We’ve been developing this game for about 3 years now—Mistaken Person: Love is Destiny. The publisher I work for is called wataame. It’s a big one. You’ve probably heard of it, if you’re into this sort of thing. Some of our most popular games are Okonomiyaki, Honey + Vengeance, Literature Love Club, and dokidoki donburi!.
Mistaken Person: Love is Destiny is expected to be one of our biggest games yet. The latest installment in the dokidoki donburi series.
In the last game of the series, dokidoki donburi: Tokyo terror!!, you play a normal guy working the line at a chain restaurant who’s in love with the waitress, Ami. But, of course, something bad happens and suddenly you and your coworkers are trying to defeat a yakuza boss, the owner of the restaurant. Surprise! Turns out the boss is Ami’s dad. That game was a big success.
The one before that was poorly animated, had bad story writing, and all the girls had the same personality, more or less. Not even worth talking about. Tokyo terror!! was the one that propelled us into the spotlight. And Mistaken Person: Love is Destiny is going to be even better than that because people want the real stuff now—they don’t want to be in the mafia or whatever. They want to see themselves and the world as is: bleak and scary and caustic—but they also want to see themselves triumph over it. Even if it’s only in a game.
◆
Wei is my only friend here. Or at least Wei is the only person I can tolerate. The rest of the guys I work with are fine, easy enough to chat with as we refill our tea at the hot drink bar during lunch, talking about the government and the weather. Or talking about the stuff we’re watching or listening to as we grab dishes of egg omelet and bean sprouts, potato salad and miso soup and put them on our trays. But that’s all I can talk about with them. Every time I try to say something else, talk about my life or what I do outside of here, I freeze up and that’s that. We make polite excuses and go sit at our respective tables.
Wei is different because he has a lot to say and because on some level, we get each other. Or at least I think we do. Sometimes I worry he’s just my friend because we grew up together, but he’s the type of guy who would stop talking to you if he disliked you so I don’t really believe it’s that.
“I wanna get really drunk tonight,” Wei says as we sit down to eat. “Like super fucking wasted.” He only ever gets the same thing every lunch: rice and whatever vegetable option they have, plus five packets of natto (for the probiotics, you know?)
“Right. For sure.”
“You should come out too,” he says, slapping my shoulder. “I only ever get to see you once or twice a month outside of work these days. Let’s get out and meet some babes. You haven’t dated anyone in forever.”
I shrug my shoulders up and then down.
“Why don’t you try a dating app? Or actually, wait. I know someone. Real cute, works at the flower shop down the street. I went to elementary school with her. Want me to introduce you guys?”
“I’m okay.”
Wei looks at me for a half a beat then rips open the small packets of mustard and sauce, mixes them into the natto until they’re sticky and white. Then he does this three more times before dumping it all onto his bowl of rice.
“Why don’t you ever get natto?” he asks. “It’s good for you.”
“I don’t like the smell.”
“Get over it.”
“I’ll try.”
Wei is the lead programmer at wataame. When we were kids we built gundams, made our stag beetles fight, all of that. But we had the most fun when we were playing video games: King’s Field, Panzer Dragoon, Star Ocean, Tactics Ogre, eating chips and drinking energy drinks until they made us sick. His family is Chinese, they owned a store that sold used electronics, which was how our families became friends. I was the half-Chinese kid whose mom couldn’t speak any elementary-level Japanese. I was lonely in a way my child mind understood but didn’t know how to help. And fate or God or whatever you believe in made me a nerd who loved games and needed a used Nintendo 64 (because we couldn’t afford a new one) and brought us to Wei’s tiny shop.
“What are you doing later tonight?” Wei asks as we pick up our trays and move them into the dish bin.
Lunch is over and everyone’s going back to work or if they’ve done enough, they’re going home. People pushing past each other to get to the elevators, thinking about love or work or sex or pissing, whatever.
“I don’t know. I have to do some more work at home, I think.”
“Alright,” Wei says, throwing on his jacket. “If you wanna come hang out, let me know. I could show you the gundam I’m working on now.”
“Okay. I will.”
“Later.”
He shakes a cigarette from his jacket pocket and puts on his sunglasses, walking out into the parking lot. I watch him light the cigarette as he leans against the car door, smiling at something on his phone. Then for some reason he looks up at the sun very fast, his head turning to look at it. As if confused that such a thing exists, or that it is so warm. Then he gets into his car and drives away.
