A Week with Boktai
Boktai is the latest work of mad genius from Konami's very own Victor Von Frankenstein of game design, Hideo Kojima. A trained eye can easily see his fingerprints all over the game. Besides the obvious fact that it's basically an isometric undead Metal Gear Solid minus the sermons on nuclear disarmament, Boktai also demonstrates Kojima's love for messing with gamers' minds. He is, after all, the same man who ended the most anticipated action game of 2001 with a two-hour thesis on the impact of digital media on society. The man who once expressed a desire to create a game that could "hurt the player."
Boktai never quite goes to those extremes. But it still does an impressive job of bending the player's experience to Kojima's mercurial whims courtesy of the built-in solar sensor. After all, everyone knows you can't slay the undead in the dark of night -- you need the sun on your side. Unlike Resident Evil or Castlevania (games which were made to be played in the wee hours of the night), Boktai forces you get out and face down the evil Count and his legion of zombies and vampires. The game can't be completed unless you soak up some serious rays. Just a gimmick, or a nefarious effort to force the average gamer to add a little color to his own vampire-esque pallor? Whatever this case, this is a game that takes its tagline -- "The Sun is in Your Hands" -- seriously.
But what about people who can't spend their days in the sun? What of gamers who work in a windowless office from sunup to sundown? What of consumers who live in the artic circle and spend half their year in a state of perpetual darkness? What of people who live in cities shrouded by fog and smog, like London or Seattle or Los Angeles?
1UP's offices are located in one such city. Specifically San Francisco, a place infamous for The Cloud -- a thick, dark slab of water vapor which looms permanently over the residential district. It's a lot like the Mist of Final Fantasy IX, in fact: hazy, gloomy and everywhere. (Granted, it isn't poisonous and doesn't spawn infinite monsters to battle in unexpected random battles. But besides that, they're exactly alike.)
This Boktai Play Diary details one San Franciscan's brave efforts to learn to love Kojima's latest exercise in audience manipulation despite the dreary, sunless nature of his home.
Friday
10:36 a.m.
The sun is shining as I walk to the local EB Games to buy my copy of Boktai, which I take to be a good omen. Unlike the rest of San Francisco, the downtown area where I work receives a little sunlight almost daily, even if it's just for half an hour. Why this is the case, I don't really know -- maybe it's because the downtown area is further from the coast, or perhaps the city fathers forged a pact with an eldritch god to keep the skies over Comerica Park clear on game days. Or maybe it's just the body heat rising from all the drunks passed out in the alleyways.
Whatever the reason, the downtown sky doesn't usually clear off until after lunch, so the fact that it's warm and bright this early in the day seems to bode well for the Boktai experience ahead of me. I slap down my hard-earned cash to claim a copy of the game and step forward into the morning sunshine, determined to put an end to the evil Count's reign of darkness.
4:21 p.m.
It turns out my noble intents had to be put on hold for a while, since it's tough to squeeze anything resembling video gaming into the daily site production routine. And here you thought all we did all day at the office was challenge one another to Halo deathmatches.
Unfortunately, by the time I finally have a chance to give Boktai a spin, the clouds have shuffled gloomily back into the sky. The cramped sliver of window beside my desk reveals a hopelessly grey cityscape below.
Sitting in front of my computer, I spring into action as best I can: by switching on my GBA and beginning a game. Before I can begin, the game asks for all sorts of personal data: my name, the date, my time zone, my hometown, my social security number, my credit card info.... I know Boktai's cartridge has a solar sensor built-in; I just hope it doesn't contain some sort of wireless transmitter as well to harvest all this information.
The game begins with a brief dialogue and immediately kicks into Metal Gear mode - I find myself sneaking around zombies with incredibly limited cones of vision and acute gullibility. At least this time I'm battling animated corpses, whose putrefying organs could ostensibly account for their stupidity and dull senses. I don't know what the Genome Soldiers' excuse is.
After getting a feel for the gameplay, and being pummeled by a few zombies whose rotting reflexes are still sharper than mine, I save and shut down and get back to more pressing jobs. Like Halo deathmatches. Er, I mean, producing graphics for the website. Right.
Saturday
1:26 a.m.
Technically it's Saturday now, but I'm just beginning to wind down from an exciting Friday night that I totally swear did NOT involve me sitting in front of my computer from the moment I got home from work. Honest. Sigh.
