This review contains spoilers
This game echoes like a soft and compassionate war cry, asking to reconsider our Lack of Love.
"There is no comedy outside of what is strictly human. A landscape can be beautiful, graceful, sublime, insignificant or ugly; it will never be laughable. We will laugh at an animal, but because we will have surprised in it a human attitude or a human expression. We will laugh at a hat; but what we mock then is not the piece of felt or straw, it is the form that men have given it, it is the human caprice from which it has taken the mold. How has such an important fact, in its simplicity, not attracted the attention of philosophers? Many have defined man as “an animal who knows how to laugh”. They could just as well have defined it as an animal that makes people laugh, because if some other animal achieves this, or some inanimate object, it is by a resemblance to man, by the mark that man leaves on it or by the use that man makes of it"
- Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
"All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death."
- Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
I wanted to start this review off with this quote from a French philosopher in his book on the comic, where he talks specifically about what it is we find funny and cute in non-human creatures. Admittedly, what I know of the book I have glanced from summaries, but it says most of it in the above quote: what we find funny in animals is the human pattern we have ordered upon them. Not that these patterns aren't real - the Fibonacci sequence for example is real and actually present among natural organisms such as plants, but we shouldn't take this as proof that humans can unlock the key to nature itself, a kind of colonialism over life itself, but rather that, in Bergson's radical conclusion, nature is one big march and that we are just one perspective in the middle of it, not above it. Like painting a still life that gets increasingly complex and abstract, say like a Cubist painting resembles the original scene it was based on, but the original scene is still there in the essence of the painting. The painting is abstract but always with immanence rather than transcendence, always a within and not an above. Point being: I think humans are within nature and just the next step from a march that was already there. The patterns and constellations we put on nature are real, but the stars were already there.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this myself - but let's take how this game constantly disorients your sense of space. For one, you start off as a very elementary organism, a little guy without eyes, almost like a jellyfish on land. You rise from the bottom of the sea, nearly being eaten by a fish. Soon after you arise, you see a creature just like yourself metamorphize into a larger creature. So you think: I want to do that.
When you do, after solving somewhat non-obvious puzzles (don't be ashamed to use a walkthrough), you get gifts from other creatures, and you can evolve into a black and white spotted little guy. In every game Kenichi Nishi has been involved in, you will see nods to his dog Tao, and while it's not apparent at first, the black and white spotted creature in their various increasingly dog-like transformations may be seen as this games nod to Tao. That's a neat little factoid as an aside.
Back to thinking of these evolutions: the very first time we evolve, we get an immediate change of scale. The whole first map is now relatively tiny, and the creatures that were imposing predators beforehand now are tiny little wimps (no offense to any of the animals in this game).
Games like Legend of Zelda: the Minish Cap are often championed as games that provide an amazing sense of scale, but Lack of Love is often left out of the conversation. A few levels after the first, IIRC, you get on a river and eventually get thrown off what was the back of a huge turtle-like creature. What an amazing change! It's almost like with each iteration of our evolution, we are laughing at what came before (a nod to the quote at the beginning), because what we thought was the entire world was simply a miniscule diorama.
The sense of scale this game gives you provokes not only simply wonder, however, but a real sense of terror. Essentially, and slight spoilers ahead, the plot goes like this: Earth has become an overpopulated, overly competitive industrial hell where the livestock have essentially been dying due to the toxic chemicals around and such. As such, the worlds space program sends a robot named, if I remember correctly, Halumi, to scope out another livable planet and make it suitable for humans.
When we first encounter Halumi, we have already become significantly larger than the creature we first got off the back of. However, we still pale in comparison to the power and size of Halumi, and we don't even match the size of their foot. Soon, (SPOILER) Halumi sets off a device of sorts which bulldozes the entire land you are standing on, and you only barely survive to end up in a barren wasteland full of dead creatures.
Of course, there is a moral grey area here, because what were the humans supposed to do? Is the paradise they eventually try to set up at the end of the game better or worse than the eat-or-be-eaten world of the animals (although at least that was more natural, and maybe not as painful as we ascribe it to be?) It brings up serious moral questions about what is artificial and natural. Yet, throughout all of this, the message is clear, we cannot insert ourselves above the environment. Yet the game itself isn't triumphant in this conclusion until perhaps the end - isn't it sad to have to restart on another planet, and how do we save our own? Isn't the whole game of survival a sad affair that we would rather avoid?