◆
When I get home to my apartment I feel like my head is about to explode so I grab a beer from the fridge. There’s some leftover karaage from the supermarket so I heat it up in the microwave and even though it’s not warm enough I decide it’ll do. I sit down on the couch and contemplate jacking off and decide it’s not worth the effort. I have work to do.
I’m the only one that can do this. I haven’t told anyone about it, but I think it’s a better way to test Mistaken Person: Love is Destiny out anyway. Nobody needs to know about it. I designed the damn game, after all.
I put on the suit that the MC wears—jeans and a white t-shirt. And my headset looks like the baseball cap the MC wears, just with a couple of knobs on it that allows me to rearrange my body into a collection of pixels; transfer what we may term a “soul” into the body of the character; and when I’m done or if things things go really bad (say, if I encounter a glitch that may cause my body physical harm), I can catapult myself out of the game. It’s only happened once.
I don the headset and the white t-shirt and the jeans. I switch the knob to ON and feel little pieces of myself begin to feel fuzzy as I start to transfer over. First the legs, then the arms, then all the rest. I don’t know what my physical shell looks like while I’m out. I guess it could, potentially, be dangerous—a robber could break in while I’m still in the game, but it hasn’t happened yet. And I’m too lazy to try and do anything about it now anyway.
I fade. Or rather I transfer existence and suddenly I’m inside of this world, blinking and looking around where I’m at now.
There’s a lot of noise and the smell of meat cooking so even before everything starts appearing I know I’m at the Korean BBQ place. This is one of the three places I’m able to go with Risa—KBBQ, the club, and the arcade.
I’ve completed almost all of Risa’s Routes:
Good Route: She becomes a successful DJ and you’re a supportive husband.
Bad Route: (I’ll tell you what happens there in a minute.)
The only one left is the Neutral Route:
“So here we are again,” Risa says. The pork belly crackles over the grill. She flips it over with a pair of tongs, grabs some pieces of kalbi, slaps them on. Everything is dark and smoky. Beer mugs clink and people lean over their tables, yell over the noise of everyone else. Servers run about looking frazzled.
While our kalbi grills, Risa takes out a pack of cigarettes and lights one. She takes a drag, plays with her eyebrow piercing. It’s one of her main character traits—cigarettes, self-masochism, being loud. She’s abrasive and hard to win over, so it’s especially rewarding when she opens up to you.
“So here we are,” I reply. A man bumps into my chair and sloshes some sesame oil onto the table. Then onto me.
“Ah, sorry,” he says.
“Don’t worry about it,” I say. Risa grabs a napkin and throws it my way, and I dab some of the sauce off my pants. I consider asking her for one of the cigarettes before she snatches them away.
“I’ve only got two left,” she says. “So what was it that you wanted to ask me?”
Here’s one of the crucial points of the game.
Selection A: So what really happened to your parents?
This leads you to the Bad Route/Ending. Risa tells you what happened to her parents, you try to get Risa to go to rehab, she does, and the doctor ends up being someone else from her past who messed her up. It’s so traumatizing that Risa loses her mind.
If you want the Good Ending, ask her to do something fun.
Selection B: Do you wanna go to the arcade?
“Do you wanna go to the arcade?” I ask.
“Sure,” she says. She crushes her cigarette in the ashtray, sloughs down the rest of her beer, shoves a bunch of beef in her mouth. “I wanna play Beatmania.”
We leave the restaurant. It’s dark outside and Risa lights another cigarette, looks up at the sky.
“Do you hang out with a lot of people outside of here,” she asks.
This is one of the components of this thing I’ve made. Risa isn’t just choosing from preset dialogue options right now. In choosing to input my own data, my own soul makeup into this game, I think it bled into the other characters.
Which has been good and bad.
“I mostly just hang out with Wei.”
Risa always wears dark eyeliner, way too heavy. Often dons shirts with metal or noise bands on them. Oftentimes, she looks pissed or annoyed. But sometimes she just looks like most of us: scared, confused, human.
Risa blows her bangs out of her eyes and they flutter right back down. She tries again and finally gives up. “I get tired of hanging out with Megumi and Bee all the time. They’re so annoying.”
