some time to talk about Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, the problems (and benefits) of most open world games, and keeping up with the MMO Joneses.

Use this link to download or listen to Episode 9 – Jojo A Go-Go.

[mp3 url="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31101742/-/SLinkEp9.mp3"]

This twenty-six episode series covers the first two arcs of Jojo: “Phantom Blood” and “Battle Tendency.” The first is concerned with the war between Jonathan Joestar and Dio Brando in the 1890’s, one a true gentleman seeking to protect his family and friends, the other a greedy monster who sacrifices his humanity for vampiric powers. “Battle Tendency” focuses on Joseph Joestar, Jonathan’s grandson, and his quest to stop the ancient beings who were the source of Dio’s strength. In each arc, the heroes are assisted by the Ripple, a mystic power allowing them to convert their breath into immense strength.

Jojo isn’t done justice by a summary; without firsthand experience, its plot may seem woefully pedestrian, but it’s the details that truly define it. Its cast is archetypal, but the vast majority of them are likeable because of this. They have purity, and charm comes out of this, whether it’s for the cartoonishly noble Jonathan Joestar, the scenery-chewing Dio Brando, or the comically devoted Speedwagon. Each archetype is pushed to its logical extent, taken to the maximum degree at each moment. Speedwagon is always in the supporting role, motivating his friends as best he can, even when all he can do is scream. Jonathan will always do the most noble thing, no matter what.

This sense of purity pervades “Phantom Blood” the most, which holds it back in some ways. It makes the characters and their actions predictable, and the plot isn’t gripping; it is carried on the back of its kitschy charm. It is only with its final twist that we see the narrative come into its own, and “Battle Tendency” carries this forward wonderfully. Where Jonathan wins fights through force of will, Joseph relies on his wits; each battle is a series of tricks and gambles. Joseph is a court jester with a sense of justice, the perfect lead for this story. The second arc is where Jojo comes into its own, and it’s packed with twists and turns at each episode. Despite its shonen structure, it knows how to pace itself, and as the conflicts are wars of wits, there isn’t any filler dedicated to watching the heroes charge up their powers. The only issues Jojo runs into with pacing are related to its supporting cast and their tendency to scream exposition at the top of their lungs. Still, it’s more often charming than it is obnoxious.As it’s reliant on ancient archetypes and common story threads, it’s clearly a product of its time. Jojo embraces the age of its material rather than shying away from it, and it’s reflected throughout. Characters are named after the most dated of bands; it’s not often that one hears references to Wham! or REO Speedwagon in 2013. David Productions are well aware of this, and they animate this series around that. Sound effects are drawn onto the action, and frames are held to match the original artist’s panels; the color scheme is bright and garish, especially during moments of introspection. There are some rough off-model shots here and there, but these have largely been fixed in the Blu-Ray releases. The soundtrack reflects the tone extremely well, especially in the openings. Each calls back to anime from around the time of Jojo’s original serialization, with intense 80’s rock in the first and funky jazz in the second. This is what openings are supposed to do: encapsulate the one of a show in a minute-and-a-half of music and visuals. The Jojo openings are fantastic at this.

Jojo does what few tales are able to do: unite archetypes and cliches together in a narrative that’s enjoyable without being off-putting in its simulacratic nature. It clings to its roots and has no pretensions of being anything more than a popcorn movie, and in this day and age that’s a true feat. Nowadays, it’s much more common for an author to put themselves above genre conventions, as though they’re better than every one of their predecessors, and it serves to distract from what that genre did well. Jojo is honest and pure, and there’s little else quite as enjoyable on the airwaves.

Today is Monday, right? No? Oh, well, whoops. Better late than never, I guess?

In this week’s episode, Justin and Virgil talk a lot about Neverwinter and then Michael makes a very unfortunate series of jokes. Everyone involved terribly regrets his decision. Also discussed is EVE Online, more Shin Megami Tensei, and the great Dragon Quest versus Seinfeld debate.

[mp3 url="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31101742/-/SLinkEp8.mp3"]

Social Link is The Stereogram’s games podcast, featuring our staffers yammering about the latest video game news and releases. Check back every Monday for new episodes! Sometimes we’ll even be on time!

Use this link to download or listen to Episode 8 – The End of Toilet Jokes.

Intro: “Dunn It Up” – Fatal Labyrinth
Outro: “Who Just Walked in the Room” — Fatal Labyrinth

Social Link is The Stereogram’s games podcast, featuring our staffers yammering about the latest video game news and releases. Check back every Monday for new episodes!

