Fantasy islands
HE WANTED A SINGULAR GAME. SO HE BUILT 150 DIORAMAS.
BEFORE Hironobu Sakaguchi began work on his latest role-playing game — he’s championed and explored the RPG genre throughout his career — the creator of the famed “Final Fantasy” series opted to look back before setting his sights forward.
Sakaguchi not too long ago replayed “Final Fantasy VI,” the 1994 entry in the franchise that is still considered among the series’ best. Having turned his attention to mobile game development — with his next, “Fantasian,” launching as an exclusive to Apple Arcade, the tech giant’s subscription service — Sakaguchi says “Final Fantasy VI” offered a number of reminders and lessons for modern game development.
“Back in the day, everything was done in tiles,” says Sakaguchi, speaking recently via a translator. “Your character would move one tile at a time. That introduces puzzle-like elements, in which you might see a treasure tile that you can’t access. But if you walk around the building and go through the back door, you might be able to reach that chest.
“When the player,” continues Sakaguchi, “reaches the ending, it feels like they have seen everything this world has to offer. That desire — that craving that humans have — we’re trying to re-create.”
For “Fantasian,” Sakaguchi wanted to present players with an overview of a game world, offering them a universe that invites curiosity via what is shown rather than what is hidden. And yet the renowned Japanese game designer didn’t want to create a retro game.
“Fantasian,” however, is a bit old school, at least in how it places century-old storytelling techniques at its forefront — in this case, about 150 hand-built dioramas.
“Fantasian,” then, is the rare video game that will not just utilize physical environments but also celebrate them. Those environments add a feeling of fragility and a lived-in, aged look to the game. Digital characters traverse landscapes that are heavily stylized, living photographs. A tiny bed looks like a cloud made of porcelain, towns and buildings emerge from hand-sculpted caverns, and the very real rocks have a foreboding presence when they clash with the game’s animation.
Video game engines today are capable of powerful, cinemaready graphics, but with “Fantasian” Sakaguchi has created a mobile game that feels tactile — a world we want to touch.
“To be able to get that feeling from the other side of a glass screen was almost a poetic experience,” he says. Sakaguchi isn’t kidding. When he speaks of the intricate dioramas for the game, he talks not only of a renewed appreciation for game design but also life itself.
“A big surprise for me — there’s a mountain-scape stage — and in the dioramas, there’s a little bit of green and flowers littered about the pathway,” he says. “I’m sure it was just a small decoration, but as we photographed it for transitioning it into a 3-D-mesh and bringing it into the digital world, I would zoom into these flowers and — my goodness — it was amazing how strong their presence was inside of these scenes.”
And although the game could have been made entirely with computer graphics — rather than by building dioramas, taking hundreds of photos of them and scanning them — Sakaguchi says he wasn’t interested in that potential “shortcut,” although he stressed that development time would have been about the same.
In part, he simply wanted a role-playing game that looked strikingly different from anything else on the market. Also, after decades of working in the RPG space, the 58-year-old wanted a challenge. “It’s possible to create something that is diorama-esque in the 3-D, CG space, but I think there’s a unique handmade touch that cannot be replicated,” Sakaguchi says. “For instance, if you’re creating a vast forest in
CG, regardless of whether you put in diorama-esque fixtures or give it that shading to give it a handmade feel, at some point it will become repetitive, too symmetrical. When making something with your hands, it warps the visual in a very unique way that can’t be replicated.”
The 150 dioramas were crafted by a staff of about 150. Although the battle scenes will be fully animated, Sakaguchi is betting on players wanting to absorb the dioramas. Thus, when enemies are encountered, players can send them to a mystical dungeon. Or, in other words, they can delay the battles until they’re ready for action, allowing users to dictate their own pace.
