Sigma Harmonics: Deconstructing Truth One Mystery at a Time
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Note: All translations are my own.
Sigma Harmonics is a mess of a video game. More concerned with creating a stylish aesthetic than with basic coherence, it refuses to obey any logic other than its own. This is why, stylish though the game may be, confusion so heavily defines the play experience: plot points that make no sense, narrative and play elements that feel tangential to the game’s world, etc. Most people would probably consider these valid reasons to dismiss Sigma Harmonics. For me, though, it’s these qualities that make the game worthy of study in the first place. Sigma Harmonics’ eagerness in committing to the fantasy story/anime trends that were popular at the time and its failure in replicating them arguably make those trends more apparent than if the game had been more successful. What the game represents is an opportunity to better understand the Japanese pop media landscape it wants to belong to, shortcomings and all.
To provide some basic context, Sigma Harmonics is an RPG from Think Garage (published by Square Enix) that was quietly released for the Nintendo DS nearly a decade ago. Its opening moments are similarly humble: Sigma Kurogami, a teenager born into a wealthy zaibatsu (industrial conglomerate) family, spending time with his friend Neon Tsukuyumi. Or at least they’re humble for the protagonists. The player, meanwhile, receives vague yet foreboding hints throughout these scenes that such a peaceful existence can’t last forever: random outbursts of television static, a shadowy figure watching their actions, a clock slowly ticking. Eventually the clock strikes noon and the illusion shatters. The Great Clock (an artifact the Kurogami family is charged with protecting) breaks, and Sigma and Neon are flung 50 years into a future devoid of human life and overrun with otherworldly creatures known as Ouma. To restore the rightful order of things, the two of them must fight the Ouma, navigate the polluted timeline, and uncover the conspiracy behind the Great Clock’s destruction.
As important as these events may sound at first, their actual importance to the game is difficult to describe. In truth, Sigma and Neon’s quest is nothing more than a framing device the game uses to connect together the various murder mysteries the two of them solve throughout the story. But it’s not an arbitrarily chosen framing device. The ideas Sigma Harmonics begins on, like uncovering some great conspiracy or the fate of existence resting on the characters’ ability to do so, provide vital hints about what it finds so fascinating about these murder mysteries. Carrying out justice isn’t among the game’s concerns, and an appreciation of the mystery genre’s craft is, at best, a secondary interest.
What really captures Sigma Harmonics’ interest is the power that truth and reason hold. Its fantasy is one of man’s intellect turning the world’s contradictions and inexplicable mysteries against themselves through pure deductive reasoning. Its murder mystery narrative frames reality as a series of fundamental truths to be uncovered, and the Ouma as a force the world exerts to prevent the protagonists from uncovering those truths. However, I feel this description may minimize how direct and thorough the game is in interrogating that fantasy. Sigma Harmonics doesn’t feel it’s sufficient to merely state what awesome power the truth holds. It believes that to make the truth as alluring to us as it is to the game, it has to answer more granular questions like what truth is and how it exists.
Most of these questions are understandably answered through play. Players guide Sigma throughout the Kurogami mansion, looking for clues and eventually piecing them all together to figure out who the killer must have been. (There are also random battles against the Ouma as Sigma wanders the mansion, but their importance to the narrative is much weaker.) And in our quest to gather clues, Sigma Harmonics encourages us to pour every detail of any given room, no matter how minor. Such a clinical study puts significant distance between us and the world, but it’s that same distance that facilitates our becoming the highly skilled detective we’re meant to be. By standing at a remove from the world, we limit emotional attachment to any particular part of the case. We can look at the world through an impartial, truly objective lens.
The Reasoning segments specify this even further. To offer a brief summary of the feature, Reasoning is when Sigma finally uses the clues he’s gathered to solve a given case. He places the known facts on an Othello board to visualize the relationships between facts, answer key questions, and make insights he couldn’t otherwise make. In other words, it’s a visual metaphor for the deductive reasoning process. In theory, Reasoning should feel disempowering. We’re made aware that there can only be one true scenario amid infinite possibilities, but we’re given no promises about being delivered to that scenario. Surprisingly, the opposite happens: we feel as though we have control over these events through reconstructing them. Not just control over how we understand these events; when fragmented clues leave us only with the effects of unseen actions, reason determines not only how we understand those actions, but what those actions must have been. We find order within the chaos, imbuing ourselves with godlike authority in the process.
