Nivahel
2 reviews liked by Nivahel
Hamtaro: Ham-Ham Heartbreak is a milestone in videogames history.
When I played it as a child, it defined my views on the concept on love, what it means to love and what it means to be loved.
Hamtaro, our silent main character, is a rather charismatic fellow well recognized in his hamster community. During one nefarious day and due to a bit of goofiness on his part, he let the ham-dictionary fall into a bucket full of milk, spelling demise for the book.
You see, in this ham-filled world, the ham-dictionary is the absolute source of lexical knowledge for the hamsters: by ruining it, Hamtaro not only the hampered the progress of society in language evolution but also retroactively forgot all the ham-words, rendering him so utterly illitterate that even the most basic emotion became unexpressible.
"What am I to do? I just want to cry and be eternally still because I know nothing and therefore I am nothing"
I am sure that, if Hamtaro could have thought in hamster language during the first moments after the tragedy (which he could not because he forgot everything he knows), he would have thought something like this. Even the most resolute and brilliant hamster reacts with utter despair when faced with horrible situations: to do not is to be an idealistic ubermensch, a utopia detrimental to the common hamster.
...What defines a good hamster then? It is its ability to stand up, calm the mind and walk on. Go on, Hamtaro, leave this Clubhouse and explore the world with your newly acquired uneducated eyes.
And so, he did. The door opens.
What awaits him beyond that door is an apocalyptic scenery. The destruction does not hide in plain sight, it is not physical: the grass looks greener than ever and oh, how beautiful is the sea!
No, the destruction hides in the hearts of the ham-people: they lost the ability to love.
While Hamtaro was busy cancelling the philologic history of his species, Spat, a trickster devilish looking hamster, broke the hearts of the hamsters through his hate-filled pitchfork, making them disdain their sweet halves and transforming them into sad husks of their former selves.
Hamtaro could not talk but he was still him: his hands, his mind, his emotions were as lively as ever. He trusted that his hamster companions needed just a push in the right direction and he had to do something. But how?
Self-love is a rather admirable form of love. Hamtaro, being the dependable hamster that he is, probably healthily loves himself. However, how can one help an heart broken couple when alone? The powerful feeling of acknowledging the value of another being and being acknowledged in return is a beautiful thing that it just can't be done alone. It takes two to tango.
After having saved his own sweetheart, Bijou, from dying from starvation after remaining trapped into a field due to the collapse of a giant tree and having met Harmony, an angelic hamster provided with a love-filled wand, Hamtaro is now ready to help. His job is to reunite half-hearts into a single one: doing so is demonstrating the worthiness of his people, their ability to return to love after everything broke down, to change idea, to apologize, to ask forgiveness, to hug while crying.
And so they go, Hamtaro and Bijou, in an emotional odissey to defeat Spat, the love wrecking calamity.
Schopenhauer once said that love is just a means to reproduce, a pessimistic approach that related to the progressive lose of faith of people towards the future that would eventually reach his climax during the XX century.
Hamtaro ham-ham heartbreak defies Schopenhauer by proposing a romantic approach to the question of love: even if love is just a means for reproduction, the fact remains that the emotions in one's heart are still real, if not in an universal way, at least in the mind. The game aptly summarizes the fundamental need for all beings to love. Each and every hamster in the story wants to: anything and anyone can be loved as long as the feelings in one's heart are real, complete and trustful. Even Spat, the hideous hate-filled devil hamster, is no exception: even as a foe of romances, his hating shenanigans give value to emotions and show that even in hate there can be love.
Spat and Schopenhauer cannot be more diverse and yet they are enemies of the same enemy: romantic love.
To summarize Hamtaro Ham-Ham Heartbreak I would use the famous sentence of 'The unbearable lightness of being':
'Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost'
When I played it as a child, it defined my views on the concept on love, what it means to love and what it means to be loved.
Hamtaro, our silent main character, is a rather charismatic fellow well recognized in his hamster community. During one nefarious day and due to a bit of goofiness on his part, he let the ham-dictionary fall into a bucket full of milk, spelling demise for the book.
