Blog: Thoughts on Rakuen

I was pretty much always going to like Rakuen. I’ve admired Laura Shigihara’s work in video game music for a long time and I was excited when she started work on a game of her own, even though it meant we’d hear less from here for a while. Four years later, Rakuen is out and it’s a beautiful game. It’s an illustration of the space available in games to tell different stories and to tell stories differently. The stories it tells is heart warming and terribly sad and I think as a work it has important things to say about life, love, loss, forgiveness, perseverance, hope and sadness. I think the game is beautiful, and, like in life, you have to take the what you can from the beautiful and happy moments to help you through the hard ones.

Rakuen, a leather bound story and a cursor with a tail 

It is worth your time to play Rakuen. It’s $11 CAD and it will take about 10 hours. As I said, the story told in this game is important. I also think that the story is told in a game this way is also important. Video games are art. They are their own artform alongside books and movies and they let you experience story in a different way than any other medium. Rakuen exposes you to the feelings of its characters and it drives its story

This post will have spoilers for Rakuen and especially for the late game which I think it is important to discuss. As I said, I think you should play this game first. That being said, this game involves a lot of tough topics, including the death of children, both from accident and illness. It’s treated very respectfully, but it's not shied away from, so this may not be the game for you right now.

Things I Liked

Rakuen is a story game. It has puzzles and exploration, but no combat. You play the Boy and His Mom (neither of them get names) as they go around a hospital meeting other people in the ward and then travelling to Morizora's Forest to help them solve their problems.

I’m very lucky to have spent almost no time in hospital, but Rakuen’s hospital segments feel very genuine. It’s scary and strange and the noises are weird and people say a lot of words that don’t make very much sense. When you start out as the Boy everything feels overwhelming, you’re faced with a mysterious and scary visitor in the middle of the night when you can’t really move. Later you get to wander your hospital ward and start meeting people. You start to get a feeling that something’s not right with the hospital, but the people are nice, so it feels like things are on the edge of being ok.

The light in the hospital

Then your mother arrives and suddenly things feel a lot better. Rakuen does such a good job of conveying that sense of fear and unease you get as a child when you’re in a situation that you can’t control, and then the relief when suddenly your family is there and you know you’re safe. The inclusion of the Boy’s Mother really make Rakuen stand out, especially when so many games want to play the orphan card.

Having a hero that’s an orphan helps create a power fantasy because it cuts your hero’s ties to the world and leaves them as a free agent to do what they want/need to do. However I think the inclusion of family makes the story of Rakuen better, more grounded and more interesting. The game does an excellent job of giving you two characters who love each other and who each have a different view of the world, along with different worries and joys.

The hospital scenes of Rakuen could stand on their own as a game. They might need a little support in terms of mechanics, but they are strong. The heart of Rakuen really comes out when the Boy and his Mother travel to Morizora's Forest. In the game Rakuen is a story that Mom and the Boy read together. One of your first quests is to get the book back, and once you do it starts to open up magical doors.

The light in the forest 

The story is about a young warrior who discovers one day that his clan has disappeared while he was out hunting, he eventually learns that they’ve traveled beyond the sea. He then asks Morizora, the forest guardian to grant him a wish to travel after his clan. The guardian grants him the wish once he finishes several quests and then gives him a boat to sail to the land of Rakuen where his clan is. Once they recover the book, the Boy and his Mom decide to go to Morizora and make a wish of their own.

The Boy and his Mom arrive in Morizora’s Forest and the colour hits the game. The music becomes a lot more light and adventury and you feel like you’ve been dropped into an action RPG from the Super Nintendo. As I mentioned there’s no combat, but you don’t miss it. You journey around the world, solving puzzles and helping people out so they can open up the path for you.

Each character you meet in the real world gets a duplicate in the Forest. Your quest becomes to help the other residents of your ward to resolve the problems they’re facing. You help each person first by helping them in the game side of the Forest and then by delving into the darkness of their own minds. Between these two sections for each person, you experience blind hatred and racism in the face of natural disasters, families falling apart under the stress of the death of a family member, domestic violence, abandonment, and dementia.

Rakuen shows a child's view of a lot of problems

If that sounds hard to play, that’s because it is. Fortunately, you also have to skip across rocks, water plants, find sticks, serve tea, make friends, sing songs and go to a festival. In this way the game feels true to life, letting you experience both the hard things the Boy has to learn and the joy he gets to have in his fantastic adventure with his Mom.

But some problems are just to make the locals happy

The antagonists of Rakuen are apathy and despair. Each adventure the Boy and his Mom go on help teach them how to retain their spirits during the hard times. By extension you get to learn this as well. This helps the game hold together in the later stages, as you realize that the Boy’s condition is terminal and that this journey has a lot to do with helping him and his mom learn how to say good bye.

They are manifestations of apathy, but Mom can protect you.

In the final story of the game, you learn about the Boy and his Mom. You learn that his Father worked at at nuclear power plant, and during a disaster, lost his life saving others. In the end the Boy has to fight despair, but you take on the role of his Mom. You get to help him see how much he is loved and how good life is even if his has been short. In the end, you succeed and the end of the game has satisfaction, if not happiness.

The story of Rakuen is really powerful, and provides a lot for people to think about. I also think they way the story is told is also powerful and it demonstrates how games are their own genre of art and their own way of telling a story.

