Rupture: 1000xResist

Welcome to ANIWIRE! This week we're talking about the new independent game 1000xResist. Before that, though, here's some news from the anime and manga world.

News

• A new start-up called Orange is claiming that they have the capacity to translate several hundred manga series per month via machine learning. Industry professionals disagree. I recommend checking out this Comics Beat feature for further info.
• Mamoru Oshii and Yoshitaka Amano's very odd anime OVA Angel's Egg is receiving a 4K remaster. Gebeka International has the world sale rights.
• Ryoko Kui, the creator of Delicious in Dungeon, will be at Anime Expo this year. Finally, Jane Mai's prophecy comes true...
• A new trailer has been released for the upcoming anime series The Magical Girl and the Evil Lieutenant Used to Be Archenemies, set for release this July. The artist of the source material passed away back in 2015; the anime is being produced in her memory.

Bookmarks

• For The Comics Journal, Helen Chazan spoke to comics artist Bhanu Pratap.
• For Comics Beat, Justin Guerrero spoke to Snailords, the artist behind WEBTOON hit Freaking Romance. (What does the series have to do with snails? I have no idea.)
• For Sakuga Blog, Kevin Cirugeda wrote about the recent anime adaptation of court mystery drama The Apothecary Diaries. I still haven't seen this one!
• For gamesindustry.biz, Alicia Haddick spoke to folks at the Tokyo Indie Games Summit about that country's independent scene.

What I Wrote

• For Comics Beat, I finished up a piece I've been tinkering with for months: the first of two articles profiling Lee Yone, the creator of Korean comics Surviving Romance and The Makeup Remover.
• Meanwhile, Beat's Bizarre Adventure is continuing apace. This week I wrote about Dorohedoro, one of my favorite comics. Check out Dan Morris's and Merve Giray's write-ups, too!
• For Unpacking the Shelf, my friend Alex and I traveled to the world of Akira Toriyama's comedy hit Dr. Slump.

AMV of the Week

Here's "The Darkness" by sailormoonfreak.

This piece contains spoilers for the events of 1000xResist. Feel free to read through if you'd like to learn more about the game, though. There's more there than I could ever cover here.

It is 3047. The ALLMOTHER rules the remaining world. Her clones luxuriate in her words from the comfort of the Orchard. Six are raised above the others. One is Watcher, whose job is to travel back and bear witness to the ALLMOTHER’s memories through the rite of Communion.

It is 2047. Extraterrestrial Occupants descend to Earth. A deadly disease infects the populace. One teenage girl, Iris, is immune. The military wants her body. Her parents demand that she stay home, while her classmate Jiao badly needs a friend. Iris is sick of dealing with other people’s garbage.

It is 2019. Hong Kong is in revolt.

1000xResist is a video game developed by sunset visitor 斜陽過客. The player embodies Watcher as they relive select moments of the ALLMOTHER’s past. In the process she learns that the deity she adores was once an angry teenage girl named Iris. Consumed by rage, Watcher turns her hand against the mother that created her. Yet behind the ALLMOTHER is another, and another. They did not make the thousand year old lie on their own. It is a collective act of longing that binds everyone in the Orchard to an impossible, beautiful, dangerous thing.

The game stems from an eclectic mix of influences. Some scenes aim for the voyeuristic pleasures of immersive theater. Others capture the chaos and coordinated motion of experimental opera Einstein on the Beach. A brief city diversion transforms the game into a Wong Kar Wai film. The trains of Neon Genesis Evangelion and the flowers of Liz and the Blue Bird make appearances.

One of 1000xResist’s touchstones is Nier Automata, a 2017 game developed by Platinum Games in collaboration with developer Yoko Taro. Nier Automata told the story of a war between androids and alien war machines long after humanity’s extinction. It is quite violent at times and yet its key register is melancholy. Nobody remembers why they are fighting. They hurt each other because, as far as they have been told, that is their role.

The costume design and brutalist environments of 1000xResist owe something to Nier Automata. Another similarity is the way it switches perspective at will between first, second and third person. These are games that can and will transform into other games at any moment, so as to keep the player on their toes. 1000xResist also sneaks in a few referential gags, although not nearly as many as in Nier Automata. I loved the shout-out to Maniac Mansion. (For those not in the know, it involves a hamster and a microwave.)

1000xResist comes as close as any game I’ve seen to recapturing what I felt playing Nier Automata in 2017. Not even the developers of Nier Automata themselves can say the same thing. Yet that pitch can't help but sell 1000xResist short. This isn’t just another game like Nier Automata. It’s a game that through its specificity and focus proves the limits of that title's imagination.

Nier Automata is a story of the video game as repetitive violence engine. In the final stage of its android/machine war, both sides fall prey to a virus that drives all mechanical lifeforms to insanity. It is implied that this virus represents the curse of extinct humanity. As machines become more like their creators, they adopt the human drive for death. The only thing able to stop them is a literal deus ex machina.

It’s a fair metaphor for the bad behavior encouraged by video game design. It falls short, though, as a model for humanity. People do not commit violence just because they are people. Violence always comes from somewhere, whether or not the origin point is known. Those who are hurt may hurt others in turn.

The violence of 1000xResist is rooted in a specific historical incident: the brutal crackdown against civilians following the 2019 Hong Kong protests. Iris’s parents left their family behind to escape retribution in Canada. Iris was abducted from her parents by the military. Watcher was alienated from everyday life in the Orchard the moment she tasted forbidden knowledge. Sooner or later they all dream of going back. They can’t.

In microcosm and macrocosm, this is a game about rupture. Leaving Hong Kong for Canada means cutting off a part of yourself. This process is rarely easy, especially under duress. It can be challenging for folks that have never experienced it to understand. I left the Philippines after eight years there to attend high school in the United States. I never had to leave my family, my birthplace or even my language behind. It's far more difficult if you do.

When Iris sees her mother sleepwalk in her apartment for the first time, she is scared, frustrated and embarrassed. She doesn’t yet realize that her mother is retracing steps of past trauma. Neither did I realize, at least not right away, that her mother’s pain differs only in scale from the disease spread in the wake of the Occupants that makes everybody on Earth weep out their body fluids and die.

That is why 1000xResist is as much multimedia installation as video game. The wound at its heart is still too raw and bloody to approach directly. sunset visitor instead trace the contours through dialogue, tableau, song, cinematography, collage, game mechanics, even live action. When you’re grappling with something so huge, your best bet is to come at the subject a thousand different ways and hope at least one will work.

Above it all are the Occupants, the alien beings that set the story of 1000xResist into motion. Most communicate only via incomprehensible metaphors. If Watcher couldn't understand the ALLMOTHER, and the ALMOTHER couldn’t understand her own mother, what hope could the Occupants have of understanding them?

But that’s the game: a metaphor machine that teaches not just through empathy but pain. Assimilation is violence; nostalgia is a dangerous thing; the ghosts of the past scar the present and future. The knife goes in. One thousand times resist.

Further Reading

• For Eurogamer, Alexis Ong reviewed the game as a diaspora text.
• Natalie Flores reviewed the game at Paste. "It's the kind of game," she wrote, "that can leave you feeling transformed."
• Kastel wrote this after finishing the game. They're currently digging into parallels to the 2019 Hong Kong protests, and hope to write that up for their blog. I reckon this will be a defining write-up on the game once it is published; keep an eye out for it. Edit: and here it is!
• While it isn't a piece of video game criticism, I'll take this moment to recommend Karen Tei Yamashita's novel I Hotel. It's good!