Saihate no Ima Video Update #2: They Should Give Me An N1 Certificate Just For Being Able To Read This Game

Hi all -- as usual, I hope you're doing as well as you can!

Last week, I posted an update on my adventure through 2005's beloved torture nexus, Saihate no Ima. Since that update, I have finished what I presume is at least 2/3rds of the game, if not more, and figure it's time for another update. This post will contain spoilers for some pretty major plotbeats of the game, but I'm going to be honest: I don't think spoilers can affect your experience of playing Ima that much.

Never the less, you should stop reading here if you're bothered by them. I've put a cute little screenshot of Youko from the game as a barrier between this opening and the spoilers.

Are you still with me? Good, because now I can explain why spoilers don't really matter for Ima: this game has too much goddamned plot for them to matter. No, seriously, that is not a joke. Saihate no Ima is, legitimately, the densest piece of fiction I have ever read, which is saying something since I still actually don't quite understand what the elevator pitch of the plot is. It's like, 'seven people get trapped in a time loop which may or may not be part of a computer simulation that's part of a larger war over human independence' or... something?

It's quite a lot, but there is method behind the madness. Not only were the nebulous "friends who have actually completed it and read dozens of essays on it after finishing it" I mentioned in my last post right about the game eventually having a coherent throughline (which I will get to in a moment), it is also so chock-full of ideas that I could in no way hope to cover everything in my video.

Just off the top of my head, the first so-called "Scenario" (of which 3 actually exist) goes into the nightmares of being a single working mother in Japan, the effects of various forms of child abuse and isolation on the psyche of those who experience it, psychosis, pharmaceutical scandals, how people drive other people out of spaces, the depths we'll go to protect our friendships, what the very nature of friendship is, whether or not the drive for human companionship is born out of a selfish desire, and MUCH more.

And then Scenario 2 plays out as somewhat of a repeat of Scenario 1, rehashing much of the same content but with radically different endings for characters and new scenes added in that flesh things out. Suddenly, the game starts making direct mention of the fact that characters are actually "Users," and there's multiple categories of "Users." The computer allegories and therefore doubts about the veracity of what's happening are important, because as it turns out later, Ima's plot may not be entirely real. It's at least a big ol' sci-fi loop, the main character has a tendency to disconnect from reality with '503 Service Unavailable' errors, and there's constant mentions of 'linking.'

There might also be drugs that give you psychic powers or something, and the game spends an immense amount of time on new themes, including: the psyche of serial killers, the horrifying realities that accompany free will and the desire to be controlled by others, how the desperation for company can lead you to devalue those you are around, and then, this.

This memo as it's called is, seemingly, somewhat infamous. It comes out of nowhere towards the middle of Scenario 2, and is, as I understand it, Romeo reflecting on how the internet has affected the way we treat other people, particularly those we deem as 'of twisted hearts.' Society is convinced that it must protect peace (common good, family, etc), and therefore, it must uphold its rules to do so. And yet, upholding these rules often leads to ostracization - we banish those we disagree with, regardless of ill actions or not.

This is pretty obvious and has been a thing as long as we've had society. Romeo breaks no new ground here and knows this - but what is horrifyingly prescient is that Romeo correctly comprehends, based on nascent 2005 internet culture, that the world and human interactions being reduced to text and images on the screen would fundamentally reshape how this works. As Romeo states, if existence is reduced to mere characters on a screen, then even a lone person who rejects the world and shuts themselves in a room can become 'of heroic status' through hatred, through scorn, through any number of reasons.

Essentially, Romeo saw that the internet; through reducing communication to something wholly abstract; was inevitably going to lead to social media debatebros, to mass dogpiling, to the Main Character of the Week, to the Wrong Side of TikTok, and so forth. The internet was going to, and has, brought our tendencies to ostracize, to uphold "rules," and to destroy communities for the "sake" of our community, beyond its limit.

This memo is the throughline of Ima, and it's a sobering and depressing read that I really can't do justice to in a small update, in particular because it ties so much into other themes the game already subtly expresses, and will express. It represents much of what I personally want to focus on my video for Ima, because I've had a lot of pretty complicated and frustrated feelings about the current reality of the internet as of late.

