JAPANoFILES #2 - Urban myths
[ For this second edition of JAPANoFILES I wish to unveil another dormant cult classic, a game I have discovered some years ago when going about my habitual research, and which appears to remain unknown even to the most avid followers of the horror genre. Thorough research is invariably required to write anything of substance on any given subject. In that regard, information resources on this game are far from abundant, but such a challenge only made the composition of the text which follows all the more gratifying. ]
The first salient aspect about Yuuyami Doori Tankentai derives from an understanding of its revealing Japanese title. Since there was never an official translation by the developer Spike or any other publisher, we are therefore at liberty to muse as to which title would constitute the best English translation. In just three words, the authors have been able to encapsulate a surprisignly wide-ranging image of what the game actually consists of.
夕闇通り探検隊, the original Japanese title, is composed of the words:
夕闇 – Yuuyami, meaning twilight
通り – Doori, meaning street
探検隊 – Tankentai, meaning expedition or journey
However, the word 探検隊 has a broader meaning. 探検 (Tan Ken) could be translated to “exploration”, while 隊 (Tai) means party or group. Of the many possible interpretations, a possible title would be “Twilight street group expedition”. And, to a large extent, that is exactly what this 1999 Playstation game consists of: the after-dark explorations of a haunted town by a group of daring children, unafraid to stand up to impending preternatural perils.
The setting is that of Hirumi City, a fictional bedroom town once prosperous at the height of the Japanese miracle, now at pains to conceal the telling symptoms of decline following the 1990 burst of the economic bubble. The population boom of previous decades demanded the construction of increasingly large apartment buildings in expanding residential areas, some still inhabitted and filled with life; others nearly abandoned, or left in a state of near disrepair. It is in such a dualistic context that a group of inquisitive teenagers, sheltered from the hardships of adult existence, come to experience the adventure of their lifetime.
Yuuyami Doori Tankentai from Eastern Mind on Vimeo.
The first contact with paranormal takes place in the very first scene. Nao, Kurumi and Sango take a casual walk to the nearby park by night. Nao, the 13 year old boy leading the party, walks alone inside a temple space where he experiences a close encounter with an inexplicable entity. The fabled bird with the face of a woman descends from above uttering a prophecy: After a hundred day, somebody dies. Incredulous and shocked, Nao passes out on the cold stone floor.
Given the warning presented to Nao by the mysterious bird-woman, the three friends find renewed interest in widespread rumours, incessantly repeated among the students at the Hinomidai Junior High School. Together, they set out to see the matter through: some moved by true faith in the tales, others willing to put their skpeticism to the test. From there on, their routine will consist of attending school, visiting with friends, overhearing conversations in classrooms, hallways or even the toilets, only to later travel to the locations of the alleged anomaly and attest its authenticity first-hand.
Each day, the player is given five minutes during the school recess to gather material. The collected accounts are conveniently written down on a notebook which can be consulted at any time, so as to prevent vital from being overlooked. Later, by dusk, the young characters are allowed to go out to the streets under the pretense of walking their dog. They are free to roam about and collect evidence on site, usually in parts of the city near sacred grounds and other mythical landmarks of great spiritual significance.
The game exploration areas are built with different background and foreground layers that are placed in different distance relations to the screen, producing a very convincing perception of depth.
Street exploration periods, lasting up to seven actual minutes, are followed by short scenes depicting the life of the juvenile myth busters as they make their way back home, including conversations with relatives who, for the most part, remain oblivious to their children’s escapades. Given the option to choose one of the three characters at the beginning of each day, the number of possible outcomes is surprisingly large: not only is the game programmed to acknowledge that each character relates to different pupils in school, it also understands that the difference in of sex and age is equally a factor determining access to locations and people to interact with. For instance, if the chatter is becoming increasingly active in the boys toilet room, it is recommended that Nao is selected for the mission; additionally, if the rumours are increasing on older student’s classrooms, it is wiser to let Sango handle the job, as she is one year older than the rest. The aforementioned “end of day” episodes are also of pivotal importance to the construction of a credible scenario, as they tend to reveal, with the passage of days, the uniqueness of each individual character in relation to their families and socioeconomic status.
School areas, depicted in a distinctively naturalistic and credible manner, work as a platform to gathered intel, later used to orient players in their after-dark investigations.
It is remarkable how fetching and genuine the game’s depiction of Japanese suburbia is. In order to achieve such a persuasive result, designers went on a twilight expedition of their own, capturing hundreds of photographs which they later converted into a fictional city composite made out of bits and pieces these capture made across a variety of areas in Japan. Through partnership with a professional Dengeki TV photographer named Shinya Nijiri, on-screen characters consist of digitised versions of real actors, displaying very smooth movements as well as masterful transitions between animations. Sound were also recorded by a team on location. One can discern the noise of car engines running on the background, the distinctive humming from high tension cables, the faint chatter from crowds far away, or even the famous zebra crossing melody signalling safe crossing of the road. Such details in the audiovisual production of Yuuyami Doori Tankentai make it a credible and pleasurable voyage through the Japanese landscape at the turn of the century.
At the beginning of each investigation stage, the player is allowed to select the starting point. As is very common with Japanese video game editions, an actual foldable map is included with the game for reference.
