A Better Lover

[This essay was funded through Patreon under the ZEAL project. ZEAL aims to provide high quality criticism of rarely discussed games and comics, and showcase the talents of exciting new writers and artists. For details and information on how to donate, please check out our Patreon!]

I wanted to love Chu♥lip. I want you to know that. No matter what else gets said, I want you to know that I tried. I really did.

~♥~

I first saw Chu♥lip in the spring of ‘07. I was home from undergrad on break, just killing time. It was in the weird GameStop in the rundown mall one town over.

The price had dropped to $9.99 new and the front of the box had faded and yellowed in the flickering fluorescent light.

The cover didn’t look like it fit with the rest of the games on the shelf. There wasn’t a gun or a sword anywhere, for one, and the protagonist looked like some sort of simian mail carrier. The back of the box promised such features as “Improve your reputation by helping critters and earning extra smooches!” and “Uncover the secret lives of mysterious underground residents!” There was a screenshot of two people kissing in the dark void of space while fireworks exploded around them. It was hard not to be a little curious.

I didn’t buy it that first time, though. I hesitated. It intrigued me. Every time I went home to visit my parents, I’d go and see it, still sitting there on that shelf. When I finally caved, the price had dropped to $9.99 new and the front of the box had faded and yellowed in the flickering fluorescent light.

“Have you heard anything about this game?” the guy asked as he scanned the barcode.

“No, but it’s been here for three years, so I’m buying it. It looks weird. I kinda just want to see what it’s actually like.”

“Mm,” he grunted. “So, wanna put down a preorder? BioShock 2? Final Fantasy XIII?”

~♥~

Sitting in the food court eating bad chicken teriyaki, I snapped a photo of Chu♥lip’s cover and texted it to my roommate. “I found a game for us to play.”

“What the hell is that?”

“It’s a game about smooching a bunch of people until you’re finally good enough to smooch the girl of your dreams.”

“So we’re doing a Let’s Play, then?”

~♥~

Putting that disc in for the first time, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’d barely glanced at the manual. I wouldn’t have looked at it at all, but the back of the box made mention of an “enclosed mini strategy guide.” I paused briefly on the page titled “Smooching for Success”:

Before kissing the girl of your dreams in the shade of Lover’s Tree, you must build your confidence and establish an impressive local reputation. In Chulip, that means you must smooch with everyone and everything that lets you kiss them, but it’s not that simple. Like real life, the only good kiss is a smooch that someone wants.

The game booted up and my roommate started to laugh as the intro theme waltzed out of the television speakers. An awkward voice crooned a lilting melody of dabada’s. I kind of liked it.

“What is this discordant mess?” my roommate joked, still laughing.

I laughed too.

~♥~

The first hour or two I spent with Chu♥lip gave me clear objectives and directions. It carefully guided me through the basic premise of how to kiss people. It was almost painfully linear, but I pushed through it, waiting for the game to open up and let me explore. But then once it finally did, I found myself at a complete loss. The game had been squeezing my hand so tightly, and now it just completely let go.

A little clock suddenly appeared in the upper right corner of the screen, showing me the time of day. The minute hand spun around with an alarming rapidity. I didn’t really know why that clock was important, and what I was supposed to do with it. It just hung over me, terrifying me with the inexorable march of time. It almost felt like it was mocking just how slowly my character walked around the world.

I would later discover that everything in Chu♥lip ran on a schedule. That clock dictated when characters would appear in certain places, and when you could do certain things. For example, the bathhouse is only open in the evening, the policeman patrols at night and shoots anyone not in their home, and the underground residents only show up during certain time windows.

The only good kiss is a smooch that someone wants.

True progress in the game, however, actually required more than just kissing townsfolk and underground residents. The end goal is to get a special letter set so you can write a truly special love letter to the girl of your dreams. For as much as the rest of the game felt like an off-kilter life sim, this part was straight out of old adventure games. There’s a lot of wandering around trying to solve arcane puzzles with odd internal logic and incredibly specific criteria for success. You hoard weird things, hoping to find the correct puzzle slot for it, only to find out that most of it is useless junk. Messing up a puzzle often spells disaster in the form of “heartbreak” damage, which essentially functions like HP in most games. If your HP hits 0, it’s game over.

So that’s what kissing people is for. Each new romantic conquest helps you level up your heart in order to take on bigger risks. When you start the game, you only have 5 HP. Kissing anyone and anything willing is the only way to build up that stat.

And to be honest, when I bought a game about kissing people, I really wasn’t expecting it have something like HP, and I definitely wasn’t expecting it to be so brutal. So when I fell from the monkey bars that first time, and scraped my hearts up so bad I got a game over and had to reboot from my last save, I was upset. I was still trying to figure out how to even play the game, and the idea that danger lurked everywhere in Long Life Town was new to me. Even things the game told me I needed to do would sometimes, randomly, turn sour. Trash cans held important items, but also piles of heartbreak-inducing poop. Failing a kiss attempt earned you a smack, and the game did nothing to indicate how risky each attempt would be. Sometimes you just had to get hurt in order to progress. At first, I didn’t know when I could trust Chu♥lip not to hurt me.

I felt like it was punishing me for playing it my way — for exploring and experimenting and just trying, intuitively, to understand what it wanted me to do.

~♥~

But maybe I was just playing it wrong. Nearly two thirds of the instruction manual was devoted to that step-by-step walkthrough, and the rest was full of tips and hints. The game gave me everything I needed to understand it and succeed in just 28 pages, but I didn’t want to use the guide. It felt like it would be cheating. I thought that games should just be intuitive. I should be able to figure a game out by pushing buttons and just seeing what works. That’s how games are supposed to work, right?

The path to true love is neither straight nor easy.