There are no easy answers.
Yet there is humor in this game, which is why I brought up the initial quote. There is a stupid pun about the games title: LOL, and how the game does not inspire laughs. Yet, I find myself disagreeing. The type of comedy we see here is non-verbal. It's seeing, for example, some dragonfly like creatures in one area hold a footrace, because it's like seeing something we as humans do that we didn't expect to see among animals. Then there are creatures who play hide-and-seek, who take a nap with you, etc. It's full of these small bouts of humor. The character designs are not without their quirks either - both of the animals themselves and of the artificial robotic people. In the last area, there is a robotic baby who guides you through the first maze of a test you have to undergo in order to be seen as the most "intelligent" and worthy of the creatures around you. More on that later. There are also some silly looking penguin-like bird creatures in one of the later areas.
Is there hope not only in this game but for us? The game leads us to answer this question, it leaves it completely open. If it's not the best game on the Dreamcast (I would almost say it is), it is the most aesthetically unique and possibly thematically challenging games on the console (along with games like DeSpiria)
The game itself is not always well designed - in fact it can be sadistically designed, maybe on purpose. Puzzles use moon logic, and one of the worst puzzles is near the end, where you have to do whole rooms full of sliding block puzzles within a timer of like 2 minutes. It kind of sucks.
There's no shame in using a guide, once again. It feels like this game was almost made for a guide.
Your health in this game is basically represented by a green sphere, surrounded by rings. The more up-going rings you have (which you get by eating food or other creatures) the more your health increases, if you have a ring going down, beware because that will deplete your life and when the sphere is gone, you are dead.
It's interesting, looking at the people who developed this game on it's MobyGames page, notably the late, great Ryuichi Sakamoto, we see a lot of future Skip members, but not a lot of Vanpool people. I find that interesting, because I would say this games spiritual successor in gameplay is "Endonesia" for the PS2. A game with similar survival aspects - and similar, albeit a more complex communication system (this game has a different function mapped to each of the buttons of the Dreamcast's controller, Endonesia uses a complex system of communicating via emotions you get from the enviroment).
If you've read to the end, thank you so much. This is probably only my first draft of this review. Highly recommend this game, if there's ever a Dreamcast mini, this practically needs to be on there.
"There is no comedy outside of what is strictly human. A landscape can be beautiful, graceful, sublime, insignificant or ugly; it will never be laughable. We will laugh at an animal, but because we will have surprised in it a human attitude or a human expression. We will laugh at a hat; but what we mock then is not the piece of felt or straw, it is the form that men have given it, it is the human caprice from which it has taken the mold. How has such an important fact, in its simplicity, not attracted the attention of philosophers? Many have defined man as “an animal who knows how to laugh”. They could just as well have defined it as an animal that makes people laugh, because if some other animal achieves this, or some inanimate object, it is by a resemblance to man, by the mark that man leaves on it or by the use that man makes of it"
- Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
"All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death."
- Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
I wanted to start this review off with this quote from a French philosopher in his book on the comic, where he talks specifically about what it is we find funny and cute in non-human creatures. Admittedly, what I know of the book I have glanced from summaries, but it says most of it in the above quote: what we find funny in animals is the human pattern we have ordered upon them. Not that these patterns aren't real - the Fibonacci sequence for example is real and actually present among natural organisms such as plants, but we shouldn't take this as proof that humans can unlock the key to nature itself, a kind of colonialism over life itself, but rather that, in Bergson's radical conclusion, nature is one big march and that we are just one perspective in the middle of it, not above it. Like painting a still life that gets increasingly complex and abstract, say like a Cubist painting resembles the original scene it was based on, but the original scene is still there in the essence of the painting. The painting is abstract but always with immanence rather than transcendence, always a within and not an above. Point being: I think humans are within nature and just the next step from a march that was already there. The patterns and constellations we put on nature are real, but the stars were already there.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this myself - but let's take how this game constantly disorients your sense of space. For one, you start off as a very elementary organism, a little guy without eyes, almost like a jellyfish on land. You rise from the bottom of the sea, nearly being eaten by a fish. Soon after you arise, you see a creature just like yourself metamorphize into a larger creature. So you think: I want to do that.
