Wafiti

Per Wiktionary, the etymology of this micro-mini-album's title comes "From the idea that in the middle of the night, a half-asleep person might get confused and enter the wrong room". A description that's just as fitting of this entire piece of art.

Released on the Spring of 1984, this is the group's only known output. 3F=C themselves are Noriko & Sumiko, vocalist & drummer of Kya→, a central band to the gal punk scene that was flourishing at the time. The label—independently-run R.B.F (Rebel Beat/Brain Factory) Records—was created by singer Shigeki Nishimura (who also produced this one) to release the recordings of his own punk band The Loods. Despite the doubly hard pedigree, this is in fact laid back new wave played on just bass and guitar.

My gateway to this record was its engineer and sound advisor, Susumu Hirasawa. Although his style never went entirely punk, the guy was deeply committed to the mindset of the movement. The early-mid '80s in particular saw him the closest to being a part of the scene, associating with a number of artists from both Tokyo and Kansai. Noriko, Sumiko & Nishimura were big Hirasawa fans and had close friendships with the guy at the time. And his commitment to the logistics of making To-Ma-Do-I happen were significant: P-Model manager Mitsuru Hirose is credited as vocal advisor, while the recording location was Model Studio (a room in the office of a friend's film/TV production company where his private studio was set up, in Akasaka).

Unfortunately; any info on how/why this group was formed, ended, or if it did anything beyond this sole release; has been impossible to come by. Despite how much it shaped his artistic approach, and how his work with Nishimura in particular helped shape one of his most popular creative phases, Hirasawa's closeness to the punk sound was short-lived, and his fans have a general disinterest/apathy towards this part of his career. The go-to reference/history book on him only gives To-Ma-Do-I a 5 sentence blurb—most of which is just relaying basic discography info—in a wider spread of brief descriptions covering his production work.

If I ever go to Japan someday, I'll likely spend 90% of the trip poring through the stock of used bookstores. I've long relied on just whatever resources made their way online. Hirasawa fandom is an outlier in that sense: plenty of his fans have shared much of their personal libraries on the internet. On the flip-side, I'm empty-handed when it comes to the history of Kya→, and have no idea where to start looking, or if there are even any such avenues online. Much of Japanese independent music is driven by the live house ecosystem, so whatever remains is mostly in the hand of middle-aged people who were there when everything went down.

I feel lucky that somebody recently shared more photos of the physical artifact beyond the cover, and found out it was pressed in red vinyl with a photo of monkeys wearing sunglasses as the label. The lyrics are here if you want to understand what these at best barely over a minute long songs are about, all of them very easy to understand.

Its been a long-term frustration of mine that 3F=C has been a dead end, both on research and overall artistry. This is an immediately charming piece of art, and I wish there was more of it.

But before I dredge long posts from elsewhere, I'd like to also take some time to introduce music I've been spinning lately.

My food breaks over the last few weeks have been accompanied by this curated playlist of Final Fantasy XI cutscenes. I've long had an interest in this game, but the likelihood of actually playing it in the near future is low, as much due to currency conversion issues as from planning out how to use my free time.

Just cutscenes misses out on a lot of the experience, of course. A key part that even an uncommentated walkthrough could cut out is getting through PlayOnline before even getting to play.

That Squaresoft had massive dreams during the turn of the millennium would be an understatement. Its easy to forget with how the service turned out, but PlayOnline was to be their own walled garden in the internet, the crossroads of dot-com bubble's highs with Japan's own game industry bubble.¹ Like their other ventures of the time, it did not pan out as expected, and while DigiCube was the biggest flop from the business side, POL became a long-standing thorn for the whole of XI to this day. Players have to deal with a protracted login process while developers pin the blame for inability to alter/add certain features to XI due to its code being so entwined with POL.

And yet, there's still a charm to it that's endemic to the era. Optimism for the possibilities of instantaneous communication across the globe abounds in its presentation, both visual and aural. Noriko Matsueda filled the brief masterfully, providing tracks that hit with the same kind of synth cozyness that Nintendo aimed for a few years later with the Wii's built-in channels. While those are the highlights, she also brought quite the variety to the other options one could pick to score their POL usage, hitting a similar kind of spot as Sheep, Dog 'n' Wolf/Looney Tunes: Sheep Raider. The final three tracks by Kumi Tanioka, which score XI-specific pages of the portal, bridge the styles of both worlds neatly (a given since she did some music for the game).