Well, nothing serves as a better nightcap for an evening of geekiness than a video game! So I decide to lull myself to sleep with the gentle blue glow of my GBA SP and the peaceful zombie-slaying action of Boktai.
I stumble rather clumsily through the first dungeon, blundering about into zombies and spiders and constantly running out of sun power for my Gun Del Sol. But, through perserverence and wanton abuse of power-ups, I finally reach the Count's chambers (strange, I expected it would take a little more than half an hour to reach the final battle) and blast the evil creep into dust. Or at least into his coffin.
Once the vampire is down for the count, so to speak, I'm forced to haul his coffin back to the mansion's entrance. Hmm, this may well be the first kid's game in which dragging an enemy's corpse around is a valuable tactical procedure.
Unfortunately, once I reach the front of the Count's lair I'm informed by Otenko (the floating sunflower who serves as the Jiminy Cricket-like conscience for Django, my in-game avatar) that I need sunlight in order to truly defeat the Count. I can't activate the magical "Piledriver" device that slams evil without at least a sliver of a beam striking the solar sensor. That's somewhat inconvenient, seeing as I'm currently snug in my bed and there's an entire planet between me and the nearest ray of sunshine. But no matter what sort of rude names I call Otenko, he remains steadfast. Django and I may wield the Gun Del Sol, but until morning I'm still S.O.L.
Grudgingly, I call it a night.
11:13 a.m.
After performing my morning toilette -- I may be a dork who curses at digital sunflowers at 2 a.m., but at least I'm a clean dork -- I catch a bus down to Japantown, which has two advantages over my apartment. First, it's right at the edge of the downtown area, so the clouds lurking overhead this morning are dissolving here as I step off the bus. Secondly, the Japan Peace Plaza adjacent to the Kinokuniya Building offers a quiet, comfortable and above all open place to sit and play Boktai. Oh, and third, I can buy takoyaki. Because fried breadballs full of octopus are to handheld gaming what pizza is to a LAN party. Or at least they would be if I ran the world.
By the time I've finished chewing my octopus, the clouds above have completely retreated, leaving me with nothing but pure clean sunshine. Newly empowered by the blazing mass of incandescent gas beaming down at me, I easily trounce the nefarious Count. My rating: "D." A "D"! How shameful. I always prided myself on respectable grades as a lad - all As and Bs. This simply will not do, so I restart the game.
This actually turns out to be a capital idea, since playing the game beneath the noontime sun makes the whole affair considerably easier. The sunlight helps me build up a decent reserve of solar power quickly, so I'm not stuck rationing energy with each new screen. Plus, I'm starting to get a feel for the zombies' specific flavor of AI enfeeblement and can easily sneak up behind them and give them a quick blast. I do wish I could smash their skulls with a cosh, mainly because I like the word "cosh." But a sunbeam to the lower spine isn't without its own charms.
As I'm playing, a tiny girl walks up to where I sit on the Peace Plaza benches and stares at me like I've sprouted an extra head from my left shoulder. That spits fire. She's a charming little tyke, but it makes me feel deeply self-conscious to realize I'm a strange enough sight that even toddlers stare at me. Maybe this was Kojima's intent with the solar sensor gimmick all along -- not to force gamers to get a tan and some fresh air, but to force them into the public eye where they would be mocked and ridiculed by "normal" people. Yes, so I'm a grown man sitting in the middle of a concrete plaza playing a kid-oriented game on a bright orange handheld system. Yes, my skin is so pale that it creates almost as much glare in direct sunlight as the white shirt I'm wearing. That doesn't make me a bad person, does it?
I pause the game and stare back at the girl. She responds with a huge grin. The her father notices her standing in close proximity to some freaky grown man playing video games and scoops her up to safety, scolding her in Japanese. Since the sum total of my Japanese vocabulary is derived from anime, I don't understand what he says to her (although I can say with confidence it isn't "Help me!" or "You jerk!"). My spider-sense tells me it has something to do with how she should be very careful around strangers, especially strangers who use words like "spider-sense" with a complete lack of irony.
Disheartened to see my nerdy self through the eyes of others, I Piledrive the Count anew (rating: A) only to learn it was a decoy! I feel like a total patsy. So I trundle off to sit alone at the office for the rest of the afternoon, eight floors above the scornful eyes of a world that hates and fears me.
11:28 p.m.
