#there beiloune goes again i says to myself

[vastderp]

Okage: Shadow King is such a great little game.

been replaying Okage: Shadow King this past week or two and it’s both better and worse than I remember. worse in that oh my lord they released this game too early and it’s buggy as fuck. better as in HOLY SHIT WHAT A GREAT STORY. 

spoilers obviously.

like the part you play is fairly boilerplate RPG, but shit’s just... weird. the world is tiny, supposedly having been spared from a global catastrophe 300 years ago. roaming monsters all look like something a child would draw, except finished by a professional. There are monster paintings that are just crayon scribbles on a framed canvas. There is a floating anteater hanging from a party balloon. it has a scribbly checkered pattern that is only partly colored in, also with crayon. 

NPCs are not named, they’re “classified” by their roles in the story. every now and then a list comes from the King of all the new “classifications” for the inhabitants of the world, telling them what they are. So they’ll be called stuff like YOUNG MAN WHO BELIEVES IN JUSTICE (and who can never shut up about Justice) and SLEEPY TOWN MANAGER (who was merely drowsy until he got "classified” at which point he couldn’t stay awake anymore to do his job). 

the world is small and simplistic and the people are very limited, to the point of sometimes seeming to be sleepwalking. The NPC who watches over the nonfunctional train station is completely brain-fried, because there is no train and no purpose for him to fulfill but hey somebody needed a stationmaster for the train station scene. who is that guy? who was he before he was given his incredibly vague role? did it erase everything else about him? is that why he doesn’t know if he’s met me before?

half the people you talk to seem like fully realized individuals being mind controlled into playing a role. funny thing, that!

even the villains are just doing what a little voice told them. they got “classified” as an Evil King, and boom! evil powers! now the Hero has to go fight them! your character’s family are assholes who have sold your soul to the evil Shadow King (stan for short) in exchange for Stan reversing a pig latin curse on your older sister.

this matters because if your sister is forced to speak in pig latin, she will be “classified” (quotation marks are always around that word per game styling) as a comic relief girl and it will ruin her marriage prospects. we’re told “classifications” matter a lot in this world, as you will see for yourself later. something as simple as being “classified” as a different fictional character trope can and will result in your life and your actual personality changing to match it. It’s played for laughs, but imagine if you were a STRESSED-OUT SOPHOMORE and you went on a bad weekend pub crawl and got “classified” as a STUMBLING DRUNKARD three days from final exams.

anyway, your character has no “classification”. he’s so forgettable it just never happened, i guess? which makes him a perfect vessel for a power-drained demon king that needs to parasitize a person’s shadow to live. so, there you go. your job is to beat up the demons that stole Stan’s power, get him back to his full strength, and then... i dunno, watch your swordswoman companion and newly separated Stan fight to the death, probably. that’s what they plan on doing, anyway. and that’s what you’re told is the plot of the game. but nope, that’s just how you get to the plot. see, the fucked-upness of the world gets more and more apparent as you go. at first you can write it off as the gamemakers screwing up (this is a very rough game, so that is understandable) but it’s more than that.

after a while of truly lousy dungeons, hilarious dialogue and goofy monsters, there is a “joke” that you can hear from various NPCs. This joke is actually not a joke at all, but people can’t stop laughing long enough to tell the whole thing to you. the story is actually very sad, but because it’s “classified” as a joke, people are compelled to laugh at it and think of it as funny.

the story is about a parent turtle and its baby turtle. one day the baby turtle is playing in the safe little yard its parent made for it, and gets lost. while it’s looking for the baby, the parent comes across a pebble that looks like its baby, and takes it home all happy that it’s found its child. the real baby finds its way home, only to see the parent has replaced it with a damn rock. the parent turtle refuses to admit the pebble isn’t its real baby, because if it admits to its error, it would look stupid. deep down, the turtle knows the pebble isn’t really its child, that the real baby is out there somewhere alone because the parent can’t put aside its pride admit it’s been fooling itself all this time. 

that’s basically a fairy tale about a narcissistic parent, isn’t it? it’s also the story of the big bad of this game, who made your world into a toybox for his daughter to play in, until she disappeared into it. not to worry, he made a pebble doll that looks just like his missing child and enchanted it to seem alive. don’t remind him it’s not really her. just don’t.

so.

this game has been pretending up til now to be a cheeky parody of the RPG genre with weird details that makes no sense. now we find out another reason why things are this way: the shitty enemies, the dazed and “classified” NPCs, the weirdly non-threatening child’s drawing monsters, all of these things are the creations of the big bad, and they look this way because they’re meant to be safe, fun game pieces for a little kid to play with. 

