2216: An Open Letter to Idea Factory International, Marvelous, Koei Tecmo, NIS America and More

Hello IFI (and IF in general), NISA (and NIS), Marvelous (worldwide), Koei Tecmo, XSEED, Tamsoft, Atlus, Falcom, Gust, JAST USA, Mangagamer, Frontwing, Sekai Project, Denpasoft and anyone else I’ve forgotten. (The “and more” in the header is to cover my own ass in case there’s some really obvious companies that I either forgot to mention or simply didn’t have space for in the headline.)

I’m writing to say something very simple that isn’t said enough these days: thank you.

Why do I want to thank you all? Well, to explain that I need to explain a little about myself first.

I am Pete. I am 34 years old, and frankly my life hasn’t quite gone in the direction I hoped it would. As the result of a combination of factors, I am saddled with depression and anxiety at the best of times, and this makes functioning relatively “normally” in society quite challenging at times. Sure, I can handle going out to the shops or ordering a coffee or whatever, but there are some things that regular people would find utterly trivial that I find either tremendously difficult or nigh-impossible: meeting new people; deferring to authority figures that I don’t respect; making small talk; being assertive and standing up for myself; at times, even expressing my own feelings clearly.

These things all feed into one another, creating a cycle of anxiety that it’s very difficult to break out of once it starts rearing its ugly head. And when I’m in a period of my life that I describe as “dark” — when things really aren’t going well at all, such as my present situation, between jobs and struggling to work out what I’m supposed to do next — it’s all the more difficult to resist the allure of those bleak emotions and their desire to make me do nothing but stare at a wall for hours at a time.

In 2012, I played a visual novel called Katawa Shoujo for the first time. I’d played Japanese video games before — most notably the Final Fantasy series, which I’d always adored — but Katawa Shoujo, despite being developed in a Japanese style rather than being truly Japanese in origin, inspired me to look further into games from the East. Why? Because Katawa Shoujo demonstrated to me something that I’d suspected for a while: that games could be deeply, personally engaging and feature characters that strongly resonate with me personally. More to the point, Katawa Shoujo helped drag me out of one of those pits of depression and anxiety that I periodically sink into; it helped me remember that although life is full of struggles, it’s always possible to pick yourself up again, and that there are always people out there looking out for you, even if you don’t always know it.

Over the course of that year, I played through a selection of visual novels from JAST and Mangagamer and wrote about them on the now sadly defunct Games Are Evil. (I’ve archived those articles, so when I get the inclination I’m planning on republishing them somewhere.) Early in the following year, I acquired the first two games in the Hyperdimension Neptunia series for PlayStation 3 and decided to give them a go out of simple curiosity; my year of visual novels had made me a big fan of anime-style art in general, and an Internet friend of mine had said vague but positive things about Neptunia in the past, so I took a chance.

I was immediately smitten, and struck with that same feeling I had when I played Katawa Shoujo for the first time. I was hopelessly, utterly enraptured with this world and its characters; they resonated deeply with me and, while not all of them were what I’d call directly relatable to my own circumstances, they all felt very “real”. And once again, I found myself drawn to these games in my darkest periods, their bright colours and relentlessly optimistic attitudes dragging me out of the abyss again and again without fail.

When I had the good fortune to be employed by Eurogamer’s American offshoot USgamer thanks to a previous professional relationship with industry veteran Jaz Rignall, I made a point of highlighting games that made me feel this way, since I was surprised to see that despite the industry’s new-found love for emotionally “honest” games, particularly from the indie scene, there was disappointingly little that had been written about these titles that had been bringing me joy for the last couple of years. In fact, what little that had been written about them tended to be rather dismissive, chastising these games and developers for often being made on a shoestring budget, having poor technical aspects or somehow being “offensive”.

I continued this during my time with USgamer. When a freelance reviewer slated Hatsune Miku: Project Diva F on PlayStation 3 for being “creepy”, I knew that enough was enough; spurred on by my colleague Cassandra Khaw, who also shared similar tastes to me, I upped my efforts to cater to Western fans of Japanese games with my weekly column JPgamer, and published a lengthy article with comments from XSEED and NIS America representatives on the hidden charms of these “otaku games”. I celebrated the joy I derived from the Neptunia series; I made a point of reviewing games that other sites didn’t touch or only had the most cursory experience of — Time and Eternity and The Witch and the Hundred Knight spring immediately to mind here; I attempted to broaden the horizons of people who had come to enjoy story-centric games such as The Walking Dead with explorations of classic Japanese visual novels. I met resistance at every turn, from both aspects of the readership and even my own editor Jeremy Parish, who despite being fairly knowledgeable about both Japanese games in general and RPGs in particular, demonstrated some rather closed-minded views towards the kinds of games I was most keen to celebrate.

I pushed through, though, because this was something I believed in. I made a number of friends through my articles’ comment sections, many of whom I’m still in contact with now, even though I no longer write for USgamer. I became part of the anime and gaming subculture on Twitter, finding numerous other like-minded individuals who shared and understood my tastes. And I’m pretty sure I ultimately lost my gig at USgamer because of my unwillingness to toe the popular line and brand everything from Japan that featured attractive female characters as somehow “problematic” — because that simply isn’t true.

Neptunia features a brilliant cast of female characters and positive attitudes towards many things that self-professed “progressive” types love to complain about. The Witch and the Hundred Knight was a wonderful example of gaming being used to explore tragedy: something which I hadn’t seen done well before. Time and Eternity told a fun story and acknowledged the immense frustration of being unable to consummate a relationship. Senran Kagura, like Neptunia, featured a memorable cast of female characters and, again, extremely positive attitudes towards sexual matters such as kinks, fetishes and homosexuality as well as more everyday issues such as identity, empathy and understanding people with a different background to you. The Atelier series demonstrated it’s possible to make a compelling game out of fairly mundane subject matter and be consistently and relentlessly cheerful throughout; the Ar Tonelico series showed that it’s possible to create a sense of an incredibly well-realised and fantastic world while only showing the tiniest part of it.

Amid all of these individual positive aspects were stories and characters so incredibly relatable and resonant it’s all but assured that, like a good book, a spectacular work of art or an awe-inspiring piece of music, these games are going to stay with me for a very long time indeed. These are games with characters who are “friends” of a sort; characters that are bigger than the individual works in which they appear; characters that have become important cultural figures in their own right, even outside their source material.

And that’s one of the reasons I want to say thank you. For bringing these games — these stories, these characters — to people who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to enjoy them. For ignoring the ill-informed hatred and ignorance repeatedly thrown in your direction by jaded, cynical reviewers who refuse to engage with these works and instead write them off as “fanservicey rubbish” just because there are pretty girls in them. For respecting the people who love your work, rather than your shareholders — or at least giving that impression. Hey, business is business.

And on a personal note, the other reason I want to say thank you is for brightening the dark periods in my life, of which there have been many, and which I’m in the middle of one as I type this. I wouldn’t be so melodramatic as to say that Neptunia saved my life or anything — even though it’s possible, I couldn’t say for certain — but I will say that these games, with their colour, their energy, their positivity, their emotional honesty and the feeling that they speak directly to me, have brought immeasurable amounts of joy and comfort to me, even during times when I’ve otherwise been struggling.

So thank you to everyone who has made that possible. Thank you to everyone who continues to make the world a better place for people like me, even facing resistance at every turn from press and public alike. Thank you to those who stand up for what they believe in, and who help to share the cultural output of another, very different country with the Western world. Most of all, thank you for the many memorable hours of fun I’ve spent enjoying these games to date — and for the many more memorable hours I’ll be spending with them in the future.

Thank you.

Pete Davison