修羅界 HOTLINE MIFUNE (Part 1)
As a rule the whole lifetime is used for paying off this debt, yet in this way only the interest is cleared off. Repayment of the capital takes place through death. And when was this debt contracted? At the begetting. Schopenhauer
/////////////////////////////////////////////
Load up. Black screen.
Fade.
Developer splash.
【竹パン】
Fade.
Black screen.
Fade.
Slowly we pan across a 16-bit fever dream. Dithered suggestions of low clouds simmer atop jagged elaborations of glass and wire. Soft tones of vintage CRT scatter like upturned rain. Indirect light is cast on the vicious contusion of sky. Deep night's dark is imperfectly exterminated.
Tokyo. The end of the twentieth century.
Title fades in. Rasters over midnight.
【廾回卞し工几ヨ・冊工乍凵几ヨ】
【〜ホットライン・ミフネ〜】
Yes, we're finally doing it. The much-requested Hotline Mifune.
Though frankly it's hard to see the point. This game is not for you. You are, all of you, plebs and casuals to a man. For the vast majority this walkthrough will only confirm what you already dimly suspect: that this game is not for you. Which if true would be understandable. Hotline Mifune is, for those not previously aware, an indie ultra-violent top-down 2D lo-fi roguelite beat-em-up horror game released by the dojin circle Bamboo Bread at C108. Large numbers of adjectives frequently portend commercial failure, which HM was, even by the modest standards of the dojin scene. Today it is all but forgotten. Chances are that you have not heard of this game. And even if you have, chances are, for not unrelated reasons, that this game is not for you. As Bamboo Bread discovered, it is not easily marketable. It has been received, to here abbreviate the general tendency, as just slightly too arthouse for those who want to enjoy the high-octane violence and kickin' darkwave electronica soundtrack, and, on the other hand, just slightly too edgy guro exploitation cold-steel sociopath mass murder simulator for the artfags. Which is a shame, because HM is probably – quite probably – the last really ambitious thing to come out of Bamboo Bread's founding duo Okura Shimeji and Ryokuchiku before they froze in the Cocytus of mobage production. That, of course, is just an opinion. By sheer coincidence it happens to be correct. You, meanwhile, are here because you do not yet have an opinion, or at least not one worth articulating, or, if it were to be articulated, worth listening to. We will do our best to rectify this situation. You, unfortunately, will not. The effort is sabotaged from the outset. Alas. History has shown that the only even marginally reliable method of obtaining an opinion of HM of the kind described above is, obviously, to play the game yourself. But you are here, reading a walkthrough, a “Let's Play” even, because you are disinclined to play the game. You're too busy. Playing the game is for other people. Naturally. We don't hold this against you. This is just to clarify where things stand. And, more to the point, even if you did play the game yourself, this is no guarantee that you would understand it. HM is not what you would call 'story-dense', being, on the contrary, about 99% pure unfiltered murder gameplay by volume. It is like the popular 'Kokuan Reikon' series of action RPGs in that the 'story' is largely delivered to you through the environment and incidental dialogue with dubious NPCs. Once you know how to navigate the menus and have a cheat sheet for the controls you can pretty well finish the entire game as an EOP, and many people do. Because of these 'people', to say nothing of the reddit immigrants and itinerant pseudo-translators, a lot of misinformation floats around regarding HM. We see many here who play this game and do not understand – or worse, misunderstand with great confidence – what Bamboo Bread were actually doing with this game. That is why we are here. To correct it. That is the purpose of this walkthrough.
People ask us what Hotline Mifune is 'about'. We tell them it's about a nameless faceless psychopath who walks into a yakuza-filled office building and ascends it floor by procedurally-generated floor, violently murdering everyone inside in copious amounts of muddy synths and pixelated gore. That satisfies most. A rare few will notice that it doesn't actually answer the question. Quite right. That is what 'happens' in the game, but it is not what the game is 'about'.
Let us say first of all that HM is not a one-and-done type of game. It is not an easy game or indeed even a moderately-challenging game. It is a hard game. Very hard. Shmup hard. It requires persistence. Of course all games require persistence, one way or another. All games implemented electronically ultimately reduce to loops in code; loops increment counters, counters increment other counters, counters within counters add up to mechanics. We play with the mechanics, repetitively. Shoot one. Kill one. Add one. Move one. Select one. Repeat. We repeat our actions. Electronic or not, all games ultimately resolve to the ability to 'repeat' on a small or large scale. Finish a chess game, clear the board, begin again from zero. If someone isn't taking a situation seriously, you say that they're treating it like a game: that is to say, they're acting as if their actions have no indelible consequences. Precisely. What is a game? Repeatability. It is the ability to choose, to will, a repetition. That is all. What makes something a 'game' in the most fundamental sense is the absence of irreversible consequences.
Insofar as it's 'about' anything, Hotline Mifune is a game about nothing more than what it is: a game. Which is to say, a repetition. It performs what it symbolises and symbolises what it performs. You play the game by choosing, by engaging your will, to persist through repetition. We might just as well say that your will 'causes' the repetition, since you are the one choosing to keep playing, which means, necessarily, doing the same things over and over again. Persistence through repetition, through the repetitive cycle of combat and death – is what the game is, and nothing more. The path of the Asura. It does not tell a story 'about' persistence, because story is for films and books and other gay shit like that. Games in the pure sense are not stories. Expecting 'story' from a game is idiotic. Games are maps. Sometimes very detailed, precise maps. Other times loose, distended, bizarrely exaggerated sketches out of the medieval world. Off the edges, here be dragons. Hotline Mifune is a map. It is an architect's schematic, inked in blood, which depicts an obsessional state of mind. Yours – which you have chosen.
We will be completely clearing Hotline Mifune and translating all of its dialogue (English patch arriving SoonTM I assure you. Open bracket, laughs, close bracket.) here in this thread, to ensure for all perpetuity that you never have to.
At the risk of repeating ourselves – we repeat ourselves.
This game is not for you.
/////////////////////////////////////////
Beneath the sickly-lilting logo, scanlines flitting up and down, are our menu options. Very simple. Continue, Config, Exit. They all do what you expect.
Exit exits.
Config lets you change things. Mainly control bindings. Audio sliders. Display resolution. Nothing spectacular. Best not to touch it.
Continue continues from where you left off, or, if it's your first time, starts a new game. HM works off one continuous save file – called act.sav in the root directory. No save slots, no save states. For our purposes, which is to say, for the purposes of this walkthrough, we have deleted our act.sav (made a backup, don't worry) in order to reset all progress back to zero. What you'll be seeing here is precisely what you'd see if you started up the game for the first time. Nothing hiding up these sleeves.
Nothing else to show here. Continue.
Smash cut to black.
BGM: Nil.
Text card fades in. The style resembles title cards in the early days of digital video editing, transposed through maybe one or two VHS tapes and replayed.
【ENVOI】
ANOTHER RIDICULOUS FALSEHOOD HAS IT THAT I
ASTERION
AM A PRISONER
SHALL I REPEAT THAT THERE ARE NO LOCKED DOORS
SHALL I ADD THAT THERE ARE NO LOCKS
J. L. BORGES
Fade to black, and after a brief pause, back into another text card.
【HEISEI 8】
【800 DAYS】
【00:00】
BGM: ΛSЖƧΛ – Black Curtain, Grey Eminence
黒幕
Cutscene cuts in. Not quite animated. A slideshow, a progression of dithered backgrounds. Still frames, rapid cuts. Establishing shots: the city in high contrast. Oversaturated colours. Neon-fucked chaos in bitmap. Sheer geometry vermiformed by rabbit-warren underlife. Tireless headlights are motile. Heat of bodies and engines. Raindrops fall and scatter like arc-welder's sparks. Entropy is bleeding out over midnight. Blacktop glistens like crackling fat.
Somewhere it exists. The deepest recess of this concrete-human synthesis. Phosphor illume of car interior. Flickering sealed in motorised hermitage.
There are two men here. Passenger and driver. They are dressed in the pastel suits proper to a yakuza stereotype of a bygone decade (the 70s). No ties. Ever so slightly camp.
They are wearing animal masks.
[HORSE] ...
[OX] ...
[HORSE] DOES IT NOT BOTHER YOU
[OX] ...
[HORSE] THE ODOMETER
[OX] WHAT
[HORSE] THE NUMBER ON THE ODOMETER
[OX] ...
[HORSE] IT IS 0
[OX] 0
The number here in the cutscene is the 'run count'. It will change as you go. Basically it tracks the number of runs you have completed, either by death or attaining an 'ending'. Since upwards of 99% of your runs will end in death, it is very nearly a serviceable 'death counter' as well. Since we, as mentioned, have deleted our act.sav and are starting from zero, the number they quote is, of course, zero.
[OX] ...
[HORSE] DOES THAT NOT BOTHER YOU
[OX] ...
[HORSE] ...
[OX] NO
[HORSE] ...
[OX] ...
[HORSE] YEAH
[HORSE] ME NEITHER
[OX] ...
[HORSE] STILL
[HORSE] WEIRD HUH
[HORSE] FEELS LIKE WE DO THIS ALL THE TIME
[OX] WE DO
[HORSE] WE DO NOT DUMP BODIES ALL THE TIME
[OX] WE DO
[HORSE] REALLY
[OX] ...
[HORSE] ...
[HORSE] MUST BE A REAL BLOODBATH UP THERE
[OX] PATH OF THE ASURA
[HORSE] I GUESS
[OX] ...