Sigma Harmonics is unique in how far it pursues these themes. However, it is not unique in choosing to explore these themes. Thematically speaking, Sigma Harmonics fits neatly with this broad trend in Japanese popular media of centering reality around a single principle the main characters dedicate themselves to: love, justice, etc. To be more specific, the game belongs to a much smaller trend best exemplified by the games that would follow it: Persona 4, Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, Danganronpa, etc. Regardless of whether or not any of these games agree with one another, putting Sigma Harmonics in conversation with them makes it clear that all of them respond to the same underlying assumptions: the belief in a single objective truth structuring our own existence; and the ability to, nay, the need for human inquiry to determine what that truth is.
Often it’s a matter of ensuring our own survival, lest our self-induced ignorance lead us to an untimely demise. The Nonary Game can only end once all its secrets have been unveiled. Yu Narukami must reach out to the truth if he’s to insure the safety of those he cares about. And on some level, it’s comforting to know that there’s a definite order to the world that we can understand, even if that order doesn’t work out in our favor. Yet at least for those stories that uphold truth’s importance, their moods are often too affirming to be reduced to something as bare as survival or as contented as minor comforts. They see in truth an alluring power to have in their grasp. What makes the truth so important, so central to the world’s existence, is that it imbues a given party’s vision of the world with an authority others can’t challenge. After all, if our authority stems not from any one person’s ability to grant it, but from an objective assessment of what the world is, then that authority becomes absolute. We’re freed to exercise at our own discretion the power truth grants us, safe in the knowledge that nothing can challenge us.
Not even the world itself can stand up to truth’s authority; especially when it’s aligned with reason, as it so often is in these stories. I don’t mean this in the sense that the truth itself is reasonable. In fact, the truth in these stories is anything but. Rather, I refer to how reason can unveil the fundamental truths of our existence, and in doing so, tame an otherwise chaotic world. The most poignant example of this occurs at the end of Persona 4: the truth is such a powerful force, the game argues, that it can force even the gods themselves to submit to an otherwise lowly mortal.
Returning to Sigma Harmonics, the parallels between this trend and the game’s own project are abundantly clear. And at least at first glance, it appears that project would justify the Kurogami’s upper class status by connecting it to the humanity’s survival — who else can protect the Great Clock and hold the Ouma back besides this family with the wealth to do so? Yet given how much more vigorously the game expounds on what truth is than its peers, it’s more likely the game is interested in the power of truth for its own sake rather than as a means to some end.
The irony is that Sigma Harmonics undermines its faith in one central truth to reality by the very method it uses to arrive at and uphold that truth. Reasoning may help the game demonstrate how truth is constructed, but in doing so it admits that truth is something to be constructed. And once Sigma Harmonics admits this, it’s forced to admit several other statements that further undermine its ideals. Truth, now an idea of purely human origins instead of something already existing in the world, loses it claim to natural authority. Indeed, it can no longer act as any authority, since the board’s multiple possibilities now all have an equal claim to being truth. Which one the player accepts becomes a matter not of the connection that possibility may have to reality, but of the effort put into building and enforcing it as truth.
Sigma Harmonics doesn’t have an answer to this. That isn’t to say it doesn’t try. Depending on how well you’re prosecuted a case, the boss at the end of the chapter is easier to defeat. And once the chapter is over, you receive a grade based not only on whether or not you chose the right answer, but on how well you prosecuted that case. Regardless of their intent, neither feature sufficiently addresses the key issue facing the game. They’re not like a bad ending, which firmly establishes the existence of a single truth by denying emotional resolution to those who pass it by. Assuming I defeat the boss of a given chapter, the story will always proceed as I’d found the right answer, even if that answer is patently false.
That’s because to a certain extent, I did. Whether or not a given theory is accepted as true ultimately rests on winning the battle, regardless of how difficult it might be (IE regardless of how close I was to the actual truth). Far from leading the game back to its intended message, these design elements distort that message further. They introduce and reinforce the idea that a patently false statement can be made to pass as truth if proposed by somebody with the strength to make it happen.
Even ignoring the possibility of human error, there’s still the matter of whether the distinction between true and false is even a meaningful one to make. The cases (and Sigma Harmonics’ lack of control over them) suggests it isn’t. The more you progress through the game and the more you learn about the Kurogami family, the more individual cases unfold into a chaotic tangle of events, each one opening up more questions than the last. This applies both within Sigma’s explanations and directly in the case at hand. Murders often happen without any apparent motivation. The family returns to their quiet dinner mere minutes after hearing about their butler’s death. Events can jump back and forth days at a time without the slightest provocation (despite investigating cases on an hour-to-hour basis). Multiple cases hinge on the actions of family members whose existence was unknown to the rest of the family, only for those family members to be incorporated into later mysteries as though their existence was always common knowledge.
