Editorial: What’s With Japanese People and Toliets? March 5, 2010

It’s Friday, and I guess there would not be a better day to release editorials than this one.  Some of the best great editorials got released on Fridays, PlanetFargo being my favorite.

With the recent Kotaku article on Japan, it got me thinking I should brush off an Editorial I wrote some time ago following a playthrough I did of No More Heroes.  Enjoy, and feel free to comment.

I guess the title is pretty self explanatory. But let me phrase this question better with this amount of background.

Normally we in the United States are against using toilets or bathroom humor. I remember when taking a video class we were forbidden from doing anything involving a bathroom or toilet. However it seems that Japanese game developers take pride in their crappers (I mean Crappiers) as these serve in some Japanese games as basically hubs with which to build an entire game mechanic around, particularly the save game system.

Normally a user goes to a menu and selects save game. This wasn’t good enough for the Japanese. No, they don’t believe in having menu functions for other than stat and progress displays. No, they want you to have the save game mechanic built into the game play.

Hideo Kojima built the save mechanic into the codec radio system to solve the design problem of working into gameplay without bringing the player out of the gaming experience in Metal Gear Solid. It was not the best solution, but it worked fine. Later on, in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots he decided it was better to take my advice and just have a save game option in the menu, probably Ryan Payton’s doing. This worked much better and you were allowed infinite saves until your memory ran out.

But then came the fantastic Dead Rising. The only place in the game you could save was the toilets, so keep bathroom locations in the mall in your head at all times, and oddly enough bathrooms were the one place zombies didn’t congregate in! Must be due to some unholy zombie belief. I’m not kidding. If you haven’t played the game let me explain it to you. You MUST go into a designated bathroom area which look exactly like mall bathrooms look, select any stall (doesn’t matter if it’s a male or female bathroom, although female bathrooms do not have stand up stalls), and activate it. That brings up the save game menu, where you are allowed to override the one save the game gives you, and after that you may choose to quit the game.

Now onto No More Heroes, the game I’ve been playing non-stop for the last three days. (I’m about thirteen hours in and ranked number three). The only acceptable save spot is again a toilet. In fact the female protagonist (your handler) informs you before each boss battle to go to take a pee. In the hub world of Santa Destroy, you may only save from your motel room bathroom, but in each boss battle area, there is usually a port-a-potty conveniently located before the boss. By using the toilet it brings up the save screen. You’re allowed 4 save spots, generous compared to Dead Rising. Hope you found all the collectable cards before you saved, but if you think you’re off by one and it’s the rank III boss battle, the last card is in the battle area where you’ll easily spend 10 minutes looking for it.

So now that you’ve got it all down, my question again is what’s with Japanese people and toilets?  Did anyone think this was actually a good idea?  I’m sure Suda 51 of No More Heroes did, as it was used in his game, and I’m sure that the Dead Rising director did as well.

However this does save one problem.  Everyone’s always offended anytime someone brings the bathroom up in the United States.  It’s hard to descriptively say, “I need to use the bathroom” and be considered polite.  Some kids like to say, “I have to pee pee” or the more offensive, “I have to go poopie.”  Others have used more slang terms to be less offensive like, “I have to pay the water bill,” or, “I have to drop my kids off at the pool.” But in most cases nobody gets what that actually means.

So thank you Japan, because now I can just inform everyone when my call of nature arrives, “I’m going to save my game.”