Hard Act to Follow: Revisiting “Boku no Natsuyasumi 2” (Part 1)
With last year’s release of Hilltop Works’ English patch for Boku no Natsuyasumi 2, we got the first translation of a game in the Bokunatsu series. I would call this monumental, but of course I would; I’m a hopeless fan.
Fortunately, the number of other English-speaking fans has grown a lot in just a few years, so many others thought this was monumental, too. I’ve witnessed a groundswell of overseas fans thanks to the promise of a fan translation of the first game, the release of two spiritual successors, and the Action Button review — and even earlier, thanks to the PlayStation 3’s region-code freedom, Bokunatsu 3 got a few people onboard back in the late 2000s.
But it’s especially fortunate (if not preferred) that the second entry was the first to be translated. Released two years after the original, Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 represented what was now a series, with a sequel crafted by a team with more experience and the opportunity to explore ideas and themes that they couldn’t before, resulting in a game generally regarded as the best of the four.
My sentimental heart will always say the first Bokunatsu is the best, but my enthusiast brain knows that 2 is the actual best, and absolutely the one to play for most people. (Even creator Kaz Ayabe told me in so few words that it was indeed the best one they made.) So for it to be the first one in English in any capacity is a stellar outcome.
Still, as a diehard fan responsible for some of the first English coverage of these games, a part of me has admired from a distance. This is due to my personal failing to really learn Japanese for 25 years, keeping me from fully appreciating the nuances in the games’ storytelling. Despite that lurking in my closet, it didn’t take Japanese fluency to know that Bokunatsu 2 is the best one. And after playing the game translated, I can now confidently say that because of elements like a threefold increase of characters over the first and Boku’s summer home being a beachside inn this time, the narrative variety that flows in and out of the game, and the filmic touches used to illustrate them, Bokunatsu 2 makes an impact that helps it stand above its siblings.
And so I thought I’d talk about why, first by recounting the game’s release in 2002, followed by analyzing story and gameplay in the next piece. What I won’t be doing is touching on the quality of Hilltop’s translation, because revisiting the game to this length is enough to suggest what I think, and if you want that kind of commentary anyway, I made several observations in my live playthrough.
Prelude
As far as I can tell, as an American kid who could only afford to visit Japan through the internet, our introduction to Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 was roughly a year before its 2002 release, published online in a ”scoop” on the Fuji News offshoot Zakzak. The post was little more than a teaser saying that a sequel to Boku no Natsuyasumi was in the works, and included a picture of the new game’s family as the first glimpse.
The article’s placement itself was strange, though. While Zakzak did have a video game section, it was no Famitsu; this was a tabloid-y publication largely concerned with sports and entertainment news. However, that section was routinely sponsored, at the time taken over by Sony and dressed in Everybody’s Golf graphics. Without a doubt this was a controlled leak, but still, a controlled leak on Zakzak? About Boku no Natsuyasumi? Well, I couldn’t complain.
Information was scant, so the post did raise questions, at least in my feeble mind. Based on the picture, I wondered: was the boy in the foreground the “new” Boku we’d play as? Then maybe the kid back there in the red shirt is the Boku from the first game? Or is this that Boku’s other aunt and uncle, from his mom’s side?!
The answer to all this was no. For one thing, the text already says the only Boku is the one in the background — not that I could reliably translate that in 2001 — and the story was not a continuation but a new telling in the same period.
But details be damned; just seeing that picture and learning of the existence of a Boku no Natsuyasumi sequel was flabbergasting. Having fallen head over heels for the first game a year prior, and with basically no one around to share in my enthusiasm, it wasn’t hard to feel special about this, as if a wish I didn’t even have was suddenly fulfilled.
The year that followed marked my efforts to keep a bead on any new information about Bokunatsu 2 that might pop up from Japan. However, the internet was not yet the Japanese game media’s first place for coverage, so print still ruled. I didn’t have or knew how to get easy access to Weekly Famitsu, for instance, but there were frequent roundups and scans from magazines posted on maverick sites like The Magic Box or Ruliweb, if not officially regurgitated on Famitsu.com International (a short-lived site ran by Gameloft, of all companies).
But being the only non-Japanese person I knew interested in Bokunatsu didn’t fill me with a lot of hope or trust that the people sharing this info from the mags would bother to mention anything that wasn’t immediately interesting to everybody, and could’ve left me ignorant of what was going on with Bokunatsu 2.
Submergence/Emergence
I say “could’ve,” because there really wasn’t much to report. The Zakzak article was intentionally premature, and as I soon learned, games in Japan didn’t get their big magazine blowouts until they were good and ready, usually a couple of months if not weeks before release. In other words, the Bokunatsu 2 marketing train wouldn’t roll through until spring 2002.
And I nearly missed it.