Megumi is the quintessential cute girl of Mistaken Person: Love is Destiny. She likes shopping, sweets, and appears ultra-happy all the time until it’s revealed how deeply insecure she is. She developed a severe eating disorder and got plastic surgery for how bullied she was in school. Didn’t leave her house for months and months and still struggles with it sometimes. She wants to be a model, but she’s so scared of rejection she’d rather not even bother.
Megumi’s Routes are:
Good: You help her accept that rejection is a part of human experience. She gets scouted by a modeling agency and walks for all the major designers. She’s busy but you two take date nights to get dessert. Your favorite is creme brûlée, her’s is strawberry crepes.
Neutral: She ends up getting gigs doing commercials. Yogurt, cell phones, tooth paste. She doesn’t mind it and sometimes you walk through Shibuya and see her brushing her teeth and smiling on the huge screen as hundreds of people walk around you, looking at their phones or talking to their partners.
Bad: You are ignorant to her hints that she’s not really the person she pretends to be. She ends up dating some guy who’s a model and won’t ever ask her questions about her life because he doesn’t care. She’s miserable and gets sicker but she pretends she’s fine.
There’s a sound like bang and me and Risa look over. Someone’s ran into a curb at the KBBQ. We make eye contact with the man inside his car and he sheepishly grins, like sorry. Then he drives away.
“Anyways,” Risa says, “Megumi is starting to get on my nerves.” Risa can pretend she doesn’t like Megumi; her big fake lashes or designer bags or frilly dresses, but she has a soft spot for her. Like she does for everyone.
Risa and I get to the arcade and it’s loud and the lights are bright and I’m feeling overwhelmed. Maybe I don’t want to try to complete a Route right now but Risa’s already got her tokens for Beatmania, she’s inserted them into the slot. She’s immersed in mixing and scratching the vinyl controllers, mashing the buttons with ease. All the other characters around us are blurred, just NPCs mumbling and playing their own games. Everywhere pop music blares and anime girl’s voices tell you that you’re doing a good job.
Risa gets PERFECT and lifts up her arms in triumph.
“I did it!” she says. “I did it!”
I clap like I do every time. She gets PERFECT every time. It’s impressive.
“So what are you going to do about Bee?” she asks.
The dialogue buttons are now floating above her head.
A: Nothing, I’m in love with you.
B: Why do you ask?
I choose B this time.
“Because I think you should talk to her. She seems like she’s going through a hard time.”
A: I’ll do it some other time.
B: You’re right. I think I should do that.
I choose B.
Risa smiles. “Good job,” she says. “You’re a good friend, you know? I hope we can continue hanging out after this. I applied for a couple of jobs, by the way. Will you come visit me if I get the one at the record store?”
“Of course.”
We fast forward from the arcade into Risa’s Neutral Ending. You visit her at the record store, buy a Soichi Terada vinyl you’ve been wanting.
“Go talk to Bee,” she says as she flips through a box of cassettes that someone brought in. “Or else you’re a pussy.”
“Alright, alright, I’ll go.”
“Love you man,” she says. And she does. And I’m scared of her love and everyone else’s, even Wei’s, scared of my parents’ love and my love for people.
Most of all, though, I’m scared of Bee’s love. Or more importantly, the lack of it.
The last shot I see of Risa is of her laughing, pretending to punch the camera as bewildered customers look on.
◆
I twist one knob on the side of my hat. The arcade scene fades, becomes blurred, becomes pixels, then right before it becomes nothing, I quickly toggle the other knob.
There’s always kind of a disconcerting feeling when you feel your soul being arranged, transferred back from one thing to another. As if it is something tangible, understandable. It’s a swift whoosh like getting sucked into a vacuum cleaner then I am back in my living room on the couch.
My apartment looks so much more depressing after being in the game. I glance at the plastic remains of trash scattered on the coffee table, decide to ignore it. My computer screen glows in the dark, the only source of light.
My phone goes off. It’s Wei calling.
“Yo.”
I can hear him clicking around on his keyboard, the firing of bullets coming from his screen. “What’s up man?”
“Not much.”
“That’s always your answer—FUCK!,” Wei says. Something erupts in the background.