The art in the game is also really well crafted. The sprites themselves are big and vibrant, but the mood they convey is also really well constructed. In particular the difference between the working parts of the hospital, the abandoned parts of the hospital, the more natural parts of Morizora’s Forest and the magical parts of the Forest all have a distinct feeling, but still feel like a part of a whole world. I know that a lot of the time developing the game went to working on the art assets and it really shows.

Finally, it almost goes without saying, but the music in Rakuen is both beautiful and appropriate. Shigihara is an excellent composer, there’s a reason we see videos from her so often in my favourites. She really understands how to weave music into a game experience. As I said, the music is beautiful but also has a discordant aspect that helps to reinforce that not all is right in the world.

Also the game is pretty charming

Things I didn’t Like

This is one of those cases where the things I didn't like are not huge, but as with all games there are some things that could be a little different.

I found the ending was a little confused. Now I may have misunderstood, in which case you can ignore this, but as the boy dies his main concern is who is going to be there for his mom. After the credits however we see Mom meeting her other son with his grandma, and I think they use one of the sprites for the Boy for the other son which was confusing.

One of my favourite lines, but also a confusing point.

I initially thought that the Mom was adopting an orphan, but, after some reading, I was reminded that Mom mentioned leaving the Boy's brother with his grandparents. If the brother had been shown as an infant or a toddler I think the game might have made sense as presented, although some reminders in game might have helped.

I liked the idea of her adopting because it ties in well with the themes of the last part of the game. Either way it would be nice to have a little more clarity in how the end of the game ties into the concerns of the Boy and his Mom and the general themes of the game.

I also feel like the last half of the game was a little light on gameplay. There were several scenes where the action played out in cut scenes when it could have been part of the play. Towards the very end I think this may have made sense, but there were a few times where it felt like the team just didn't have time to add another mechanic. As an indie, and 4 years into development, I can't say I blame them.

Things I Noticed

Rakuen’s style is very reminiscent of the Super Nintendo and that really appealed to me. That style is always very nostalgic for me, so that’s another automatic plus for the game in my book. Beyond that however, I think the game pulls some interesting things from the SNES era of games. When you solve a puzzle, the game gives you an audio cue, but in a couple of places where it’s not evident on screen what you just solved, the game pops up a very Final Fantasy “A door opened somewhere nearby” text note. I think it’s worth noting that this is a perfectly valid approach to some game puzzles. Obviously you want the player to understand what the goal of the puzzle is from the puzzle itself, but sometimes that doesn’t fit in with the flow of the game.

I also though the times where the game didn’t do that were really interesting. Especially in the sections of the game dealing with mental health there are times where the game silently changes the space around you. I thought this was interesting because the game is dealing with matters of dementia and brain damage and it puts that forward in your thinking. It’s also illustrative of the way the game uses the environment for storytelling. You learn a lot about the people you’re helping through changes in the world around you.

One of the hardest parts of the game, emotionally. Told significantly through the environment.

I think Rakuen is particularly interesting because it allows us to look at health and illness in a game. We get to see how people handle illness, especially mental illness and how it affects both the people suffering, but also the people around them. It also allows death to be addressed much more directly because there are no combat aspects of the game.

In Final Fantasy VII, when Aerith dies you’re left wondering too much about the world because you get to regularly bring your party members back from death in combat, why is this death different than that death. By eliminating combat, as such, we can explore death and illness in Rakuen because those issues become a lot more like they are in the real world. That the game does this without sacrificing the game play elements, the “fun”, shows that there’s not a binary in game versus story in game design.

Things I’d Include in a Game

Rakuen feels like a handcrafted game. It feels like a game that someone has checked every aspect of and that it all falls into tight artistic vision and it feels like you’re being told a story by a single storyteller. I know that’s not a thing that can be included in every game but I think it’s a thing that can make some games really stand out.

For that mater, every game should have Teables, because ... tea and Leebles 

The other thing I’d like to to include in a game is a real world story. A game where you try to save people but can’t is an interesting thing. I think it’s similar to my reading of Illusion of Gaia where Will and Kara are not really saving the world but cast in a much more realistic light. . This isn't for every game, of course, sometimes you just need to shoot demons in the face, but Rakuen is a great example of how to keep your story in your game if that`s what you're looking for.

Final Things

I’m not going to lie to you. I’d have loved it, if Rakuen had been the adventure of a boy and his mom solving all the problems of the people in the hospital and bringing beautiful magic to the world and ending up with everyone cured and happy. Sometimes the game reminds me so powerfully of Secret of Mana that it’s somewhat unreal. But if that’s all it was, it would be a disservice to the story Shigihara and her team told here and a disservice to the medium of games.

There is sadness, but there is joy. You are alone, but there are friends on your journey.

Rakuen is worth your time and worth your money. It’s worth it for the story and it’s worth it for the experience. Finally I think it’s worth it just to support the team creating it. I’ve followed the game’s development over the last four years and while “the artists are good people” isn’t the best reason to support art, when the art is this good, I think they deserve it.

Rakuen is an excellent example of how a game can allow you to experience the lives of others.Games are art, they allow you to experience empathy and story in a way other media don’t and Rakuen is a shining example of a game.

The End