Was I wrong to hate it for that? Maybe, like adolescence itself, it’s supposed to be impossible without something to help guide you. My own adolescence was rife with pain and hardship. If someone had told me there was a manual to walk me through being an awkward little creature pretending to be a boy, I would’ve gladly taken it. Maybe I should’ve just been thankful that Chu♥lip had a place where it laid all its secrets bare, even if it was somewhere separate from the game itself, buried in sheets of paper tucked into the game case.

One of my friends once told me, “Trying to beat it as a Let’s Play probably isn’t the ideal way to enjoy that game.” Maybe it’s my fault I didn’t have fun.

~♥~

If you watched those old Let’s Plays, then forgive me for all the cracks I made at Chu♥lip’s expense. I was younger and dumber and trying to be funny. I said a lot of things I didn’t really mean back then.

I remember early on, when the game first asks you to step outside the rundown hovel you and your father just moved into, that little simian mail carrier boy stepped into a pair of bright red shoes at the door. I joked, “Is he wearing girl’s shoes?”

Third grade, I’d worn my own pair of girl’s shoes. Bright red, too. Boy’s clothing was so boring and drab — black and white shoes as far as the eye could see, or maybe blue, or that awful neon purple and green combo that always makes me think of Eva Unit 1 and the ‘90s. The girl’s section was full of different colors, including red, my favorite color. I got fitted in girl’s sizes and my parents bought them for me. They were bright red and pink and devoid of all the radical ‘tude that epitomized being a boy at the time. They were happy and cute, and wearing them made me feel happy and cute. I loved those shoes.

The next day at school, I ate dirt. My love of oversized sweatshirts with elaborate wolf and dragon paintings on them had already earned me some scorn, but those shoes pushed it over the edge. “Are you wearing girl’s shoes?” my bully asked before he pushed my face into the playground soil. Years later, I took those words and spit them back out.

But I’m not trying to make excuses. I understand if you don’t believe me when I say I really did want to love Chu♥lip. But I did.

I promise I did.

~♥~

I finished Chu♥lip. I didn’t have to, but I did. Doing the Let’s Plays weren’t that much of a push to keep going, since it was mostly just a handful of friends watching, and no one would’ve blamed me for giving up. But I kept playing, and I got better. I learned how to avoid making Chu♥lip angry. I started using the guide, so I knew the risks. When I did get punished, I knew ahead of time that I’d be able to take it. Yeah, it still slapped me around a little, but now I was stronger. I got good at not getting a game over.

But sometimes I really did just want to give up. I was able to push past the difficulty, but I could never forgive it for its terrible pacing. Chu♥lip would make me just sit and wait, staring at the screen, watching the in game clock slowly tick around to the correct hour so I could do whatever I was supposed to do. And then, half the time, I missed the opportunity. The moment came and went without anything really happening. How much of my time with Chu♥lip was spent just waiting for it to do something? I could take the punishment, but don’t just put me out like that.

Still, I was compelled to keep playing. I guess I wanted Chu♥lip to prove me wrong. I wanted it to surprise me and to become a better game than it was. And there were things that kept me enticed, that offered me promises, that made me want to spend more time in that world even when I didn’t really want to spend more time playing the game.

The music and art direction hit me in a way few other games have. A friend once described it as “Animal Crossing set in the Sector 7 slums.” It was clumsy and weird, even a little unsettling at times. But I found it all endearing. Wandering around a graveyard trying to get a kiss from a tengu while listening to a discordant a capella jazz track hit a little closer to my own youthful romances than I should probably freely admit. Chu♥lip felt lanky and awkward in its own skin. Is it really that surprising that it spoke to me?

And really, what other games have I played with so many potential queer and kinky relationships? A ghostly boy who wants you to chase him around the playground first, a woman in a clam shell who only opens up if you get her hot, a bara lion who owns a steamy bathhouse, some guy in a restroom stall… The subversive potential is there, even if Chu♥lip never lets it go past first base.

Although I guess the whole premise that you’re kissing all these other people as mere stepping stones to smooching the girl of your dreams could be seen as a pretty cynical take on romance. Supposedly, Yoshirou Kimura got the idea for Chu♥lip from seeing how open Westerners were with public kissing, but couldn’t you extend that to a critique of how fleeting we are in love? Is Chu♥lip really about our tendency to get bored with one partner, move on to the next, and all the while pine after some idealized dream lover?

~♥~

I still have my PS2 hooked up. It’s my favorite console. Sometimes I look over my shelf of games, wondering what I want to play. I see Chu♥lip. I hesitate.

Maybe I’ll appreciate it now. Back then, I was still so wrapped up in pretending to be something I wasn’t. Now I’m older and more confident in myself — in my gender and my queerness. I’m also more confident in what I want out of a game. I like games that will let me fall in love and kiss and be queer, and didn’t Chu♥lip give me that? There was a promise there. Unrealized or not, the potential itself spoke to a part of me that at the time I was still desperately trying to ignore.

So maybe now I’ll be able to see past its faults. Maybe now I’ll understand it better. Maybe now I’ll love it more completely.

Or maybe the waves of time have just washed away the immediacy of my frustration. Maybe I’ve forgotten the pain and dissatisfaction.

Maybe what I really loved about Chu♥lip were all the things it never really was. Maybe I loved all the clumsy attempts at intimacy that never happened between characters that never existed. Maybe I loved the idea of hushed kisses in the darkness, of hidden fingers in hair, hands fumbling, making mistakes. Maybe I loved the promise that there was a manual out there somewhere to help you make sense of everything, but not needing it. Maybe I just loved the thought of a game that would hold my hand and whisper, “It’s okay, it’s okay…”

Maybe I asked for too much.

Maybe it’s too much to ask that of anything.