At the Dragon Palace: Ruta and Better Living Through Puzzles

Crazy Fat Ethel wouldn't return my Fig Newtons, so I decided to play a game instead! This time it was the tricky puzzle game, Ruta!

---

Operator: Thank you for calling Better Living Through Puzzles, how may I help you?

Girl: Yeah, hi, I just got here today and I'm trying to move into my apartment, but there's all these barrels and pillars and creepy rock face people in my way.

Operator: Okay, what you're going to want to do is press the arrow keys to move around, press Z to generate a flaming ball of fire from the palm of your hands, X to go back to the main menu and C to commit suicide.

Girl: What?!

Operator: Glad you're following me. Now then, do you see a shiny golden key?

Does this make me a keyblade master?

Girl: Uh, hold on, there it is. Yeah, I see it. Is that my apartment key?

Operator: No, that's just the key to the first level. What's your name?

Ruta: Ruta.

Operator: Your apartment is on level 51, you'll have to pass 50 levels to go there.

Ruta: How do I do that?

Operator: Get the key and stick it into the keyhole you see on the ground. You should then be sucked into an inter-dimensional vortex and transported to the next floor. You'll see we've also generated a nifty clear animation for you. Enjoy.

The first stage already contains a trick and by the third stage the game has completely warmed up into something dastardly, tricky and vermiciously knid.

Ruta: Wait, I have to do this 50 times.

Operator: Yes, but don't fall into the gaps, or you'll lose hearts and lives.

Ruta: What?!

Operator: Well, if you want you can always get them back to start all over again.

Ruta: I don't wanna die!

Operator: Nobody does honey.

Ruta: Well, if I can just get them all back by re-starting or continuing, what's the point of them?

Operator: Tradition, honey.

Ruta: ...fine. But can you help? The key seems to be behind a barrel and I can't pull it out.

Operator: Of course you can't, we don't believe in being pully with objects. It objectifies them. You can push them around all you like, but don't you dare pull them!

Don't push my barrels, or I'll make you sit in the car again!

Ruta: Why do I have to do this?

Operator: At Better Living Through Puzzles, we believe that life can be improved by enhancing the mundane tasks such as opening a door through the fun integration of multi-level puzzle dungeons. Better Living Through Puzzles, for a better, smarter tomorrow.

Ruta: So every time I want to enter my new home, I have to go through all 50 levels of this thing?

Operator: Yep, have a nice day and don't let the bats that appear later on kill you!

*click*

---

Operator: Thank you for calling Better--

Ruta: Why did you put bats in here?

Operator: We find they add a nice new twist to the rooms and keep them from becoming monotonous.

Ruta: Yeah, well when I get hit by them, they take my hearts and then I die in the middle of a puzzle!

Operator: At Better Living Through Puzzles, we believe in teaching residents to protect their hearts, lest they be hurt.

Ruta: How am I supposed to get rid of them?

Operator: You know that frustration that you can't just walk into your damn house? You can manifest that into a flaming ball of fire and shoot that at them.

Batman might not approve, but Ryu sure would!

Ruta: Do you sell laser bursts from the eyes for when I encounter creepy, leering old men on the subway?

Operator: 'Fraid not. Thanks for calling and for heaven's sakes, don't die.

---

Operator: Thank you for calling--

Ruta: I notice that as the puzzles start introducing new ideas and get more complex, there's a host of different ways to complete them. If I do it particularly well, can I get a bonus, like an extra life?

Operator: Thank you praising our in-depth personality monitoring system, where the puzzle solvers find solutions based on the way they think. You are free to work out a variety of different ways to complete each stage. We're especially proud that unlike other inter-dimensional apartment challenge complexes, our puzzles change based on how you think them through and what type of player you are. We reflect the diverse personalities of our customers--

This one requires a creative mind and excellent timing. Or does it?

Ruta: Are you reading from a script?

Operator: At Better Living Through Puzzles, we believe in increasing reading comprehension, by using only English in our puzzles, even though our manufacturer is Japanese. Anyone can play! Reading is good for you!