I play for a little while before calling it a night, meandering about killing (or re-killing) assorted undead until I arrive at the oddly-named "Bloodrust Manor." (I suspect that perhaps an L and an R have been transposed somewhere in that name.) Since Bloodrust is the home of the real honest-to-goodness Count rather than his feeble decoy, I decide it would be best to tackle his domain abetted by our friendly neighborhood star. And I know just the place to go, too. Tomorrow.
Sunday
10:19
It's already sunny and steamy this morning, even at my residence. It's going to be toasty hot within a few hours, so it's good that I'm getting something of an early start on the day.
I've decided to continue my playthrough at Golden Gate Park. As a newcomer to the city, I've never actually been there before. So this will be not simply an interesting gaming experience, but a geographically adventurous trip as well. I stroll to the nearest southbound bus stop and wait.
10:38
After sitting for nearly twenty minutes without a sign of a bus, I become somewhat frustrated. A quick look at the bus map reveals that Golden Gate Park is a mere four blocks from where I'm sitting, and that it would have been far faster for me to walk than to sit at this stupid bus stop frying in the sun. Hmm. Maybe I should have looked that up before I left home.
11:10
A short walk later and I arrive at the park. Then it's simply a matter of finding a comfortable spot to sit. Ideally somewhat in the shade, since our friend the sun has decided that this would be a fine day to beat down with unusual intensity.
Happily, I stumble across just such a place by either (a) destiny or (b) sheer dumb luck: a quiet duck pond surrounded by foot paths and lots of trees. The paths seem to be fairly unused based on the number of ducks sleeping peacefully in the middle of them. Hopefully I can game in quiet anonymity... and without being reminded of the social stigma that playing a GBA brings for a grown adult.
I quietly skirt my way along the edges of the east path, eliciting only a few resentful stares from the resting birds, and have a seat on the plank of a wooden planter. The balance of light and shadow here is perfect -- I can sit in the shade of the trees while my GameBoy soaks up sunlight. The game even gives me an optimist shout-out when I start it up. The Count's evil minions are so dead.
Bloodrust Manor is a piece of cake while I'm fully powered by sunlight. Strangely enough, I can't seem to max out the sunlight meter despite the fact that it's a clear, cloudless day in a smog-free city and the sun is at its zenith. Is sunlight less real here or something? It's a mystery.
I manage to put the real Count (none of this fakey decoy crap now) down for the count in fairly short time. Once again I find myself with the need to drag his coffin back through the entire mansion before I can truly send him to whatever afterlife the undead enjoy once they're annihilated. This is a fairly daunting task, but I stumble upon what seems to be a shortcut and begin hauling the coffin about as I open assorted trap doors and switch puzzles. Shortcuts are a fine invention indeed, and I am pleased to have the opportunity to partake of this one.
As I play, the park seems to wake up, and people begin strolling past, admiring the plethora of ducks gathered by the waterside. Each passerby graces me with a quizzical stare, not unlike the child yesterday in Japantown. Mothers, fathers, children and greasy stoner types alike all give me funny looks as they walk along, all of them seemingly saying, "Aren't you a little old for that sort of thing?" I want to explain to them that it's cool, because playing video games in the park on a sunny afternoon is all part of my job.
Oh well. I can deal with it. I mean, it's my job, right? The scorn of strangers isn't so bad. I could be cleaning toilets or something, where I'd have to deal with much worse than mere scorn from strangers.
But I do decide to pack it in and go home a little while later when a duck ambles up to me and gives me the same puzzled expression. Even animals think I'm a freak now? I can't win.
5:33
I take another stab at sealing away the Count a few hours later. It's nearing sunset and I don't have the time to go anywhere more conducive to illuminated gaming, so I decide to make use of the last rays of light filtering through the huge sliding window that occupies the west wall of my apartment. The reddening beams that strain their way through the blinds give me only a point or two on my light meter, but it's still enough to activate the Piledriver and put the Count out.
Or it would be, if I could get the Count's coffin to the Piledriver. Unfortunately, my shortcut leads to a locked door, and pressing against it doesn't seem to have any effect. It therefore stands to reason that I've somehow missed the key I need to open the door, so I leave the coffin where it is and begin combing over the mansion in search of the treasure chest I seem to have missed.