The game, about three years in the making and with no current plans to be made available outside of the Apple Arcade ecosystem, is nearing completion, with Apple beginning a promotional push this week by touting the exclusive, without a specific release date, in its App Store. And although Sakaguchi’s Mistwalker studio has worked in the mobile space before, with “Fantasian” he says he wanted no direct concessions to the smartphone and tablet-focused medium, saying it is his job, and goal, to create a game worthy of ignoring text message notifications.
“On a technical level, there have been some learnings from recent projects Mistwalker has undertaken,” Sakaguchi says. “But ‘Fantasian’ is a full-blown console RPG experience. I drew upon that experience. I want to re-create that feel and touch for ‘Fantasian.’ ”
This likely means we can expect a somewhat convoluted, deep and twisting story. The game starts with players in control of a protagonist named Leo, a character on a quest for his missing father. In relatively standard video game fashion, however, Leo’s memory is wiped, and he travels from a machine-driven world to the more rustic one represented by the dioramas. Sakaguchi says this simply scratches the surface, and memories of in-game characters are presented as mini fairy-tale-like novels.
In “Fantasian,” you will read. “The novels are a system in the game that progresses between scenes,” says Sakaguchi. “Humans, when you read something, it really jogs the imagination in ways that being fed audiovisual cues does not seem to do. We’re talking about dioramas and, now, novels, which are a very old-world, old-school medium, if you will, and as you go through and read these stories, it gets the player to shift their mind-set and use different parts of their brain as they go through this interactive experience.”
None of this, of course, should be a surprise to fans of his work. Over the course of his more than three-decade career, Sakaguchi has steadfastly focused on the RPG genre. What brings him back, he says, is the way RPG stories are told. A good one, he says, should make the player feel like a tourist.
“The idea of exploring a completely new world is akin to traveling to a country we’ve never experienced before,” Sakaguchi says. “You’re walking down the street and discover this really cute cafe or boutique. There is a sense of discovery and wonder that comes with the RPG genre.”
TODD MARTENS GAME CRITIC
IN 19 9 9 , Sister Souljah publishred her first novel, “The Coldest Winter Ever,” considered to be the mother of so-called urban or street fiction and the first classic of the genre. Its heroine, Winter Santiaga, the pampered daughter of a Brooklyn drug kingpin, uses her feminine wiles and hustler smarts to survive after her father’s empire suddenly comes crashing down. “The Coldest Winter Ever” was one of the bestselling novels of 1999 and has since sold more than a million
copies. Naturally, the publisher wanted more.
“The book company and everyone [else] expected me to write the sequel,” said Souljah by phone from the United Arab Emirates, where she had gone to find “peace of mind” and to finish a draft of the book’s long-awaited screen adaptation.
But because Winter Santiaga’s story had ended with a mandatory 15-year prison sentence, Souljah felt she had to wait until Winter’s time was served. “I didn’t want to feed the hood a fantasy that going to prison is a joke or a cakewalk,” she said. “Like ‘Ta-da! Here she is,’ and it’s all good. There are real consequences to the things that happen in real life.”
So instead she wrote spinoffs: three books about Midnight, the handsome and capable lieutenant of Winter’s father, Ricky Santiaga, and one about Winter’s younger sister Porsche, who ends up in juvenile detention. She even planned to write a Ricky story (and still hopes to). “But the character was always alive in my imagination,” Souljah said. Finally, 22 years later, Winter is back in “Life After Death.”
True to Souljah’s insistence on consequences, the sequel begins with a hard shock: Winter is dead, stuck in a purgatory known as the Last Stop Before the Drop, and given one last chance to avoid eternal damnation. “People have said, ‘It’s so unexpected,’ ” said Souljah. “And I say, as an author, if I write what any reader expects me to write
then I’ve failed because that means the readers could have written the book. I want to write something that you never would have imagined.”
Though Winter’s journey in “Life After Death” may take place largely in the metaphysical realm, there’s still plenty of sex, danger and debauchery. “I didn’t want to write a book where everything looks the same as how people expect or imagine,” said Souljah. “Growing up Christian, there’s the devil and he has horns and a tail . ... It doesn’t resonate with what you can see with your eyes in the real world.”