Ruta: Can you just tell me whether I can get a life or something for doing well?

Operator: Don't try to get a life, do well with the one you have. That's our motto at Better Living Through Puzzles.

Victory is celebrated with "You won the battle RPG music," while defeat is lamented with "Your party was defeated RPG music.

Ruta: Fine. Gotta go. If I don't complete these damn puzzles soon, the milk and yogurt I bought from the store is going to go bad.

---

Operator: Thank you for--

Ruta: Hello again. You know the music here is nice and catchy, but there's only two types, and it's so short and loops so much it kind of gets on my nerves.

Operator: I'm sorry, sir, I'm afraid that's all we've got.

Ruta: Well, put on the radio then. Some smooth jazz would be nice.

Operator: None of that, either.

Ruta: Not even a little saxophone playing by a balding, middle-aged man?

Operator: Not even a little. Goodbye and thank you for calling Better Living Through Puzzles.

---

Headaches, you will get! Lovely fun headaches!

Operator: Hi, Ruta.

Ruta: How'd you know it was me this time?

Operator: Lucky guess!

Ruta: Okay. Well, here's the thing. These puzzles are getting bloody hard! There's warp tiles and directional arrows and crumbling blocks and frozen blocks and switches that raise blocks and blocks that change the direction of the directional arrows, how am I supposed to keep track of all the possibilities?

Operator: Use your prefrontal cortex!

Ruta: My what?

By this point the game is every bit as tricky as Lolo or Solomon's Key.

Operator: Better Living Through Puzzles is designed to stop you from being a troglodyte and reduce procrastination by making you think several steps ahead. If you don't, you'll burn your bridges and die. We think this a healthy lesson to teach our children.

Ruta: Aren't I your resident?

Operator: Oh, child please. The sad fact is that more and more people are giving into the urges and demands of their limbic system, which is a buried in a primitive part of the brain and causes you to eat ice cream until you get dumped by your boyfriend instead of thinking toward your bright, sexy future in the Bahamas together! If only your prefrontal cortex had been stronger and you were able to think ahead several steps so you don't meet disaster and regret!

One of my favorite stages. Can you figure it out?

Ruta: Where are your getting this?

Operator: You know that guy who designed the robot masters?

Ruta: Dr. Wily?

Operator: Yeah, he told us it would strengthen the prefrontal cortex.

Ruta: ...

Operator: Hello? Hello?

---

Rating: Three rutabagas out of  an unmolested lamb.

Comes recommended. Does not include above story. In English too! Download it here, at Japanese software portal site, Vector. (For those who don't know Japanese, click here where it says Download Now in green.) Some other games by the same group can be found here.

If you need help navigating either of those Japanese sites, let me know in the comments! And don't forget to remind Crazy Fat Ethel to bring back my Fig Newtons!

Don't Open the Box: Mama Mia, My Dear Korea!

Viva Korea!

When I was still a young Sazanami of about nine, I cherished two weekly events more than anything else: my video game time and my time with my English tutor. He was a ruddy Scottish man who taught you through the things you liked best. The things I liked best were stories, especially fantasy stories. He had a whole head full of myths to impart on me and would relate them to me in energetic story-telling sessions. Then he would write them down in a to-be-understood-by-9-year-old-Japanese-boy-if-he-studied-hard versions every week and then ask me the next week to explain it to him in English, hopefully having understood it more.

My lovely black mage badass, Medea!

I loved all the stories, but especially the Greek ones! At around the same time I was obsessed with playing Super Mario USA (2 for the rest of the world) with my friends, I was learning all about Jason and the Argonauts. I especially liked Medea, because she reminded me of a Japanese RPG female sorceress character, with all the ways she would cleverly help Jason. If you know the story, you know that it's also like an RPG in that there are several different endings, particularly about Medea. No matter how it ends though, Medea either has something horrible done to her or is coerced by fate to do terrible things. I didn't like how Jason betrayed her. I would always think, "Poor Medea!"