[HORSE] ...SFX: Click.
BGM: Nil.
[OX] HEY
[HORSE] ...
[OX] I WAS LISTENING TO THAT
[HORSE] JUST SHUT UP FOR A MOMENTSFX: Engine roar.
SFX: Crumpling air.
SFX: Pure background, pure noise.
SFX: Nil.
[OX] SIT DOWNSFX: Thump.
[HORSE] THAT
[OX] ...SFX: And again. Louder.
[HORSE] YOU HEARD THAT
[OX] ...
[HORSE] YOU DID HEAR THAT
[OX] THE TRANSMISSION
[HORSE] ...
[OX] OLD VEHICLE
[HORSE] NO
[OX] ...
[HORSE] ...
[OX] IT HAD BETTER BESFX: And again, louder still – pure nil of virtual silence broken by something.
SFX: Impulse from the dark.
[HORSE] THAT IS NOT POSSIBLE
[OX] DO WE HAVE A PROBLEM
[HORSE] THAT IS NOT POSSIBLE
[OX] DO WE
[HORSE] ...SFX: Thump.
SFX: Something tearing.
SFX: Plastic cracks.
[OX] WE HAVE A PROBLEM
[HORSE] ...
[OX] ...SFX: Something trying to scream.
[OX] PATH OF THE FUCKING ASURA
[OX] FIGURESSFX: Breaking.
Smash cut to black.
SFX: Hideous screech. Mechanised roar.
SFX: Something is crushed.
SFX: Rending metal, breaking glass.
SFX: Crumpled form.
SFX: Laceration.
SFX: Electric motor dies.
SFX: Air is moving through here, howling in far distance.
SFX: Lights are blinking on and off.
SFX: Nil.
SFX: Ticks of cooling engine.
SFX: Nil.
SFX: Nil.
SFX: Nil.
Cut from black. Wreck. Vicious concatenation of metal on edge of rainslick street, some corner alcove of labyrinth sealed under yellow spectra. Twisted metal. Asphalt strewn with crystalline glass.
SFX: Breathing.
Something is on the inside. Dark mass, limbs involuted, insectile, crawling in and over crushed enclosure.
SFX: Something like a cough. Phlegmy, guttural.
SFX: Tearing, crushing.
SFX: Raw meat is chewed.
SFX: Laboured gulping.
SFX: It breathes.
Ruined door is cracked open. Trickle of blood drains to road, garish crimson pooling under streetlight.
Door opens wider.
Mutilated corpse spills out, collapses onto hard ground.
SFX: Gasping in pain.
Seized, winded from impact, lacerated by cuts of glass. Shuddering, trembling, gaze lost in blood, teeth grinding the vestige of flesh from its jaw, blood spilling from its gorge, wounded, cut-open, tendons stripped and muscles raw and exposed, bone-like visage scabbed to permanent red.
The corpse stands up.
SFX: Dial tone.
SFX: Dial tone.
Cut to black.
SFX: Dial tone.
SFX: Click.
BGM: Nil.
Pause of 4-5 seconds.
SFX: Rain is pouring.
SFX: Distant thunder.
Fade in.
We perceive from our top-down, overlooking view a dark expanse of ground onto which rain is falling heavily. Countless overlapping circlets of ripples interlace and fade. In the very centre of this screen stands the player character. From overhead the human form is crushed into a vaguely rectangular clump of coloured pixels which describe, here, discernible features only of a bulky yellow rain-jacket. The figure in the yellow rain-jacket has a large bag with it, held at the side, off the shoulder.
What to call this guy? He never gets named, canonically. In the script files he's just called 'ware', which means 'I' or 'me'. First person pronoun. Somewhat inconvenient. You could try something like Shujinkou or Main Character but that's not very poggers, is it? Basically we have two choices here. Okura Shimeji, in one of his many Q&As, once jokingly referred to the protagonist of HM as 'Shura-kun' while answering an unrelated question from someone called Mongoose. Meanwhile randos on Pixiv have adopted 'Rasetsu' as his tag, which you can search in order to find all three (3) pieces of fanart which feature him. We're following the latter.
This empty outdoor space is where you get introduced to basic movement. You will soon grasp that fundamentally this game controls like a twin-stick shooter. The camera is locked so as to keep Rasetsu's body in the exact centre at all times. The direction of Rasetsu's motion and the direction he's looking/attacking are completely independent.
People, which is to say EOPs (who are, admittedly, only tenuously 'people') who jump right in without paying attention will run into trouble here. They will wail and gnash their teeth and make posts on the forum saying things like “why can't I move???” or “help my character is frozen!” because they are retards. They assume character movement should be done with WASD, but it is not. They then assume OK, maybe it is like Touhou and movement is done with the arrow keys. No. What you neglect to learn in your haste to be one of the cool kids is that this game is controlled with the Numpad. With all numeral keys on the Numpad – except 5 which does nothing – you have eight-directional movement. It takes getting used to. But it gives a very fine degree of control. We suggest moving your keyboard way over to the left so you have it in front of you. If your keyboard does not have a Numpad then you are poor.
As for the direction Rasetsu looks, this is controlled with the mouse. There is a crosshair on screen which you can move around. This is the exact point he is looking at. Crosshair is used also for aiming thrown weapons, which we will discuss later. We recommend turning mouse acceleration off for a more precise aiming experience.
Incidentally, there is controller support if you think a keyboard is too MLG for your cerebral palsy stricken fingers.
We move around this vast empty rain-slick asphalt surface, just to get used to controls.
In lines, in circles, in spirals.
Let us assume we are ready. This is very simple. Move far enough in any direction – it doesn't matter where you go – and eventually you will come to the sole point of distinction on this boundless asphalt plane: the street-facing facade of an office building, seen skewed orthogonal. Through a spillway set into the dark mass of concrete, a torrid stream of light is vomited out onto the surface of the road. The door. Walk to the door. A prompt will appear, left-click to interact. Do it.
Smash cut to black for the load transition. Title card.
【CONNECTED DISCOURSES】
【1F::HELL REALM】
Rasetsu stands in a lobby of characterless style associated with the dubious prosperity of the late 1980s. The floor is tiled, slate-grey. Light is aseptic, fluorescent, colourless. The walls have decorative glass bricks. There are ferns, or aspidistras, or some other kind of indoor plant in pots here and there. The lobby is a room with chairs set out on either side, like the waiting-room at a dentist. At the far end there is a door which is closed, and next to it, a window which is open in the wall. A service kiosk. Behind it sits a female concierge in a sealed booth.
SFX: Storm fades, receding through glass.
SFX: Circulating air.
Highly cinematic black bars, as in the prologue cutscene, slide in from the top and bottom of the screen. Control is taken away for this short section. Rasetsu walks up to the woman at the desk. Their conversation plays out silently – no expense spared for seiyuu – given only in subtitles in the lower empty space. To indicate the 'speaker', so to speak, a portrait appears from one side or another of the emptiness. These portraits are somewhat deliberately grotesque. Caricatures, pixel-art abominations. Rasetsu has a garishly yellow rain-jacket on, and in the portrait the hood obscures most of his face. At most one can see the bottom half. A tuft of blonde hair extrudes faintly. The jawline that is visible is a little too angular, almost polygonal. The 'concierge' as we call her – again, no name – presents as a sallow-faced woman, around forty, with mole on her lower cheek and a frown next to it and all over a deep, featureless disinterest in what's before her.
[CONCIERGE] GMK FINANCING AND LOAN
There will be some complaints here. The name of the company is Gyoukai Mujin Kumiai [業界無尽組合] which might be literally translated as 'Industrial Credit/Mutual Aid Association'. We have rendered it as GMK Financing and Loan, which is, yes, redundant. The thing to communicate with this nondescript Three-Letter-Acronym is that in Japanese this is a tremendously nondescript kind of name, which would be equally at home in some kind of third-floor office at the Bank of Japan or a private lobby group or whatever. It is an opaque name, all corporate sheen and smell of antiseptic, which covers over what is already being implied to be a yakuza-run loan shark operation. That is the point.
[RASETSU] ...
[RASETSU] ...
[RASETSU] ...
[CONCIERGE] CAN I HELP YOU
[RASETSU] I HAVE
[RASETSU] ...
[RASETSU] AN OUTSTANDING DEBT
[RASETSU] ...
[RASETSU] I WANT TO RESOLVE IT
[RASETSU] NOW
[CONCIERGE] WILL THAT BE BY WIRE TRANSFER
[RASETSU] NO
[RASETSU] CASH
[RASETSU] LUMP SUM
[RASETSU] I HAVE IT HERE
[RASETSU] ...
[RASETSU] YOU ARE EXPECTING ME
[RASETSU] UPSTAIRS
[RASETSU] YOU KNOW WHO I AM
[CONCIERGE] ONE MOMENT PLEASE
From overhead we observe the concierge's sprite reaching for the phone on the desk in front of her. She lifts the receiver.
SFX: Dialling.
[CONCIERGE] ...
[CONCIERGE] SIR
[CONCIERGE] ...
[CONCIERGE] YESSFX: Distant laughter, very faint, through tinny speakers.
[CONCIERGE] ...
[CONCIERGE] RIGHT NOWSFX: The laughter again.
[CONCIERGE] ...
[CONCIERGE] YES SIRSFX: Click.