In May that year, I attended E3 for the first time, along with my first experience of southern California. On one of the days before the show, I joined my cadre of friends from the Gaming Intelligence Agency as we took a drive out to some of Los Angeles’ import video game stores. Browsing Japanese games in a shop was exciting enough (I hadn’t been to such a place “in person”), but that was nothing compared to when I noticed a recent issue of Famitsu on a shelf (issue #700 with the gold cover!), casually flipped through it, and suddenly landed on a new preview of Boku no Natsuyasumi 2.
Finally, the character art! Actual screenshots! Confirmation it’s coming!
Thrilled, I brought the magazine and a couple of games up to the counter, cash in hand and ready to pore over the article on the ride back.
Only to be told by the cashier “uh, that’s not for sale.”
No magazine was. They were meant for the small manga lounge in the back of the store.
I didn’t have the charisma to make a deal on the spot—really though, who’s gonna miss a ten-dollar magazine?—I just awkwardly muttered “oh,” let it go, marked another embarrassing moment on my social anxiety scorecard, and went home Bokuless.
But at least I got an update — confirmation that something happened after the Zakzak post. And while it hurt not getting to keep the magazine, it was still gratifying.
At any rate, I knew the game was coming out soon, and I didn’t have to wait much longer before more Bokunatsu 2 material started showing up online. The official webpage was launched, and TV commercials would start running in June, taking on the style of a ’70s home movie where a boy leaves a message to his grownup self. Cute, if not really providing anything new.
The more interesting TV campaign was a 25-installment serialized commercial that ran from June 17 to July 19 during World Business Satellite, a nightly news magazine whose target audience you can probably guess. Each commercial depicts and is narrated by a man writing in his journal, not unlike Boku does in every game. He’s a typical working dad who flatly dismisses video games, but one day sees a commercial for Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 (how meta), is intrigued, driven to buy a PS2 once the game is out, sneakily plays it at night, eventually introduces his family to it, and in that renewed bond finds himself changed. Gameplay is rarely shown, and the narrative device of the journal is supplemented with shots of the man’s living room as he heads to bed or experiences the game.
Needless to say, this arm of the marketing was the best remembered and preserved — back in the day, I did download all the episodes from Sony’s site, though RealVideo wasn’t a lasting format, so luckily, it’s on YouTube.
Mass media was but one stop for the Bokunatsu 2 marketing train. Just before the game’s release, creator Kaz Ayabe opened Millennium Kitchen’s official website, ready to go with pages on Bokunatsu 2 that acted as a sort of companion piece to Sony’s pages. But it was also a mini blog, and for the next several years, Ayabe dutifully posted one- or two-line updates on things like game and merch releases, when the office was closed, and related media appearances.
Before Ayabe signed up for Twitter, I found this to be a valuable connection to not just Bokunatsu news, but to its creator, and today the archived versions of the site are an important time capsule of goings-on at the company.
Incidentally, through Ayabe’s posts, I was informed of a world of PR outside the game industry where Bokunatsu 2 was worth talking about. Not a ton, but little looks at lifestyle magazines and such that had articles about him and the game. There was no chance I would get any of those any easier than that Famitsu in LA, but at least whenever a piece was on the web, I could save it for later.
This PR blitz included Ayabe appearing on the radio program Suntory Saturday Waiting Bar Avanti, a weekly topic-based talk show with the conceit that the guests are all patrons that night at an Italian restaurant bar. (I went on to develop a side obsession with the show, but that’s another story.) On the July 27, 2002 episode, Ayabe was one of three guests on the topic of summer vacation, and going by the description, he discussed the genesis of Bokunatsu and the nature of making a “summer vacation simulator.” The radio show ended in 2013, and fans have uploaded several hundred airchecks on Niconico and YouTube… but so far not that episode. It’s eluded me, and as someone who saved everything I could about Bokunatsu 2 at that time, it stings. But I learn from that loss, and have saved what I could of Ayabe’s video/radio appearances from his promotion of Natsu-Mon.
Solstice
Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 hit Japanese stores on July 11, 2002.
This is where I tell you that as a superfan, I got the game immediately, had the time of my life, and now let’s move on to the review.
No, actually, it was a similar story to how I bought Bokunatsu 1: a few months late.
By the time the PlayStation 2 was released, the financial situation of my mother and I was not great, and I was no help whatsoever as an unemployed 19-year-old mooch thinking he was going to make it big writing about video games. (Whoops!) Point being, I couldn’t buy new games as often as I used to, and that included the sequel to the game I most cared about. And part of the reason I was keeping close track of Bokunatsu 2 coverage on the web is because for months on end, being an outside observer was the only choice I had.
Eventually, after saving a bit of money from writing, I was able to order Bokunatsu 2 online at the start of September. It sucked not having it closer to release, and this was right past the end of actual summer… but I had it, and that was enough.
Wait, no, I also needed a way to play it.
I did already have a PlayStation 2, but I’m in America with no way to play Japanese PS2 games. I could have had a modchip installed, but I was still a little too inexperienced and meek to know where to go or who to trust, and the “flip top” shells weren’t on my radar yet. You would think that maybe I’d have the foresight to get this squared away in the 13-or-so months between the Zakzak post and the game’s release, but again, money was tight and I wasn’t in my best mental state.