As my brothers and friends played through Super Mario USA, we'd say "Mama mia!" when we died. One time, I said, "Mama mia, poor Medea!" when I died as the princess, because you know, the princess was helping out like Medea did. It caught on.

One of my friends was a master at Super Mario USA. Her family had moved from Korea to work in Japan. She was my first Korean friend. We always left the hardest parts to her. It was in one of those levels where you have to be very careful how you bomb the rock walls to move on and in a dubious case of carelessness, she accidentally died. Cue, "Mama mia, poor Medea!" I thought I would be clever and add "From Korea" to the rhyme.

From that point on, the rhyme got longer and longer as we added more silly things to it. Anything we could think of that rhymed with "mia" got in. The chain got very long, but it always started with, "Mama mia!" and ended with, "Poor Medea!" At one point we added "Pizzeria" and of course if you eat something, what's the funniest food-related thing in the world to a nine-year-old? If you guessed poop, congratulations, you either understand children, are one yourself or are a child at heart -- all good things if you ask me! So the pizzeria chain evolved into "Pizzeria, poopa-pee-a, diarrhea!"

Now keep in mind we were just playing around, so we didn't really pay any particular attention to the order we were rhyming in. Here's what the finished monster looked like:

Mama mia
Two and three-a 
It's a me-a
No, it's a she-a
Drives a Kia
From Korea
Pizzeria
Poopa pee-a
Diarrhea
Ants and bee-a
Gonna sting-ya
Poor Medea!

Harmless and fun, right? Well, not entirely. Unfortunately, our little rhyme was so catchy to us, we'd often sing it when not playing the game. My Korean friend sang it at home in front of her parents. I'm not sure how fluent they were in English, but all that stuck out to them was "Korea" and "poop."

We got in trouble. While my parents were understanding and tried to reason with her parents, I'm afraid I was never allowed to play with my Korean friend again. It was obvious to me and my brothers that we weren't trying to be mean to Koreans. My dad and mom simply warned me that no matter how innocent the intentions are, one should never put country names anywhere close to defecating terms. I did take the advice, of course and I've been lucky to make many other good Korean friends since then, but I can't help but think this when I look back on it:

Mama mia! Poor Medea!

Mr. Fix It: How Random Battles and Lives Systems are Like Balding Remedies

Dear Sazanami,

My friend just recommended what he called a great RPG to me. But I starting playing it and to my horror, it has random battles!

I spent good money on this game! Why would my friend do that to me?

-Quaff, a Hairy Middle-Aged Accountant from Wisconsin

My dear Quaff,

I have a friend who has been blessed with a natural affinity toward beauty. Without any effort, he has maintained a nicely muscular frame, avoided any nasty kind of facial blemish and been endowed with lovely, floppy hair whose default state is permanent sexy. He doesn't use skin products, work out or constantly fuss with his hair.

As if dragged by some beauty inertia, his careless handsomeness has led him to become as vain as the sorceress from the Gummi Bears, Lady Bane. About a year ago, nearing the last futile bleats of his roaring twenties, my friend found his hair was starting to thin. This caused a sense of crisis in him until the day he saw a tip on variety show that advised people to stand on their head a little each day. Doing so would increase circulation to the head, which is needed for healthy hair growth, so goes the traditional wisdom.

At this point, I imagine many who read this can be dragged into two categories. You could be the curious, open-minded type who is sometimes easily fooled, "Oh, does that help stave off balding?" Or you could be the type who scoffs at such things as if they were irrational nonsense, "Scientists have found no direct link between such silly remedies and hair growth."

However, like usual, I think the truth is in the middle somewhere. It would appear that the prevailing fact is that once hair follicles stop growing -- not simply falling out, as from brushing or cancer treatment -- that's it, there's no getting them back. Until evidence comes saying otherwise, that's what I think is the truth. On the other hand, as somebody who was pulled into endless bathroom sessions to confirm that yes, my friend's hair did seem to be thinning at an alarming rate, with no discernible sickness or malady causing it, and seeing how he looks now, I can confirm that his hair definitely made a recovery. Apparently, the trick has worked for others as well.