Under different circumstances, it’s easy to imagine this being humorous. Events are so absurd and the characters’ acknowledgements of them so mechanical that the game could pass as a satirical critique of all its genre’s excesses. Yet Sigma Harmonics is insistent about this being a world where anything can happen but there still being a single absolute truth for the player/Sigma to uncover. For this belief to hold true under the conditions the game has given itself, the game must weaken truth’s status as the organizing principle behind reality to the point where right and wrong become functionally indistinguishable. After all, on what grounds can one object to Sigma’s claim that “the maid was the killer because frankly, it could have been anyone” if similarly implausible claims were deemed correct in other situations? Building off that thought, what does the process of gathering and working through clues become but an empty ritual reaching toward some meaning that might not be there?
Before Sigma Harmonics lay two possible explanations. First, truth becomes not just a human creation bound by its subjective origins, but also a fluid and unstable creation; ready to rupture at the slightest disturbance. According to this theory the world becomes abstract material to be worked with, itself unable to grant the clout normally associated with truth. Alternatively, there is some objective truth structuring existence, but one that lies so far beyond human understanding that it can hardly serve as the grounding principle we expect it to be.
In both cases it’s difficult to see how the game can recuperate its initial ideas about the empowering nature of truth. Either we defeat the purpose of that empowerment by directly granting it to ourselves or by empowering the truth so much that we divorce it from reason (not to mention our lived experiences). If anything, the game flips its own fantasy on its head. The characters employ reason not to restore order or in service of some greater ideal, but because it’s the only way they can make their existences necessary to an indifferent world. Sigma Harmonics’ world is one in which nobody is essential; not any of the Kurogamis, not Neon, not Sigma.
All of this comes to a head in Sigma Harmonics’ final chapter. I’ll spare you the complex web of inter-family politics and magical chicanery that brings the story to this point. Suffice it to say that over the course of the story, the pure reason Sigma dedicates himself to practicing slowly divorces him from the reality he inhabits. He’s a Kurogami, yet he’s somehow never directly relevant to the Kurogami family life, and all the functions he should fulfill — the son, the inquisitive young mind, the heir to the family legacy — fall onto other characters. This never seems to bother him — possibly because of the more immediate concern of restoring order, possibly because being removed from this family makes him a better detective. By the final chapter, though, we learn that Sigma’s actions have created the necessary conditions for an outside actor named Rin Housui to put his plans into motion. He rewrites history in such a way as to usurp Sigma’s own existence and render the latter an existential anomaly.
Seeing the chaos Rin has plunged the world into, Sigma performs one last Reasoning session, hoping it can lead him to the answer he needs. But his efforts fail him. There’s no piercing insight like before; no apparent way out of Rin’s machinations. Just when all hope seems lost, Sigma remembers the now-lost Neon and considers the time they spent together both before and during their adventure. This dispels any doubts he once had, giving him the power he needs to restore order to the world. In the end, it’s not his deductive prowess or some great principle that save Sigma, but a personal interrogation of who he is as a person. Where reason backs Sigma into a corner, his memories restore confidence to the existence that Rin previously threw into doubt.
The game, like its characters, abandons any attempt to ground all of existence in a single overarching principle, seeing them as inherently bound to failure. It sees their abstract nature as rendering any connection to reality too tenuous to serve the purpose that they need to. And as we see through Rin, the ability to mold reality to one’s will through a given principle makes the power it grants far too liable to abuse. Sigma Harmonics instead suggests we ground reality in personal truths rather than any one grand principle. While ultimately just as tenuous as that principle (how removed is Sigma at this point from the memories Neon invokes in him?), those truths are both harder to abuse and more material because they’re grounded in something we can immediately perceive.
In some ways, this moment both confirms Sigma Harmonics’ place in and uncovers the ambivalence at the heart of the Japanese pop media landscape. The stock narrative beats it uses, like the youthful characters reaffirming their conviction, speak to a modernist belief in the power of grand narratives. According to cultural critic Hiroki Azuma in Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, there is an irony in this: despite the popularity of grand narratives within fiction, Japanese audiences became disillusioned with those narratives in the 1970s and especially during the 1990s. The works that resonated with them frame smaller personal narratives as the core of their story, even when the thematic backbone alludes to some grand narrative (in our case the power of truth).
Sigma Harmonics’ climax and its appeal to Sigma’s personal experiences fit this framework. The game’s directness in interrogating truth’s status as a grounding principle (and the subsequent stripping from truth its authority) let it more clearly articulate that framework than its peers. However, neither of these facts are enough to separate the game from the cultural ecosystem it emerged from. If anything, they show how critical the game can be of that ecosystem, perhaps without even realizing it.