“classification” is not just a winking acknowledgement of the genre, it’s an actual magical force used by the big bad to create roles for living human beings who are effectively mind controlled slaves. that’s some dark stuff right there, if you look past the cutesy video game storytelling for a sec and imagine what that must be like for the people. it’s a simple story, hidden inside the decoy RPG plot, but damn if it isn’t good.

so, about the the small world you can explore in the game: it used to be a lot bigger, but it’s been cut out of the much larger real world by magic and turned into a sort of childproofed playpen full of colorful NPCs specifically “classified” (presumably from the residents of the part of the world that got isolated) for the intended player to encounter on an adventure plot. 

You aren’t the intended player of the game, either. your protagonist is a random boring teenager who didn’t get “classified” at all, presumably because everyone, including the big bad, forgets he’s there. He was left off the list entirely, making him very useful to the opponent of the big bad, a former collaborator and “classification” worker who rebelled. this former collaborator is the same guy who originally spread the story of the turtle and the pebble to shame the big bad, by the way. to make the story go away, big bad tried to “classify” it as a joke. ok dude, you do you.

People who don’t get “classified” can act however they choose, it looks like. they don’t get stuck in the story like YOUNG MAN WHO BELIEVES IN JUSTICE, who can only stand on the sidewalk and talk about justice. somebody who wanted to fight the big bad, who’s always looking for gaps in the system to drive a wedge into, could really break the game if he could find someone who wasn’t “classified” to work through. he’s done it before (unsuccessfully) but this time around, your player character is that wedge. 

and what a wedge he is!

imagine Link running all those endless, thankless errands in all his endless, thankless incarnations. saving babies, fetching cheese, herding goats, getting no real say in things but always doing the hard work--that’s you. now imagine Link literally fades into invisibility from being ignored so hard. that is also you. as in, your character will disappear from existence at one point when the big bad decides you’re ruining his daughter’s RPG adventure (more like because you make him remember that she’s just a doll and not actually his missing daughter) and writes you out of the story. it’s easy to do because your character’s main trait is that people don’t really pay attention to him. even in the game itself, this character is just your vehicle to play Okage: Shadow King and enact the choices you make. (this game gets super meta and i love it.)

big bad just emphasizes your overshadowed (eh? ehhhh?) nature until you stop existing at all. 

while you’re invisible, you end up in the town of Triste, where ignored people gather. this whole sequence is just amazing--half the businesses are closed, or they’re open and you can hear music and smell food but no one is inside. a lot of people who are inside their homes won’t open the door and might yell at you to go away. some folks hang around outside and will talk to you. everyone is sad but happy to have this place to belong when no one else can see they exist. Triste is well-named (means “sad” in french). it’s basically the town of social anxiety, hesitation, longing and depression. and it’s amazing. 

you can find a closed up house where, when you knock, a guy inside yells “I HOPE IT BREAKS! THAT TINY WORLD OF YOURS!” like. someone’s extra mad at the big bad 0_0

and oh hey by the way, while you’re exploring this beautiful village of forgotten NPCs, you run into the voice of a certain princess who got lost in the world her father made for her to play in who knows how many hundreds of years ago. turns out this poor kid used to play all sorts of fun games in the world, but she ended up in Triste. while the doll version of her has adventures, she can watch through its eyes, so she knows you despite never having actually met. 

man, imagine being that poor baby turtle princess and having to wait around all alone in a town full of invisible sad people because your dad has replaced you, in his grief, with an enchanted doll. but now someone’s come to help her, someone who is also sad and alone because everyone’s forgotten them. your defining flaw as a character, your tendency to be neglected to the point of non-existence, is what allows you to connect with the lost princess. your sorrow brings you to a place where you can plan to make real change and fix your broken ass world. i fucking love that! 

first you have to get people to acknowledge you so you will stop being invisible, and then you have to confront the big bad’s weird grief-crazy reign of terror, bring the real princess back from Triste, and end the “classification” system that keeps the world isolated and its people enslaved. somewhere in all of this, you will also presumably need to deal with the fully-powered Shadow King, but eh. later for that. 

this is the ps4 version, so first i have to get the goddamn Q of Hearts for the platinum trophy. THEN we’ll deal with Stan.