That may down to what they and my friend did though. He's never been the type who can stand on his head, or do cartwheels, but every morning, after introducing an exercise regimen of various push-ups, pull-ups and the like, he spent some time against the wall teaching himself to stand on his head. Now, he has become quite an acrobatic guy who can walk on his head and do some impressive body-bending tricks.

My hair will be victorious against the ravaging of time!

He also started to take in more minerals, cut down on snacks and eat more fruits and vegetables. He learned to become more flexible and changed his sedentary lifestyle to something a little more athletic and healthy.

I think what happened is a combination of good living habits made his remaining hair much thicker and staved off any additional hair loss. He perhaps realized that nobody stays beautiful forever without at least a little effort. Either way, the change has made him a healthier person. He still doesn't use balding creams or spend hours in the bathroom, but indulges in good habits to maintain the pride in his natural beauty.

This could be called a healthy kind of vanity: a kind that inspires movement in a better direction and does not make the person seem like a massive piece of dick lint. So elements that have passed out of favor in video games, like random battles and lives systems, are at their best when they are inspired by a healthy kind of vanity. I bet you thought I would compare them to balding because such old video game ideas were once considered normal and natural, and have now faded away, didn't you? Gotcha!

No, no. The truth is that some people go bald and others keep their hair. (Some games still use old ideas for their mechanics, others adapt the new ones.) There is a third category of person though. They try endless remedies, like tonics or implants and such, to regrow their hair. (Some game designers throw in old elements without thinking much, in a misguided attempt to recapture the old days.) In this third category, there is still another person like my friend who practices healthy vanity. (They continue to carry on the tradition of the old games by thinking about the reasons why they started to fade and adopting healthier practices to prevent them falling out of favor.)

There go the random battles of my youth.

There are many unhealthy practices that went on with lives systems and random battles that led to some gamers thinking these ideas are now obsolete.

Because it was easy to design, older RPGs would repeatedly vomit out easy battles and with little care, attention or thought, one could mop up the chunky brown monster goo by taping down their A button. There weren't many engaging ideas in the battles, but that's not because they were random. Another complaint was that, like a wannabe rapper interrupted by his mom yelling to come to dinner, it interrupts the flow of the game and happened too frequently, which isn't so much a complaint leveled at the mechanic as it is due to sloppy game design or an incompatible taste between the developer's intentions and the player's wants.

Likewise, now that we can save our games to hard media independent from the game itself, the consensus seems to be that nobody wants to replay the same portion of the game. If a game isn't much fun anymore under the duress of repeated play, how good could it have really been? Even if it's a game where the appeal comes in experiencing the interactions, like any good story, it should inspire another go eventually (any parent who gets a nighttime request for the same book for weeks on end can tell you this). Everyone has their personal level to which they like to repeat an experience. Which would be healthier: insist that the only modern ideal of game design should be to keep the player going forward as much as possible, at all times, or that there is a spectrum of different preferences that can be catered to by knowing your audience?

Random battles, as a design element, still have a lot of value.

They can be a boon to developers with scarce resources. Inventing a system for encounters where battle initiate through contact with a visible object involves animating, programming and designing a whole host of symbols or enemies to populate the world and then designing environments so that players can avoid them, but are fostered into enough battles to keep the difficulty curve in the desirable area. Doing this incorrectly makes the whole thing cascade into the same kind of frustrations that poorly implemented random battles used to cause; players can still get caught into a series of battles that cause tedium and frustration because of AI routines, enemy or area designs. Developers who want to focus on character growth, intricate tactics or other mechanics; they can skip implementing symbol encounter battles and focus on the mathematical equations and ratios that are much easier to tweak and change.

Random battles also allow for interesting and fantastic contradictions. You can have a knight crawling in a series of narrow pipes and fighting witches and ogres. Some may say that ruins immersion, but many will also say they don't care about that, and like the strange gap, and rightly so for both parties. Random battles also help less coordinated players who do not like to have to contend with any action elements. They're also great for preserving surprise and tension.

