Nanman Revenge In Dynasty Warriors 4

Fives on Friday

Happy Friday!

Last week I mentioned that I’ve been thinking about Dynasty Warriors lately. These thoughts have only intensified as July crossed into August. Never the hottest month, August is nonetheless the slowest. After enduring the heat waves of the early summer August is when I let my shoulders relax. Body language can be its own “OOO” reply. When I am relaxed and heat-zonked my mind wanders back to simple pleasures. I ache once more to take my shirt off under a fan, assemble a list of interesting albums, strap on my headphones, and play Dynasty Warriors until I’ve reached the end of the list.

I wrote briefly about Dynasty Warriors in a newsletter about the start of my Micro Review project. Since that was only a cursory glance at the subject, and since it’s been a few years, I feel like it’s worth revisiting.

Dynasty Warriors is a video game series based on The Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong. Three Kingdoms is a 14th century Chinese novel about a period that lasted most of the 3rd century AD when the Han empire was divided into three waring factions, Shu in the West, Wei in the North, and Wu in the South East. The novel spans generations as power shifts back and forth between the different kingdoms. Armies clash leaving astounding numbers of casualties. Generals face off in duals on horseback whose outcomes decide entire battles. Strategists engage in Loony Tunes level trickery, sometimes with help from weather magic. Though the novel’s sympathies begin with Shu, particularly the three sworn brothers at its head, the story doesn’t boil down to an easy “good vs evil” narrative. Wei are the closest to being the novel’s villains, but only because they’ve got the upper hand for much of the story.

Romance of the Three Kingdoms is long. Over 1,100 in my copy. Still, I read it at least twice start to finish in middle school. I was obsessed with Romance of the Three Kingdoms because I was obsessed with killing time on Dynasty Warriors.

In the Dynasty Warriors series, developed by Omega Force and published by Koei, you play as a character of your choice from a wide roster pulled from the novel. You then guide that character through levels that recreate the novel’s biggest set pieces. You face off against other notable characters on the opposing side, as well as hundreds upon hundreds of anonymous soldiers. While you battle on your side of the map the rest of both armies persistently fight everywhere else where they encounter each other. The battles develop in real time with scripted events like sneak attacks, surging reinforcements, and changes in the weather arriving at reliable intervals. These events change the morale, or fighting spirit, of the combatants. If you kill enough enemy soldiers the survives lose morale. Soldiers with low morale die faster. Defeat an enemy officer in combat and their unit scatters. Defeat the head officer and the level ends.

Because you play as a character luck enough to be born with a name, you can reliably kill hundreds of enemy soldiers single-handedly on your path to complete the level’s objectives. Since individual skirmishes aren’t too difficult, the real challenge of the game is managing the battle as a whole. Your attention is constantly being pulled to different fronts and new developments. In order to play the game at a high level you have to develop a knack for being in the right place at the right time. Play the game well and you’ll feel like you’re participating in the unfolding of the novel. Play the game too well and it’ll feel like you’re rewriting history.

Dynasty Warriors is an easy game to get too good at. Let me offer Dark Souls, another former subject of this newsletter, as a point of maximum contrast. Dynasty Warriors is nothing like Dark Souls. Dark Souls is slow. Dynasty Warriors is fast. Combat in Dark Souls feels like boxing underwater. Combat in Dynasty Warriors feels like mowing the lawn. Dark Souls is mysterious and withholding. Dynasty Warriors never shuts the fuck up. The game bombards you with flashing notifications and repetitive encouragements praising you for every 50 kills or single officer you defeat. Dark Souls has evocative sound design and a grand, operatic score. Dynasty Warriors fills your whole house with the sound of men yelling in the distance and 80s butt-metal lead guitar over 90s breakbeats. I know that describes roughly 40% of the music I feature in this newsletter but trust me, in this case it is not a compliment. What I’m trying to say here is that if Dark Souls is The Good Stuff™, Dynasty Warriors is cheap trash.

Koei is a Japanese company. Over the last month I’ve had several different conversations with friends that unexpectedly stumbled their way to the topic of Japan’s troubled history with China. An Instagram post of a book I read last year about American-Japanese diplomacy following the Meiji Restoration prompted a conversation about how the re-opened Japan tried to speed-run colonialism. A bandmate brought up Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast series about Japanese Imperialism after a rehearsal, flabbergasted at the death tolls left in the Japanese army’s wake. The failed assassination here in the States made me recall videos of Chinese DJ’s celebrating the successful assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister and war-crime denier Shinzo Abe. I suppose, as the Israeli occupation of Gaza grinds on, that it’s difficult to keep other examples of settler-colonialism out of one’s mind.

