once, we all lived inside the bottle. but without us noticing, without us hearing, little by little, crack by crack, the bottle broke. and all worlds became one world. the inside became the outside.

--#006: PLASTIC --

playing this game and reminding myself that it came out in 2005 and not in 2018 is wildly difficult because this feels like a game so perfectly aligned with the current Moment that it's absolutely surreal that it was originally beamed to Japanese flip phones a decade before we heard the word "hypernormalisation".

if the original Silver Case explored the anxieties and changing face of a world slowly becoming digitized, then The 25th Ward is a true sequel, exploring a world where there is no difference, no boundary, between the digital world and the physical world, between the person we present and the person we are, and whether it even matters enough to make a distinction. tokio plugging his eye into a computer through an enormous analog cable is one of the most evocative images of the game, but it goes so far beyond that.

in the 25th ward, people have become pieces of data moving through a system filtered out by antivirus software made of the opinions and thoughts the system breeds them to have. the cast of the 25th Ward are far less distinct than the original's more eclectic cast, a deliberate contrast made clear by the points at which the original cast show up, and that more muted palette for these people is the result of the planning of this city turning each person within it into a piece of a wider machine, circuits in a system, receivers for the Word of Kamui.

work. consume. report suspicious activity. die. and when the experiment has run its course, they switch it all off. and the 25th ward crumbles into the sea. planned obsolescence. make sure to buy the Next Ward.

that machine takes the shape of the game itself. The 25th Ward is positioned as part of the "kill the past" universe, but I honestly believe that any attempt to view it as part of some wider universe where the characters exist in any way other than how we interact with them here will fail to derive anything meaningful from that read. when The Interface Itself is a character that the people inside these windows framed inside abstract void spaces can interact with and respond to, you have to abandon any attempt to apply verisimilitude as we traditionally understand it in order to survive. the style is the substance. everything is real. everything is virtual. everything is the same, all at once. is there a difference? does it matter?

as people become part of this machine, their selves become digital, and spread outwards, into and throughout the net. people become fictional characters. Kamui Uehara manifesting in the Matchmaker chapters in the form of Tsuki, a generic Ex-Yakuza man with a generic Dark And Troubled Past, navigating around his partner slolely being transformed into another Kamui by the Powers That Be.

people become other selves. Placebo has been cited as the highlight of the game by numerous people and while I don't know if I'd entirely agree, I can't deny the tremendous impact the story contained within had on me. Milu's existence hit hard for me, a fragmented individual spread across multiple real and unreal versions of herself each one shaped by the perceptions of others beyond the control of the original/format Milu, a wholly digital existence that is still tethered to a weak, dying, incorrect body that causes her pain on many levels.

even before The Unprecedented Times shifted even more of it onto digital spaces, I lived a life that I would have struggled to call my own outside of the internet. not just because I've never felt truly safe enough in the world outside my window to express myself fully within it, but also because the explorations of my self and my gender take up fragmented, distinct, and often contradictory forms that I try not to let intersect for fear of the friction that their ill-fitting will create. which of these forms is the real me? what makes the me that types these words with physical hands more real than the me created when the words are read? am i the name the structures of my 25th ward place on me, or am I the name I choose and have people online say? i don't feel like me outside. i don't feel like me when I look in the mirror. i feel like me when draping myself in images, when hiding myself behind makeup and voice training and cameras and filters. i feel more like me prancing around as a gay catboy in an online game than when I go out to buy milk. am I ignoring reality, or is this just another part of it?

i don't know. maybe there is a true me, out there, with a true name and a true face. maybe the real me is out there somewhere. or maybe this is all the real me, and every single contradiction and lie and false assumption is truth.

all i know for sure is that I believe these words I say, these things I feel, and these people i know are real.

i choose to believe in the net. what else is there to believe in?

this is an uneven work. despite being better paced than most VNs and certainly featuring less mandatory timewasting than its predecessor, the pacing still feels drawn out past the point of purposefulness. much like this review, it often feels...meandering.

i also feel compelled to bring up a part of the game that has gone largely unremarked upon on this site: Correctness 3, boys don't cry, which is where the game goes too far in my opinion and plays with the sensitive subject of rape in a way that feels extremely ill-advised, crass, and exploitative. when criticism of content in such a way is brought up in critical spaces like this there is a tendency by some to dismiss it out of hand as being unable to handle sensitive content and wishing everything to be sanitized of such frictions, so let me clarify that I do not think games should never discuss rape and I don't inherently want to avoid a game where it is discussed and to underline that point i want to stress that i think suda has been better about this subject in other works, but in this instance, he fucked up. this bit isn't bad because it's a rape scene, it's bad because it is a badly done scene. the vibes are rancid in that chapter, folks.

despite that, however, and other minor complaints, it's hard not to be blown away by the 25th ward. it's such a thematically dense and stylish work, with so much to say and so many ways to say it. if Umurangi is the macro experience of life today, then The 25th Ward is the micro, the day to day life of living inside and outside a screen at the same time, of being a different person to different people, of existing in a thousand spaces at once and not really knowing who I am in any of them.

sorry about this review. it's a bit of a mess. i'm a bit of a mess, after finishing this game. but it's ok. it's all right. I can fix it.

I just need 50,000 yen.

KAMUI UEHARA WILL
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I
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KILL THE PAST
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KILL THE LIFE
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JOIN HOLOLIVE

TO BE CONTINUED -- ?