[CONCIERGE] AN ASSOCIATE WILL BE WITH YOU PRESENTLY
[CONCIERGE] PLEASE WAIT HERE
And you will wait. Rasetsu now walks over to one of the seats and sits down and waits. The cutscene is still running. Nothing happens. The background soundscape continues, muffled storm effluence, rain hammering on the glass, occasionally passing cars. Nothing continues to happen. The game will actually make you wait here for up to about two minutes of real time. (The interval is randomly selected between 1 and 108 seconds.) Yes, this will happen on every new cycle. No, you cannot skip it. Your frustration has been anticipated. We dare not say that there is some deeper meaning. Just that everything happens for a reason.
SFX: Approaching footsteps, muffled.
After a period of time, the door at the far end of the room (which is closed), opens. A clean-shaven though somewhat ratty middle-aged man walks out. Sweat-stained, balding, office attire. Not quite ugly enough for doujin work.
[ASSOCIATE] THERE YOU ARE
[RASETSU] ...
Rasetsu stands up.
[ASSOCIATE] COME ON
[ASSOCIATE] THIS WAY
The associate turns around and disappears into the doorway. Still in the cutscene, Rasetsu follows him, shutting the door as he passes through into the corridor. The corridor is silent, still, carpeted slate-grey. Air-conditioning murmurs. Various doors lead off, all closed. Halfway down its length there are set of elevator doors. The associate and Rasetsu come to a halt in front of these, and the former pushes a button.
SFX: Machinery humming, in the distance, behind the walls.
[ASSOCIATE] IT HAS BEEN A WHILE
A sudden smash cut to black. Really a 'flicker'. A black screen flashes up for less than one second and vanishes just as quickly. On it is a single line of text.
【BREAK】
And back.
[ASSOCIATE] HAVE YOU LEARNED ANYTHING
[RASETSU] ...
[RASETSU] NO
[RASETSU] NOTHING
And again.
【BREAK NOW】
And back.
[ASSOCIATE] TO HAVE LEARNED NOTHING EHSFX: Elevator nearing.
And again.
【PERFECTLY BREAK】
And back.
[ASSOCIATE] WHAT A WASTESFX: Elevator arrives.
SFX: Ding.
SFX: Doors slide open.
And one last time.
【PRESS “LEFT CLICK” TO BREAK】
This one doesn't flash momentarily. It hangs there on the screen, indefinitely. Pure black text card with tutorial instruction. The indicated input is whatever you have bound to 'attack'. Left-click is default. This instruction will hang there no matter what, until the player finally does hit left-click.
At which point, naturally, all hell breaks loose.
BGM: 下司照ル – Complicity With Anonymous Materials
無名物質との共謀
Snap back to the corridor. Rasetsu reaches over and snaps the associate's neck in one deft movement.
SFX: Breaking bone.
SFX: Dying gasp.
SFX: Body crumples to floor.
We observe as Rasetsu takes the fresh kill by its legs and drags it halfway into the elevator, lying across the gap, thus preventing the door from closing, and, by extension, the elevator from leaving the ground floor. This done, he steps over the body and back into the corridor. Another 'flicker'.
【HER TOO】
Now, at last, we have control. The overhead camera zooms out, giving us a clearer view of the level in general, its rectilinear array of rooms linked by doors. One can see how one of the doors in the corridor connects to a room which connects to the rear of the concierge's office. More importantly, however, we now have a view of the UI elements.
UI in this game is minimalist but not simple. In the top centre of the screen there is a circle filled with a stylised illustration of an empty palm, and 'empty palm' written under it. This displays the equipped weapon. On either side of the circle there is a filled bar.
On the left there is a white bar set against a black cartouche. The bar slowly drains rightward, toward centre-screen. Below the bar there is a percentage readout which ticks down as the bar drains: 100%, 99%, 98%, and so forth. This left-hand bar is labelled 【PURITY・志士伝導率】.
On the right there is another black cartouche which contains a bar split into a red portion (the half nearest centre-screen) and a blue portion (the half nearest the edge of the screen). This bar is currently static. Below the bar is a percentage readout which is holding stable at +50%. This right-hand bar is labelled 【FLESH・死屍伝導率】.
For future convenience, these values will be referred to simply as PURITY and FLESH. What they represent will be tutorialised in-game shortly. All you need to know for now is that if PURITY reaches 0% then it's a game over. This will happen if you tool around and waste time here instead of taking the hint and heading over to waste the concierge, like you should be. No great loss, just means you have to start a new run.
With our overlooking view of things and ability to move the character on-screen it is a trivial matter to navigate Rasetsu through the shabby minor labyrinth of back-rooms – an office or two, a break room, a bathroom, filing cabinets, some kind of dubious kitchenette, all formica and chrome, pot plants, scattered pieces of paper. Eventually we come to the door behind the concierge's booth. We burst through. The handful of pixels which describe her form seen from above swivel in the chair. She turns around. She falls off the chair and collapses on the floor next to it. When we approach her several 'flickers' occur in very rapid succession. About one second encloses all of the following.
【THIS WAS YOUR MISTAKE】
【WHAT DID I DO WRONG】
【THIS WAS YOUR MISTAKE】
【IT IS BETTER THIS WAY】
【THIS WAS YOUR MISTAKE】
【UNSIGHTLY】
【THIS WAS YOUR MISTAKE】
【UNDESERVING OF LIFE】
【JUST DIE】
Approach the concierge and left-click. Nothing else will happen otherwise.
Rasetsu kicks her in the stomach.
SFX: Impacted flesh.
She splays out on the floor. Her legs twitch slightly.
A flicker.
【JUST DIE】
Rasetsu begins to stomp on the concierge's face.
SFX: Ribs breaking.
Continues.
【JUST DIE】
SFX: Skull cracks.
Continues continuing.
SFX: Death rattle.
【JUST DIE】
After this last flicker we cut back to the whole of the inside of the concierge's booth drenched in blood. Rasetsu's yellow raincoat is now fairly red.
SFX: Heavy breathing.
SFX: Breathing slackens.
SFX: Nil.
BGM: 陰陰殷殷 –
Brief cutscene. The view pans a little way across the level to centre on a nondescript door back in the corridor with the elevator – still uselessly trying to close around the corpse of the Associate from earlier. This door swings open. You get the hint. Navigate Rasetsu – note how he leaves bloody footprints now, a neat detail which also helps you in navigating the more complex floors later on – back through the remnants of the mayhem you have caused, back through this shitty kitchenette and these paper-strewn backrooms to the corridor. Enter the door. You can tool around here if you want, but your PURITY is still ticking down, so don't waste too much time. Hit the door and the level ends.
Smash cut to black for the load transition. Title card.
【STAIRWELL】
BGM: 幽玄会社 – Far Shore Return Trip
彼岸帰航
I hope you like stairwells. You'll be seeing a lot of this one. This is your intermediate space, the pause for breath between levels/floors. Like a safe room in RE. You will notice that PURITY does not decay while you're in here; in fact it regenerates, so even if you walk in with 1% left you'll be fine for the next go at things. So don't be in a hurry. Examine the fine texture work. Appreciate the long mellow drones of Yuugengaisha playing in the background. You wouldn't think there'd be so much detail in concrete, but here we are. From above we see an oblong space, delineated by right-angled shadings of raw, unpolished concrete. Overlit, to the point of shadowlessness. On the floor where we enter, before the door, there is a stencilled mark '1F'. In front of the stencil is a flight of stairs, yellow steel handrail, leading to an intermediate landing; from here another flight runs back the other way to arrive at a landing similarly stencilled '2F' with a similar door before it. On the intermediate landing, next to an exposed water mains pipe, there is an NPC.
It is a figure dressed in black, wearing a mask which is roughly as blood-red as Rasetsu's rain-jacket right about now. Ascend the first flight of stairs to the landing, and a cutscene starts. Black bars slide in. The NPC's 'portrait' appears – a crimson, glaring, angry, fearsome-looking Enma mask, or at least, a mask at some point intended to be fearsome, which the combined effect of garish kabuki-esque colouration and the exaggerated ugliness of the pixel-art style renders a bit clownish. Being anonymous, like everyone else in this game, we call him Enma. Because 'homeless guy who lives in the stairwell' is too long.
[ENMA] YOU
[ENMA] ...
[ENMA] I SEE
[ENMA] AFTER THE BOSS ARE WE
[RASETSU] ...
[RASETSU] ...
[RASETSU] YOU WORK HERE
[ENMA] NO
[ENMA] NOT AT ALL
[RASETSU] ...
[ENMA] I CAME HERE SOME TIME AGO
[ENMA] FOR REASONS NOT WHOLLY DISSIMILAR TO YOUR OWN
[ENMA] A MATTER CONCERNING DEBT
[ENMA] IT IS NOT SO UNUSUAL
[ENMA] MANY PEOPLE HAVE TAKEN OUT LOANS HERE
[ENMA] LOANS TO PAY OFF OTHER LOANS
[ENMA] CREDIT CARDS AND WHATNOT
[ENMA] AND SO ON
[ENMA] DEBT BEGETS DEBT
[ENMA] THE INTEREST IS HIGH
[ENMA] PEOPLE GOT TRAPPED LIKE THIS
[ENMA] FORCED TO BE SLAVES IN ORDER TO REPAY THEIR DEBT
[ENMA] ...