After twenty minutes of fruitless searching, I feel no closer to finding the key than when I began this play session. On the other hand, I've squandered a fair amount of my solar reserves, my rank for clearing Bloodrust is dwindling toward a failing grade, and my back is burning from the intensified dusklight coming through the window. Ah, I love how glass filters out light and UV but magnifies heat. I'm reminded of when I was a small child and would cruelly burn ants as a child using my eyeglasses (they were thick), and I suffer a sudden vision of myself smoking and twitching in agony under Hideo Kojima's burning lens.
I decide to call it quits for a while.
Monday
12:11 a.m.
The prospect of spending any more time hunting for the stupid key depresses me, so I decide to give up on finding it and settle for dragging the stinking coffin the long way around. (Later I'll learn that I had the key in my inventory the entire time and that I simply failed to activate the proper hotspot on the door which would have triggered the key. GREAT.)
So I take yet another journey through the mansion. I'm starting to get the hang of the game, and I've noticed that you can stand a fighting chance whether you're playing in sunlight or in the dark of night. Granted, things tend to be easier when the light sensor is being flooded with solar radiation/ But at night the dungeons are kind enough to provide you with almost-invisible power-ups, both for your life meter and the Gun Del Sol. At times, it's actually easier to play at midnight, because life power-ups are harder to come by in the sunlight. Now that I have a feel for the circadian rhythms of this undead virtual world, I'm generally having more success. More importantly, I'm enjoying the game more. At least when my skin isn't blistering from the heat of filtered sunlight.
Of course, I still have to have sunlight to Piledrive the Immortals. And that's where I leave off for the night, since it's awfully hard to go walkin' on sunshine at 12:30 a.m.
12:53 p.m.
I take my lunch break at the Metreon plaza a few blocks from the office. The irony of playing a Nintendo handheld game in a park attached to a huge Sony-based building does not escape me, and I glance around occasionally from time to time to make sure the PSP Police aren't coming after me.
There's definitely no lack of sunlight here. In fact, the only real problem I have is tracking down a place to sit. This place is popular on a sunny day like today -- all the worker bees come out to absorb some fresh air and non-flourescent light. The shady spots are all claimed by serious-looking people in suits, or by dazed-looking people in earth shoes, so I settle for a short concrete next to an artificial waterfall.
It's hot. Bright, too. I'm actually having trouble seeing the screen thanks to the glare. (Although my light meter still refuses to max out, even though the evidence provided by my senses suggests that I'm actually sitting on the surface of the sun and that I run the risk of sublimating into plasma without warning.) That doesn't stop me from handing the Count his pasty greyish undead ass on an exquisite silver platter, though. And it only took me, what, two days? Good grief.
After reducing the Count into dust, goo, or whatever corporeal state a Piledriven Immortal exists in, I begin to explore more of the world of Boktai. There's some girl hanging out next to a tree who is bound to become Django's love interest, because in games like this the heroes always end up with the female character they save. All it takes to fall in love is three or four lines of terse, dry dialogue. I also find an armory, although I'm deeply disappointed that Django doesn't snag a pair of swords and become a whirling dervish of bladed destruction. Guns are fine and all, but anyone who plays console RPGs knows that swords are at least twice as powerful.
Unfortunately, the mid-day glare and heat conspire to make this gaming session untenably uncomfortable and I'm forced to cut my adventuring short so that I can hunt down some criminally overpriced food for lunch.
5:52 p.m.
As work winds down, I give the game another go at the office. A complete tactical error on my part, as it turns out -- there's no sunlight available for blocks, as it's all obstructed by the surrounding skyscrapers. But technically, it's not sunset, and Boktai's distressingly accurate internal clock refuses to cut me slack. Bereft of sunlight, I still receive no help in the form of hidden crystals. I am, in effect, doomed. This session lasts only a few minutes before I give it up as hopeless.
10:56 p.m.
I decide to spend some quality time with the game tonight. Sure, it's dark, but there are almost a dozen mini-dungeons to tackle before I have to move along to the next Immortal's haven -- none of which require the use of the Piledriver. That's a good hour and a half of game time: easily the longest session I've been able to enjoy so far, and the most enjoyable, too. It's nice to be able to play Boktai like, you know, a normal game. I've powered up the Gun Del Sol with some jumbo-sized batteries and high-powered frames, so I have more juice and expend less per enemy. Plus the sun I soaked up at the Metreon gives me a nice pot of savings at the Sun Bank for a pinch.