You’d be surprised how much mileage we got out of that picture of St. George. It’s pretty damned goofy to be fair. After getting that out of our systems, we move on to talking about Nintendo Direct, localizing Japanese games, Atlus’ parent company going into insolvency, and the importance of lances in monster hunting.

[mp3 url="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31101742/-/SLinkEp7.mp3"]

Use this link to download or listen to Episode 7 – Dragon’s Dingus.

Intro: “Dunn It Up” – Fatal Labyrinth
Outro: “Who Just Walked in the Room” — Fatal Labyrinth

[Warning: this article spoils the entirety of Shin Megami Tensei 1. If you are new to the series or looking for an overview of the series as a whole, read this before this specific piece. It'll help introduce you to the franchise's overarching concepts before seeing their original interpretations as presented in Shin Megami Tensei 1.]

“By these names then, and by all the other holy names of God before whom no man can stand and live, and which names the armies of the demons fear, tremble at, and shudder; we conjure ye, we potently exorcise and command ye, conjuring ye in addition by the terrible and tremendous paths of God and by his holy habitation wherein he reigneth and commandeth unto the eternal ages. Amen.” – The Key of Solomon, Chapter VI, translated by S. Liddell MacGregor Mathers

Shin Megami Tensei is a bit of an odd duck in regards to the JRPG genre. Unlike its contemporaries (Final Fantasy V, Dragon Quest V, Romancing SaGa, Lunar: The Silver Star), it isn’t a game defined by its combat and character building nor an intricate, detailed narrative. Outside of the demon collecting, it’s a standard Wizardry-style JRPG, and the plot isn’t intrusive nor the writing especially deep. Very little about it couldn’t have been done on the previous generation of hardware. What makes Shin Megami Tensei notable is its atmosphere; the bleakness hanging over its head and the dreamlike trance enveloping the world. This tone turns what would have been a bland post-apocalyptic hero’s journey into something much more: a journey within the self, where the prize is true happiness and man is beset from all sides by the destructive facets of his mind. This is a game about enlightenment.

Much of SMT’s unique tone can be sensed within its opening reel. It first presents an image of the tetragrammaton from The Key of Solomon, a book of Judeo-Christian magic from the Italian Renaissance. In Judaism, the tetragrammaton is a holy symbol representing the true name of God: YHWH. In The Key of Solomon, it is invoked for the purposes of summoning and exorcising spirits. Images begin to flit in and out as a man types various greek letters into a command line, followed by an invocation of the many names of God. All the while, deep piano chords bang away. Within the first minute of booting up the cartridge, SMT sets the tone it will follow for the remainder of its story; it is claustrophobic and paranoid, without brightness or hope.

From here, the player avatar is thrust into a dream; a presence asks for his name and tells him to preserve the balance between the followers of “Law” and “Chaos”. He then meets two men: one “whose soul has been offered to God,” hanging from a cross; and another “who seeks power,” pinned beneath a demon. Both are freed from their tortures and joined to the player’s party. After forcibly moving through the labyrinthine red halls of the dreamscape, the party encounters a spring in which a nude woman is bathing. She swears to be with the protagonist for eternity.

Demons appear and begin slaughtering humans left and right. Tokyo is placed under martial law, and conflicts erupt between the Japanese Self-Defense Force and stationed American troops. The protagonist meets the men from his dreams (Law Hero and Chaos Hero), the lustful woman (Yuriko), as well as another woman he saves from sacrifice in a subsequent dream (Heroine). The Heroes and Heroine join forces to fight the totalitarian military regime, but no matter what they do, nuclear bombs are dropped on Tokyo by America in order to contain the demon forces. From the void of nonexistence, the party is resurrected and divided thirty years later, as the forces of Law and Chaos battle for the control of mankind in the post-apocalyptic Tokyo cityscape. Narrative objectives fade and become more vague; all that matters is surviving the road through this hell.

The SMT franchise tropes are in full force here, but the narrative around them isn’t fully developed yet; it is in a prenatal state, before the script and engine are complex enough to support its ambitions. What makes it work is its atmosphere, the psychological veneer across the world that flits between the realms of reality and the mental conflict between man’s id, ego, and super-ego. Through the minimal dialogue, the surreality of the world, the repeating aesthetics, and the archetypal cast, SMT becomes a hallucination, a nightmare, a midnight revelation formed out of internal war. It turns hardware and budget limitations into the JRPG equivalent of a Beckett play.