[ENMA] YOU ARE A DEBTOR ARE YOU NOT
[RASETSU] FOR THE TIME BEING
[ENMA] YOU SHOULD KNOW
[ENMA] THESE GUYS ARE CONNECTED
[ENMA] YAKUZA
[ENMA] TRIADS
[ENMA] EVEN THE STATE
[ENMA] THE BOSS IS OWED A LOT OF FAVOURS
[ENMA] MANY CAME THIS WAY BEFORE YOU
[ENMA] THEY ALL GOT KILLED
[RASETSU] OBVIOUSLY
[ENMA] ...
[ENMA] I ASSUME THEN THAT YOU KNOW
[ENMA] WHY YOU ARE HERE
[RASETSU] ...
[ENMA] IN THE STAIRWELL
In fine Okura Shimeji style, Enma sometimes relies on untranslatable wordplay and furigana manipulation to 'communicate' what he means. While 'stairwell' is written normally in the title card when you enter, i.e. as [階段室], Enma's line here replaces the character [段] with the identically-pronounced [壇]. All sorts of ill-informed translation attempts have been made; we would prefer not to conjure up some atrocity like 'stair-altar' and instead just explain it in a TN. The allusion is probably to the word [戒壇] – also pronounced 'kaidan' – which is a ceremonial podium where Buddhist monks are ordained.
[RASETSU] BY CHOICE
[RASETSU] ...
[ENMA] UNMISTAKEABLY
[ENMA] YOU ARE HERE BECAUSE YOU WANT TO BE HERE
[ENMA] IT IS MUCH THE SAME WITH EVERYONE
[ENMA] YOU ARE ABLE TO BE HERE ONLY INSOFAR AS YOU WILL IT
[ENMA] AND THAT HAS CERTAIN ENTAILMENTS
[ENMA] I WOULD SAY GOOD LUCK
[ENMA] BUT YOU WILL NEED MORE THAN THAT
[ENMA] STRENGTH IN THE FLESH IS ONE THING
[ENMA] BUT THE FLESH IS ONLY A SUGGESTION
[ENMA] WHETHER YOUR FLESH IS STRONG OR WEAK
[ENMA] DAMAGED (-50%) OR HEALTHY (+50%)
[ENMA] YOU CAN GET NOWHERE IN THIS PLACE WITHOUT PURITY OF WILL
[ENMA] IF THERE IS NO PURITY (0%) TO YOUR ACTIONS
[ENMA] YOU DIE
[ENMA] AND ALL THIS RETURNS TO ZERO
We said earlier that PURITY and FLESH would be tutorialised in-game. So that was a fucking lie. This is all you get. The game came with a physical manual in the CD jewel case, illustrated by Ryokuchiku (a collector's item nowadays) and presumably they were expecting you to have read it. Don't worry. We'll explain it once we get into 2F.
[ENMA] PURITY OF WILL MEANS BEING WHAT ONE ESSENTIALLY IS
[ENMA] BUT ONE DOES NOT KNOW WHAT ONE ESSENTIALLY IS
[ENMA] BECAUSE IT IS MORE ESSENTIAL THAN THE SELF WHICH WOULD KNOW IT
[ENMA] THE FACE OF FLESH YOU WEAR IS NOT THE TRUE FACE
[ENMA] THE TRUE FACE YOU HAD BEFORE YOUR MOTHER AND FATHER WERE BORN
[ENMA] A MASK REVEALS THE TRUE FACE
[ENMA] HERE
Enma's sprite hands something to Rasetsu. A brief smash cut to black – no, not quite. Not entirely. A text card appears, but instead of a pure-black background it is displayed against a faint 'portrait', in the same grotesque pixel-art style as all others, of a distinctly canine-looking mask with slathering tongue and long fangs.
【MASK GET】
【CONSCIOUS HYENA】
This dialogue with Enma happens only once, the very first time you start a run and enter the stairwell. CONSCIOUS HYENA, which he gives you, is the first mask you'll have. Masks are preserved between runs; once you get one, it's in your inventory (the gym bag) forever. We'll explain what the name means and how masks work in a bit. Left-click and you snap back to the stairwell.
[ENMA] TAKE THIS
[ENMA] THE REST WILL COME NATURALLY
[RASETSU] PATH OF THE ASURA
[ENMA] NONE OTHER
End cutscene. Enma sticks around, but you can't talk to him. In fact you can't really do anything else here but climb the stairs up to the 2F landing. As we said above, Enma is scripted to appear here and give you CONSCIOUS HYENA on your first run; on subsequent runs he probably won't, and if he does, you'll have different dialogue. His other appearances in the stairwell are randomised. Whenever he shows up, you'll get a short conversation in cutscene. He is the closest thing this game has to a 'lore NPC', kind of like the Remnant Psyches in Killer7.
Ascend the stairs to the 2F landing. When you approach the door, Rasetsu will enter a scripted animation where he takes the gym bag off his shoulder, puts it on the ground, and opens it. A garish menu appears, superimposed over the screen: a long horizontal bar along which you scroll to select your mask. Since only one mask is available at the start of a run, this is a simple choice.
【CONSCIOUS HYENA】
【FEED ON CORPSES TO REGAIN FLESH】
Select it. Menu vanishes. Rasetsu's sprite, now visibly equipped with the mask, zips up the bag – leaving it on the ground, mind you – and steps forward and opens the door into 2F.
Smash cut to black – no, not quite. Again. Loading screens for entry and exit of levels will always have the currently-equipped mask as the background. Smash cut to Hyena, then.
Text card.
【CONNECTED DISCOURSES】
【2F::HUNGRY GHOST REALM】
And we're in.
Every level – which is to say, every floor of the building excluding 1F – is procedurally generated from a 64-bit seed which is randomised at the start of the run. Thus every run is different. For every floor the game will assemble a conglomeration of rooms, corridors, doors, and so on, from out of one of six 'tilesets' or 'biomes'. These determine the look and feel of the level, the selection of music which plays on the level, as well as, to a degree, what kinds of enemies and weapons spawn on the level. This is what the 'realm' mentioned in the level entry dialogue refers to. Thus all floors which are labelled 'Hell Realm' will visually resemble 1F, with its pot plants, shabby offices, formica tables, break rooms, and so on. Floors 1F through 6F are called the Connected Discourses because they go through the six realms in order, one floor of each, more or less as a sampler to get you used to what each one looks like. On 7F and above we move into the Collected Discourses, wherein the floor 'realms' are fully random.
Our first view of 2F, the scion of the Hungry Ghost Realm, reveals a loud, shiny, garish, gold-and-silver everywhere, cigarette-stained, red-carpeted, shady as hell, blatantly yakuza-run, pachinko parlour. From the stairwell door we enter into a corridor; from our overlooking view we can see branching off several large rooms containing rows of pachinko machines. There are sprites which suggest pastel-suit-clad yakuza toughs around. Some are roaming on patrol paths, others are idle, others are sitting in scripted animations playing pachinko, believe it or not. They're not aggro'd yet, but they have weapons: a baseball bat here, a length of pipe there. We can't see the whole level – too big for the screen – but within our FOV there are about eight guys, obscured from Rasetsu's present position by diverse combinations of walls, side-rooms, bathrooms, and whatnot. The nearest door to the level entry point leads directly into one of these big gambling pits. The music is blasting. This part needs no further commentary: just burst through the door, run up to the guys, keep the crosshair in their direction, and hit left click to fuck them up before they fuck you up.
SFX: Crunch.
SFX: Blood gushing everywhere.
Yeah, like that. Now since you have no equipped weapon other than 'empty palm', you can walk over any dropped weapon and pick it up with right-click. Once you have a weapon – which the marker in the centre of the HUD will indicate – you can left-click to attack with it, and right-click to throw it in the direction you're aiming. Never underestimate the utility of throwing a weapon at someone.
SFX: Whap!
SFX: Someone's skull getting smashed in with a baseball bat.
Now that we have your attention-
SFX: Death gargle.
SFX: Horrific screaming in Japanese.
Ahem.
SFX: Impact of a semi-conscious body with a pachinko machine.
SFX: Smashing glass and plastic.
SFX: Pachinko balls exploding everywhere.
Yeah, the pachinko machines are pretty fun. Real-time physics on the balls, by the way. Anyway, while you're busy with these guys, it's time to explain how FLESH and PURITY actually work, which is somewhat vital information if you don't want to die.
So, first: as you know, PURITY starts at 100% and begins ticking down when you're on the level. If PURITY reaches 0%, you die. Whenever you kill an enemy, you gain PURITY. This is the basic loop of HM: PURITY is constantly decaying, and you need to be constantly killing to keep it up.
SFX: Splintering door frame.
SFX: Golf club striking the teeth from some unfortunate jaw.
Now FLESH starts at +50% at the start of a run, and does not regenerate between floors like PURITY does. Whenever you take a hit, you lose some FLESH. However, as you were told in the stairwell, FLESH is only a suggestion. Even if you lose all your FLESH – i.e. it drops to the minimum of -50% – you don't die. So what does FLESH do? Well, when you get hit, you lose FLESH, but at the same time, your PURITY gets modified by an amount proportional to the FLESH value (the one you just lost, not the one you just arrived at by losing FLESH). So if you have +50% FLESH, getting hit will actually give you some PURITY, while if you have -50% FLESH, getting hit will cause you to lose PURITY. The FLESH value also affects some other things. The lower your FLESH, the higher the rate at which PURITY drains – but, at the same time, the amount of PURITY regained from kills is also higher.
