DISCLAIMER: see part one of this article at https://deep-hell.com/bring-me-all-your-love/

FLCL aired in 2001 on Adult Swim, and I remember catching it mid season and having the series be profoundly awkward to watch around older people – it’s a wild time for someone staying up way too late at night. It sticks in your head and makes you fall in love with Anime when you’re not that big of a fan of it in the first place. Kids don’t really know what they like, but age and nostalgia color our perspective with rose and help us catalog the things that affect us most.

I have not, as of writing this (3/15/2020 and we’ll mark it for later) watched either of the follow up seasons FLCL: Alternative or FLCL: Progressive not because of some bitter or resentful “how dare they make a sequel to perfection!” or belief that it can’t measure up: it’s just that coming of age stories tend to come around once, and stick with us no matter what. I haven’t watched them out of I don’t know, a weird sense of gratitude.

As a work of art that sticks to your ribs, I was the kind of person who fell for a particular kind of story early on. Fuck me can you trace the hallmarks of fiction I like back to the moment I watched with a wide eyed fervor a woman with pink hair crash a guitar over a kid’s skull. The sound of the bass rips through the air: all of the jokes that follow it don’t mean shit in that moment.

FLCL would additionally start a lifelong love affair with music that I kept buried for a very long time. I was a music nerd about whatever I could find. Absolutely no critical eye, god damn did I listen to a lot of music nobody in their right mind should be a fan of but for the grace of whatever a theatre kid is and progressive metal fans* (*at 30 years old, I am now a progressive metal fan)

Recently, deep-hell went back in time to write about “THE WORLD ENDS WITH YOU” based on a lingering disappointment I felt after playing its sequel for about an hour. All of the hallmarks are there, the reapers game, shibuya. A little more modern for the time difference, but where the original game is seemingly convinced of the relationship between adults and young adults, THE WORLD ENDS WITH YOU: NEO is once again a game about teenagers, and teenage things. Hiroyuki Ito, the director, has to at least be in his fifties by now.

I desperately, desperately, want to play a game directed by Hiroyuki Ito that uses symbolism like THE WORLD ENDS WITH YOU does to convey the pains of fitting into a scene, making friends and discovering who you are, about all of the ways life changes as you get older. Stories and things we tell ourselves to keep going, making decisions and years later dealing with how they define us. There’s a videogame there, I bet. Hiroyuki Ito if you’re listening: do you wanna knock back a few beers some time? I’m just old enough most days that the hangover isn’t too bad.

I still feel like a kid when I’m surrounded by the professionals. A lot of us take this shit seriously, life or death. It makes me want to sit back sometimes and say “It’s just videogames, man” but have you played ZeroRanger? It might have all of the qualities that snowball when put together and create an avalanche that buries everything it touches and after the controller gets set down you can breathe a sigh of relief and say “that was the Best Videogame I have ever played.” I take that game more seriously than I weight the opinions of some friends when they tell me I need to play DimaHoo. I don’t need to play DimaHoo anymore. I’ve seen the insert coin splash page just enough I can recognize it.

Anyway, have you played ZeroRanger?

Shibuya didn’t change much when I revisited it – I mostly revisit in bed now. The Nintendo Switch is a funny little game console because with the ubiquity of smart phones, maybe some of us have forgotten the difference between playing a game in bed and playing it from the bed. My eyes are screaming at me to stop when I load up that LCD screen in the middle of the afternoon. I’ve definitely played THE WORLD ENDS WITH YOU: NEO from the backseat of a car.

I imagine that FLCL: PROGRESSIVE is a little like THE WORLD ENDS WITH YOU: NEO. So much so that we’ve made the stylistic decision here to render the titles of both in all capital letters. I’m bet it is once again a journey of a teenager through the complicated maze that adolescence creates. Love and heartbreak, all of that shit: that’s not really why I’m there.

I imagine that FLCL: ALTERNATIVE is both a little like THE WORLD ENDS WITH YOU: NEO and FINAL FANTASY XII: LIGHTNING RETURNS in that it is expressly a point where all of the narrative threads of the former season reach some kind of conclusion, and a bit like the latter example in that we do so at the call of the pre-existing cast, having seen everyone grow and change and be able. New lessons are learned and the value of…; What I’m getting at here is that sometimes you just don’t gotta watch shit.

FLCL always got me with the pitch that it was one of those good ol’ wandering fortune anime’s. Haruko rides into town with a mission of her own connected to some grand and large plot, but we only see it develop from Naota’s perspective. There’s about a hundred anime we could name here with the exact same setup, where like usual the perspective stays on a protagonist who’s at the center of events much larger than the location they find themselves in. It is classic Folk’s Walking On A Country Road anime, and to this day I am sure not the plot of Record of Lodoss War and Slayers in equal reasons. The reasons are for the same reason any tabletop RPG has a tendency to play out that selfsame way.

