Released in 1950, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon left a defining impact on genre storytelling. Today, it’s April 15th in 2020. Almost seventy years hence, the appeal of the movie seems to only become more profound as time passes. Or, to put it another way – people keep putting Rashomon in works they make. References to it abound between almost every type of fiction and it also serves as a ground work to numerous works of nonfiction.
Connecting the story of four different characters and how they view a singular event. Rashomon is a meditation on justice, the application of violence and deals heavily in themes of lust and control. I’m not generally a cinema person – my first introduction to the story was probably through comic books. A particularly popular framing device in that medium, because the reader is in perfect control of a story that freezes from page to page.
The way videogames tend to focus on point of view narratives means that here is a medium not immediately predisposed to this storytelling. After all – videogames are Point of View power fantasies before they often allow themselves to be anything else.
Here is another place that Rashomon is going to show up: this very website. Three games, only united by their use of Samurai.
Ranshin tells the story of a wounded Samurai trying to delay the inevitable. A storytelling technique fairly common in fiction about Samurai, Ranshin knows that context is meaningless in the face of mood.
This story is the end of a narrative, but it could very well be the beginning of another one. More of a mood piece than a video game, but isn’t that what most videogames are anyway?
Is it necessary to shoot and to kill, or is the first use of the medium meant for telling stories? All stories are small endings, pieced together to form a narrative. What matters is what we do between stories.
A story need sometime be overly literal. Saint Vulture’s Rashomon is the literal interpretation of our framing device. Three narratives told through a usage of interface design that can only be described as “a comic book”. Storytellers seem to be drawn to these themes, and these easy to use images. A Samurai is a sword for someone: an agent of war and destruction. The bandit is lawless and wild, representation of an untamed, natural world beyond our story. The noble woman may be be betrayer or manipulator, or victim. The fourth story here is our own – with nothing to do but wonder, the only mind we can set at ease is our own.
Allow the story to spill out onto your desktop like blood from a wound.
Is that Samurai in Chojiro arriving too late? Or is he, after all, arriving right when they need to. The smell of burnt flesh and wood fills our nostrils.
Chojiro may be the game most beholden to the way Kurosawa told stories. There are no images here that sit perfectly still. Even though a fire rages – it could be our home – the world is still in motion.
Flames flicker and blades of grass dance around us. Even the sky below the moon does not wait in pacification.
Are the people we meet laughing or crying? Do we hunt spirits, nightmares, or something in between? Is this the beginning of a journey and could Ranshin be the end?
Storytelling implies we place a beginning, a middle, and end to everything. All stories are inexorably linked by the use of themes and images we understand. What is more pure than a warrior drawing their sword underneath the stare of moonlight?