Occasionally, some areas of particular importance to the quest will take the player closer to the action, using a proprietary version of QuickTime VR, in which several pictures are used to compose a seemingly tridimensional perspective from a stationary point of view. The developers at EXIT/Team Yura included these panoramas instill greater proximity to the danger, allowing for moments of greater tension, showing chilling glimpses of ghostly entities, just brief enough to leave some room to doubt one’s eyes.
The birth of a myth: the rumoured figure of a bird with the human head, sketched in some student’s school book (no cryptozoological relation to Seaman 2).
A divergent look at the average Japanese school: one can almost hear the echoes of children’s murmurs, telling secret and strange stories meant to frighten and impress their peers.
The quest for paranormal events depends also on other factors that provide valuable assistance in pinpointing haunted spots. When in the presence of evil spirits, the dog exhibits signs of apprehension or instability, barking repeatedly or even refusing to move. This can be considered as one of the earliest and most effective uses of a dog character as a partner in the horror game genre, one which was later recaptured to great acclaim in Punchline’s Rule of Rose, or Capcom’s Demento. The importance of Melos, the faithful canine, is such that its presence can impact the pace of game play itself. The overuse of the running button may result in a forced slow down for it to catch its breath. Similarly, the party can also come to a complete halt, should it have an urge to relieve itself near a lamppost.
The inevitable comparison with Twilight Syndrome, an earlier cult horror game from 1996 about two high-school girls who investigate mysterious circumstances of a friend’s disappearance.
Because of its side-scrolling perspective and its approach to the horror theme, through the eyes of young students, Yuuyami Doori Tankentai is instantly reminiscent of Human’s Twilight and Moonlight Syndrome. The world wide web has on occasion misrepresented these parallels as a case of shameless plagiary - they are, of course, entirely mistaken. This spiritual link derives from the simple fact that the actual game designer for the first Twilight Syndrome episodes, Tansaku-hen and Kyūmei-hen, was Keita Kimura, the director and designer of this later project. Though the game is credited almost exclusively to its director, Goichi Suda, who has in recent years garnered considerable media exposure in the west, the base game has undeniable parallels with Kimura’s debut game at Human, Septentrion, a side-scrolling survival game released for the Super Famicom in 1993, set aboard a sinking sea vessel. What remains unquestionable, however, is that all of the above owe a debt of gratitude to the supreme horror experience of the 16-Bit era that was Clock Tower.
It is also important to understand that the bankruptcy of Human Entertainment was a lengthy process. Many of its talents proactively sought a way out of the company before the financial struggles were revealed to the public, ultimately resulting in a restructuring of the company’s debt, liquidation of assets and sale of intellectual properties, a portion of which were acquired by the producers and publishers of this game, Spike. By the year 1999, Kimura and other colleagues had established their own small studio, Yura Co Ltd. The minutiae of how the Yuuyami Doori Tankentai project originated remains unknown for the most part, however it is not overly fanciful to assume Keita Kimura may have wanted to explore the Twilight formula further in a direction of his own choosing, a proposition for which Spike, then the legal owner of that intellectual property, would naturally be drawn to. The truth of the matter is that the game expands and develops nearly every single aspect of that early series, doing away with the urge to rely on novelty features such as its 3D backgrounds and anime-like stylised characters, instead concentrating on the team’s strenghts and aspirations to produce a more photo-realist visual make-up, one capable of inciting a more potent emotional response.
Having limited means at their disposal, the team designing Yuuyami Doori Tankentai was concerned about reproducing a space where non-playable characters walked or crossed sidewalks beside the protagonists, where vehicles randomly passing, in an effort to simulate the living, breathing organism that is a city.
Nao walks near the shrine where he has an encounter that will change the course of his life.
Released a full decade ago to this date, YDT stands as a premium example of the prevalence of creative spirit over the deficiency of technical means which characterised so many of the emblematic game experiences of the late 1990s. Its incredibly compelling and believable depiction of a slice of ordinary Japanese life exists in sharp contrast against the dark background of an underlying world of demonic beings thirsting for human sacrifice. Its three protagonists share a perilously close glimpse of the unknown, while retaining their obligations before a society for which that domain exists solely as allegory. As tends to be the case with many a historical case of supernatural apparitions, they seem to manifest themselves often before the eyes of children, while remaining off-limits to the adult population. In that regard, the player is may very well question whether the events on screen did indeed take place within the game’s own fiction, or if they consist, merely, of a shared hallucination afflicting young and suggestible minds. By probing deep into the structures of contemporary mythology, the game suggests an alternative horror canon. No doubt inspired by the popularity of the film Ringu, Yuuyami Doori Tankentai turns its back at the medium’s propensity to suffuse television screens with mindless visceral imagery; instead contemplating the fine line between normality and that which takes places at the very fringes of perception.
In Japan, religion and allegory still hold a fulcral role in the everyday life of millions, especially among older generations. Modern metropolitan areas, equipped with cutting edge infrastructures and readily available high-tech equipment, are still known to harbor several temples and other places of prayer – some claim, for protection against evil spirits. Expanding on this singular dichotomy between a traditional and contemporary Japan, characterized by emerging technologies, interconnectivity and imported lifestyles, Yuuyami Doori Tankentai suggests an unassuming yet provocative glimpse into those untapped dimensions of reality from where the myths of old once originated, now reemerging to prey on the suburban populace.
Additional Media: Yuuyami Doori Tankentai Gameplay Video @ Youtube
More JAPANoFILES features: #1: Reintroducing Rimo Cocoron
