Exile Election / 追放選挙


Progress does not happen in a vacuum. Every so often we get a groundbreaking, massively influential video game, and while such masterpieces might have plenty of originality, they’re never completely original, and always build upon previous works in some way. For example, take Dark Souls, which formed the bedrock and namesake of the Souls-like subgenre, and has been used as a point of comparison so often it’s become a meme. It’s arguably the most influential game of the past decade (if we exclude the mobile market). But neither Dark Souls itself nor the underlying ideas that led to its success and influence popped up out of nowhere. Dark Souls very clearly inherited a lot from Demon’s Souls, FromSoftware’s previous game. And if this was an essay on video game genealogy and not a review for a game that I haven’t even mentioned yet, we could dig even further and identify Demon’s Souls’ influences.

My point is that for every massively popular, genre-defining game out there, there are going to be other games that laid the groundwork for it. And that means that other games need to actually lay the groundwork. They won’t be highly-polished pinnacles of perfection, but a unique idea or two in an otherwise ordinary package with an execution that will range from flawed to decent. And that’s what I feel like Exile Election is. It introduces some original ideas to the death game subgenre, but they just... aren’t very good. They’re not bad, but not very good, either. Exile Election seems to me like a game that is underwhelming on its own, but will someday serve as a reference point that someone will use to identify, analyze, and rectify in their own game in order to make it fantastic.

Death Among the Undead / 屍人荘の殺人

Sometimes it feels like orthodox detective stories belong to a dead genre. The "Golden Age" came and went a century ago, and that really does seem like it was the perfect time period for classic puzzle plots. Forensics could provide basic information about a crime, but technology hadn't progressed so far that nearly any physical trace could blow a trick wide open. Plus, as the genre has developed and readers have become more savvy, it's become more and more difficult to develop original tricks that will surprise and delight readers.

But then every once in a while you get a work like Imamura Masahiro's debut novel Death Among the Undead which, through sheer originality and style, kindles hope that the genre can be reanimated.