You see, in this ham-filled world, the ham-dictionary is the absolute source of lexical knowledge for the hamsters: by ruining it, Hamtaro not only the hampered the progress of society in language evolution but also retroactively forgot all the ham-words, rendering him so utterly illitterate that even the most basic emotion became unexpressible.
"What am I to do? I just want to cry and be eternally still because I know nothing and therefore I am nothing"
I am sure that, if Hamtaro could have thought in hamster language during the first moments after the tragedy (which he could not because he forgot everything he knows), he would have thought something like this. Even the most resolute and brilliant hamster reacts with utter despair when faced with horrible situations: to do not is to be an idealistic ubermensch, a utopia detrimental to the common hamster.
...What defines a good hamster then? It is its ability to stand up, calm the mind and walk on. Go on, Hamtaro, leave this Clubhouse and explore the world with your newly acquired uneducated eyes.
And so, he did. The door opens.
What awaits him beyond that door is an apocalyptic scenery. The destruction does not hide in plain sight, it is not physical: the grass looks greener than ever and oh, how beautiful is the sea!
No, the destruction hides in the hearts of the ham-people: they lost the ability to love.
While Hamtaro was busy cancelling the philologic history of his species, Spat, a trickster devilish looking hamster, broke the hearts of the hamsters through his hate-filled pitchfork, making them disdain their sweet halves and transforming them into sad husks of their former selves.
Hamtaro could not talk but he was still him: his hands, his mind, his emotions were as lively as ever. He trusted that his hamster companions needed just a push in the right direction and he had to do something. But how?
Self-love is a rather admirable form of love. Hamtaro, being the dependable hamster that he is, probably healthily loves himself. However, how can one help an heart broken couple when alone? The powerful feeling of acknowledging the value of another being and being acknowledged in return is a beautiful thing that it just can't be done alone. It takes two to tango.
After having saved his own sweetheart, Bijou, from dying from starvation after remaining trapped into a field due to the collapse of a giant tree and having met Harmony, an angelic hamster provided with a love-filled wand, Hamtaro is now ready to help. His job is to reunite half-hearts into a single one: doing so is demonstrating the worthiness of his people, their ability to return to love after everything broke down, to change idea, to apologize, to ask forgiveness, to hug while crying.
And so they go, Hamtaro and Bijou, in an emotional odissey to defeat Spat, the love wrecking calamity.
Schopenhauer once said that love is just a means to reproduce, a pessimistic approach that related to the progressive lose of faith of people towards the future that would eventually reach his climax during the XX century.
Hamtaro ham-ham heartbreak defies Schopenhauer by proposing a romantic approach to the question of love: even if love is just a means for reproduction, the fact remains that the emotions in one's heart are still real, if not in an universal way, at least in the mind. The game aptly summarizes the fundamental need for all beings to love. Each and every hamster in the story wants to: anything and anyone can be loved as long as the feelings in one's heart are real, complete and trustful. Even Spat, the hideous hate-filled devil hamster, is no exception: even as a foe of romances, his hating shenanigans give value to emotions and show that even in hate there can be love.
Spat and Schopenhauer cannot be more diverse and yet they are enemies of the same enemy: romantic love.
To summarize Hamtaro Ham-Ham Heartbreak I would use the famous sentence of 'The unbearable lightness of being':
'Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost'
Although it is often regarded as a stepping stone that leads to more famous Dragon quest games like the 8th or the 11th chapter, this is not only my favourite Dragon Quest game but one of my favourite games of all time.
Why?
This answer is a difficult one:
- Is it because of the story?
The story, even though it follows the DQ standard pattern established officially in Dragon Quest III and further strengthened in Dragon Quest IV, contains innovations (foremost, the iconic choice of which I'm not gonna talk about) and a richness of expressive characters that adds a unique flavor to a game with an already strong foundation.
Is it because the gameplay?
