Bid Me Discourse, I Will Enchant Thine . . . Arm?

(One Step Forward, Two Steps Back)

The crux of the issue is that I really want to know the street date for Enchanted Arms for the PS3, but I’m afraid to ask. The two main reasons (for my fear) are: First, that I don’t want to hear any PS3 jokes; and, second, neither do I want to hear any Enchanted Arms jokes. I’m a fan of JRPGs, so when reviews arise that advise against purchasing a game based on the fact that the game in question---itself in fact a JRPG---exhibits characteristics suspiciously like those found in a---wait for it!---JRPG, I may somehow not be warned off buying it. But I don’t fancy getting into this conversation with the clerk at EBStop, so I am loathe to call them up and enquire about the street date. Wikipedia says March 13. Gamestop.com says March 27. Ubisoft is only confirming March, 2007. I averaged the two street dates and came up with March 20, which is good enough for the moment.

The street date for Enchanted Arms isn’t really the crux of the issue, however. That was all just a clever ruse. Apparently the game is a piece---I still want to/intend to give it a try, but, to be fair, I hear it’s really terrible. I checked out some comments on the web from players of the previously released X-Box 360 version, and I must say there was an almost palpable sense of displeasure wafting up from the forums. Complaints cover the whole spectrum: People just don’t like the gameplay; the graphics aren’t very good for "next gen"; the voice acting is terrible; the plot is lame; the encounter rate is uneven and generally engineered badly; the battle mechanics are troublesome; the list goes on, and on, and on.

What I did not find on the list was any complaint about the fact that one of the main party characters in Enchanted Arms, Makoto, is a flamboyant transvestite and homosexual. In a demographic primarily populated by males aged 14 to 35 (my approximation), and specifically by the subgroup (X-Box 360 owners) that enjoys games based on shooting every living thing that isn’t from the same country/planet as them, I was pleasantly surprised to find such a complete and utter lack of bigotry in terms of this game.

Congratulations, gaming industry, for your sensitivity! Kudos to you, Ubisoft, for your inclusive sexual politics! I think we should all be very proud of ourselves. Although gaming is often maligned as a catalyst for violence and a hotbed of unfortunate stereotypes, you must admit that the industry has a long and illustrious history of tolerance for transvestism in its products.

Perhaps the most famous and most inspiring instance is Princess Zelda’s male alter ego, Sheik, from The Ocarina of Time. After narrowly escaping Ganondorf’s clutches as a young child, Zelda spends the next seven years, while Link is frozen in the Temple of Time, studying the arts of war under her tutor and bodyguard, Impa. She then returns to Hyrule disguised as (or magically transformed into?) a man in order to aid Link in the battle against Ganondorf and his evil influence. A major theme of The Legend of Zelda series is that of disguising and/or discovering one’s true nature. Even as The Ocarina of Time begins, Link learns that he is actually a Hylian after having been raised as a Kokiri for his whole life. So it is, too, with Zelda, one of the most archetypically feminine characters in the entire genre, who must discover her untapped potential as a warrior in order to save her kingdom after having been raised as a pampered princess for her whole life.

This is one of the oldest plot devices in the history of the book: In order to accomplish her goal, a woman must disguise herself as a man. We don't even bat an eye at this, because we all know that the heroine won't be able to accomplish anything if everyone knows she's a woman. Eventually, inevitably, her hair and breasts will come tumbling out of their hiding places and the male lead will fall in love on the spot, ending the lady's cross-dressing career forever. Shakespeare did it. Tolkien, too. Even Disney has tapped this one without raising any eyebrows.

For some reason, though, it's a completely different story when it's a man dressing as a woman.

As early as 1988, when Nintendo rolled out Super Mario Bros. 2 (arguably one of the weirdest games of all time), they were already on the path to equal representation for sexual minorities. One of the first boss fights was versus Birdo, a pink dinosaur-bird-thing that hopped around like mad and spat eggs at you. The instruction manual had this to say of him: "He thinks he is a girl and he spits eggs from his mouth. He'd rather be called 'Birdetta.'" Later documentation insists that Birdo has always been a girl.

This backpedaling would be distasteful enough if Nintendo were trying to conceal a cross-dresser in the otherwise irreproachable Super Mario Brothers family, but the truth is actually worse. Although at the time---I was seven?---I didn't find anything particularly strange or funny about Birdo, I now suspect that s/he was intended to be a joke---ala, that guy who wants so badly to be a woman that he's quite literally got eggs spewing out of him. In order to defeat Birdo, the player is tasked with catching the eggs in midair and hurling them back at Birdo until s/he is knocked unconscious, dropping the key to the next level. (I don't think that metaphor needs any explanation.)

Which brings me back to the case of Enchanted Arms, in a sort of roundabout way. What I mean to point out is that it’s hardly revolutionary to feature a transvestite in a video game. (Much more revolutionary is that Makoto is also gay, which doesn’t seem to have been the case with Sheik, or even at issue with Birdo.) Ubisoft, you don't score any points for being on the cutting edge of youth subculture. It's been done before. What would have scored some points, and been truly revolutionary, would have been to include a transvestite or homosexual character who isn't a running joke, as Makoto appears to be. From Ubisoft's website:

Atsuma and Toya's classmate at Enchant University. Atsuma and Toya are his best friends. Makoto is openly gay and his friends like to call him the "yellow otomegokoro."* He is blindly in love with Toya and centers all of his actions and thoughts around Toya. Makoto has a confrontational attitude with Atsuma because he is jealous of Atsuma and Toya's close friendship.

* According to this dictionary, "otomegokoro" seems to translate to "girl's feeling, maiden's mind."

I was proud to see people in the gaming community refraining from making fun of this character, even when Ubisoft appears to have set him up as comic relief, in favor of making fun of more concrete aspects of the game, like the gameplay. Ubisoft's brief description of him defines him only in terms of his relationship to his "best friends," Toya and Atsuma, who call him names. I wonder if they also throw eggs at him? I'll have to play the game for myself to really assess the situation, but you have to admit, on the surface at least, it looks pretty bad.

Therefore, in conclusion: If you know the street date for Enchanted Arms PS3, can you please leave a message in the comments? kthxbye