Tokyo seems to be a constant backdrop for tales of love in media. Lost in Translation brought two foreigners together in Tokyo to experience love while also undergoing culture shock, Babel explores a Tokyo teens experiences with love, disability and angst. Go! Go! Nippon! is joining such touching tales of romance in Tokyo featuring a complete moron whose ability to divert brain power to respiratory function, let alone flirting, is a feat in and of itself.
Welcome to Go! Go! Nippon! ~My First Trip to Japan~. The title MUST be said with those little squiggly line tilde things, so make sure if you ever slip this game into vocal conversation that you really enunciate that “~”. The game advertises itself as a bit of a virtual tour of Japan, promoting the experience to see Tokyo first hand from the comfort of your own living room. As long as you don’t mind experiencing Tokyo through photoshop filters, anime girls with giant glass eyes, and a protagonist who most likely flunked out of the first grade.
Now bare in mind first and foremost the game is meant to “educate” you. Secondly, to keep said educational jaunt entertaining there’s a Whacky Love Triangle (c) between the protagonist and the two sisters he accidentally, and dare say “hilariously”, ended up staying with in Japan. Let’s stick a pin in these two things and get back to it.
Now before setting out on ~My First Trip to Japan~ I was asked to name my character, whom I christened Roadblock since G.I. Joe has lead me to believe this is a very American name.
Then for some reason I had to choose the currency exchange rate between U.S. Dollars and Japanese Yen though this mechanic never, ever, comes up over the course of the game. I figured for the hell of it I’d set my exchange to 999.9 Yen off the dollar so I could go to Japan as daddy warbucks.
Roadblock on a date with Akira.
Roadblock on a date with Duke.
Coming off the plane we meet brothers. Oh wait. I mean sisters Makoto and Akira. Assuming these two ladies were dudes, I remind you, was meant to be a hilarious mixup on Roadblock’s part. The prospect of staying in close proximity to estrogen for his next week in Japan gets Roadblock extremely hot in the willies. I will remind you Roadblock is an adult with a J-O-B while both girls are indicated to be high school students and one sister is implied to be very young but, what the hell, it’s Japan.
Now the mixup as to whether Roadblock would be staying with brothers or sisters comes from the fact he assumed Makoto and Akira were male names, when in Japan they’re unisex. Roadblock claims it’s been his lifelong dream to visit Japan, so you’d think knowing a name like Akira is unisex, or at the very least occasionally used for females, would be readily available knowledge to him.
So this brings us to a very good point. How stupid exactly is Roadblock? I can break it down into three levels of stupidity:
- Lack of any detailed knowledge of Japan
- Lack of any general knowledge of Japan that even some random asshole could find out flipping to a travel channel.
- Lack of any common sense or knowledge about the world in general.
A man obsessed with Japan who has never heard of Ramen. Ever.
“Roadblock can’t be that bad” you say. “Jay is exaggerating for the sake of his Terrible Tuesday.” Well. No. Roadblock is that bad, and I can prove it. The very first interaction you have with the ladies after the case of Hilarious Mistaken Genders is over Japan’s mass transit system. You see, Roadblock finds the idea that you can “pre-pay” a card to get you onto a train system absolutely mindblowing. So much so Akira and Makoto spend a good 15 minutes trying to explain how such a card works and convincing Roadblock he’s not a victim of Ashton Kutcher’s PUNK’D.
We spent so much damn time talking about trains I wanted to jump in front of one.
They take him to a train terminal. He realizes the terminal automatically deducts the cost of his train ticket from the card. This is all world shaking for him. Though perhaps the worst part of this is, Roadblock solely credits Japan for having such incredible and advanced technology. This isn’t something you could find in oh, say, any major city in the United States or several other countries across the globe. As Roadblock insist: Only Japan is capable of this. Now I double checked the year this game was made, 2011, so I must come from some alternate reality where my hometown (which isn’t in Japan) introduced this technology near two decades ago and Tokyo is the only place you could find such a revolutionary mass transportation system.
It’s not the only time either, later he learns of the existence of 24 hour convenience stores. Ones you can even walk to! Again with his mantra “Only in Japan! How amazing and advanced!” As he lives in a world where there are no such things as bodegas or 7-11s. Now with all this talk of conveniences and mass transit as a New Yorker I must say, Go! Go! Nippon!’s Tokyo is such an overwhelming experience for the guy, Go! Go! Manhattan! will probably drive him into a fit of seizures as his eyes melt out of his skull whilst he has such mind crushing revelations as though he’s been touched directly by the pinky of God.
Magstripe cards. Only in Japan.
