Flower, Sun and Rain – Stay Awhile

“As the sun appeared over the eastern horizon, a man arrived from over the seas, carrying a box made of metal. The man looked over the praying people with a wordless smile, … then began circling the tower.”

Where we came from

It doesn’t matter that game designer Suda 51 has probably never met retired game designer Shigesato Itoi. It would be nice if they met. Itoi a real-life copy editor, Suda one in spirit, they consider words and pictures and sounds and thoughts to be disposable, but they treat their arrangement as sacred all the same. What matters, though, is that one learned how to be a good person (hint: making video games for a giant corporation was not the answer), and the other is still learning. As enlightenment is not very interesting, let’s concern ourselves with the one on the path.

You have most likely come across Suda 51 on one of two paths: You have either heard of Killer 7, or you have played No More Heroes. These are sensational(ist) adventure games dressed up as action figures. That people finally have been tricked by this and have started buying Suda’s art* in moderate quantities is a great thing: Buy both of these entertainment softwares about finding meaning in an era in which American and Japanese imperialism have turned their sights on consumption.

Today, however, we will discuss the game that has come the closest to looking itself in the mirror and stepping away unashamed. (As such, it’s far more tedious than the rest of Suda’s work, which people already hotly debate on Internet forums re: their fun level.)

Besides Moon. (Come back soon for a cleaned-up guest review of this thing by someone who knows someone who knows moonspeak.)

Continuing the motif of two paths in reaching Flower, Sun and Rain (arguably the most important number of many important numbers in the game), you can either know Japanese and already have been frustrated by this years ago on the PS2, or you can go in in English with slightly more hideous art execution and much inferior sound quality and theme selection on the Nintendo DS. You do get new and actually challenging optional puzzles on the DS, however. The fact that the art and music direction are often leaps and bounds ahead of anything else in the video game world will carry you through the game regardless.

What we are

To get anywhere on LosPass Island, you will have to walk. You will walk like the psychological cripple you are, in no hurry because you have no one, only your bio-hacking suitcase, Catherine. The cryptic 50-page guidebook inside will tell you who you are and what to do, but only if you already know.

You are possibly a spy on vacation, and soon you will want more than life itself not to be. You will probably spend a good three hours in Flower, Sun and Rain just walking. This is why the PS2 version might be a good idea, because the extra tune beauty will force you to pay attention. This will be hard, as everyone you meet will do their best to distract you.

The other thing you will do in FSR, besides talk to people over and over, is solve math and keyword puzzles. Except the solutions are usually absurdly simple; the hard part, in classic adventure game fashion, is knowing when and where the game wants you to implement them. The how is easy: just jack Catherine into that camera, telephone pole, or Mexican wrestler, and punch in their number. If you cheat and find a guide on Gamefaqs to ease having to think your way through the tedium, I won’t blame you. I do, however, refuse to link you to one.

Where we are going

Many inexplicable things await you on LosPass. The most obvious is a pink crocodile, who follows a girl following you to your destruction. They intervene at one point so it doesn’t happen too quickly: Like all things that are good, Flower, Sun and Rain won’t let you off easily. To understand the surface, you will need to understand what’s beneath. But sometimes it’s turtles all the way down.

And there will be gaps. These exist to enhance the shock of recognition, which despite not knowing the game’s history you will feel in full force at least three times. FSR is an entry in an unconcluded series Suda likes to call “Kill the Past”, most of which is still in Japanese. Google and you will fill in a couple of the holes.

All this means nothing unless there is writing to back up the nonsense. The American DS translation is better than the European one, to be sure, but it still straddles the line between purposefully flat, and just awkward. You will have to endure some video game jokes and expository spoon-feeding to get to the real wit.

As this is from Suda’s 51-dollar budget era, there are many guidebook typos, but the guidebook also contains the some of the most literary writing and creative world-building you will find in ostensibly popular entertainment. It is an editor’s mind that can distill an island into flower, sun, rain, and that can spin out an infinite world from those three things. It takes an enormous amount of planning and a lot of nerve to lay bare the entire story and the answer to almost every puzzle in cryptic prose form, from square one. The subtle and spare details smoothing out the convolution show Suda cares about craft, even if he sometimes (see: jokes about video games) is afraid of it.

Maybe he’s further along than I thought. If you can see this game through, you may never need to play another.
And if you aspire to be an artist of any kind, read this first. When I listen to “Catherine No. 1”, I flick my arm up like I’m at a turntable to pump up the volume on my laptop.

*=craft until further notice