From the beginning, SMT isn’t especially wordy. Its story is reliant on short exchanges of dialogue, without set piece moments or long monologues, excluding the finale. Only ten to fifteen minutes pass in the introduction before random encounters start. While its contemporaries were lengthening cutscenes and pouring more resources into their writing, SMT keeps itself simplistic. At its core, it is a dungeon crawl with occasional moments of narrative, but it manages to work; enough is left to the imagination of the audience that it becomes an internal experience. We do not see the death of the first victim of the demons; we only see his sprite replaced with a demon, accompanied by one line factually stating his death. There is no grandeur here. It’s reminiscent of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: two forces playing themselves out in a seemingly eternal conflict, where the drama is inferred rather than explained. SMT’s horror lays in what we assume rather than what we are told. We do not see the Hero’s Mother being killed by a demon, but after the party slays the shapeshifter possessing her lifeless body, we fill the gap. When the Hero’s childhood friend is resurrected as an immortal plaything for demons and the party fails to save her, when Tokyo washes away in a divine flood, we can infer that she’s still in a cage, drowning for eternity.

The magical realism of the setting does much for SMT’s tone. After the initial dream, the world is real, concrete. A few fleeting glimpses and strange conversations create an otherness. Dream logic creates odd meetings and disappearances, as when the player meets Yuriko in reality for one line of dialogue in a cafe where she references his dream before promptly leaving. The illusion of reality dies with the first witnessed casualty of the demons, an old man getting his throat ripped out by a goblin. As the narrative progresses, the demons become more pervasive; the conflict goes from interhuman conflict to inter-demon conflict, where humans are merely pawns. With the bombing of Tokyo, the last vestiges of reality are removed. The Abyss is entirely unreal, a labyrinth separated from reason and matter. Once the heroes are reborn, the city has become a no-man’s-land, dotted by a few small communities living off of resources scavenged from the old world. Demons are the key players now, not humanity. Many random encounters are against human followers of Law or Chaos; they function as demons, to be slaughtered by the party just the same. Law Hero and Chaos Hero are reborn by their respective churches: Law Hero is reincarnated by God as a messiah who will lead His human followers, and Chaos Hero becomes a general under Lucifer. Both lose the vestiges of their human forms in the process; Law Hero looks akin to an alabaster ghost, and Chaos Hero’s humanity is hidden beneath his demonic armor. The fading of humanity is reflected in their visages. It is only through the Hero and Heroine that humanity is represented, free from the control of God and Lucifer. They are the only reality left in Tokyo, artefacts of a world that died thirty years prior.

The cast is mostly archetypal, and many of them become more archetypal as the plot goes on. Conflicts between the Gaians and Messians come to divide the party. Where Law Hero once represented kindness and selflessness, he comes to represent pure Law, a strong believer in God’s love and divine punishment of the unfaithful. Chaos Hero was once a scared, bullied kid; he sacrifices his humanity for power and vengeance, killing anyone who seeks to tie him down: a pure Chaotic force. The Heroine, unfortunately, goes from being the respected leader of a revolution to playing the damsel in distress multiple times before deciding to follow the protagonist wherever he goes.

As the Heroine becomes a passive character after her rescue by the Hero, the player avatar is the sole driving force in the battle between Law and Chaos. The only guidance he receives is from an incarnation of Laozi, the founder of Taoism. He takes the form of an old man, warning the protagonist of the dangers of imbalance and spurring him on once he reaches the final battle between the two sides. Once both the forces of God and Lucifer are defeated by the protagonist in the Neutral ending, he appears to present a final piece of guidance for man’s new age: there is merit to the systems of Law and Chaos, but neither are what humanity needs; it is through cooperation, freedom without fear, that man can be truly happy. As the camera zooms away from the Milky Way, he closes his monologue: “Can you sense it? The world… the galaxy… the universe… The common thread that connects all exists… You too are a part of it….” He is the guiding sage of this story, the morality in a world abandoned by man.Aesthetically, SMT is almost as minimal as its dialogue. Most of the environments aren’t more advanced than what was in Wizardry: a series of cubes connected to each other, separate dungeons differentiated by their color schemes. Tsukasa Masuko’s soundtrack is similar in this; where in Megami Tensei II he focused on upbeat melodies, here the music is dark and repetitive. The shortened loops become trancelike.

