This may be a bold choice - but I want to say something about Disaster Report 4 before I'm even done with it.
This games genius comes from how it tries to portray something that, in my opinion, video game medium or perhaps I should say industry struggles to come to terms with - "social realism", an earnest portrayal of the actual conditions of suffering in a society.
Now, it may seem strange to declare Disaster Report 4 a depiction of a society, when it at surface value is a depiction of natural disaster and it's effects on a society. Yet, I see something even deeper here.
I'm sure a lot of us have endured natural disasters of some sort. For me, living on the coastline of America, said natural disasters were often hurricanes. At first, when I was doing some volunteering to help mitigate the impacts of such a disaster, I had the true idea that "it brought out the good in people". Only, at that time this idea was somewhat superficial.
Since, I found in this game that disasters not only bring about good faith in each other as human beings, but also show and X-ray of a society that causes people suffering. Here we can see people with their heads down, suffering from not only natural disasters but the kind of bureaucratic cushioning that tries to absorb the impact of the natural disasters, while human individuals are left in the dark. Take an example of a character in this game, a man from a poor family who moved to the city after getting a job offering, who made it through multiple stages of the interview process before the disaster hit. All of a sudden his suffering is at a boiling point - not only has he come to the city searching for a job so he can support his family, but that hope has ultimately collapsed and as a result left him collapsed. In the search for light and hope for his family, and in his total destitution and misery at his own perceived failure to do so, do we realize something - no corporate body will set him free from this, it's *ultimately the power of human love at it's simplest, love for the Other (A la Levinas's Ethics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_(philosophy) ) - that we come to understand how interdependent we are.
So the thesis that natural disasters "bring out the good in people" is not totally unfalse -
but we have to see the profundity of this good, that it's a good that has to happen through struggling in order to be 'pure good'.
There are multiple people in this game who's life situations are ultimately at maybe their bleakest, and this is ultimately where the 'social realism' of this game shines through.
This is amazing, because I think the game medium itself encourages a kind of detachment from our own bodies - an 'out-of-body' experience, our movement projected onto an avatar. In order to make gaming 'pleasant' many video game companies resort to thus providing fantastical worlds, these days, most likely "open" worlds where peoples desire for escape from the vicissitudes of everyday life is ultimately encouraged, as a trade off for their money. So the fact that a game like Disaster Report 4 is allowed to exist is amazing. You won't find much extremely pleasant in gameplay here, for good and bad reasons - one such reason is that you are dodging natural disasters, collapsing buildings. For those of us who have survived this thing - it is an unpleasant thought to see our very human avatar being killed by a falling steel building.
I'm sure Granzella themselves were very aware of this - they were planning to release the game a day before the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake hit (source: https://www.vgfacts.com/game/disasterreport4summermemories/), that caused at least 18,000 people to die (source: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/day-2011-japan-earthquake-and-tsunami).
So knowing this, I think Granzella (who before the earthquake was known as Irem) must've known that the Disaster Report series could not stick to it's roots as simply a fictional disaster-flick inspired game (not to say the original games were without any weight, either though). Many people who had survived the disaster who would think to play this game would find such a representation bullshit at best, and insensitive at worst. Yet, in a stroke I consider genius, they had to imbue it with a serious humanistic weight. It's one of the most 'real' games that I've played all my life.
Play this, it should hit you like a lightning bolt.
This games genius comes from how it tries to portray something that, in my opinion, video game medium or perhaps I should say industry struggles to come to terms with - "social realism", an earnest portrayal of the actual conditions of suffering in a society.
Now, it may seem strange to declare Disaster Report 4 a depiction of a society, when it at surface value is a depiction of natural disaster and it's effects on a society. Yet, I see something even deeper here.
I'm sure a lot of us have endured natural disasters of some sort. For me, living on the coastline of America, said natural disasters were often hurricanes. At first, when I was doing some volunteering to help mitigate the impacts of such a disaster, I had the true idea that "it brought out the good in people". Only, at that time this idea was somewhat superficial.
Since, I found in this game that disasters not only bring about good faith in each other as human beings, but also show and X-ray of a society that causes people suffering. Here we can see people with their heads down, suffering from not only natural disasters but the kind of bureaucratic cushioning that tries to absorb the impact of the natural disasters, while human individuals are left in the dark. Take an example of a character in this game, a man from a poor family who moved to the city after getting a job offering, who made it through multiple stages of the interview process before the disaster hit. All of a sudden his suffering is at a boiling point - not only has he come to the city searching for a job so he can support his family, but that hope has ultimately collapsed and as a result left him collapsed. In the search for light and hope for his family, and in his total destitution and misery at his own perceived failure to do so, do we realize something - no corporate body will set him free from this, it's *ultimately the power of human love at it's simplest, love for the Other (A la Levinas's Ethics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_(philosophy) ) - that we come to understand how interdependent we are.
So the thesis that natural disasters "bring out the good in people" is not totally unfalse -
but we have to see the profundity of this good, that it's a good that has to happen through struggling in order to be 'pure good'.
There are multiple people in this game who's life situations are ultimately at maybe their bleakest, and this is ultimately where the 'social realism' of this game shines through.
This is amazing, because I think the game medium itself encourages a kind of detachment from our own bodies - an 'out-of-body' experience, our movement projected onto an avatar. In order to make gaming 'pleasant' many video game companies resort to thus providing fantastical worlds, these days, most likely "open" worlds where peoples desire for escape from the vicissitudes of everyday life is ultimately encouraged, as a trade off for their money. So the fact that a game like Disaster Report 4 is allowed to exist is amazing. You won't find much extremely pleasant in gameplay here, for good and bad reasons - one such reason is that you are dodging natural disasters, collapsing buildings. For those of us who have survived this thing - it is an unpleasant thought to see our very human avatar being killed by a falling steel building.
I'm sure Granzella themselves were very aware of this - they were planning to release the game a day before the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake hit (source: https://www.vgfacts.com/game/disasterreport4summermemories/), that caused at least 18,000 people to die (source: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/day-2011-japan-earthquake-and-tsunami).
So knowing this, I think Granzella (who before the earthquake was known as Irem) must've known that the Disaster Report series could not stick to it's roots as simply a fictional disaster-flick inspired game (not to say the original games were without any weight, either though). Many people who had survived the disaster who would think to play this game would find such a representation bullshit at best, and insensitive at worst. Yet, in a stroke I consider genius, they had to imbue it with a serious humanistic weight. It's one of the most 'real' games that I've played all my life.
Play this, it should hit you like a lightning bolt.