Preparing to invent her own underworld, Souljah researched religious texts for seven months, “[mainly] nonfiction works that refer back to the major three books: the Torah, the New Testament and the Qu’ran.”
She also read Dante’s “Inferno,” which she didn’t like at all. “I thought it alienated the reader, the way that it was written,” she said. “I never want to write books like that. I want you to read [my] books and be blown away because it was so close to your own soul and experience and you can take things from it and use it in your own real life.”
Souljah’s outspokenness made her a flashpoint of national politics long before she wrote her bestselling novel. For a time she was a member of the anti-racist rap group Public Enemy, and in the wake of the 1992 L.A. riots she said publicly, “If Black people kill Black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” Then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton denounced her. (She responded that her quote had been taken out of context.)
Ever since, any political candidate’s denunciation of radical ideas (like Barack Obama’s over Jeremiah Wright) has been glossed as “a Sister Souljah moment.” Asked how she feels about the term today, she said, “A Sister Souljah moment is simply ‘a moment of truth.’ And the truth should never ever be considered radical or un-American.”
Souljah’s books counter the caricature of her as an advocate of violence. Having grown up (as Lisa Williamson) in the South Bronx during the drug-ravaged ’70s and ’80s, she says she wrote “The Coldest Winter Ever” as a cautionary tale. “It was my desire to show our people that this lifestyle that we glorify is actually a death-style,” she said. “And it doesn’t end nicely, almost ever.”
As a child, she lived in fear of the heroin epidemic. “It was explained to me and my brothers and sisters as a life-or-death situation,” Souljah said. “People carried around needles in their pockets. I was horrified about people drugging me or anyone in my family. I would say my prayers before bed and ask for protection.”
Soon she began to notice the glamour of the drug-dealer lifestyle. “When you hit the teen years, I think that’s when you notice the flash. So I wanted to write a story about drugs without writing something that preaches to people because I didn’t think that preaching was something that people would accept, listen to or learn from,” she said.
She’d thought about writing from the perspective of a dealer before trying something closer to her experience: “I do know about girls and women and love.”
Though Souljah is often credited with igniting the urban/street genre, she considers the category inherently racist. “When a Black author writes, it’s not literature,” she said. “I mean, who are these ‘street’ people anyway? What are people who are not street authors writing about? The topics are the same. ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is a battle between families that are basically in gangs, so why don’t they call Shakespeare street literature?”
She finds the idea of a lower class of writing insulting. “If you look at my characters and my storytelling, it spans from the inner city to the suburbs to several countries outside of America. You’ll see Japan, Korea, China, the UAE and Oman mentioned. And before writing about these places, I normally travel there and stay long enough to get a sense of the people, the culture, the language. So why belittle all of that effort by then saying ‘No, this is only urban literature. Only a certain set of people will buy it and understand it and that’s why we put it in the back.’ ”
Rumors of a film adaptation of “The Coldest Winter Ever” have been circulating since the early aughts. In 2008, Jada Pinkett Smith told Vibe magazine she was set to executive produce the film. But nothing ever materialized. “‘The Coldest Winter Ever’ is a classic,” said Smith by email. “Timeless. When [it’s] ready to be made into a movie, it will be. Sometimes you have to wait for the right timing for certain creations.”
Souljah considers it worth the wait. “My thing is, I want to have the movie but I want the business of it to be correct,” she said. “I try to do business [in a way] that matches the art that I create. I don’t want to do business in a way where somebody just processes me . ... I read the contracts and I’m told that no one does that in Hollywood.”
Today she’s attached to a deal with a major studio; she delivered the script in July 2019 and expected it to go into pre-production that September. Then there was a contract delay. Then there was COVID-19. “So I’m not quite sure what will happen next,” she said. “But I’m grateful that books stand the test of time and keep coming out no matter what. The pandemic is still a good time for [authors].”