You can think of it as a risk/reward thing in place of a traditional HP system. Taking damage, in HM, does not kill you – in fact it cannot kill you, not directly. On the level of FLESH, you are immortal. The only way to die is by running out of PURITY. The basic loop of HM is managing PURITY, keeping it as high as possible; taking damage, and thus losing FLESH, simply raises the stakes of this loop. PURITY starts draining faster, and further damage will cause increasing losses to PURITY, but you can make it all back, provided you can get the kills. No matter how much damage you take, you can survive, provided you keep on killing, killing more, killing faster. Kill forever, infinite life.
SFX: Breaking ribs with a hammer.
You done yet? I think everyone's pretty well dead here.
SFX: Heavy breathing.
SFX: Breathing slackens.
SFX: Nil.
BGM: 陰陰殷殷 –
When the BGM swaps out for Reishi [Cold Gaze] by In'in'in'in then that means everyone's dead and you should head back to the stairwell. Good job. Damn, that's a lot of blood. You wouldn't think these guys would have it all in them. We step over the bodies strewn across air-conditioned corridors, obliterated faces and torsos beneath the bright chirpy light of pachinko machines. Just head back over to the door you came in from and exit the level/floor.
Smash cut to Hyena for the load transition. Title card.
【STAIRWELL】
BGM: 幽玄会社 – Far Shore Return Trip
彼岸帰航
Back in the stairwell. Scripted animation plays where Rasetsu picks up his gym bag at the door and puts it on his shoulder. Enma isn't here, so there's nothing to do but catch your breath, wait for PURITY to regen, and climb the stairs up to 3F. When you get to the 3F landing, Rasetsu – get this – takes off his gym back, puts it down on the floor, and opens it again. You might think this would get boring after a while. No. It's hypnotic, really. Select mask menu again – but, as before, you only have the one mask, so this is barely a choice. Don't waste time. Into 3F. Go go go. Do it.
Pause to load. Load times are quite good in HM, rarely more than a second or two even on HDD.
【CONNECTED DISCOURSES】
【3F::ANIMAL REALM】
The first 'Animal Realm' floor discloses itself as some kind of nightclub or bar. The top-down view discloses a layout structured around a large central area, a dance-floor, captured in a kaleidoscopic flux of rave lighting and artificial smoke. Branching off from here are corridors interrupted by doors leading to private booths, a DJ nest, and the back-room behind the bar, a utilitarian space divided up between storage and cleaning equipment. Distributed around this area – mostly on the dancefloor, smoking, milling about, some even trying to dance – are more of the usual suit-clad yakuza toughs, equipped with various blunt objects, sporting equipment, pocket-knives, and so on. You know what to do from here. Your weapon carries over from when you left the last level. Go forth and kill.
SFX: Swish, slash.
SFX: Gasping through severed vocal cords.
While you're busy with that, we should talk about another mechanic: weapon durability. As you can see, in the middle top of the screen, between the PURITY and FLESH meters, there is an icon which indicates the currently-equipped weapon, or 'empty palm' if you have none. When you first picked up a weapon you doubtless noticed that the icon was divided into an upper white part and a lower black part. As you used the weapon, you would have also noticed – if you weren't too busy dismembering people – that the black part decreased in size, leaving more and more of the icon shaded in white. This is the condition of the weapon. If the icon is fully shaded in black, it's in perfect condition; when the icon becomes fully shaded in white, the weapon breaks, and you drop it automatically...most of the time. There are some weapons which when broken are still usable; or rather, when you break them, they are replaced with a new weapon entirely. Case in point, see what you have now?
SFX: Hollow thud.
That's a champagne bottle you just brained that guy with. Champagne bottle has a pretty low durability. A couple more hits like that, and,
SFX: Shattering.
It breaks. But you're not empty-handed: you're now holding a broken champagne bottle, which is an entirely new weapon with its own durability.
SFX: Screaming.
SFX: Carving out an eye-socket with crystalline edges of glass.
SFX: Screaming continues.
SFX: Screaming stops continuing.
Its durability is even lower, so it'll break too before long, and then you will be back to being empty-handed. So there are some weapons which are one-and-done, break them and they're gone, and there are others which become entirely new weapons once broken. You'll discover these as you go. There are a lot of weapons in HM, 108 to be exact. A lot of extremely horrible ways to destroy people. Some of them are very rare, some are locked to particular kinds of floor, etc.
SFX: Heavy breathing.
SFX: Breathing slackens.
SFX: Nil.
BGM: 陰陰殷殷 –
Yeah, that looks pretty well done. Time to walk back through this horrorshow you've made, back to the stairs where you began.
【STAIRWELL】
BGM: 幽玄会社 – Far Shore Return Trip
彼岸帰航
Now you may be wondering – if you're in the stairwell, can't you just skip floors by climbing past them? Do you have to clear every single one? Can't you just go up to the final boss right away?
This is not a stupid question, but it does have a stupid answer. By all means, go ahead. Try it. You can take Rasetsu up from the 3F landing, up a flight, up another flight, now you're at the 4F landing. You can go up again. Up one flight, up another, and...
...4F again. Hm. OK, maybe that's a fluke. Try climbing another flight, another – 4F. Higher and higher – still 4F. Nope. Sorry. The game has your number. You can't skip floors. The stairwell will just keep looping you back, real MC Escher shit. Until you finally get the hint. Head to the 4F door, put your bag down, get your mask out, and get to work.
【CONNECTED DISCOURSES】
【4F::HUMAN REALM】
BGM: 河原=ステレオ – All Living Things Must Die
生者必滅
The 'Human Realm' floors are very dense, close-packed, labyrinthine. Aesthetically they conform to an indoor shopping district – an aggregate of small retail outlets, izakaya, ramen places, chinese restaurants, etc., all cramped together so as to fill the floorspace in a deceptively fractalised way. A rabbit-warren, veritably. This could be anywhere. You get the feeling that whole stretches of the inner 23 wards are tiled, aperiodically, with this kind of generic outlay of exchange relations. Some kind of hideous muzak is playing very faintly underneath the face-melting atonal synths of Kawara=Stereo. There are, as ever, a bunch of yakuza milling around: some just wandering, some smoking in the corridors, some crouched on a stool at the ramen place slurping ramen, of all things. Anyway, time to get killin'.
SFX: The inexpressible sound of hitting a man in the face with a wok, which resembles but does not wholly replicate the ceremonial gong struck at Buddhist temples to mark the hours.
SFX: Crunching of skull.
Now it's time to talk about another mechanic, which you have probably discovered by accident already: parrying. Let us suppose that an enemy yakuza has run up to you and is about to hit you in the face with a baseball bat, as often happens. If you input to move Rasetsu in the direction of the enemy attacking you, and at the same time hit left-click to attack – and you do both of these things fast enough, before the enemy's attack connects – you will perform a parry. At the cost of a small amount of weapon durability, you will take no FLESH damage from the enemy attack, and you will regain PURITY equivalent to half the amount you would get if you killed the guy outright. (The exception here is if you parry with no weapon equipped; since 'empty palm' has no durability to lose, you will instead lose a bit of FLESH if you parry with it. Which makes sense, really.)
SFX: Parry cue, which sounds like a snare-drum hit.
SFX: Decapitation via rusty machete.
SFX: Small geyser of blood impacts and disperses on the proximate walls and floor.
Now if you time these inputs just right, you will perform what is called a perfect parry. The timing here is very tight. Basically frame-perfect. There's an audio cue if you do it right. If you perfect parry an attack you take no durability or FLESH damage whatsoever, and the enemy will be momentarily stunned. When they're in that state you can quickly follow up by hitting 'attack' again for an instant kill riposte which regains double the amount of PURITY returned by a regular kill. This is the pro gamer move. Where an outright kill would return 'x' amount, let's say 10% PURITY, a perfect parry plus riposte will return 2.5 times 'x', so 25%.
SFX: Perfect parry cue, which sounds like a taiko being hit, as in the Noh theatre.
SFX: Someone is choking on half-vomited blood.
SFX: Tearing linen.
SFX: Expertly filleting some hapless yakuza's liver with a kitchen-grade stainless steel santoku.
Vital skills, vital skills. What else is there? Oh yeah, almost forgot: the mask ability. That's somewhat important. So, the current mask – the one you are guaranteed when you start your first run – is CONSCIOUS HYENA. This one is kind of the game's trademark; there's promotional art featuring Rasetsu wearing it. It was on the CD jewel case, on the inside. There was a figurine at some point. Maybe a daki. We'll explain what the CONSCIOUS part means later, when it becomes important; what is important now, what determines the mask ability, is the second part of the name. In this case HYENA. As the selection menu at the start of the level disclosed to you, the HYENA ability is described as 'feed on corpses to regain FLESH'. Now you can imagine-
SFX: Heavy breathing.
SFX: Breathing slackens.
SFX: Nil.
BGM: 陰陰殷殷 –
Ah, good, you've killed everyone here. That simplifies things. Just walk up to a corpse – quickly, remember PURITY is still draining – and hit left-click to attack it. Rasetsu's sprite will display a brief animation where he, uh – well. Just listen.
SFX: Tendons rip.
SFX: Grinding cartilage.
SFX: Mastication.
SFX: Swallowing.
Even more gore sprays everywhere around the corpse. A big mess. In an interview a few years back Ryokuchiku claimed that these SFX originate from a recording of him eating a plate of crab rangoon. You will notice that you have regained FLESH from doing this. That is all that CONSCIOUS HYENA does. It doesn't do anything else. The reason it exists is as, probably, sort of a 'safety net' for if you end up taking hits and losing all your FLESH and want to get it back. In other words it is for those who aren't good enough to do no-hit runs, but also don't want to play high-risk high-return with negative FLESH values. Casuals, basically. CONSCIOUS HYENA is the closest thing to an 'easy mode' this game has available. Don't worry. We'll be getting more masks soon enough. All that our MLG instincts crave and more. But, whatever – PURITY is still ticking down, so go back to the stairwell before Rasetsu dies of boredom.