I want to tell Wei what I’m feeling but I don’t know how so I listen to him shoot down more spaceships, fight more monsters.
“Um. I. I actually—”
“Do you want to go to Akiba tomorrow? Animate is having a sale on a bunch of figures tomorrow.”
“Ok. Ok, that sounds like something I could do.”
“I’ve been wanting this Mayoi figure for a while. Super rare. You can actually open her backpack up, and it comes with different outfits as well. Great deal.”
“I don’t really need anything. But I don’t mind coming along. Maybe they’ll have some Evangelion 4.0 promotional stuff.”
“Right, totally, for sure. Oh yeah, I meant to ask. How’s Bee? Talk to her lately?”
And suddenly I feel myself shutting down. My body disintegrating into pixels, atoms, whatever.
I hear Wei take off his headset, it makes a small clatter. He pauses the game.
“Still like that, huh?” he says.
“Yeah.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask you. Do you—” He hesitates. “Do you think it was a good idea to make this character just like her?”
“I don’t think so. But I won’t be the one playing it anyway.”
“Okay. Well, I mean, if we pushed the release date back a little…’
“It’s fine.” Suddenly I feel like I am drowning. A sea of plasma. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow, alright?”
“Just be careful,” Wei says. Which means he knows, more or less.
“Ok.”
“Later, man.” Wei hangs up the phone.
◆
Megumi and Risa weren’t based off of anyone really. Just an assortment of characteristics from different people I had come in contact with in my life, different girls I had met. Things I liked or disliked about other people.
Bee is just one person. One person whose face can remain inside of Mistaken Person: Love is Destiny, even if her real face begins to slowly fade from my memory since we decided to not speak any more. Or I guess she decided to not speak to me. I haven’t checked her social media or anything.
But she’s still here, at least, if not in any other place in my life.
I reach into the fridge for a beer. I finish my beer and then another and then suddenly I’ve drank six. I say fuck it and pour myself vodka and then it’s the whole bottle. I puke once. Then another beer.
I manage to stumble toward where I’ve thrown the cap on the couch, twist all the knobs from muscle memory. If I don’t think about it, then I don’t have to think about it.
The Good Ending for Bee is one I made up, of course: We’re still together, and she’s holding my hand as we walk through the garden, seeing the names of different trees and she looks up at me and her cheeks are pink from the cold and she’s smiling.
The Neutral Ending is Bee and I are still friends and we don’t bear any resentment and we’ve both found other people and sometimes we talk about the things we enjoy, new music from bands we liked, new books, funny clips of TV comedians we liked.
The Bad Ending and the true ending are the same, of course.
A: Bee, you are the only girl I’ve ever loved and there will never be anyone I’ll love again.
B: I am sorry for what I have done and will do in the future and everything in between.
It won’t matter either way.
I ask myself why I’m doing this. We have actual game testers on the team. Why repeat a bad thing a second time? Am I trying to punish myself for not being a better boyfriend, a better me—someone better in holding together both myself and the person she became as she started unraveling?
The soul drifts. The world begins to form around me. I’m in the garden. The small lake in the middle is frozen over. I wonder if the fish are still alive. I look up at the trees and their bare limbs look back at me.
Bee’s sitting on a bench and she has two cups of coffee beside her. Her face is in her hands, her hair covering her like moss. I wobble toward her with a big smile on my face.
She looks up at me and there’s tears collecting on her eyelashes, forming small clumps. She’s wearing the hat we bought together at the boutique she likes so much, a red knit beanie. I’m remembering even through the drunken haze. I can prove it to her this time that I’m still me even when I’m like this.
“You’re fucking drunk again,” she says.
I try to take a seat beside her and one of the coffees spills into the grass.
“Oops! Guess I’ll just have to buy you another. You like those honey lattes the most, right? We can go to that one cafe after this!”
I put my arm around her, place my head on her shoulder. Her body doesn’t react. I’m looking up at her face. She won’t even look at me. There are no tears anymore. Just something blank and unknowable.
“Oh,” I say, jumping up. I fall over and pick myself up and Bee still isn’t looking at me. “We can even go to that cake shop you like too! And maybe after that we can watch a movie, finish that one horror movie about the Mom who gets possessed by a demon we started the other—”
“I’m leaving you.”