The dreamlike tone of SMT ends up reinforcing and internalizing the underlying message of the narrative. If we view the Law and Chaos dynamic as a representation of the super-ego and id, self-control and perversion, the symbolism gains meaning. The conflict between God and Lucifer reflects the conflict within us all: the internal quest for enlightenment.

While the Law vs. Chaos dynamic fits into Freud’s theories, the journey of SMT’s protagonist reflects Jung’s concept of individuation. The Hero is the Self, an avatar upon which the player impresses their unique traits. What we impress upon him is based on the true facets of our own personality. He isn’t his own character. He is a persona the audience takes so that they may participate in the narrative of SMT as an active being. His shadows, the elements of himself that aren’t expressed in the narrative, are impressed upon him by the audience in the same way. These shadows may be seen within the cast members that represent alignments; each influences the Hero to follow a facet of his personality that aligns with their position in the Law and Chaos spectrum. What we choose for him is a representation of ourselves.

The Law and Chaos conflict is as external as it is internal, and its respective heroes fit Jungian archetypes on their own as well as they fit the internal archetypes of the Hero. In the beginning, in reality, all of the characters present their personae: the forms of their personality that are dictated by society. As this society frays and falls into oblivion, the personae of humanity dies along with it. Chaos Hero sheds his frail outer shell to give himself over to his id. He becomes a true Chaos Hero. After the end, the Gaians and Messians will engage you in combat, the same as the demons; they do not care about their personae. Law Hero is the exception to this rule; he was a truly good person underneath his persona, as he travels with the Hero and assists him until his untimely death. His transformation into the messiah is not through his will but the will of God. This makes him less of a tragic character but at the same time makes his role in God’s second flooding of the Earth all the more despicable; he loses his morality and humanity to become a messiah, where Chaos Hero willingly forgoes humanity for power.Yuriko and the Heroine represent the Anima, the facet of the male Self which allows for openness and emotionality. The Anima paves the way for the Self to open itself up to others. In von Franz’s essay, “The Process of Individuation,” she warns of the dual aspects of the Anima: “They can bring life-giving development and creativeness to the personality, or they can cause petrification and physical death.” The Heroine is life; she sacrifices herself for the Hero and supports him through the entirety of his journey. Yuriko is death. She lusts for the Hero and symbolizes his erotic desires but is exploitative and deceitful. At one point in the story, she can paralyze the whole party if the Hero refuses her demands, literally representing Jung’s idea of “petrification.” In the end, Yuriko is slain after attempting to kill the Heroine, revealing her true nature as Lilith and the dual protagonists as Adam and Eve. The Hero’s relationship with Yuriko and the Heroine also reflect Jung’s levels of anima development. SMT’s first female presence is Yuriko bathing in a pool, unclothed and erotic, representing the Hero’s sexual desire. The second important female presence is the Heroine in her first meeting with the Hero. Here she is the leader of a group rebelling against the military coup d’etat; we do not know of her virtue yet. After she sacrifices herself to save the party from the nuclear holocaust, we become aware of this, sympathetic to her plight. With the death of Lilith, the balance is reached; we may sympathize with both facets of the anima: the chaste and sexual, the ego and id. Each has its positives and negatives.

Laozi, the guiding sage, represents the boon of the journey of individuation: the Wise Old Man. This is the penultimate form of the Self that provides assistance in reaching the final, true Self. Laozi’s role in SMT is to teach the Hero to accept his shadows and his Anima so that his quest can end. As he says in his speech, each facet of the Hero’s personality has its positives and negatives, and balance between them all must be achieved in order for one to be truly happy. He sums up the philosophy of Taoism and the philosophy of individuation in a single, grand speech.

What unites all of these archetypes is the ethereal tone hanging across SMT. Jung believed that the journey of individuation was an internal one that would be achieved through dreams or active imagination. When SMT opens with its iconic dream sequence, Jung’s quest begins in the same way. The preservation of this tone throughout SMT is a reminder that this is, in the end, completely internal. Everything on screen, everything in the narrative, is an internalized conflict. In this regard, the Hero is truly us, and the quest is truly our own. Where other games cast the player as a free-will in an external conflict, this is a quest into our own hearts and minds. The Law Hero and Chaos Hero, the Heroine and Yuriko, God and Lucifer, Laozi–they are within us all. It is by accepting and balancing them that we are able to become enlightened, happy beings.This franchise’s Jungian themes aren’t exclusive to this singular game; the Persona series is completely based around them, casting shadows as dungeon bosses, demons as the collective unconscious, and, in Persona 3 and Persona 4, making the player a guiding sage to assist others in their own journeys of individuation. What these games failed to do was make the player subject to this journey. The heroes of Persona 3 and Persona 4 are already playing the role of sages when we control them. We do not work to become these enlightened beings; we just are enlightened. SMT removes this power fantasy. It is not an external quest to enlighten others; it is an internal quest to enlighten ourselves.