I’m not saying that all Japanese adaptations of Chinese subjects are fraught with this history, to be clear. Dragonball started as a loose riff on Journey To The West, and if you don’t like Goku you can get bent. And again, by the time you read this letter I will be shirtless, blasting heavy metal, and playing Dynasty Warriors 4. It’s just that I will also be thinking about all this other stuff while I do so. I’ll think about this stuff a lot if I play the level “The Nanman Campaign”.

Late in Romance of the Three Kingdoms, stratigest Zhuge Liang, in an attempt to shore up Shu’s position against a formidable Wei/Wu alliance, marches south to put down a rebellion from the Nanman territories in present day southern China. The novel depicts the Nanman territories as an exotic backwater, unincorporated into the rest of the empire and distinct culturally from their Han neighbors in the north. Though he looks down on them, Zhuge Liang understands that in order to quell the rebellion he needs to earn the respect of their leader Meng Huo. To that end he repeatedly outsmarts Meng Huo on the battlefield, capturing him and releasing him seven times until he finally surrenders. The whole affair is a light, humorous diversion from the main story.

Dynasty Warriors typically treats this part of the novel with the same “humorous” touch. Since Dynasty Warriors is cheap trash, this means that the Nanman are a racist cartoon. They wear loin-clothes, body paint, have feathers in their hair and animal bones as weapons. They have noticeably darker skin than the rest of the playable characters. Koei saw the assignment of depicting “southern barbarians” and threw every colonial cliche they could get their hands on at it. True to the novel Meng Huo is a blowhard loud mouth who vastly overestimates his chances of besting the Shu forces. However, the idea of the player coming to respect him when he looks like he walked out of a banned Tintin comic is a stretch. The game does not want you to respect the Nanman. It wants you to crush them. Even as a teenager I found this very uncomfortably.

Luckily, because Dynasty Warriors 4 is a cheap piece of trash, their colonialism simulator failed in an interesting way. “The Nanman Campaign” in Dynasty Warriors 4 isn’t fun, light, or “funny” at all. “The Nanman Campaign” is a fever dream straight out of Heart of Darkness. It’s the end of The Man Who Would Be King distilled into a video game. It is nearly impossible to recreate the events of the novel, even at the lowest difficulty. Your allies die get trapped in poison swamps. Unseen archers pelt you with arrows, slowing your progress to a crawl. Elephant riders crush you underfoot or send you hurtling into the air. Nanman soldiers never stop spilling into the map even as their officers die. Unless you’re an absolute freak at the game, the entire Shu army will crumble around you, leaving you to take on the entire Nanman nation singlehandedly. It’s doable, but it suuuuucks. Beating the level solo can take upwards of an hour. It never feels like you win, only that you survive.

Earlier I mentioned that high-level Dynasty Warriors feels like rewriting history. “The Nanman Campaign” gives me the same feeling but in the other direction. Seemingly by chance Koei buried a story of anti-colonial revenge deep in the guts of their imperial power fantasy. It doesn’t forgive the racist art design, but the game play forces you, one way or another, to respect the Nanman.

The cheap stuff can be The Good Stuff, even accidentally, if you know how to read it. But I’ve gone on long enough, let’s get to the tunes.

# # # # # The Self Promo Zone # # # # #

• Next week I’ll be playing drums for Bellows on a short tour of the Northeast opening for Terror Pigeon. You can find a full list of the dates on Terror Pigeon website, we’ll be on the tour from 8/4 to 8/9.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Listening Diary ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Here are five songs that I enjoyed listening to recently! You can find a Spotify playlist with all of this year’s tracks here.

“Round Trips” by Yaz Lancaster (AmethYst, 2023)

This week’s Listening Diary features a number of selections from my label mates at People | Places Records. Written by Andrew Noseworthy and performed by Yaz Lancaster, who co-run People | Places, “Round Trips” might as well be the de facto theme song for the label. It suits that role well. A three way conversation between lancaster’s chopped up voice, violin, and other sounds that are harder to pin down.