Which means it’s a good time for her. “Because you’re basically just writing,” she says. “There’s nothing else to do.”
VIET THANH NGUYEN’S debutnovel“TheSympathizer” introduced readers to its unnamed protagonist, a half-Vietnamese, halfFrench communist double agent navigating life, love, loyalty and espionage in Los Angeles after the fall of Saigon. In Nguyen’s sequel, “The Committed,” his narrator is “still a man of two faces and two minds.” But now he is also “a revolutionary without a revolution,” a refugee in 1980s Paris who is grappling with politics, ideologies and himself.
“I wasn’t done with his story,” says Nguyen, who joins the Los Angeles Times Book Club on Wednesday. “I’m very cognizant of the fact that people read “The
Sympathizer” as a Vietnam War novel and me as a Vietnamese American writing about the Vietnam War.”
The sequel, he says, allowed him “to expand upon what I’ve always felt, which is that ‘The Sympathizer’ is not only a Vietnam War novel but a novel about race and colonialism.”
By all measures, “The Sympathizer” is a tough act to follow: a bestseller that drew comparisons to Ralph Ellison, John le Carré and Saul Bellow, the novel earned the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. But “The Committed” is both a seamless continuation of its predecessor — the same unsparing intellect and takeno-prisoners sardonic wit animate each page — and a stand-alone book.
Like “The Sympathizer,” “The Committed” strides genres. Nguyen delivers a literary thriller that’s part political novel, part historical novel and part comic novel. He trades the conventions of the spy novel of the first book for crime. Gangsters, drug dealing, turf wars and shootouts propel hairpin plot-twists and belie an ambitious book of ideas.
“I thought that there would be a sweet spot for readers who would be willing to grapple with serious ideas and be entertained at the same time,” Nguyen says.
Nguyen, 49, is the author of six books, including “The Refugees,” a bestselling short story collection, and “Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War,” a National Book Award finalist in nonfiction. Until recently, he wrote from a spare bedroom in Silver Lake where he lived for 20 years before his family relocated to Pasadena to give his 7-year-old son, Ellison, more space to play. He spoke to The Times on Zoom from his book-lined home office where Ellison entertained himself in the background, occasionally approaching the screen to smile and wave.
A USC professor, Nguyen notes that contemporary American literary fiction often lacks the sense of setup and suspense more often seen in so-called genre writing and he chooses instead to embrace the page-turning quality of a good plot in
his own work. Nguyen has been praised for his biting satirical humor, which he deploys to similar effect. “Laughter just makes things go down easier,” he says.
Nguyen cites Shakespearean tragicomedies and Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels as inspirations for “The Sympathizer” and “The Committed.” He also cites the action films of John Woo. Part of the drama of both novels is the relationship between the narrator and his blood brothers, a communist and a killer of communists, both of whom he betrays and both of whom he loves.
“I was deeply influenced by watching films like ‘A Better Tomorrow’ and ‘A Bullet in the Head,’ which is actually set in Vietnam. … It’s that same sense of romantic blood brotherhood, the good guy versus bad guy who are actually mirror images of each other.”
For a writer adept at penning thrillers, it might come as a surprise that Nguyen also names as a major influence W.G. Sebald, the German writer known for hybrid works exploring loss, memory and the aftermath of World War II, although the connection is less technical than thematic. Like Sebald, Nguyen is partly preoccupied with the historical events that informed his life.
Nguyen was 4 years old when his family fled Vietnam and landed in a Pennsylvania refugee camp, at which point he was separated from his parents for several months before being reunited and settling in California in the late 1970s. His parents opened one of the first Vietnamese grocery stores in San Jose.
“My memories begin with being separated from my parents as a part of the refugee experience,” Nguyen says, “That left a deep imprint on me.” He describes the separation as well-intentioned — an attempt to help his parents get on their own two feet — but profoundly wounding.