SMT’s ultimate contribution to the medium is that, where the vast majority of games externalize their conflicts, relying on the concrete and objective, SMT internalizes the conflict; the antagonists of this story are within us, not without. It is about subjectivity of the Self as well as the subjectivity of a narrative. We are encouraged to question what specifically makes us heroic and what elements of our individual minds truly define us. We are not predefined heroes, but we have the potential to become heroic.

In which we spend a lot of time talking about Dark Souls and keying every conversation into Dark Souls somehow. 

Social Link is The Stereogram’s games podcast, featuring our staffers yammering about the latest video game news and releases. Check back every Monday for new episodes!

As well as some talk about Dark Souls, we manage to discuss SMT and Jungian psychology, the dog knots of Corruption of Champions, Wind Waker (again), and then more Dark Souls. At least there’s no MOBA talk. Well… there’s very little MOBA talk. What are ya gonna do?

[mp3 url="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31101742/-/SLinkEp6.mp3"]

Use this link to download or listen to Episode 6 – Soul-cial Link.

Intro: “Dunn It Up” – Fatal Labyrinth

Psycho-Pass is set in a dystopian future where Japan is controlled by the “Sibyl System,” a mysterious mechanism that measures residents’ danger levels in a test called a “Psycho-Pass.” The protagonist, Akane Tsunemori, is a new member of a police squad designed to deal with potential criminals through the use of “Enforcers,” people with high chances to commit crimes kept separate from general society. As she becomes sympathetic to their plight, everything in the police unit goes topsy-turvy when they discover a series of crimes orchestrated by a mysterious man whose Psycho-Pass cannot be measured.

It’s quite simulacratic, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing; everything is unoriginal to a degree, and the cyberpunk genre built itself off of its unique merging of science fiction and noir storytelling. The problem with Psycho-Pass is that it doesn’t merge its influences together into a consistent product.

Early on, quite a lot of focus is placed on building the world, but the world itself is very compact. No explanation is given to the state of Earth outside of Japan. Very little information is provided as to how the country works outside of the vast city the majority of Psycho-Pass takes place in. It’s comparable to The Naked City and its idea of the city as a living being, but it’s odd that Psycho-Pass goes into detail about the state of technology and the Internet in its setting yet has nothing to say about how Japan somehow went from a globalized state to wholly isolationist again, even in a world where the Internet still exists. Its attempts to be large-scale hard sci-fi become ludicrous when one considers the world outside of Japan. After these arcs resolve themselves, the scope moves back to the main cast and the antagonist.

Sadly, once Psycho-Pass pulls its focus back from world-building and onto the characters, it doesn’t improve. Since its early arcs are primarily focused on building the setting, the shift back to the character drama comes before much of the cast gets much development or moments that make them likeable to the audience. Most of them don’t get this development, and the few characters who are developed aren’t used much in the remainder of the series. One of the most prominent and obnoxious characters doesn’t make an ounce of progress until the penultimate episode; a side character gets a whole episode dedicated to showing her intriguing backstory, and then all she gets is a few throwaway lines and a needless sex scene near the end.

It doesn’t help that the writers seem to use the dialogue as a platform for self-aggrandizement rather than character building. Many conversations exist only to have characters name drop writers and philosophers, from Gibson to Kierkegaard. It’s rarely used in a way that makes sense for the characters or is needed for the story. One murderer explains their whole motivation through a monologue on Kierkegaard that never ends up tying Kierkegaard’s philosophical views back to why they need to kill people for what they do. A few minutes of dialogue are used to only show that two characters know who William Gibson is. The final shot of Psycho-Pass is a copy of Swann’s Way on a table, despite the conclusion having nothing to do with that novel. It’s rarely necessary, if ever, and it comes off as pretentious. Allusion isn’t supposed to be used this way; it’s for symbolism and comparing themes across different texts, not for writers to show off their worldliness.