【STAIRWELL】
BGM: 幽玄会社 – Far Shore Return Trip
彼岸帰航
Look around on entering. Hey, what do you know? Enma is here. Aside from the landing after 1F on first playthrough, there is a 1/6 chance that he appears in the stairwell whenever you load in. He's got a whole bunch of unique dialogue; odds are you'll need multiple runs to hear everything he has to say. We will be translating all of it in the course of this LP, because that is what 100% means. Let's walk up to him and enter a cutscene.
[ENMA] YOU AGAIN
[ENMA] ...
[ENMA] HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN HERE
[RASETSU] ...
[RASETSU] ...
[RASETSU] ...
[ENMA] STUPID QUESTION
[ENMA] WHERE ELSE WOULD YOU BE
[ENMA] ALL THE SAME
[ENMA] QUITE A MESS YOU HAVE MADE SO FAR
[RASETSU] THERE WILL BE MORE GOING FORWARD
[ENMA] WHO DO YOU THINK WILL CLEAN IT UP
[RASETSU] THAT IS NONE OF MY CONCERN
[ENMA] DO YOU ENJOY HURTING OTHER PEOPLE
[RASETSU] WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE
[ENMA] IT SHOWS ON YOUR FACE
[RASETSU] THE FACE OF FLESH
[ENMA] ADMITTEDLY
[ENMA] THE FACE OF FLESH IS NOT THE TRUE FACE
[RASETSU] IT IS NOT A QUESTION OF ENJOYING OR NOT
[RASETSU] I JUST WANT TO
[ENMA] DO YOU KNOW WHY
[RASETSU] IF I WANT TO DO SOMETHING I CAN CHOOSE WHETHER OR NOT TO DO IT
[RASETSU] BUT I CANNOT CHOOSE WHETHER OR NOT TO WANT TO DO IT
[RASETSU] IT IS OUTSIDE MY CONTROL
[ENMA] OUTSIDE THE CONTROL OF THE FACE OF FLESH YOU MEAN
[RASETSU] OBVIOUSLY
[ENMA] I SUPPOSE IT CANNOT BE OTHERWISE
[ENMA] AS FOR ME
[ENMA] I AM JUST HERE AS A COLLECTOR
[ENMA] SOME OF THESE DEAD GUYS HAVE GOOD STUFF ON THEM
[ENMA] GOT A ROLEX HERE
[ENMA] WANT ONE
[RASETSU] NO
[ENMA] SUIT YOURSELF
Cutscene ends. There's not a lot else to say here. Leave Enma behind, climb up to the 5F door, and put your mask on. The upcoming rogue's gallery won't depopulate itself.
【CONNECTED DISCOURSES】
【5F::ASURA REALM】
BGM: 陰陰殷殷 – ko.ro.si.te.ya.ru
Floors of the 'Asura Realm' have a kind of traditional Japanese theme – long corridors with polished wooden floors, sliding doors, big rooms with tatami mats on the floor. Like an old martial arts dojo, with a touch here and there of a traditional ryokan or bath-house. Can't quite decide which it wants to be. Sometimes an interior courtyard or rock-garden will spawn when the floor is generated, but this is not common. Ornamentation is quite sparing overall, but here and there you'll see – insofar as you can make them out, through the pixelation and gore – standing suits of samurai armour, bonsai trees, Buddha statues, etc. The yakuza who appear on these floors have a more traditional look to them; the suits get swapped out for judo and kendo practice outfits, and you'll see a whole lot of swords, singlesticks, nunchaku and so on being directed your way.
SFX: Beating a guy to death with a wooden practice sword.
SFX: It breaks.
SFX: Beating a guy to death with a broken wooden practice sword.
Oh, that is brutal. 'Asura' floors are the best, speaking honestly. They have the best music too. Anyway, while murdering your way through this gauntlet of nameless extras from Jingi Naki Tatakai, it's time to address a question you may have raised previously vis-a-vis the extent to which this game, Hotline Mifune, conforms to the general pattern of other games of its type. That is to say – how does one keep score? Because it is one thing to clear the game, but what is more important than that is gaining the recognition of others that you've done it, and what is even more important than that is flexing on them to show you did it better. Well, HM does have a 'score' in a manner of speaking, though as you will notice it does not appear on the UI. You can only see it when you pause the game [Esc by default. Brings up the usual stuff; restart run, options, return to title, quit to desktop] or on the results screen which appears when a run ends [either by your death or attaining an ending]. If you go in and check yours now, you'll see it right there at the top of the pause screen.
【超伝導率+329%】
What does this mean? Basically-
SFX: Performing a flawless iai-jutsu strike through an enemy's guard, slashing the torso through and past the sternum in a single diagonal strike which causes the victim to collapse to the floor in a geyser of arterial blood.
Basically it works like this. Your goal throughout gameplay is to keep the PURITY meter as high as possible. By performing various actions – kills, parries, ripostes – you gain PURITY up to a maximum of 100%. The stat you see on the pause screen, which we will refer to as SCORE for convenience, represents the aggregate total of all PURITY you have ever gained in excess of the meter. That is to say, for example, if you're at 90% PURITY and do something which gains you 25%, your PURITY goes to 100% while the remaining 15% is added to SCORE. Much like PURITY itself, the SCORE mechanic incentivises keeping PURITY as high as possible at all times; the more often you're maxing out PURITY, the more excess you're adding to SCORE.
SFX: The highly cinematic swish-thunk of a meat cleaver hurled through the air at professional cricket-pitcher velocity so as to embed itself in the face of an approaching enemy with a gory ripping of nasal cartilage.
The world record for SCORE at the time of writing is +42190%, obtained by Sato Itoguchi. Go find it on niconico. Incredible run.
SFX: Heavy breathing.
SFX: Breathing slackens.
SFX: Nil.
BGM: 陰陰殷殷 –
What a mess. Due to the spawn weightings you're more likely to get edged than blunt weapons on floors of this type, so the gore is something spectacular. Blood on the tatami. You should just accept that this game runs on, like, Hong Kong action movie rules, where everyone has about 50 litres of blood and need to lose all of it before they die.
【STAIRWELL】
BGM: 幽玄会社 – Far Shore Return Trip
彼岸帰航
Time to roll the dice. And guess what? Here's Enma again. This happens more often than you'd think. 1/6 doesn't seem like a lot, and his appearances are – as far as anyone can tell – truly random, no less random than the 64-bit seed which generates all the level layouts for a particular run; but still it will often seem that you'll get him appearing two or three times in a row. This is called the 'clustering illusion', a term you may recognise as one of the chuuni shibboleths much beloved by Okura Shimeji back in the old days, before mobage and the Sleep of Reason. Let's see what our tame homeless guy has to say.
[ENMA] WHY DO YOU THINK IT IS
[ENMA] PEOPLE GET INTO DEBT
[RASETSU] CAUSE THEY SPEND MORE THAN THEY HAVE
[ENMA] YEAH NO SHIT
[ENMA] BUT WHY DO THEY DO THAT
[RASETSU] WHY DID YOU
[ENMA] THERE WAS SOMETHING I WANTED
[ENMA] I KNOW YOU ARE THE SAME
[RASETSU] ...
[ENMA] BUT CAN IT REALLY BE THAT SIMPLE
[ENMA] WE ARE ALL HERE BECAUSE OF OUR WANTS
[ENMA] ALL OF US
[ENMA] THE GUYS YOU FIGHT ARE ALSO IN DEBT
[ENMA] IN A MANNER OF SPEAKING THEY ARE ALL VERSIONS OF YOU
It seems that this translation has provoked some controversy. The word rendered as 'versions' is [片反], read as 'henpan' probably, which might, if you were in a mildly autistic mood, produce something like 'fragmentary counterpart' or 'reversal.' We, however, are more autistic by far, and so we have noticed that these two characters written horizontally are actually just the one character [版], a 'version' or 'edition' e.g. of a published work, divided into its component radicals because Okura Shimeji hates translators, the Japanese language, and making sense in general.
[RASETSU] MAKES NO DIFFERENCE TO ME
[ENMA] SOME PEOPLE LIVE THE HIGH LIFE
[ENMA] SOME FIGHT
[ENMA] SOME JUST GET BY
[ENMA] SOME GORGE THEMSELVES
[ENMA] SOME ARE STARVING NONETHELESS
[ENMA] SOME ARE MADE SLAVES AND FORCED TO REPAY
[ENMA] BUT IT IS ALL ON CREDIT WHICH MUST BE REPAID
[ENMA] ALL FOR THE SAME REASON
[ENMA] BECAUSE THEY WANT THINGS
[ENMA] BUT WHY
[RASETSU] EVERYTHING GOTTA HAVE A REASON TO YOU
[ENMA] EVERYTHING IN THIS WORLD HAS A REASON
[ENMA] THE WORLD IS REGULATED ACCORDING TO THAT PRINCIPLE
[ENMA] ALL YOU SEE BEFORE YOU IS EXHAUSTIVELY DETERMINED
The word 'determined' [定められている] is given the reading 'programmed' [プログラムされている] in furigana. Can't figure out how to say that in a clever way so here's a TN.
