Collective longing for a by-gone era. A faded memory. Life distilled. An unwitting oxymoron.

I've never 'completed a goal' in Kaze no NOTAM. I doubt I ever will. I don't think I need to.

From the outset, Kaze no NOTAM does not read to me as a game that needs extensive play, or completion, to be understood and appreciated.

Hiroshi Nagai's Hockney-esque artwork graces the box art and title screen. Since his summer trip to the United States in the summer of 1973, and his vacation in Guam the following year, Nagai has been enamoured by idyllic Americana-infused seascapes. His paintings evoke the phenomenological sensation of the Californian coast as imagined, lived vicariously through Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero. They drip of capitalist excess with their unbounded pools, Barragánian architectures, and designer cars. Nagai is also inseparable from Japan's Bubble Economy and concordant tech boom. His 1979 collaboration with Eiichi Ohtaki on a picture book inspired Ohtaki's 1981 album A Long Vacation, itself a staple of the City Pop genre. His work became so renowned that other City Pop and AOR artists sought Nagai out in droves. Though Nagai's output continued and continues through to the present day, it is intensely emblematic of the 1980s in reality, as imagined, and in the cultural zeitgeist more broadly. The resurgence of City Pop as informed and influenced by the nostalgic reminisces of Vaporwave and Future Funk makes this self-reinforcing.

Listening to A Long Vacation or any number of its progeny and siblings is an exercise in misremembered and falsified nostalgia. I did not live in mid-century America or Japan. My understanding is informed by the memories of others. My constructed and artificial memory sees only the good of that time, supplemented by the noteworthy. I have this mental image I know to be untrue and unrealistic of life as slow and transient, something that simply occurred. An era of what might as well be no information compared to today, marked by deliberation and intent.

Kaze no NOTAM is much the same. I certainly have input here, and while my actions and decisions are not made lightly, they are ultimately unimportant. Approaching a goal, a destination, is effectively happenstance. Opportunity comes when it wishes, not when I reach for it. This is a loss of control not in the sense of a mistake in Getting Over It, or things going to hell in HITMAN, or the physical chaos of BeamNG.drive. It is an understanding that control was never, and is never had. It is the Stoic coming to terms with the fact that what may happen, will happen. Our choice is whether or not we make peace with that fact. We are to appreciate what we have, what we had, what we will not have, what we never had, what will never be. I can't go back to my past, or anyone's past, but I can luxuriate in the wind and in their memory.

I drift through the city, over the valley, betwixt the haves and have-nots.

Whatever will be, will be.

Reviewed on Jan 21, 2023


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