Similarly, leaving the concept of lives and continues to drown with the Titanic would seriously hurt the design scope of surviving games. Many have noted that modern Mario games are so easy that "it makes the concept of lives meaningless." I wouldn't go that far. For one thing, I still encounter younger children or less skilled players who play Mario levels and can't get through a level without running out of all their lives. "Exactly! That's why there shouldn't be any lives. Just replays!" Not so fast.

Many games adopt a difficulty structure where the challenges grow more complex as the game continues. If a player is having trouble completing a certain stage, one reason might be that they have not learned or perfected skills in earlier stages that would help them. Designing a lives system that punishes the player by requiring a play-through of earlier stages can be a great strength of the design. Players may be reminded of other ways to play, might strengthen skills that could help with further portions and encounter situations that may provide hints or new insights to their current problem. In real life, is it reasonable to say anyone should just their charge their horns into their problems without taking a breather, looking at it from a different angle, telling the intern to do it instead, or going back to an earlier step? I think most would agree, it's often not healthy to do it this way.

There are many benefits of a lives system such as bragging rights, infinite 1-up tricks, rewards for exploration or skill, pithy comments about getting a life and easy numerical comparisons of how much more skilled one player is to another. Anyone who has played modern Mario games know also that it can also be fun just to stop and find ways to generate lives.

There are all sorts of other mechanics that have come under fire by using hyperbolic statements that call them archaic, like turn-based battle systems, save points or indeed, even things like boss battles and boss rushes. These well-trodden, traditional game mechanics are much like works of art whose perceived quality fluctuates based on the cultural values of the people who view them (also because plebes point at them and say, "I don't understand it, therefore it has no value.")

Let's keep them around by involving a healthy amount of skepticism toward sketchy ways bad designers implement them, letting them wax and wane like the hairline of a recurring chemotherapy patient, and by indulging in healthy vanity to keep the tradition alive. 

Yours If You Want Me to Be,

Sazanami

Don't Open the Box: Lakitu is a Tongue Twister

Quiz! Who is that creepy guy in the clouds throwing his red spiny friends at you from his fortress of solitude? Yeah that guy, the one on the left. If you come from North America or an English-speaking country, you might know that his name is Lakitu.

A violent hikikomori

However if you come from my land and his country of origin (where apparently we speak the language of the moon), his name is Jugem, or more appropriately, Jugemu.

You might recognize the word Jugem from the item Jugem's Cloud, which in Super Mario Bros. 3 allowed you to skip levels! (Funny how today that doesn't seem to be as appealing a concept, isn't it? Nowadays hopping on his cloud will help you explore more of the level or open up new ones.)

Sure, in English, he lacks a tu, that makes perfect sense, considering the world of cloud ballerinas and their single tus. But Jugemu? That makes no sense at all!

Well, maybe, but I remember a childhood tongue twister that is known as Jugemu. It goes like this:

Jugemu jugemu
Gokou no surikire
Kaijari suigyou no
Suigyoumatsu unraimatsu fuuraimatsu
Kuu neru tokoro ni sumu tokoro
Yaburakouji no burakouji
Paipo paipo paipo no shuuringan
Shuuringan no guurindai
Guurindai no ponpokopii no ponpokonaa no
Choukyuumei no chousuke
   
I loved this tongue twister as a kid. I could always get to the middle part easily, my mouth rattling it off at 400 RPM, but the middle part (that starts with yaburakouji) always messed me up. It still does to this day. I can even do the last few lines perfectly. If it weren't that dastardly middle line and its pesky syllables.

The tongue twister was said to be created when a man asked a priest to name his child something that would ensure he had a long life. The priest came up with all sorts of long-lived metaphors, legends and expressions, which form each part of the verse. (The very name Jugemu is an amalgamation of Japanese characters meaning "no end to the life line.") Can you imagine someone being named that? "Jugemu jugemu, gokou no surikire ... blah blah blah ... shuuringan ... blah blah blah ... chousuke, can you pass me the salt?"