When you do, after solving somewhat non-obvious puzzles (don't be ashamed to use a walkthrough), you get gifts from other creatures, and you can evolve into a black and white spotted little guy. In every game Kenichi Nishi has been involved in, you will see nods to his dog Tao, and while it's not apparent at first, the black and white spotted creature in their various increasingly dog-like transformations may be seen as this games nod to Tao. That's a neat little factoid as an aside.
Back to thinking of these evolutions: the very first time we evolve, we get an immediate change of scale. The whole first map is now relatively tiny, and the creatures that were imposing predators beforehand now are tiny little wimps (no offense to any of the animals in this game).
Games like Legend of Zelda: the Minish Cap are often championed as games that provide an amazing sense of scale, but Lack of Love is often left out of the conversation. A few levels after the first, IIRC, you get on a river and eventually get thrown off what was the back of a huge turtle-like creature. What an amazing change! It's almost like with each iteration of our evolution, we are laughing at what came before (a nod to the quote at the beginning), because what we thought was the entire world was simply a miniscule diorama.
The sense of scale this game gives you provokes not only simply wonder, however, but a real sense of terror. Essentially, and slight spoilers ahead, the plot goes like this: Earth has become an overpopulated, overly competitive industrial hell where the livestock have essentially been dying due to the toxic chemicals around and such. As such, the worlds space program sends a robot named, if I remember correctly, Halumi, to scope out another livable planet and make it suitable for humans.
When we first encounter Halumi, we have already become significantly larger than the creature we first got off the back of. However, we still pale in comparison to the power and size of Halumi, and we don't even match the size of their foot. Soon, (SPOILER) Halumi sets off a device of sorts which bulldozes the entire land you are standing on, and you only barely survive to end up in a barren wasteland full of dead creatures.
Of course, there is a moral grey area here, because what were the humans supposed to do? Is the paradise they eventually try to set up at the end of the game better or worse than the eat-or-be-eaten world of the animals (although at least that was more natural, and maybe not as painful as we ascribe it to be?) It brings up serious moral questions about what is artificial and natural. Yet, throughout all of this, the message is clear, we cannot insert ourselves above the environment. Yet the game itself isn't triumphant in this conclusion until perhaps the end - isn't it sad to have to restart on another planet, and how do we save our own? Isn't the whole game of survival a sad affair that we would rather avoid?
There are no easy answers.
Yet there is humor in this game, which is why I brought up the initial quote. There is a stupid pun about the games title: LOL, and how the game does not inspire laughs. Yet, I find myself disagreeing. The type of comedy we see here is non-verbal. It's seeing, for example, some dragonfly like creatures in one area hold a footrace, because it's like seeing something we as humans do that we didn't expect to see among animals. Then there are creatures who play hide-and-seek, who take a nap with you, etc. It's full of these small bouts of humor. The character designs are not without their quirks either - both of the animals themselves and of the artificial robotic people. In the last area, there is a robotic baby who guides you through the first maze of a test you have to undergo in order to be seen as the most "intelligent" and worthy of the creatures around you. More on that later. There are also some silly looking penguin-like bird creatures in one of the later areas.
Is there hope not only in this game but for us? The game leads us to answer this question, it leaves it completely open. If it's not the best game on the Dreamcast (I would almost say it is), it is the most aesthetically unique and possibly thematically challenging games on the console (along with games like DeSpiria)
The game itself is not always well designed - in fact it can be sadistically designed, maybe on purpose. Puzzles use moon logic, and one of the worst puzzles is near the end, where you have to do whole rooms full of sliding block puzzles within a timer of like 2 minutes. It kind of sucks.
There's no shame in using a guide, once again. It feels like this game was almost made for a guide.
Your health in this game is basically represented by a green sphere, surrounded by rings. The more up-going rings you have (which you get by eating food or other creatures) the more your health increases, if you have a ring going down, beware because that will deplete your life and when the sphere is gone, you are dead.
It's interesting, looking at the people who developed this game on it's MobyGames page, notably the late, great Ryuichi Sakamoto, we see a lot of future Skip members, but not a lot of Vanpool people. I find that interesting, because I would say this games spiritual successor in gameplay is "Endonesia" for the PS2. A game with similar survival aspects - and similar, albeit a more complex communication system (this game has a different function mapped to each of the buttons of the Dreamcast's controller, Endonesia uses a complex system of communicating via emotions you get from the enviroment).
If you've read to the end, thank you so much. This is probably only my first draft of this review. Highly recommend this game, if there's ever a Dreamcast mini, this practically needs to be on there.