Tuesday
5:17
My first opportunity to play is towards the end of the day. Fortunately, our office has a huge west-facing glass atrium at ground level, with lots of chairs right in the midst of the pools of sunlight which stream in at this time of day. I take the elevator down and pick a seat in a choice spot... and promptly fail to get even a single bar of energy on the game's light meter. The atrium windows are apparently polarized, unlike my windows at home. Polarization is good, since it means that dangerous radiation is blocked and I'm not likely to come down with skin cancer for eating lunch in the atrium. But it also means that whatever powers Boktai's solar sensor is being filtered out, and therefore to play Boktai I need to expose myself to deadly solar radiation. Truly, a cheering thought.
The sun is beginning to sink below the buildings, but I decide to step out onto the sidewalk and give it a try anyway. Alas, the only available ray of light I see in any direction is a tiny shaft about 3 inches wide streaming between two buildings across the street. If I stand at the curb next to my building and lean against the light pole, I can just barely angle my GBA to get a two-bar light reading.
Oh, this is silly. This time, I really do deserve all the ridiculous looks I'm getting. I'm standing on a busy rush-hour street, holding my GameBoy at a bizarre angle to soak up a tiny little shaft of sunlight. No game is worth this nonsense. I go back upstairs.
Wednesday
8:23 a.m
Someone once told me that the strange thing about San Francisco's weather is that it's rigidly cyclical. The Cloud, he said, is like some kind of living creature, and when the air is too hot or the sky too clear for more than a few days, The Cloud knows to come back. It's been absolutely sunny and gorgeous since Friday, so unsurprisingly, The Cloud is making a comeback.
There's still a little blue sky showing, though, so I take a seat on the right side of the bus to work. Anyone who sits on this half of the bus on a cloudless day spends the journey bathing in sunlight. Normally I prefer to huddle in the shadows, but for the purposes of furthering my Boktai experience I'm willing to suffer. I'm exploring a volcano with an Immortal at the end, after all - it pays to be prepared.
A fine idea in theory, but a disaster in practice. I forgot to take into account that the morning sun is low in the sky, while the city is comprised almost entirely of 3-5 story high residences and businesses. I get a lot of sunlight, it's true, but only between the gaps in the buildings as the bus advances. The effect is sort of like playing under a strobe light. Which, it turns out, isn't terribly fun. I have a headache inside of five minutes and give up the notion of playing on the bus for a bad idea. Which it is.
1:48 p.m.
I have quite a lot of free time in the office this afternoon (translation: none of my superiors are around to keep me on-task), so I can game at will. There's no point whatsoever in going outside, since the clouds have returned with a vengeance and it's probably considerably brighter in my cubicle than on the street, so I decide to tackle the volcano sans sunlight. This turns out to be considerably less daunting than I expected; despite the in-game lack of curative items and the naturally-occuring lack of light, the volcano isn't terribly difficult. The boss is a complete pushover. Trouble only rears its ugly head when -- yes -- I need to Piledrive the stupid golem boss at the gates to the volcano. This is becoming a bit predictable.
Thursday
4:06 p.m.
It's cloudy all stinking day, but the sun finally peeps through for a few minutes toward the latter half of the afternoon. I take advantage of this break in the clouds to rush outside and progress past my latest sticking point. Standing on the curb at the foot of my building to take advantages of the narrow columns of light squeezing their way between the towering buildings, I can only eke a lousy two points for my light meter. The resulting battle with the golem's spirit is, as a result, extremely protracted and deeply annoying.
I think I've had enough. I really can't afford to schedule my life around this game. I learned that lesson the hard way almost a decade ago, when I lost my summer job as a result of my Chrono Trigger obsession. And this is even worse, because the random element of the weather makes a mess of anything resembling an orderly routine I might adopt for my gaming sessions.
Curse you, Boktai. You're fun, but you're incredibly frustrating. If I want to fight vampires I think I'll just stick to Castlevania. At least Dracula doesn't force me to fight him during office hours. And you gotta respect an undead nobleman who keeps juicy turkey dinners hidden in his walls.
I keep telling myself that someday I'll get around to all these games I buy and never quite finish. Someday when I have lots of free time on my hands. Probably when I retire, actually -- and when I'm sitting on my front porch in the summer sun, quietly sucking on my dentures and yelling at kids to get off my lawn, Boktai will be one of the first on my list. I should build up quite a lot of interest at the Sun Bank in 35 years, too. I just hope the battery still works.