Uniqlo, a popular retail clothes store in Japan, has teamed up with Konami and will be releasing a line of Metal Gear Solid 4 inspired T-shirts. You can take a look at all the different designs here. The shirts go on sale June 12th, so you can have one equipped when you first slide MGS4 into your PS3. They are priced at approximately 1,500 yen or around 15$.

Sadly these shirts are being released after I return to America, so it will be unlikely that I get to purchase one. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them appear on eBay shortly after they hit the market.

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The lucky individuals in Japan who preorder Disgaea: Prince of Hell and the Red Moon (魔界戦記ディスガイア 魔界の王子と赤い月) for the Nintendo DS get this spiffy Prinny shaped touchpen/stylus. The game comes out June 26th 2008, so there is a good amount of time to preorder, but these guys probably won’t last long.

To those living in the West, a localization has indeed been confirmed for Spring of this year, but no concrete date yet. Will we be among the lucky few to get a stylus which is both hilarious and explodes when thrown? Here’s hoping so.

Related Entries:
All other Kotowari posts relating to Makai Senki Disgaea 3 can be found here.

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click the image for the rest of the cover art

I guess the first Persona game is old news these days, but I was still excited to find the complete 7 volume manga set at Book Off for 500 yen (around 5 dollars). The art is quite good for being an afterthought spawned from the games popularity. The story so far is exactly the same as the game. It may be hard for me to say that with any certainty considering the butchering the American localization received.

The series starts out on a normal day at school. The main character and his friends are gathered in their home room discussing a rumor they heard about “Persona”. None of them seem to be taking it very seriously, and they are egging each other on a bit. Finally, after some friendly bets are placed on whether the rumors are true or not, the characters try to evoke the “Persona-sama” as they jokingly call it.

They form a square with 4 people, and the remaining 3 in the center. After calling the Persona, the characters enter a strange void-world with a young girl holding a teddy bear. She repeatedly asks for their help, but everyone is frozen with fear. Finally the main character enters a world akin to the Velvet room, where a masked man named Philemon bestows upon him his very own Persona. Here the story begins, and the team of teenagers attempt to uncover the mysteries of the increasingly dark world around them.

click the image for the rest of the page

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It is difficult to find quality scans of video game art without doing some digging. The older a series gets, the harder it becomes. Luckily Kei, the creator of Dokuganryu (formally Be Your True Mind–a reference to the first Persona game), has amassed an enormous collection of video game art and scans from media that are difficult to find outside of Japan. The scanned media range from game guides to art and poster books.

The most exciting feature to me is a section devoted to MegaTen art. Some of these scans go back to the earliest games, and are of course in their original un-altered state, so they are high quality and generally very large files. As of March 15, the complete works of Kazuma Kaneko are also available. Any fan of the series should definitely check it out.

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So Crisis Core comes out for the PSP today in the states. I gotta say, I have mixed feelings about it. I keep hearing that is has an outstanding story, which accents Final Fantasy VII. For this reason I am very excited. However, I don’t know how I feel about the addition of some new bad guys who are supposedly as bad-ass as Sephiroth… I guess I will wait and see what everyone thinks.

To celebrate I want to explain the underlying elements of Japanese thought which are persistent throughout the game. Before getting into it, this post assumes the reader has played Final Fantasy VII and is familiar with its themes and major events which occur in its world. If you have NOT played the game, reading on may spoil parts of the game and be a tad confusing.

Let us start with Makou, or Mako energy, a substance which is contained in all life on the face of the planet (including the planet itself). Bugenhagen, Red XIII’s “father” explains that when a creature dies, its mako returns to the earth, and is transferred into a new living being. Unlike most energies, it is extinguishable when consumed by Shin-ra’s reactors AND there is a limited amount of it.

The cyclical aspect of mako “life”, is very similar to life as seen in eastern religions such as Buddhism’s idea of samsara or reincarnation. Life does not have a clear beginning and end like it does in the west. There is no heaven and no hell,–just transition. In addition to Buddhism, mako also has characteristics of nature seen through Shinto, Japan’s native folk religion. According to Shinto all elements of nature have a kind of energy and purity to them. Therefore tampering with nature, effectively destroys this purity or energy.

The fact that mako is consumable by Shin-ra’s reactors is where things get a bit more complex. Japan began modernizing rapidly during the Meiji restoration, and going on until the Taisho era. This time period marked an increasing dependence on industrialization. The earth was scoured for resources, forests were cleared, and enormous factories were constructed. The Japanese government was the main force pushing these advances, and part of the force behind the government were Zaibatsu, or mega-corporations, which existed since the early Meiji period.

Shin-ra can be seen as one of these Zaibatsu or mega-corporations, advancing the world of the game with their industrial technology, the mako reactors, by consuming mako, or the planets life-fource. While these parallel events were taking place in Japan, there was a sense that this advancement came at a cost. A character in the village of Kalm explains her feelings to Cloud:

“Mako energy’s made things a lot more convenient…..”
“But it seems like a lot of plants and animals have been
disappearing at a rapid pace.”
“I think the old life was better.”
“Don’t you think so?”

_{credits to Little Chiba}

The world of Final Fantasy VII was once home to the ancients, a race of nomadic people who could speak with the earth and understand its deeper workings. As time went on, some members of the ancients stopped wandering and began settling down, losing the ability to communicate with the earth. These individuals are who became the populace of the earth, and eventually the ancients all but died off. As the situation on earth becomes more dire, the characters in Final Fantasy VII turn to their ally Aerith, the last remaining ancient for guidance.

In modern Japan the ancients would be those who mastered a craft hundreds of years ago and whose teachings have been passed down for generations. These crafts can be anything from gardening to knowing how to put on a kimono properly. The more people keep up their busy lifestyles, the more these trades are forgotten, thus the ancients are still dying in Japan today.

Modern Japan regrets what it lost during the process of modernization. For this reason many forms of Japanese pop-media portray this struggle between convenience and losing touch with nature as well as a longing for simpler times. To those who get their hands on Crisis Core: do you notice any of these themes?

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