However, back in Japan, about a week after the Bokunatsu 2 launch, Sony released new PS2 color variants: the translucent “Ocean Blue” and “Zen Black.” I thought that Ocean Blue, aside from looking great, was a wonderful match for Bokunatsu 2 and its seaside setting. A no-brainer, then: I would save up again to buy the Ocean Blue PS2, and that was that. That required another helping of patience, but only about eight weeks.
And so at last, on October 24, 2002, the PS2 arrived, and I could finally — finally — play Boku no Natsuyasumi 2. Three months late, but in style.
How do I still know the date? Oh, nothing special, it was just the same day they captured “Beltway Sniper” John Allen Muhammad, and I had stayed up through the night watching the live news coverage as authorities closed in. (You see, it was reported that he once lived in my hometown, so at that point I was hooked.) The dust settled early in the morning, but for whatever reason I decided to stay awake the rest of the day so I wouldn’t miss the UPS truck with my PS2. (Once again: not doing hot mentally.)
It took until the late afternoon, well after I was awake for 24 hours, when the package was dropped at my door. My first play of Bokunatsu 2 was on that beautiful Ocean Blue PS2 in the characteristically crisp Pacific Northwest autumn, under a haze of self-inflicted sleep deprivation.
And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Other than “earlier.”
Boku wa Me
As we headed into 2003, it maybe — sort of — possibly — could’ve seemed like Bokunatsu 2 would have a chance to be translated and released in the West. I never had any info it was happening, I was just working on specific vibes.
Consider, for instance, that the PS2 was a confirmed success, and its widespread popularity meant that several of Sony’s licensees started playing at the edges. For example, Midway localized the goth RPG Shadow Hearts; Capcom USA would bring over Sony’s Flipnic and Bombastic (Xi Go), and then there was Bandai’s .hack: when first revealed, I thought the four-game fictional MMO was too high-concept to make it to America, but to my shock it appeared at that fateful 2002 E3, and its anime and manga offshoots helped the IP capture a following. Other neat games that first seemed like lost causes showed up fashionably late, like La Pucelle and Chulip, and eventually Katamary Damacy became the platform’s icon of “weird” Japanese games we thought would never come over. There were still many missed opportunities, but the PS2 in the West was nonetheless getting a number of Japan’s fresh games.
And well, there was Fresh Games, an Eidos imprint representing the company’s new effort to localize Japanese titles. The lineup featured uniform box art branding, emblazoned with funky (as in funky-fresh) bright yellow borders. Typically that uniformity would be an indication of cheapness like a Greatest Hits release, but Fresh was clearly trying a (loosely) boutique approach. Still, who really knows why they went with an imprint, but up to that point Eidos was as British as black pudding, so maybe it made sense.
Fresh Games was around for four years yet only managed five releases. But serendipitously, it began with three Sony games — textbook offbeat titles Mister Mosquito (Ka) and Mad Maestro (Bravo Music), plus the RPG Legaia 2 — games that SCEA or SCEE weren’t as interested in publishing as they might’ve been in the PS1 days.
But it seemed like a precedent to me: given that lineup, a version of Bokunatsu 2 from Fresh Games had the most potential, as much of a tenuous fantasy as it was. But it was also just funny to imagine that edgy yellow border surrounding the pleasant cover art.
And I did imagine it, in Photoshop, mainly for a cheap laugh among my IRC friends that became a micro-meme once I reposted it on Twitter in 2022:
But while the market climate may have felt more inviting, I didn’t invest much actual hope into seeing Bokunatsu 2 in English. My rationale was equally pragmatic and defeatist, the two main points being “it’s too Japanese” (culturally) and “it has vertical text.”
While plenty of Japanese games were already accepted here by the PS2 generation, I’m sure any prospect of bringing over a game that needs reprogramming vertical text boxes, and had a setting firmly planted in everyday Japanese life (the kind without samurai or a city you could whitewash) probably demanded a localization budget as big as two Fresh Games put together.
At any rate, we must acknowledge that Bokunatsu 2 isn’t the precise kind of “artsy” or “wacky” Japanese game that was going to sell at the time. Even the ones that could had trouble: I recall how Sony sibling Ico needed to be propped up by the media to get anyone to pay attention, yet stayed a slow burn until the release of its much-acclaimed sequel. Comparatively, Bokunatsu 2 had no fantasy trappings to fall back on and no high concepts for its genre. It was simultaneously too normal and too odd for an overseas audience.
It did have beauty and depth, but that especially was not going to jell with the Western video game industry of 2002: a patriarchal utopia of Rockstar hubris, Xbox machismo, nine too many “import tuner” games, anger towards a cartoony Zelda, and worst of all: the launch of G4. Little Boku never stood a chance. 🌻