“Buddha v.3” by Emmanuel Jacob Lacopo (Eastman, 2023)

Another P|P tune. This album features four variations on the piece “Buddha” by Julius Eastman. In the third variation Lacopo layers each individual stave of the score as a separate guitar line. Even though the piece still progresses linearly, the effect is something like hearing the music from an omniscient, “unstuck from time” perspective. At first distressing, gradually the drone settles into a soothing stasis.

“Kinda I Want To” by Nine Inch Nails (Pretty Hate Machine, 1989)

For the twenty years I’ve been listening to Nine Inch Nails (uh, jeez), I’ve always considering this Pretty Hate Machine album cut to be merely fine. This summer it finally clicked. I think the Challengers score uncorked something in the way I listen to Reznor music. It’s easier to appreciate the horny club kid lurking behind the grinding guitars and artsy drones. There might not be a better thesis statement for the post-catholic blend of desire and dread in Reznor’s catalog than “I know it’s not the right thing/I know it’s not the good thing/but kinda I want to”. In every subsequent NIN album Reznor finds out why it was not a good or right thing, but here he’s still thoroughly in the “fucking around” phase.

“Ornithopter” by Nick Joliat (Casio Music 2, 2023)

Back to P|P, here’s a piece made entirely out of Casio keyboard sounds. Joliat gets some amazing stuff out of limited gear here. Slick, shifting time signatures, eerie counter-melodies, all written in a way that highlights the unique qualities of the instrument.

“Latency” by Connor D’Netto & Yaz Lancaster (Latency, 2023)

The theme for this final P|P tune is the difficulty of “synching up” while collaborating. It’s like the graduate program version of the idea behind calling a band The Postal Service. D’Netto & Lancaster turn faulty connections into fruitful ruptures. Freed from the burden of moving in sync, the sounds are free to operate at their own pace.

\ \ \ \ \ Micro Reviews / / / / /

Here are five micro reviews from my high school and college CD collection. Long time Lamniformes Instagram followers will recognize these from my stories back in late 2020, however they’ve been re-edited and spruced up with links so that you can actually hear the music instead of just taking my word for it.

South of Heaven by Slayer (1988) - Thrash Metal

Slayer’s “slow” album, which just means that it isn’t as fast as Reign In Blood. The songs are regular length and have more defined arcs as well. I think there’s a real case that this is their best. The quality dips a bit at the end, but that opening salvo and the stretch of “Mandatory Suicide” through “Read Between The Lies” is top tier Slayer. The lyrics are dumb as usual but god damn did they strike gold with the riffs here.

Awake? by Zao (2009) - Metalcore

A long running 90s hardcore band that has changed lineups so many times that they have essentially been three different bands. This isn’t one of their best. The clean vocals really don’t fit. The band performs well, but the songs just do not pop. The album they put out in 2007 does all of what they’re doing here much, much better. Still, can’t knock them for still sticking with it after so long.

California by Mr. Bungle (1999) - Art Rock

Until recently, the final Mr. Bungle record. After two albums of batshit clown nightmare music, this was their version of pop music. Lots of doo-wop, surf rock, Beach Boys stuff, swing revival, etc. Probably my favorite of their records because they use their immense skills to entertain instead of troll their audience. They save the truly outrageous stuff for the very end. It’s still got that classic Patton sarcasm, but he’s less of a dick about it here. Cool record.

Undoing Ruin by Darkest Hour (2005) - Metalcore

Their first album with Devin Townsend producing. Townsend pushed them hard to be a more melodically rich and texturally colorful band. I fell in love from the first fade-in. If I had to make any criticism it’s that this record is front loaded, but that’s hardly damning when the back half is good too. Lyrically this one is pretty distinct from other metal, urging the listener to find meaning and purpose in life rather than emphasizing the negative. Life affirming, beautifully written, righteous as all hell. A personal favorite.

Mabool: The Story of the Three Sons of Seven by Orphaned Land (2004) - Progressive Metal

A re-telling of the biblical flood. This time God turns on the cosmic faucet because of the conflicts between the three Abrahamic religions. This record got a ton of hype as a hidden gem of the 00s and was one of my first exposures to metal from outside of the US or Europe. I was expecting this to be a slog, but it’s actually really good. Every song is distinct and there’s a ton of cool melodies and rhythms throughout. The blend of Mediterranean folk instruments with heavy metal works much better than you’d expect. Obviously this album did not achieve the band’s goal of peace in the middle east, but that’s an absurd standard to hold a prog metal record to.