The overarching story isn’t much to write home about either. Like any good thriller, it builds itself off of tension and intrigue. Early arcs focused around singular crimes and building the world are great to watch, despite little of the cast having much depth. There’s always a sense that anything can happen, that things can go totally off the rails at any point, and then they go off the rails in the most hamfisted way possible. Psycho-Pass digs its own grave through its excellence in creating tension. Before its reveal, it’s a genuinely enjoyable show, one of the best hard sci-fi stories I’ve seen in a long time. Once it lifts its mysterious veil, all that’s left is a crudely-constructed world with misused characters. There are no thrills to what happens subsequently; it’s predictable, and all of the tension it needed to be a good thriller was thrown out. The few tricks left feel more like they came out of the writers’ asses than their sleeves. A few moments of world development come, but they only serve as last-minute excuses to make a climax after the initial climactic reveal came up short.

Just like its story, the animation quality in Psycho-Pass begins impressively; there’s a great sense of motion to the action, and the gore is appropriately organic. Production I.G. initially gave it a healthy budget, and it seems like they had a lot of their best animators working on it at the time. At its best, its as visually thrilling as I.G.’s previous work on the Ghost in the Shell franchise. After the mystery is revealed, that animation quality goes as far down as the story does. The off-model shots sharply decline in detail. A character loses and gains a suit jacket and tie multiple times over the course of a single scene. It’s just pitiful. Around the same time as the reveal, I.G.’s other series Robotics;Notes got a significant boost in budget for its computer-generated robots, so there’s a good chance this resulted in resources being diverted away from Psycho-Pass. By this point, Psycho-Pass wasn’t especially deserving of that budget anyway.

Psycho-Pass has an identity crisis. It clearly wants to be the best in its genre, a shining example of adult fiction in a medium steeped in moe tropes. Its writers attempt to emulate the ideas of Shirow Masamune, Chiaki J. Konaka, and William Gibson, but they don’t do anything of value with their predecessors’ works. They just take their innovations and cobble them together into a weak, unfocused narrative. Psycho-Pass is nothing more than a big-budget Hollywood action film weighed down by its own pretensions of being something more.

I’d rather have a BBS but that’s a ridiculous can of worms in the year of our lord 2013.

Social Link is The Stereogram’s games podcast, featuring our staffers yammering about the latest video game news and releases. Check back every Monday for new episodes!

Due to extenuating circumstances, we weren’t able to record an episode last week. To make up for that, we put our A game into this one, and it’s longer than most of our previous work. Enjoy! Also we should totally get an IRC channel. It’ll be great.

[mp3 url="https://dl.dropbox.com/u/31101742/-/SLinkEp5.mp3"]

Use this link to download or listen to Episode 5 – We Should Get An IRC Channel.

Intro: “Dunn It Up” – Fatal Labyrinth
Outro: “Who Just Walked in the Room” – Fatal Labyrinth

Let’s face facts: slice-of-life high school comedies are a dime a dozen nowadays. They’re easy to make, easy to market and they’re almost always guaranteed money for a production studio, new or old. So whenever I hear about a new slice-of-life with a decent twist, I get pretty excited to see if it’ll be one of those slice-of-life shows that actually shakes it up. It is for these reasons combined that Kotoura-san is without a doubt the biggest disappointment of the season, and maybe even of all of 2013.

Let’s start with the premise. Kotoura Haruka is 15 years old and has psychic powers. These not only allow her to read minds, they seem to make everyone’s thoughts audible as speech, thus forcing Haruka to hear everyone’s thoughts as she would if they were normally talking to her. As a young girl this causes mountains of trouble for Haruka, as she is unable to tell when people are speaking and when their thoughts are being projected. The first episode of Kotoura-san opens with a montage spanning the entire first half, consisting of Haruka revealing her grade school friends crushes, being ostracized at school and at home, her parents divorcing and ultimately her mother abandoning her to live with her grandfather, seemingly her only relative left, all happening by the time she is about 8 or 9 years old. Quite a heavy opening for what appeared to be a light-hearted comedy! The rest of the episode is Haruka starting at (yet another) new school, this time a high school. She is cynical of everyone and speaks to no one, as she assumes they will hate her. Because this makes her appears standoffish and creepy, the prophecy is self-fulfilling and no one likes her. Enter male romantic lead, Manabe Yoshihisa.