And I feel my heart stop. I don’t feel so drunk any more. Of course I remember every single part of this.
“What do you mean?”
She shakes a pack of cigarettes out of her bag, lights one. Blows the smoke out. Did I ever tell you that she had the most beautiful eyebrows in the world? What a weird thing. But it’s true. Beautiful eyebrows and a beautiful mole near her mouth and a beautiful little nose—beautiful Bee.
“I don’t want to be with you any more.”
I sit in the middle of the pathway. There’s no one else in the garden. It starts snowing and the beauty of it makes me feel angry. Sitting isn’t good enough so I lay down. I can feel myself shaking.
“Who is it?”
“There’s nobody. But I know it’s not you.”
I’m crying now and staring at her shoes because it’s too hard to look at her face. I hear her start crying again too. A noise like ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, is coming from somewhere and I realize it’s me.
“Please. Please. Pleasepleasepleaseplease—”
“My sister. She killed herself yesterday. I tried to call you but you wouldn’t answer. Probably passed out somewhere drunk, right? Probably tried to reach for your phone and couldn’t get to it in time. Or maybe you just didn’t give a shit. That’s probably right. You didn’t give a shit.”
And that’s it and now Bee is the one spilling the coffee and she’s throwing things, anything she can find in her bag, spinning out of control, she’s running out of the garden toward the sidewalk and I try to catch up to her as the snow starts falling heavy.
Then something weird happens. Something that’s not supposed to happen. Bee is suddenly not this memory. She stops in the middle of the sidewalk and when I reach her, she looks at me with something like love.
And she twists the knobs on the hat. No other character in this game can see those. When I’m in here it just looks like a hat. How?
I start to fade away and I want to see her for one last time but she’s waving at me, goodbye goodbye. This isn’t how it ended. What happened was much worse. Right before I blink out, shift back into the real world, I see her mouthing something but I can’t make out what she’s saying. She’s saying it over and over again but I can’t hear her and then I’m back on my couch and I’m sobbing. Everything is quiet now. Seems like there’s not even traffic. The night shifts into morning. A bird flits past my window and the tears won’t come any more but I can feel my eyes burning.
The Bad Ending, the one you’ll encounter when you’re playing the game, concludes with you two screaming at each other and she’s spitting at you and you’re trying to tell her you did love her, loved her sister too, loved her family, and she says, “She didn’t deserve to die. But maybe you do.”
And that’s not actually what Bee said when it happened. She said something like, “Just stay away from me forever. Get some help.” And she gave me 100,000 yen. But the Mistaken Person: Love is Destiny version makes for better dialogue, one that will really pull at the player’s heartstrings.
What’s so bad about the thing that just happened is that even in the game, Bee was the one saving me. Like she always did.
◆
As I sobered up the next day, I focused on remembering the motions of Bee’s mouth until I figured out what she was saying. I wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget:
“I forgive you.”
That’s what she said.
◆
After Mistaken Person: Love is Destiny, I decided to not make romance games any more. I left wataame and switched to a different company, made RPGs with cool weaponry and villains. Still stayed in touch with Wei. Even went to drink with Wei once, like he wanted me too. I got one hi-ball and left.
The game did well. Made a lot of money, actually. But a lot of reviewers said they were confused with the MC’s interactions with Bee, that her storyline didn’t seem as smooth as the others—how did the MC start drinking? When? And there’s a glitch at the end of one of Risa’s Routes that we had to patch up because it kept freezing. Stuff like that.
I am tired of seeing the human heart so easily and carelessly displayed.
I didn’t touch Mistaken Person: Love is Destiny after its release. I smashed the hat, destroyed all the knobs. I want to tell you I stopped drinking so much at home but that isn’t true.
I think about contacting Bee though. I open LINE, close it. I still remember her username. Maybe she’s unblocked me. Or maybe I can even e-mail her: Was that you? Was it really you there with me?
But I never contact her. Maybe one day she’ll talk to me again—ask me the name of that author I recommended to her, the name of that trail that we hiked once in autumn. Or we’ll run into each other by accident and she’ll be happier now and still as funny as she was when I first knew her, telling me ridiculous stories, flapping her hands around.
Besides, it’s not like I don’t know the answers to those questions. Of course I do. Of course.