If you are fluent in Mushroom Kingdom common sense, like all right-thinking people are, you will remember that Lakitu/Jugemu tends to come back no matter how many times you kill him and will follow you to the ends of the earth (or at least the stage). Do you think that's why Nintendo named him Jugemu? Can you say the tongue twister as fast as you can?

Japanese Lessons: Your Entire Life on Video

In my my article on the creepy TV show episode, Your Story,  the title of the TV show presents a couple of talking points to help Japanese learners become more fluent and deepen their understanding. So let's get right into them. Remember! It's much easier to read these articles, and they won't display gooble-de-gook if you're doing so on a device that can read Japanese characters.

First of all, let's look at the title of the TV show, 世にも奇妙な物語, which reads Yo ni mo Kimyo na Monogatari. The yo (世) is commonly read this way when it is alone, though I think a lot of foreign speakers I've spoken to are used to seeing it read as se in sekai (世界). Both yo and sekai mean world, but yo has a less literal and more figurative meaning. You'll see the word used in more factual and formal circumstances such as the World Bank, sekai ginkou (世界銀行), the concept of world peace, sekai heiwa (世界平和), or the actual designation of a world. In many video games, the dark world is yami no sekai (闇の世界) and the light world, hikari no sekai (光の世界).

Yo (世）is a much older term and more poetic. It stands for society, the perceived world, the human idea of what a world is. If you want to say "That's just the way it is!" in Japanese, you'd probably say something like, "Yo no naka wa sonna mon da!" (「世の中はそんなもんだ！」). Here, yo no naka (世の中), means the everyday world we're accustomed to live in. Paintings of the floating world were known as ukiyo-e (浮世絵), a study of the opinions in a society is known as a yoronchousa (世論調査) and the expression in the title of this show yo ni mo (世にも) is a saying that emphasizes that the thing that comes after the "mo" is something so extreme it could hardly be thought to be part of this world.

One of the most famous usages of the yo ni mo expression is yo ni mo fushigi na mono (世にも不思議なもの). This means something close a thing or idea that is "out of this world mysterious."

Now that you have a better idea of what the title is saying when it uses yo ni mo (世にも), next comes kimyou (奇妙), which means bizarre, strange, unlikely, weird or peculiar.  The title uses kimyou (奇妙) instead of fushigi (不思議), perhaps because the ki (奇) in that word can take part in words that mean anything from a miracle (kiseki, 奇跡), to novel, as in new and interesting (kibatsu, 奇抜) to rare and marvelous talent (kisai 奇才).

Meanwhile, myou (妙) can often be used by itself to describe that is odd and out of place. If you got up from your desk and noticed that your cup wasn't where you left it last, you might say myou da na (妙だな), meaning, "Well, that's a little off/odd/strange."

Put them together and you have a perfect to describe the many arresting, novel stories of people beset with odd situations and strange, miraculous powers.

The last part of the title is monogatari (物語) part. You might notice the title is written na monogatari (な物語), but the oft-used expression is written na mono (なもの. Well beside the na character being there to designate a noun after an adjective, there isn't much of one. The title could be written in hiragana characters and still be the same. The mono (もの) used is the same meaning as the one used in monogatari (物語). That mono is hard to explain. Mono are things that are true about life, on a deep and irrefutable level. They are also physical things, like lamps and paper. Sometimes mono can also be living things, but in this case, it isn't. Mono are different from koto (こと/事), which is an incident. So for instance, if the name was yo ni mo kimyou na jiken (世にも奇妙な事件), which is jiken but contains the character and meaning of koto (事), then it would be about strange and peculiar instances. But because it uses mono, these are stories, in other words, by the Japanese way of reckoning, a telling of the way things are on their most basic and true levels. Katari (語り) is just that, using words to tell about something. It just loses the ri (り) character in writing and becomes gatari after mono for grammar reasons too tedious to expound upon now.

So if you put it all together, it's a novel truth about life and society told in such a way that it is too strange to be believed as part of this world.

Now you see why some people (like me) get headaches from trying to translate Japanese into English properly!