The Tragedy of Moma Kumakura
The second instalment of the Zero Escape series, Virtue’s Last Reward, was conceived from a game that was not initially intended to have a continuation. Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, released three years prior and before Spike and Chunsoft fused into one, had successfully opened and closed its case, with a possible sequel hook at the very end but nothing set in stone just yet. 999 didn’t reach notable success in Kotaro Uchikoshi’s home country of Japan, but it became a cult hit overseas, where the overwhelming support from American fans was able to keep Zero Escape rolling for two more entries.
Looking to appeal to Japanese audiences that little bit more, the second game had two major cards up its sleeve: one was the introduction of a mascot character known as Zero III (if you’re wondering about the two other Zeroes, they appear in other titles), a garishly-coloured rabbit whose loud personality and love of species-related puns blatantly ride the coattails of Zero Escape’s sister series and its own beloved face, Danganronpa’s Monokuma. The other was the return of who the Japanese popularity polls for 999 revealed as its most popular character in the region — Clover Field, a cheerful young girl with an unstable demeanour.
Virtue’s Last Reward banks every single chip of fan service it has on Clover. She is hardly the only sexualised female character in the cast: her good friend and co-worker Alice, for one, is blessed with curves she makes little to no effort to hide; however, her condescending, impatient attitude acts as an intentional turnoff, much like it did for Lotus from the past game, similarly as beautiful as she was unpleasant. (No shade. Love you, girl!) Clover, on the other hand, is thrust headfirst into the “brainless beauty” trope, a far cry from her childlike mannerisms of 999 — though those are very much still there, as she gives cutesy nicknames to dead animals and misreads “pantry” as “panty” in its own immensely drawn-out dirty joke about how silly this little lady is.
The appeal to Japanese audiences with what was made of Clover shows much more in the region-exclusive promotional game where… huh. Can I write this in? It’s not like I have an editor for this page, but it just gives me such a visceral sense of second-hand embarrassment it feels forbidden. Whatever: it’s a Flash game, since preserved by fans, where the player essentially gets to grope Clover. May I remind the reading audience that she is 19 in that game, and Japanese law at the time of release declared that meant she was underage? Because that’s fun, huh?
Teenage sexualisation notwithstanding, the point remains — in order to appeal to a wider public in the sequel, Uchikoshi decided to take a character from the first game and bring their original personality to frankly ridiculous extremes. Why, I sure hope that doesn’t become a tendency!
Yyyyyyyeah it did.
Enter his other major series, kickstarted in 2019 by the widely acclaimed AI: The Somnium Files. It tracks with a lot of what 999 was (and even makes references): a standalone game with a lovable cast, not necessarily written to spawn a sequel but still offering a hook or two, that garnered a sizable Western fanbase, this time mostly composed of Zero Escape or Danganronpa fans looking for something with the same flavour as their since-finished series. Joy ensued when, in early 2022, a sequel by the name of nirvanA Initiative was announced; what followed, however, was some insanely mixed fan reception.
The major thing with nirvanA Initiative is that it was written around what I can only fathom as a direct superior order, because I like to believe it would’ve been better executed if it was Uchikoshi’s own decision: it features a spoiler toggle. When you first boot it up, a dreamlike sequence will play where the game itself directly asks you if you’ve played the first one. If yes, it will ask you questions about the ending; one is a rather minute detail (a bit of a trick question, too, as it asks for the name of the character that got shot in the leg; there are two characters that get shot, but one of them gets it in the gut and inputting his name will get a “this ain’t about him”), the other is the answer to the final mystery. If no, all proceeds as normal.
But what does the spoiler toggle accomplish? The answer: very little. All you will get if you have it on is a bunch of throwaway references to the first game at best, and an absolutely infuriating reason for a character’s appearance dissonating from what the ending established that makes one go “ha ha, very funny, now tell me the truth… wait, that’s the truth?!” at worst. To top it off, in a game that already suffers from cast bloat as it insists on bringing nearly every surviving AI1 cast member over, the need to avoid spoiling their character development (or really, anything interesting about them) makes 90% of them get under the big, old, painful knife of flanderisation.
A fellow AI fan wrote her own, more all-encompassing spiel on the same issue right here, in case you are looking for more examples of that (full spoilers for both games), but what I have decided to focus on here is the particular character assassination that hurt me the most.
I would like to introduce you to Moma Kumakura, the War Horse.
Moma is the chairman of the Kumakura Family, a yakuza syndicate with a bloody past under their previous leader, his older brother Rohan. Rohan was every bit a Saturday morning cartoon villain in essence (his hobbies include organ trading. He does it for fun) and is, in many ways, one of the main antagonistic forces of the original AI. His baby brother, on the other hand, puts on a violent front but is really a pacifistic person; when he rises to the chairman spot, Moma’s main goal is to make the family into a more business-minded organisation and do away with what he defines as “old-fashioned and irrational traditions”. (Despite the direct link with one of our villains, it’s not a connection properly explored, but that is not the issue at hand.)