It’s like breaking a spell to see the characters lives intertwined again. The drama, the thing that pulls on the heartstrings at the end of those anime that have VHS lines in our memory and the scratch and fuzz of old tube TV’s in our favorite quotes is knowing they wont. Knowing that when the heroes ride off into the sunset, and everyone stands on a hill and tells them to come back any time, that the journey must continue. There’s no chance we’ll revisit this place except in the lingering feeling of those awful two words: what if?

What if? Anyway, I didn’t even realize I had kind of fallen into the FLCL sequels without even realizing it. I was one album listen away from that time of the year where out of some suspicious act of self care, I throw the original season on and ride one long day into the sunset. Of course somewhere down the road distraction hit and FLCL: Progressive/Alternative’s album got put on.

Most days I’ve got two or three tracks from the album on constantly in the background somewhere. Most days I might even give myself the kind of time that sitting down and listening to something really begs for. I’m not a freak: I don’t listen to everything out of a cellphone. I know in my heart the kinds of times that it’s perfectly applicable to only listen to music out of a cellphone.

You should listen to music out of a cell phone in a car, or to show a friend something. It’s just as appropriate in your pocket with our without headphones. So far gone are the days of proprietary music-listening on the go hardware that there’s no time left to lament them. Really, you can listen to music out of a cellphone pretty much any time and anywhere: I have a sneaking suspicion some cellphones are better at music-listening than they really are at text-messaging or any of the other things we use phones for.

It’s worth it to turn your PC monitor off and put an album on while you clean the house. One of those little bluetooth speakers is a great thing to have in the shower. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy: the great thing about music is there’s still a hobby that’s got an entry point somewhere well below a hundred-fucking dollars. I’ll always urge everyone to go to one show in their life and buy a record from a table with a black-tablecloth in it. Doing that is a tricky way to stumbling drunkly into a hobby with a final price point of your entire life.

FLCL: Progressive/Alternative’s album isn’t one of the best rock-and-roll albums of all time. I bet with no connection with the series emotionally that there’s a billion better rock-and-roll albums. It is, as a sequel to FLCL, damn impressive.

How do we do sequels, anyway? Are we locked into format eternally? Is there space for a world where a sequel can still follow up in mood and attitude but not have to show us any pretty pictures or let us tech new equipment in our inventory and ride with the console cowboys?

I mean hey: th guy’s got a particular audience and he’s way passed the point of self parody. Let’s let Haruki Murakami write The World Ends With You as a sequel to the original game only. At least if the book comes out, I don’t have to spend 60$ on another piece of software I play through a quarter of and read an article about just to set down in agreement.

“I don’t need this.” I’ll say, buried deep in the second strung of tracks from FLCL: Progressive/Alternative’s album that repeat two of the most important title tracks from the first season. You can paint a picture in your head of what happens to everybody if you can allow for it, if you can let yourself tell a story that’s somewhere far removed from the briny world of distant sequels and corporate reminders that we love something.

In a way it’s removed from the way the soundtrack to THE WORLD ENDS WITH YOU: NEO stretches and conforms to directly remind players of the original. In texture and style, The Pillows are still playing to the transient nature of Rock-and-Roll that they were twenty years ago, with a whole two decades of confidence to fill the intervening decades. Is that the nature of a follow-up work, just to constantly be looking back and reminding us of the original, with a little style and flair as if to say

“It’s changed, but it’s still the thing you love.”

I haven’t finished THE WORLD ENDS WITH YOU: NEO and I probably wont. We’re neck deep in about a dozen other videogames now that aren’t connected to ideas we had when we were teenagers. They might be referencing old stories, but that’s the trap of adulthood, right? The good adults in THE WORLD ENDS WITH YOU, FLCL, the ones that are worth something: they’re the ones that continued to grow as they got older.

Making peace with the fact that I wont finish this shit was something that cut into me like a knife. Not for want of an article, a feature, anything that looked at and analyzed the texture and feeling of both games. I simply do not have any more of it left in my body.

Not finishing something, taking a look at a work of art and deciding that you’re through with it comes at a cost: the jeers and constant pressure of everyone around you acting like a fucking lunatic if you put down a videogame. The list of achievement’s hovers softly behind your eyelids. Threatening to tear you down. Just one more. Come on. You can even see the list of people that got into the winners club: don’t you want that to be you?

FLCL’s now duo of albums has also come at a cost. There’s going to be even more FLCL coming from Animation Studio soon, a reality that wasn’t true when I started writing this a week ago. We all must have been feeling something outside of the sonic vibrations of bass guitar. A screaming lick down the neck of an electric, the vibratto crack in the lead singers voice, maybe? That the songs from the album can find me, me! Of all fucking people, in a place out of time like I had a story building in my head all along.

In a way, videogames have us all held hostage. Sequels and achievement lists, the always corporate mandated line separate from all the ways we make videogames stick around. Will you be there for Horizon Zero Dawn: 3? Will we get new DLC ever matched to take place in the world of The Halo TV Show? If a critic walks out of a movie, it’s sometimes taken as a failure of the director. If a critic walks out of a videogame, it’s almost unanimously the fault of the critic.

If I do stick around to the end, what’s waiting for me? The World Ends With You: 3?