Manabe-kun is the only person to try speaking with Haruka, and she is at first confused and bothered by his advances. This quickly creates an interesting dynamic of Harkua, who has only ever experienced the eventual abandonment of everyone she ever cared about, having a friend who doesn’t care about her psychic powers. Manabe-kun is impressed by Haruka’s mind reading, and promises to be her friend and to never let her down or leave her, as long as Haruka can ignore his constant fantasies (involving her). Right here was where I felt like the show had room to impress me over the coming episodes. I was excited to see what would come of their relationship, like if Manabe-kun would learn to stop fantasizing over Haruka as they got closer to each other. Once the show introduces the first major arc along with the first antagonist, Moritani, I was really liking what I was seeing. The show does not make light of Haruka’s PTSD nor does it make everything easy to swallow for the audience. Parts of this show are very emotionally difficult, but never did it seem exploitative or melodramatic. I was hooked. Then came episode 4.

Backing up slightly, remember that Haruka was left with her grandfather. The first episode clearly depicts her as living alone, in the city where she goes to school. It is not clear why exactly this is, it’s easy to assume that it’s because her grandfather lives far away, but it is not touched upon. Episode 4 reveals that her grandfather does live very far away, in a mansion estate. But this is not why Haruka lives in the city. Her grandfather is a disgusting man who thinks of nothing but touching his granddaughter in actually surprisingly gross ways, and here is where the show had a choice, and took the wrong option.

Up until now, Haruka experiences and is shown to have experienced numerous hardships and tragedies in her personal life. We are presented with her final relative who has not estranged themselves from her, and they are a lecherous scumbag. If the first arc demonstrated anything, it’s that the show’s writers can do a good job of taking something truly tragic and letting Manabe-kun show Haruka that despite all she has seen, there is still someone who truly cares about her. Her abusive grandfather’s actions can be viewed as disgusting by Manabe-kun, and he can be left in the past as Haruka and Manabe march forward to a better life for Hakura. Or Manabe and the granddad can laugh it up as they discuss what parts of Haruka’s body turn them on more.

It is safe to say that episode 4 is where the show lost me. The writers have done something very crass in portraying Haruka’s emotional trauma as tragic sometimes and comedic other times depending on their whim. How absolutely crushing would it be if your last remaining relative was a sexual abuser? And how much more upsetting is it to make light of that situation? This cheapens all the abuse that Haruka has experienced and turns the show’s mood completely on its head. Why make the viewer care about a character’s trauma when you as a writer clearly don’t? It leaves the audience wondering what the point of the show is, not to mention making Manabe-kun fully unlikeable, changing him from a loveable goofball with a heart of gold into a gross motherfucker, out-grossed only by the granddad of his girlfriend.

The feeling I was left with once I’d dropped Kotoura-san was one of disappointment but also one of resignation. I started telling myself that even though the show seemed to have such promise, I was still foolish to think that I would get something truly satisfying out of what was still probably gonna be a low-to-middling comedy. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed and continue to enjoy many other slice-of-life shows. However, save for two exceptions to the rule, I’d hardly say any of them were meaningful or had a story or concept that engaged me. In the ever-growing field of moe/school comedy anime, only Nichijou and Hidamari Sketch held my enthusiasm or at the very least had something to say that resonated with me.

I guess ultimately what I’m getting at is that if creators want people to give a shit about the genre anymore, then they need to step up their game. Hidamari Sketch reduced the visual language of a slightly-above-average 4-koma moe show to its absolute basics and thrived on abstraction and experimentation with the depiction of its otherwise incredibly normal subjects. Nichijou analyzed the tropes and elements of slice-of-life anime and shoved them in front of the viewer’s face so we could learn to laugh with and at the conventions of school life anime. All of this leaves me completely unable to recommend Kotoura-san to anyone, as even fans of mediocre comedic anime will find funnier and less jarring examples with little to no effort.

Social Link is The Stereogram’s games podcast, featuring our staffers yammering about the latest video game news and releases. Check back every Monday for new episodes!

We’re a bit short-but-sweet this week, back to a three-man lineup. We still manage to pack in a lot of discussion, on subjects ranging from old educational computer games, Real and his Monster Hunter love, Johnny R., and the dangers of the Face Singularity.

[mp3 url="https://dl.dropbox.com/u/31101742/The%20Stereogram%20-/SLinkEp4.mp3"]

Use this link to download or listen to Episode 4 – John Riccitiello Football.

Intro: “Dunn It Up” – Fatal Labyrinth
Outro: “Main Theme (from John Madden Football)” – Rob Hubbard