While that is a respectable goal, neither the narrative nor the characters take it seriously. It wouldn’t be a problem in and of itself normally — this isn’t a game about Moma, he’s a side character that gets, what, seven scenes for himself in a game over thirty hours long. It does become aggravating, though, when nirvanA Initiative makes every single mention of the “clean gang” gimmick be postfaced with “lol what even is a clean gang isn’t he so funny”. Or when the game does remind you that Moma knows of a certain character’s yakuza troubles, and yet makes no move to help with no convincing reason why he wouldn’t, given that his whole thing is that he tries to play it clean in the underworld. The man does nursing home magic shows, for God’s sake, he’s not too cool to help.
But now I do feel like you may be staring at me. I’m nitpicking, I know. It’s a small plot thread, it’s a convenient character to present it, it’s not that big a deal that not every little story presented before the player is developed. Though, the thing is: nirvanA Initiative is packed full of stories it refuses to elaborate on. Ota and Gen’s rivalry; So Sejima trying to reach out to a certain someone; Riichi Chieda and how much he truly cared about the Aioen children; Lien and Moma (and a spoilery third party) being former associates; you get a trail of breadcrumbs that almost begs for fanfiction to do all the rest of the work (and I have taken the bait, I must admit), with nothing else of substance.
And then the spoiler toggle hits and it gets worse.
As said before, hiding away character development and not putting it back on for players who have completed the first game immensely hinders nirvanA Initiative’s treatment of the legacy cast. When it comes to Moma, what this sequel chooses to latch on to is the exact trait that made droves of fans get away from him never to return: the fact that he’s a middle-aged man obsessed with an idol who’s in high school.
It’s a throwaway trait in the first game to begin with. If they wanted to have an old man who likes girly pop music, that’s already funny in and of itself for the comic relief purposes (especially when you consider Moma’s huge complex with looking masculine, given that he is a very short dude already). And, in his first scene with his idol A-set (or “Tesa”, as he calls her), that is exactly the dynamic that plays out: an embarrassed little fan, happy to shake her hand, while she is perfectly willing to rob him. I won’t deny the creepy undertones of some pieces of dialogue in that scene (when Date says he’ll leave Tesa there with Moma, the latter looks way too happy for my comfort), but it does give a general overview of what Moma could have been like if the writers didn’t decide to take a sharp turn towards Make It Disgusting Lane.
Of course, going headfirst for that is exactly what they chose to do. nirvanA Initiative states from the very first scene he’s in that Moma is a Tesa fan, and that literally gets brought up in every single goddamn scene he next appears in. And he gets more of those — the aforementioned seven scenes of the first game become eleven in the second (counting a mention and an audio clip). It gets so ridiculous that, during a short scene where protagonist Kuruto Ryuki goes to Moma looking for information, all we get from our dear War Horse is him calling Tesa his “future wife” and claiming not to have any intel. Because that’s how much he contributes for this game.
Nah, I misspoke. Why, Moma does have a contribution in the plot! And it comes via, let me see here… a scene where his obsession with Tesa actually nearly makes him choke to death. And everyone else involved is ridiculously, painfully ambivalent to this guy thirty years older than this girl being so off the deep end about her that he has fantasies of her asking to marry him, with the maximum acknowledgement of him being a fucking weirdo being two characters essentially gossiping amongst themselves and saying “wow he’s a fucking weirdo”. Ain’t that FUN!
The sad thing is — it didn’t need to be like that. Both games give us glimpses of a reality where it’s not like that. One starts out with a healthier fan relationship without the weird undertones (before bashing your head in with gross shit), and the other actually teases a larger involvement of the Kumakura Family in the main plot, via that connection mentioned above between Moma, Lien and our mystery third person, as well as giving underling Chinpei Wagai a slightly bigger role (before violently pulling the rug from under him for no good reason other than removing him from the narrative). None of these games expand on what could have been; instead, they actively take the worst route possible.
I’d given up on Moma as a character after the Tesa element got introduced in AI1, but when the sequel made it all so much worse, I picked him back up out of spite. This text comes as more or less an articulation of what most frustrated me when it came to him, between the missed opportunities and the spoiler toggle amplifying his worst traits in such a way that I’ve seen people actively differentiate between “Momas” across games, and it serves as a plea. Uchikoshi-sensei, Okada-sensei, or anyone with any sort of direct line to these guys, if you ever find this text — please, by all means, re-evaluate how you’ve treated this character. (And others — but I have said my piece on the part that directly concerns my interests.)