[ENMA] THIS COMPANY FOR INSTANCE
[ENMA] THIS BUILDING
[ENMA] IT IS ALL BUILT ON REPAID DEBTS
[ENMA] THAT IS HOW THEY MADE MONEY
[ENMA] IN A GENERAL SENSE THE ECONOMY RELIES UPON IT
[ENMA] IN THE SECOND YEAR OF HEISEI JAPANESE CONSUMER LENDING EXCEEDED 57 TRILLION YEN
[ENMA] THE CHAIN MUST LEAD BACK TO SOMEWHERE
[ENMA] IT ALL TRACES BACK TO PEOPLE WANTING THINGS
[ENMA] ALL OF THIS IS HERE ONLY BECAUSE OF WANTING
[ENMA] AND YOU ARE HERE ALSO ONLY BECAUSE OF THAT
[ENMA] WANTING DESIRING WILLING
[ENMA] IT IS ALL THE SAME
[ENMA] AND EVERYTHING THAT EXISTS HERE IS AN EXPRESSION OF IT
[RASETSU] I GUESS PEOPLE WANT WHAT OTHERS HAVE
[ENMA] THAT IS WHY THEY WANT THIS OR THAT IN PARTICULAR
[ENMA] CAUSE THEY SEE OTHER PEOPLE WITH IT
[ENMA] SURE
[ENMA] BUT WHY DO THEY WANT ANYTHING AT ALL
[RASETSU] THAT IS JUST WHAT HUMAN BEINGS ARE
[RASETSU] THEIR TRUE FACE
[RASETSU] THERE IS NO REASON FOR IT
[ENMA] BUT EVERYTHING IN THIS WORLD HAS A REASON
[RASETSU] THEREFORE
[ENMA] YES
[ENMA] EXACTLY
And that's all she wrote. This is actually one of the more explicit dialogues with Enma; we'll consider it more closely later on. For the time being, let's continue. Let's head up the stairs, open our mask bag, select good old CONSCIOUS HYENA (as if we have a choice right now) and get into 6F.
【CONNECTED DISCOURSES】
【6F::HEAVEN REALM】
BGM: 遠流と王国 – 92\235
Time for the fun part. Oh, make no mistake, you're having fun already. But now we're gonna do this unleaded. You're on a 'Heaven' floor for the first time. These present themselves as a complex of corporate offices, but not like the entry-level kind you saw down in 'Hell'. This is way, way, upper management. Top floor, mahogany row, nice carpets, brass fittings, big desks, bigger boardrooms, internal lounges done up with an inhuman modernist sheen, elevator lobbies with installations of abstract sculpture, etc. On the wall? Probably a genuine fake genuine Rothko. It's from rooms and corridors like this that corporate raiders and high-level MITI bureaucrats once long ago coordinated massive offshore movements of Japanese capital during the bubble period, buying up half the world with nothing but unlimited credit extensions and terrible 80s haircuts. Now only the latter remain, attached to the for-now intact crania of the diverse crowd of extremely well-dressed yakuza thugs who prowl the ruins of the Showa era, looking for trouble and finding you.
SFX: Sounds of horrible murder.
SFX: More of them.
SFX: More of the more.
Now 'Heaven' floors are not like the others. Where the other biomes will spawn a floor which is generally maze-like, on a 'Heaven' floor the layout is more linear. You will proceed through the level, murdering everything in your path as per SOP, and you will observe as you do (from your overlooking view) that the level progresses toward a large room at the end, a big window-facing or corner office generally, with a desk of despotic size in its centre and exactly one door, and which contains exactly one enemy. You do not have to be a pro gamer to know what this means, but it helps. You might be expecting an intro cutscene, but no. What happens is quite simply that after killing all the rest of the guys on the level Rasetsu's trail of bloody footprints arrives at the last door, you bust through it like any other, and you're in a boss fight. His title appears. This isn't one of those smash-cuts to black like in the level transitions, the text is just superimposed at the bottom of the screen.
【CORPORATE AGENT GENZHEN XIAOGUO】
【SOARING BIRD THUS OMINOUS】
This looks like unintelligible kanjispam, because it is Chinese. The bosses on 'Heaven' floors are all given the peculiar 'title' of Gyoukai-dairi [業界代理] here translated as Corporate Agent. In addition to their title, the bosses each individually have a name, or something which could be a name but could also be another kind of title. The name is generated from a randomly chosen I Ching hexagram, in this case No. 62: Xiao Guo or Small Preponderance. The subtitle is a quote from the I Ching referring to the hexagram in question. As for what it means, there'll be a time to speculate later. Right now the boss is trying to murder you.
SFX: Sounds of exertion, yelling kiai.
You will also note – in the brief window of time while this dude is rushing you with his katana – that he is not like other enemies. First in that his sprite is slightly bigger than the usual and is wearing a mask (a dog mask, it looks like), and second in that he has two bars floating over his head – a white bar on the left and a red-blue bar on the right. This looks familiar, or it should, because you have the exact same thing on your HUD. Yes, indeed: bosses have PURITY and FLESH meters too. And all the same rules apply to them as to you.
SFX: The furious clash of blades, or rather the clash of a blade and an aluminium baseball bat which altogether produces a sound like dropping a saucepan on concrete.
So the boss has PURITY which will constantly drain (starting from the moment he aggros). Your goal is to make his PURITY reach 0% so that he dies. If you're feeling very MLG you can actually do this fully pacifist. You just keep parrying or perfect-parrying his attacks to keep your PURITY up, and his will keep draining as long as he's not landing hits. But that is also boring as shit so we're just going to murder him instead.
SFX: Sharpened steel impacting flesh – a heavy sword, crushing and mutilating as it goes, very much like a baseball bat if it were made of knives.
SFX: Spitting blood.
Yeah, be careful. The bosses can parry you, even perfect parry if you're unlucky. Just pay attention to the sprite, there's a certain stance they adopt which cues you in. Basically you have to try and goad them into breaking that stance, or try and get behind them (easier once you have more advanced movement options from the other masks). That's a spoiler. Oh well. You'll see what we mean.
SFX: A very palpable hit.
SFX: A human figure crumples to the floor.
SFX: Beating the crumpled figure with a baseball bat until it is a bleeding mass of bloodsoaked clothing and exposed flesh.
This is a pro strat actually. When a Corporate Agent hits 0% on his PURITY metre he falls over. When this happens you've won the fight, effectively, but you can keep hitting him for a while and get PURITY boosts from it. That's for the high scores.
SFX: Beating to a pulp.
SFX: Beating the pulp to a pulp.
You can't do it indefinitely. It tails off after a bit. Diminishing returns. Eventually the fallen Corporate Agent will really 'die', meaning his now-empty FLESH and PURITY metres vanish, and the fight is over.
SFX: Heavy breathing.
SFX: Breathing slackens.
SFX: Nil.
BGM: 陰陰殷殷 –
You will notice, now that you're no longer distracted, that when he collapsed his mask fell off, just to the side. Just walk over it and you'll pick it up.
【MASK GET】
【CONSCIOUS DOG】
The usual smash-cut black screen here. The PURITY drain is paused while you're in screens like this so don't worry about wasting time here. We have here a mask – faintly pulsating, in the usual 2-bit grotesque style – which represents the growling maw of a rather vicious-looking Alsatian. This is CONSCIOUS DOG. We'll examine what it does shortly. In the meantime, click through to banish the screen. You're still in the office. Now, before you navigate Rasetsu back to the level exit as normal, there's one more thing you can do here – quickly, so you don't die from PURITY loss. The boss room, you'll notice, is an office with a big desk. On the desk, if you can discern it in the blood-tinged pixel vomit which covers it now, is a phone, a bulky 90s-style corded handset. Now that Cold Gaze is playing, a quieter and more subdued track than the level theme, you can just faintly hear it.
SFX: Dial tone.
Walk over to the side of the desk nearest the phone. You don't need to do anything to interact with it.
SFX: Click. The receiver is lifted.
SFX: A pause, not more than a breath.
SFX: Distant laughter, very faint.
SFX: Click. Hang up.
That's all. Or is it? Navigate your way back to the level entrance as normal. Exit. Smash cut to black for load transition. As usual it reads:
【STAIRWELL】
But below that, in smaller text:
【HEAVEN OPERATES WITH REGULARITY】
【IT DOES NOT EXIST BECAUSE OF YAO】
【IT DOES NOT PERISH BECAUSE OF JIE】
【ANSWER HEAVEN WITH ORDER AND FORTUNE WILL RESULT】
【ANSWER HEAVEN WITH DISORDER AND MISFORTUNE WILL RESULT】
Just for a second. Then we fade into the stairwell as normal.
BGM: 幽玄会社 – Far Shore Return Trip
彼岸帰航
So the fortune-cookie bullshit you have here is another Chinese thing. It is (our translation of a Japanese translation of) a quote from the philosopher Xun Zi. This will appear after a 'Heaven' floor on the level-exit-to-stairwell loading screen if-and-only-if you (1) have interacted with the phone in the boss room after killing the boss and (2) were wearing a mask of the CONSCIOUS grade when you were in the level. That is all. There is nothing else you have to do to activate it, contrary to what certain seditious Discord mafias might have intimated to you. Mask doesn't matter; HYENA, DOG, whatever, as long as it's CONSCIOUS and you do the phone thing you will always get this quote. There are – as you might guess from this – different quotes that you get from doing it with a different grade of mask, but we'll deal with those when it happens.