Dragon Quest V is particularly famous for having introduced to the franchise the monster taming mechanic: as a player, you could capture certain monsters in order to make them fight in your party and having them participate in other minigames. This, combined with the unique monster designs of Akira Toriyama, make a compelling argument for anyone who wants to start this game while also scratching that 'Monster collector' itch.
The battling gameplay itself is a traditional, yet refined version, of the one already seen in Dragon Quest IV.
Is it because of the sound compartment?
The soundtrack retains the Dragon Quest feeling already fully established in earlier chapters by Koichi Sugiyama so, although good, it does not strike as groundbreaking or innovative by any means: however, I think that the particular vibe of the tracks really influenced my taste for jRPG music throughout my life.
-Is it the world?
One of the things I love the most about Dragon Quest is the way people in cities are represented: being an Italian, I felt amazed by seeing a wonderful localization where all the different dialects of my native land were used to neatly characterize cities and regions.
The world is colorful and full of things to discover, museums to fill (rather specific thing to say...) and extra dungeons to explore: not even the skies will be safe from your wanderlust!
However, I think the true factor that made me really love this game lies within the fact that it is one of the major representative of something that I always thought as a key message in the Dragon Quest franchise: 'be playful in the face of adversity and always look straight ahead'.
It is a really simple message, maybe clichè at times, but I think that, in its linearity, it contains an unspoken hope capable to give to the player strength and a unique sense of freedom: even with the terrible tragedies that adorn the main character's life throughout its existence, he never stops to move forward and to try his best to make his life worth living. By living the game with his eyes we, as players, become heroes ourselves capable of saving the world against all odds, even for just a moment.
I think that this unwavering effort to make things better is, ultimately, true heroism and why I felt so inspired by playing it.
To cite the Dragon Quest movie, 'This is as real as it gets, I was the hero".
Why?
This answer is a difficult one:
- Is it because of the story?
The story, even though it follows the DQ standard pattern established officially in Dragon Quest III and further strengthened in Dragon Quest IV, contains innovations (foremost, the iconic choice of which I'm not gonna talk about) and a richness of expressive characters that adds a unique flavor to a game with an already strong foundation.
Is it because the gameplay?
Dragon Quest V is particularly famous for having introduced to the franchise the monster taming mechanic: as a player, you could capture certain monsters in order to make them fight in your party and having them participate in other minigames. This, combined with the unique monster designs of Akira Toriyama, make a compelling argument for anyone who wants to start this game while also scratching that 'Monster collector' itch.
The battling gameplay itself is a traditional, yet refined version, of the one already seen in Dragon Quest IV.
Is it because of the sound compartment?
The soundtrack retains the Dragon Quest feeling already fully established in earlier chapters by Koichi Sugiyama so, although good, it does not strike as groundbreaking or innovative by any means: however, I think that the particular vibe of the tracks really influenced my taste for jRPG music throughout my life.
-Is it the world?
One of the things I love the most about Dragon Quest is the way people in cities are represented: being an Italian, I felt amazed by seeing a wonderful localization where all the different dialects of my native land were used to neatly characterize cities and regions.
The world is colorful and full of things to discover, museums to fill (rather specific thing to say...) and extra dungeons to explore: not even the skies will be safe from your wanderlust!
However, I think the true factor that made me really love this game lies within the fact that it is one of the major representative of something that I always thought as a key message in the Dragon Quest franchise: 'be playful in the face of adversity and always look straight ahead'.
It is a really simple message, maybe clichè at times, but I think that, in its linearity, it contains an unspoken hope capable to give to the player strength and a unique sense of freedom: even with the terrible tragedies that adorn the main character's life throughout its existence, he never stops to move forward and to try his best to make his life worth living. By living the game with his eyes we, as players, become heroes ourselves capable of saving the world against all odds, even for just a moment.
I think that this unwavering effort to make things better is, ultimately, true heroism and why I felt so inspired by playing it.
To cite the Dragon Quest movie, 'This is as real as it gets, I was the hero".