24 Hour Convenience Stores. Only in Japan.
As an aside I would like to note Roadblock said “wow” so goddamn much I began to envision him as this guy:
wow
Now I get it. I do. For a game like this and, really, most narrative forms you need a Johnny Everyman. A guy who ‘doesn’t get it’ so the audience has someone to relate to while he navigates the world and learns its rules. That’s all well and good but his simple lack of knowledge and understanding, as to anything whatsoever, left me with a mix of boredom and awe. Boredom because the game kept going over concepts I understood as young as 7 years old. In awe because, how did this man make it into adult life not understanding simple concepts you learn when you’re 7 years old? As Lucio put it, it’s like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Only instead of raising your shackled prisoners with shadows on the wall, you blast them with nonstop anime and terrible J-Pop songs.
Or at least what one thinks J-Pop is.
Occasionally, very rarely, Go! Go! Nippon! would have a little tidbit of Japanese trivia I actually didn’t know. A small story about some Japanese history or folklore, or a unique insight as to the architecture and street planning. Hell, one of the neater aspects of the game is the ability to click on a button that bounces you out to a google maps street view of whichever area you’re currently touring.
Small, actually interesting tidbits like this were lost in the sea of this game’s buffoonery.
Jumping out into the street view was also cool. In fact Google Maps is a better game, period. Go play that instead.
Though for the most part it was Roadblock’s Lack of Common Sense. Example: A woman dressed up as a maid hands Roadblock a box of tissues, and rather than assuming this is some kind of promotional gimmick or advertising stunt like most human beings on the planet would do, he believes this trussed up maid is expressing her undying love for him. Unfortunately in blinding praising Japan at every step, and treating the player like they’re the dumbest person on the planet and unable to follow simple concepts like “A store, only it’s open all the time”, any real educational attempts this game has are few and far between.
NO. I REFUSE TO BELIEVE YOU’VE NEVER BEEN TO A RESTAURANT THAT DIDN’T GIVE FREE WATER OUTSIDE OF JAPAN.
We haven’t even gotten to the good part. The part I teased when I began writing this Terrible Tuesday, and that’s the romance. I hope you have your bon bons in your lap because it’s time for a tale of passion and heartbreak that will rival even the greatest of paragraph long fanfictions found on geocities. Makoto, so outgoing and flirtatious she doesn’t mind it when Roadblock walks in on her in the bathroom and stares at her long enough she could probably legally try him for sexual assault. Akira, a tsundere*. You don’t really have to do much to convince these ladies you are Alpha male prime rib (despite the fact Roadblock is probably in for a Darwin Award, and soon) as the game does all the work for you. They just kind of fall in love with Roadblock because he’s hanging around them for a week. If only it were that easy, OKCupid! would be out of business.
*Tsundere is Japanese for Being a Total Prick But Its Okay She Really Loves You.
PLOT PLOT PLOT PLOT PLOT PLOT PLOT
Now this is a visual novel and I almost always start out hating those. However while both Long Live the Queen and Dangan Ronpa cracked my hard outer shell and got me to soften up, Go! Go! Nippon! kept my haterade flowing strong. It wasn’t solely due to Roadblock’s deflating stupidity either. See, despite being visual novels where Queen and Ronpa got me was gameplay. Queen had stat building. Dangan Ronpa had interactive sections. As I hinted, like with how the romance subplot played out, there is no real interactivity or influence the player can have with Go! Go! Nippon! But the game actually manages to do one worse than “no gameplay.”
How you may ask? Ass backwards menus. You could jump into the game’s menu, if you were ready to completely lose the ability to play the game. Having gotten through a good portion of the game, as far as I could determine, the only way to return to the game from the menu would be to save, completely exit out, then load back from where you were. Later on and after much menu combing I found there was an easier way, it just wasn’t clear. Call me nuts but it seems like a game that requires you to do absolutely jack shit should have at least created functional menus.
Now this game also really loves to never show you anything it’s talking about. Roadblock will exclaim how amazing something is and you, player, are treated to a stock photo of a clear blue sky. There are times the game will translate a word with a green cliff note, likely a simple word or slang anyone who has an interest in Japan already knows, while at other times it won’t bother to translate the words more likely to escape non-Japanese speakers. Then there was Akira’s entire Engrish-speaking introduction translated from Japanese characters despite the fact she was speaking in English… Yeah, don’t ask, I had no idea what they were trying to accomplish there.
But don’t show it to us or anything.
As far as “dating” the ladies is concerned it’s as easy as choosing a tourist destination and going there. I actually had no idea who I would be romancing, just whichever of the two volunteered to be seen with Roadblock that day. This, for me, ended in courting the questionably legal Akira.
I think this was meant to be a touching moment. But hysterical and awkward is close enough.
Go! Go! Nippon! Is most definitely not a Japanese tour simulator. It is most definitely a dumbass simulator. So if you ever thought to yourself “Man, I need to experience what it’s like to not be able to function at all socially” this is the title for you.
Wow.