At this stage you may be beginning to put the pieces together. Some pieces, anyway. It would be inappropriate to extend your speculations beyond what you have gathered, since there's a lot more left to go. But you've seen some things. The distant laughter on the other end of the phone, for instance, is the same – the same actual sound file in fact – as that which plays during the introduction, when the Concierge is on the phone to her boss who is upstairs. The messages you get after interacting with the phone on a 'Heaven' floor may be regarded as messages from 'upstairs' – i.e., the director of GMK Financing and Loan. More on this later. For the time being, we've got a shiny new mask to play with. Climb the stairwell – no Enma this time, alas – and get to the 7F door. Open up the bag. In the menu here we can now scroll across to see the latest addition to our collection.
【CONSCIOUS DOG】
【WEAPON IS UNBREAKABLE】
Pretty self-explanatory. Wearing a DOG mask means that your weapon doesn't lose durability and therefore cannot break. Useful if there's one in particular you want to keep, for a challenge run or whatever. Otherwise it's fairly generic. Doesn't do anything else. Still, let's select it and go in.
【COLLECTED DISCOURSES】
【7F::HUNGRY GHOST REALM】
BGM: 陰陰殷殷 – No memories, nothing
記憶もなければ何もない
So now we're into the “Collected Discourses”, which means that the biomes of successive floors are randomly determined, as opposed to the fixed progression from 'Hell' to 'Heaven' over 1F-6F. A lot can happen from here on out. For example, you could, theoretically, get nothing but 'Heaven' floors and have to fight a boss on every single one. Statistically this is exceedingly unlikely, but it is possible. Likewise for getting no 'Heaven' floors at all. It can happen, and it has even come close to happening on one or two occasions that people have recorded, but practically speaking you would have to play for a very, very, very long time before you could be reasonably sure of getting it. So don't sweat the RNG. Just kill.
SFX: Just killing.
The usual pachinko parlour. This being your second time on this biome, you'll begin to see how the level randomisation actually works. This is quite technical, but it's interesting, so fuck you you're learning about it. For each biome the game has a big set of 'tiles', which are like individual pre-fab pieces of level geometry, containing art assets, collision data, enemy spawn points, and so on. Every individual edge of a tile has a certain 'code' which means that it can only connect to another edge with the same 'code', kind of like the game of Dominos. So a tile with a piece of hallway running east-west is 'coded' such that it cannot immediately plug into another tile with a piece of hallway running north-south, because there would be an inconsistency where an open edge would plug directly into a wall in the next tile. But it can connect to a tile with a four-way hallway intersection, because that has an edge with a 'code' which matches. The game builds levels like this. It starts with an 'entrance/exit' tile, which contains the door where Rasetsu walks in. There are several different variants of this for a given biome, so one is picked at random. Then the game checks the edges of this first tile to see what 'codes' they they have, and randomly selects out of biome-appropriate tiles with edges that match the entrance tile's edges. Then it looks at the new tiles it's added, checks their edges, finds more tiles with edges that match those, and adds them. And so on and so forth. This process iterates until the game reaches a point where there are no available tiles in the biome pool which have edges that can fit the edges that are already spawned. Because of how the tiles are laid out and coded, this process will always produce a single topologically 'closed' level. Mathematically this is very elegant. In the literature systems like these are called “Wang Tiles” after their discoverer Hao Wang. You've killed everyone on the level in the course of this discussion, haven't you?
SFX: Killing the last guy on the level.
SFX: A human corpse slams backward into a pachinko machine which explodes into a melange of glass and metal.
SFX: Heavy breathing.
SFX: Breathing slackens.
SFX: Nil.
BGM: 陰陰殷殷 –
Well, let's get out of here. Nothing really to report. As we said, the CONSCIOUS DOG mask has nothing really special about it, it just lets you use weapons without worrying about them breaking. This is the point, you know, when narration in the vein we've been doing up till now becomes rather superficial; for the most part there's nothing to say other than “Rasetsu walks in, Rasetsu kills everyone, Rasetsu walks out.” It becomes formal, perfunctory, like all those passages in ancient chronicles where the only thing they bother writing down for the whole year is like “Waged war against the Volscians again.” From this point forth – which means, in the next update or updates, however long this takes – we're going to be treating the playthrough in less detail. We'll still be translating all the dialogue and everything, there's just not much more need to describe all the levels in detail now that we're into the Collected Discourses.
【STAIRWELL】
BGM: 幽玄会社 – Far Shore Return Trip
彼岸帰航
Good old stairwell. Oh, look who decided to show. Hi, Enma. What's poppin'?
[ENMA] HAVE YOU NOTICED IT YET
[RASETSU] WHAT
[ENMA] THE SHAPE
[ENMA] IT DOES NOT MATCH
[RASETSU] ...
[ENMA] FROM ONE TO THE NEXT
[ENMA] THE FLOORS
[RASETSU] SO
[ENMA] ...
[ENMA] WHAT DO THEY LOOK LIKE
[ENMA] TO YOU I MEAN
[RASETSU] FULL OF DEAD MEN
[RASETSU] OBVIOUSLY
[RASETSU] ...
[ENMA] ...
That's that. Some of these dialogues are, fortunately, quite short. You will find that Enma makes a lot of 'meta' comments. In some ways that is his job. He is here obliquely referring to how the architecture of this building – consisting of a large number of floors of radically different styles, shapes, and layouts – makes no sense whatsoever if you stop to think about it. Indeed, this is not a 'realistic' environment; it does not conform to objective reality. It is, rather, radically impossible.
Okay. So we said above that this seems about a good place to end this first update. And it is. We're right, as usual. But people – this is fact – are going to complain if we don't do something in particular. Already we can hear them bitching in the replies. “What about the creepypasta stuff?!!” Yeah, yeah. Right. So, yes, Hotline Mifune is indeed a creepypasta game. But what does this mean, exactly? How does one even go so far as to realise this? Actually it is quite simple. Remember how, earlier, in the stairwell, we tried getting Rasetsu to climb up a flight and skip to the next floor? Remember how it doesn't work and no matter how high up you climb you're always on the same flight? Some real MC Hammer shit? About that. Turns out, while trying to climb 'up' the stairs will keep warping you back to where you're supposed to be, the same is not true if you try to go back 'down' the way you came. Try it now.
SFX: Footsteps on concrete, descending stairs.
SFX: Screen wipe, reload.
【STAIRWELL】
So after you left 7F you were in the 7F-8F stairwell. Now you're back down in the 6F-7F stairwell. First thing to note: Enma is gone. This wouldn't happen if you had tried going up. It is your clue that you've actually changed levels. Now you can actually walk right back in – you could earlier even – to the floor you've just left, 7F, but why stop there? Keep going down. See what happens.
【STAIRWELL】
【STAIRWELL】
【STAIRWELL】
BGM: Nil.
We are now down on the 3F-4F stairwell. Notice that the music has cut out. Dead silence.
SFX: Vague movements of air.
SFX: Water gurgles in pipes.
The lighting flickers now and then – which it doesn't do, normally.
SFX: Fluorescent hum.
Walk Rasetsu down to the 3F doorway. You'll notice you don't have to go through the animation where you put down the gym back and select a mask. Just walk right on in.
【CONNECTED DISCOURSES】
【3F::ANIMAL REALM】
BGM: Nil.
The floor is just how you left it. The same nightclub, the same DJ pit, bartop, dancefloor, all just as it was when you walked in the last time. The layout is the same. Perfectly the same. Only, just, all the corpses are gone.
SFX: Rainstorm outside.
SFX: Distant thunder.
Yes, just as if someone has cleaned it. Very thoroughly. There is not even a vestige of blood. And there's no music, of course, which lends a certain feeling of desolation to the now-pristine area. And PURITY is draining, you realise at this point. You're on the level, of course it is. Your PURITY is dropping dangerously fast, and you're about to cut this exploration short and head back to the stairwell when you notice, at the edge of your screen, flitting through the extremity of the level-
SFX: Footsteps approaching.
SFX: Quickly.
-something moving. You're not alone, here, you never were. And as fast as you can move Rasetsu toward the exit, the other thing is much, much faster. At approximately jump-scare velocity a white, pixelated blur rushes the player character, and in the space of about five frames it attacks and drops your PURITY to 0% instantly.
SFX: Bladed weapon slicing flesh.
SFX: Choking on blood.
SFX: Ragged breathing.
SFX: Breathing stops.
You die. Smash cut to black, so fast and so jarring you'd otherwise assume the game crashed.
【UNSIGHTLY】
【UNDESERVING OF LIFE】
SFX: Dial tone.
SFX: Dial tone.
SFX: Click.
That death message is always the same, by the way, it's nothing to do with whether or not you get killed by the white thing. There are a few other more subtle creepypasta things we can look at next time, but that is the one you've probably seen in reaction videos. It's very RPG Maker like that, cheap funhouse shit. Not very scary just to read about it, of course, but let there be no doubt: encountering it on an empty floor after a long gameplay session has shit quite a few pants. The 'white thing', if you are very quick on the screenshot button – or you just extract the sprite from the game files ell oh ell – is a humanoid figure, as much as anyone is in top-down perspective.
And after that brief message from our sponsors, we smash cut right back to the main menu screen where it all began. Simple as. Rainy night, urbanised pixel hell.
【廾回卞し工几ヨ・冊工乍凵几ヨ】
【〜ホットライン・ミフネ〜】
That's enough for today. We've shown you how the game begins. Next time you'll see how it can end.