Natsumon and the Subdued Japanese Open World
This post originally ran on Cohost on 2023/8/8 and is being reuploaded here for future posterity. The content has been lightly edited for enhanced readability.
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I think it's fair to say that even in a post-Breath of the Wild world, for almost all intents and purposes, most people, developers and players alike, probably consider open world games to be primarily the dominion of western developers. Although the very earliest direct roots of Japanese experimentation in the genre arguably date back to a similar time frame as western efforts by way of games such as Doukyuusei for the PC-98, it wasn't without a kernel of truth, at least depending on how you qualify a game's environments as open world. If we're talking about vast sandbox-style games in the mold of Grand Theft Auto III and onwards specifically, then, yeah, budgetary realities previously meant few Japanese developers had the finances and manpower to seriously attempt them, let alone compete at an international level. It's not say that there weren't games that tried, especially around a decade, decade and a half ago, but it's fair to surmise that few left any lasting impression, with some games outright crashing and burning for getting too close to the sun.
The problem with this mindset is that it presupposes that open world games are, by their nature, a format of action games first and foremost, if not exclusively. Games like GTA, Just Cause, and Saints Row where you have an antagonistic relationship with the environment and the pleasure comes from subjugating that environment and its denizens on your terms and only your terms. It's true that a lot of the most globally successful examples build upon such templates, and for perfectly understandable reasons. In a world of suffocating socioeconomic realities, for those in the poor and working class, there's a real catharsis to be felt in attaining a digital safe space to cast aside their inhibitions and be on top of the world for a change, and an often violent change at that. I felt as much in the summers I spent in New Mexico taking turns with my cousins seeing how long we could all survive in Vice City and it's a premise that's only gone on to resonate to exponentially higher degrees over time.
But it's not the only way to make open world games and the real reason most Japanese open world games don't look as though they can compete to that standard is because they aren't. The open world ideal as expressed through Japanese games tends not to be an action game, but an adventure one.
You see it most readily in the relationship that players form with their surroundings in Japanese open worlds. You're part of the environment. Not necessarily even an intrinsic part of it; just a facet that operates within a greater picture in tandem with everything and everyone else. In Deadly Premonition, you're an outside detective going on lots of meandering drives along winding, sparsely populated roads and waxing nostalgic about movies as you piece together a murder mystery. In Mizzurna Falls, you're a high school kid living in the snowy Colorado mountains trying to figure out the disappearance of a close friend as time and the in-game clock march relentlessly forward. (I can certainly relate to that first part.) In PachiPara 13 and 14, you're a jobless young adult trying to climb out of poverty in a city where the riches to be seen in neighboring districts feel as distant to attain as they are tangible to touch. And in Natsumon, you're Satoru, a little boy from a circus troupe on summer vacation in rural Japan circa 1999.
The common thread uniting all of these games, one lying at the heart of Japanese open worlds more widely, is how the environment itself is framed as the payoff. Not the act of bringing it to submission as in countless western examples, but in getting to know it and appreciating your humble place within it, and it's remarkably true in Natsumon. It gives you things to do and checklists to pursue at your leisure, sure, doling out those activities at a smart, restrained pace. But the activities aren't mandates you have to do in order to get to "the good stuff." They're prompts, small nudges pointing you in directions towards nooks and crannies you might miss, things that'll enrich your stay in Yomogi-machi and bring you closer to it. Did you know that the other elementary school kids run a heartwarming little detective agency in the back of the general store? Did you know there's a package courier who climbs up the mountain every day carrying conspicuously heavy loads on his back? Did you know there's a series of ponds and lakes on the northern edge of the map that formed under mysterious circumstances, disconnected from the ocean? If you look into those things, chances are, you'll eventually be rewarded, maybe with a little extra spending money, or maybe even an additional lightning sticker to be tacked onto the bottom of your screen, giving you an extra pip of stamina.
But if you find something else along the way? If you find an insect to catch, a boulder to climb, a tree to kick, a rooftop to clamber onto? Then that's okay to pursue, too, or even instead of what you originally set out to do. Because Yomogi-machi and the surrounding environs have that certain quiet, roughened beauty you find a lot in such disconnected hamlets in Japan: contemporary enough to appear familiar, yet nevertheless aged enough to make you doubt there it was once ever new. Here, a missed opportunity to do something in one place is simply a chance to appreciate another area in a different light. To Satoru, it's all in good, fulfilling fun, as he attests in his daily journal that you help him write every night before bed, the people you meet and the events you witness rendered in charming crayon squiggles.
There are lots of things Natsumon does to keep things fresh throughout your sojourn in August 1999. NPCs possess their own routines that unfold in real time, their antics and objectives varying depending on the day. New systems get layered in over time that further encourage you to go out and indulge in the basic pastimes, adding further impetus to your inexhaustible exploits. Yet at the end of the day, the same thing that kept me coming back to other Japanese open worlds is the same thing that has me turning on my Switch to spend another couple of days in Yomogi-machi: the whole environment offers warmth and meaning, the depth of which only growing the farther I explore it and the closer I get to its denizens, all of whom have their own perspective and insight about where they fit into things.
I remember in an initial run of one of the PachiParas—I'm not sure which, 13 or 14, but most likely the former—I paid a visit to the high school my character graduated from at the very start of the story, the one part of the city you never actually have to visit during either game. It's a lightly populated part of town, as you might expect, but not without a fair amount of things to see and do if you take the time to visit it. There's the tailor you can shop at that sells the school uniforms. The mom and pop restaurant that offers some humble treats to snack on. The riverbank where you'll sometimes find the Russian exchange student jogging along. A baseball field where the school team diligently practices. Even a pool that you can take your dates to for a refreshing swim, gay, straight, and bi alike.
That day, I decided to take a stroll around the shaded, wooded mountain behind the school and I didn't find a whole lot. But it wasn't nothing and what I did find has stuck with me for over a decade since: a small community graveyard attached to a modest, unmanned shrine, what we call natively in Japanese a hokora. In front of that hokora was a donation box where pilgrims can make a small offering before praying. Whether praying confers any benefit in the game, to this day, I don't know. Even as an atheist, however, when I come upon hokora and full-fledged shinto shrines in real life, I tend to offer up the customary 5 yen and a prayer. The austere, yet unassuming spirituality, I think, speaks to me in a way that all my years attending Catholic school and attending mass three times a week never did. So when I came upon that hokora in PachiPara, I didn't hesitate to make a beeline for the offering box and pay my five yen so my Hanabi could briefly pray before going about the rest of her day.
Hokora are ever-present in this country, spread throughout Japan, even in the densest urban neighborhoods. You'll find plenty without trying if you go even the slightest bit off the beaten path in many places. Yet for all of their ubiquity in the real Japanese world, rarely do they figure into virual ones. Perhaps Kiryu has been known to make a stop or two of them in his time in the Yakuza games, but other than that? The list of games that comes to mind is sparse. When I found that one for the first time in PachiPara, I felt a team committed to crafting a special kind of open world imbued with little touches of life and humanity, even in the most obscure locations few may ever discover. It's taken until Natsumon, a game released almost exactly sixteen years to the day, for a Japanese open world to rekindle that sensation so keenly from the simple act of roaming around a world teeming with quiet life in every direction without the slightest obligation to witness it. Just as when Irem entered the fray with its pair of inconspicuous pachinko RPGs, the open world format is only as done and figured out as developers and games as a culture resign themselves to one kind of relationship with the environment, one paradigm for existence within it. This is the open world where Japanese developers have led the global pack for decades and it's the vein the rest of the real world has yet to tap, if only they know to turn the valve the other way.
