100 years into the future
and in response to a foreign invasion aimed at sucking all the spiritual power out of the ley lines coursing through its islands
Japan ditches its parliamentary system of government
and establishes a kind of militarized Shintoist eco-nationalist ultra-presidency concentrated inside a triune structure:
a flying battleship which contains the executive cabinet;
a flying super robot which finds its home within a hangar aboard the flying battleship;
and the President, who rides on the back of the flying super robot,
obvi,
and, from playing the game, this all seems to work out pretty great.
You play as the President, who is actually the second president under this new system, and is also the elfin purple-haired teenage daughter of the first president, who was assassinated;
and when you go into battle against the spirit-vampire enemy machines,
you and your super robot can generate a form of super-combo energy
that neither of you, on your own, can create;
but it is only through the mystical union of teenage president and newly manufactured super robot
that you can wield a laser sword of supremacy,
that both obliterates
and purifies.
You see,
as you vanquish the enemy spirit-vampire machines
the decadent cities and industrial complexes of New Japan vanish
and are replaced by verdant forests full of giant trees
like from the poster that came with the original SNES cartridge release of Secret of Mana
and I start to wonder,
“Who is this Enemy? Is it a faction within New Japan itself? Is this a battle within the soul of Japan between Nature and Industry?”
Of course,
as you play the game, you unlock bits of lore-text that characterizes the Enemy as a foreign imperialist invader,
and I observed, “Combat unlocks history. Unlocks technical specs. Unlocks intel about the Enemy. You can only obtain knowledge by fighting.”
You see.
Is this what all those heady, theoretical game design/development blog posts from fifteen years ago were on about when “ludo-narrative dissonance” was all the rage?
I like the idea of going to the library, and having to fight a hulking mecha-dragon boss in order to be able to check out Silent Spring, An Inconvenient Truth, The Art of War, A People’s History of the United States, or The New Jim Crow. Gamification has been trendy this past decade-let’s kick it up a notch. You have to survive an actual anime-style battle to the death to unlock substantial knowledge of your world. Nobody could credibly claim the library was boring ever again, that’s for damn sure.
I’m probably overthinking things as per usual.
And I wouldn’t have me any other way.
Especially if overthinking requires that I first put my foot up some multistage combiner mech’s ass.
Oh, shit.
What if every thought requires victory against some gleaming threshold guardian bristling with ordnance?
Well . . . let the battle be joined.