The above is the playlist of the official release of the POL soundtrack, which was disc 2 of a set with "additional" XI tracks (material from the most recent expansion which didn't fit its CD + newer songs written for subsequent small scale add-on scenarios). If you look around YouTube, there are fan-made playlists with more tracks, most of them from the online version of Tetra Master which was only available packaged with XI and the POL Viewer, shut down in 2010 with no official release of its music anywhere, puzzlingly.

Just as mystifying, however, is the near-complete lack of online footprint for the other "digital table game" on the PS2 version of that package. Square went as far as developing their own take on mahjong, JongHoLo/雀鳳楼, but I cannot find any trace of its music, or any video of the thing being played. This is a cursory search for what was supposed to be a quickie "coast", but with how Doman mahjong has attracted a dedicated playbase within Final Fantasy XIV, its bewildering how its "older sibling" is almost entirely MIA.

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1. Produced by local online game junkie Yasumi Matsuno, who pulled triple duty while also working on Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Final Fantasy XII, natch.

idle thought re that dragon's dogma "travel is boring" post but I wonder how much of the classic sense of "just traveling through a space with nothing to do" that open world games often induce has to do with the 'consumability' of the world design? Like a classic ubisoft style open world game that is just icons on a map? Once you've cleared out the icons, that section of the world is truly lifeless, beyond whatever respawning encounters are present.

I really do feel like, in order to design a world where traversal feels continually meaningful, the world mustn't be a checklist; there needs to be a sense of surprise and wonder in simply walking around, and that means not just nooks to explore but a consistent sense that any time you return to a place it could be different somehow; that a trip, any trip, is a journey with its own unique ups and downs, that you could be waylaid at any moment by anything, even in places you know well. And that's a VERY different allocation of dev resources than filling a space with hand-placed collectibles.

A big thing that I think gets missed a lot about most Japanese open worlds is that, philosophically, in direct contrast to western ones, they're much more directly descended from domestic adventure games than action games beyond maybe basic combat mechanics, when they even have any to begin with. When open worlds started to appear in Japanese games with the PS1 by way of stuff like Mizzurna Falls, Japanese devs, perhaps seeing the challenges in sufficiently populating such environments to fit other genres and gameplay styles, were primarily interested in exploring ways to engender a tangible relationship between players and the environments they're meant to inhabit, which is naturally easier to achieve with slower, more methodical games.

It's why Deadly Premonition, for instance, combines those really long car drives with York's extended monologues, to reinforce the idea that he's operating in a remote American mountain town where the population is scattered and nothing gets done quickly; as a Colorado native who's lived in and around the Rockies plenty, I can tell you, I've gone on plenty of meandering drives exactly like that. It's also why Irem's long-forgotten Pachipara games on the PS2 don't let you drive cars until pretty much the very end of the game, to the point where they're all but useless unless you engage in post-game content. You have to either walk, bike, or take the train everywhere in the meantime; your character is down on their luck and largely impoverished for most of those games and those limited means really impress upon you the urban, working class struggles they're pitted against. (Yes, the pachinko RPGs really explore these themes!)

I could go on and on with examples, but it's very much an approach that you only see when developers are comfortable with taking away players' control over their environments and I think a lot of western devs erroneously conflate complete or even relative player freedom with the format when, narratively and especially experientially, that can be more of a hindrance than an asset, at least if you're looking to do something genuinely different in the space. We're beginning to see people outside Japan come around to that with the Zelda games, which, for as explicitly derived from Bethesda and Ubisoft games as they are on a surface level very much so elaborate on those styles from that same lens. But I think it's fair to say there's yet to be a more widespread recognition that there are more ways to make a big open world than a GTA or a Skyrim or an Assassin's Creed and Japanese games have been investigating that for at least 25 years.

This is the funniest takedown of fast travel systems I've ever seen. So matter of fact. God damn