And that is exactly why I say spoilers don't really matter for Ima. No matter how much you read about the game, no matter how much I personally say about it, you aren't going to get even a fraction of what's within it. Being able to fully explore every idea Ima presents would basically require you to be a quintuple PhD in biology, philosophy, computer science, international relations, and Japanese, and to have an infinite amount of time on your hands, and I am not sure a single person like that exists.

It also doesn't help that a complete analysis of Ima is impossible, because Ima isn't complete. Scenarios 3 and 4 are completely missing for mysterious reasons, and you feel this loss the second you start Scenario 5. S2 ends on a cliffhanger that teases the truth behind our main characters existence after hours of doubts over how much of what we're seeing is real and fake, and the defeat of a major villain in the story, which should have long lasting reprecussions to discuss.

But suddenly, the entire story that has been built up for 30 hours vanishes, and you're plonked into a bunch of off-white lab-sterile backgrounds with a new cast of characters, and literal hours of jargon to read: all in service of exploring a war that's about to happen, and a plan to give everyone the 5G Covid mindcontrol vaxx. But really, what I remember as I write this is the post-graduate level academic texts thrown at you one after another mere minutes after starting the scenario.

Ima is infamous for being one of the hardest works of otaku media to read, and I cannot disagree with that reputation. It's been years since I got literally got headaches trying to read something in Japanese, and I found myself having to take breaks every 50 minutes or so to avoid those turning into migraines. Because on top of the game throwing tons of jargon at you in supremely inaccessible academic language (no seriously this shit reads like post-grad medical texts), it also does this using the hyperlink system I mentioned in the first blog post... and these links can go 2, 3, maybe 4 deep.

Here's a great example of this: at one point, the game mentions the WHO, and if you click on the WHO hyperlink, you get a massive text dump about fictional political affairs written like a Wikipedia article. This text dump has another link to explain the fictional vaccine incident (which is scarily similar to the modern COVID conspiracy theories), and then one or two pages into that, you get a link to an explanation about how memes work. Except memes now are genetic virus data that they're... putting... in the vaccines??? To control people for the Global Village Plan? And that has its own hyperlink, which I think leads to something about unmyelinated nerve fibers or something???? I don't even remember why I googled unmyelinatred nerve fibers...

By the way, all of this is important. Like, really important. You need to understand that the WHO (or maybe it's the Japan + US partnership that formed after they both left the WHO, I need to re-read the hyperlink) is conspiring to put memes in the vaccines in order to indoctrinate people into the Global Village Plan so they can have mass control over society. It does not matter that this isn't in the main story text, this hyperlink glossary is REALLY important.

Oh, also, there was the main story happening under all this. You didn't forget that the characters were talking about the internet war that's about to happen, right?

It's so much, and it just does not relent. I genuinely feel like I need to re-read massive chunks tomorrow because I feel like I don't understand certain things correctly, and I... kind of love it? It feels like Ima genuinely, really enforces you to engage with it through its density and friction, because it wants you to think about its ideas.

And those ideas really are worth thinking about! In particular, that core idea of stratification and violence through modern communication gets expanded upon in fascinating ways. Romeo repurposes Marshall McLuhan's idea of the global village to create a key plot thread about how the internet has simultaneously connected the world, and stratified it.

It has not lead to a unitarian understanding, but enabled the urges society instills in us to separate ourselves based on religious, philosophical, and political ideas, and then to reject everyone from our communities who would dare to separate from us in any way. And key to the story is the idea that this is extremely beneficial for fascists and totalitarianists - those with power find it very beneficial to have the general populace living under the simultaneous illusion of connection and intense social separation.

These are ideas we discuss somewhat regularly now, but Ima really does feel like it belongs in the same realm as titles like MGS2 in terms of how forward thinking it was with predicting the ways the internet would morph and affect us now. And the fine details it goes into, the ways it discusses it, beats out a lot of modern analysis in terms of its quality.

So where do I stand so far with Ima? Like I said in the last post, I still think it's absolutely goddamn brilliant and horrifyingly prescient. It's a bit in over its own head at points with the density of text - not helped by literally being unfinished - but it's still an incredible ride so far that I look forward to trying to decipher, and soon enough, make a video on. After it, though... dear god, I need something easier. I hear that 'ManoSoba' game is pretty popular with the zoomers right now.

Okay, see y'all later. o/