“As a child, you just interpret it as abandonment. I spent most of my life trying to not think about that... So it’s been very, very difficult, as a writer, to excavate myself because that’s where the material is. The real material is what’s inside: the emotions, the contradictions, the damage, the hurt and the harm that most sensible people don’t want to have to confront. But as a writer, I think that’s absolutely necessary.”
In the complex and fractured protagonist of the novels, Nguyen has created a character through which to tap the vein. He describes him as his alter ego. An interrogator of fellow spies and rival gangsters, the character is also a relentless interrogator of ideologies and the failings of all people, on all sides.
“In both of these books, I wanted to be as unrelenting as possible in terms of both interrogating these dominant cultures of the United States and France, but also interrogating the narrator and interrogating the communities that he is involved with.”
In “The Committed,” the man of two minds remains alert to ambiguities, contradictions and doublemeanings. “Continuing his misadventures is continuing my interrogation of him, but also my interrogation of myself,” says Nguyen.
One of the many strengths of Nguyen’s writing is that nothing is spared from his clear-eyed analysis: not France, the United States or Vietnam, not communism or capitalism, not his characters and most importantly, not his own work. In “The Sympathizer,” he concedes, “there’s a lot of sexualization and objectification of women, discussions of [the narrator’s] virility, that kind of thing. I had a lot of fun, then halfway through the book, I thought, ‘Wait a minute, I’m having too much fun; I’m enjoying this’.”
Nguyen saw the realization as an opportunity. “’The Committed’ takes on his masculinity and heterosexuality and sexism and patriarchy,” Nguyen says, “and his gradually dawning understanding that his investment in them has these terrible outcomes.” Secondary characters and subplots, including one loosely inspired by the sexual scandals of French socialist Dominique StraussKahn, further dramatize this exploration. Nguyen hopes the book “models this kind of necessary interrogation.”
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re on the left or the right or where your political convictions happen to be. There’s still a trade and commerce in the objectification and exploitation of women that all these men with all their pretensions participate in and that’s partly what’s being satirized in ‘The Committed.’”
Between teaching and the demands on his schedule as a public literary figure (he recently became the first Asian American member of the Pulitzer Board), Nguyen is intentional with his time. The packed bookshelves in his office are designed to keep literature front-and-center; he records each book he reads — for tenure reviews, prize deadlines and pleasure — in a spreadsheet.
“The only things I don’t put on there are his books,” he says, nodding toward Ellison. “But maybe I should… Why not? Children’s books should count.” Father and son do more than read together: in 2019 they co-authored “Chicken of the Sea,” in which a band of chickens join the ranks of a pirate ship and seek adventure.
Lately, Nguyen has returned to nonfiction and is working on a memoir that takes up the problem of representation in literature.
“So-called minority or multicultural writers are only supposed to represent ourselves, whereas the unmarked writers, the people who are just writers, get to represent everybody,” says Nguyen. “I knew my own work would be bracketed in this way, that the first reflex that people would have picking up my novels would be to say, ‘He’s a Vietnamese guy writing about Vietnamese stuff.’ And I had to take a position where I say, ‘I am a Vietnamese guy writing about Vietnamese stuff, and that’s not a limitation any more than John Updike writing about people from New England is a limitation.”
As an artist, his challenge is to work against the limitations imposed by that assumption, in part by creating a protagonist who insists, “to say we were all human was merely sentimental, but to say that we were all inhuman was the truth.”
“Inhumanity is humanity,” says Nguyen. “That’s the kind of complexity I think art should reach for and which I hope my novels do.”
In addition to the memoir, Nguyen also plans to turn his pair of novels into a trilogy. “The Committed” will be followed by an “epic crime-gangster-spy novel.”
“The final installment is going to be back here in the United States,” Nguyen says. In the third book, “the man of two faces and two minds” returns to L.A. to “either seek revenge or make amends or both. We’ll find out.”