Issue #335: The Anatomy of Luck
There is an apocryphal quotation regarding luck that is inaccurately attributed to Seneca: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” It is an appealing enough idea that one’s luck is not the result of random chance, but the culmination of one’s effort. Generally, it does seem to me that many things one might conceive of as luck actually have determinate causes. To pick up a few threads from previous letters, take Magic: the Gathering for instance. Because players randomize their decks by shuffling, the cards each draw is seen as a function of luck. Drawing the right or wrong card, one that advances your game plan or leaves you with nothing to do, is up to chance. But this ignores the influence of the things the player does control, like deck construction. How does one construct their deck to maximize the probability of drawing the right card at the right time? This involves both card selection and the proportion of various types of cards.
NBA basketball is another great example, one I have discussed extensively regarding this very point. In the April 24 playoff game between the Miami Heat and Boston Celtics this past season, the Heat had a historic three point shooting performance. Were they lucky? Perhaps, but they were also uncontested by Boston’s defense at the three point line. Boston could have made each of those unlikely shots much more difficult. There are margins of ostensible luck in the defense’s control.
Blue Lock (2018) has a long riff on this idea, too.
If you read all that, you’ve seen that the Blue Lock conception of luck is similar to the fake Seneca quotation. One has to put themselves in position to take advantage of luck. And, like in Magic, the description of the game state in Blue Lock suggests that the lucky Rin played to his outs. Take the action that puts you in the best position to win, not the one that prevents you from losing. So much in human life gives only an illusion of control. But in a competitive environment, we are in control of more than we might think.
My point? I need to go take more notes on my dissertation before my defense.
Etsushi Takahashi’s Elasticity
Kill! (1968) is a very impressive samurai film from Kihachi Okamoto, the director of The Sword of Doom (1966). Though ostensibly within the same genre and released only two years later, Kill! couldn’t be more different from its predecessor. Even as the themes are similar enough, there isn’t a hint of the brutality of The Sword of Doom in Kill!, despite the aggressive name. In fact, Kill! had me in stitches from nearly the opening credits. It is a genuinely hilarious and joyous film compared to the unvarnished pessimism of Okamoto’s previous film. Much of this is due to the inspired, scene stealing performance of Etsushi Takahashi as Hanjiro Tabata, one of the film’s heroes.
Though I give Takahashi a lot of credit, there’s at least some chance I’m speaking out of turn. I don’t think I have developed the eye for physical comedy. I think of Chaplin, Looney Tunes, Mr. Magoo, and Jackie Chan as exemplary. But the exaggerated movement of Takahashi fills every frame spectacularly, appearing oafish with the precision required for filmmaking. And maybe something that looks awesome to the untrained eye is just self-evidently awesome. As much as his movement makes him the butt of a joke, it’s clear that his character Tabata is also the model for shounen manga protagonists. He is preternaturally powerful but utterly clueless, surviving trial after trial without wit but with a profound moralism.
Tabata is introduced in the film as a samurai, but is only impersonating one, embracing the image of the samurai with all the naïveté of a child — or American who has never seen a samurai movie. He aspires to be one, while Genta (Tatsuya Nakadai) attempts to hide his samurai background. If Tabata is the screwball, Genta is the straight man. But his humor is subtle deadpan. And it’s not as if every bit of the movie is funny. It is, like The Sword of Doom, a condemnation of the samurai class. For Okamoto, the samurai will never adhere to the values that they supposedly hold dear. Instead, the values of the samurai are violence, deception, and opportunism.
Ultimately, it’s the logic of the U.S. western, as is the cast with most samurai film, that grounds the characters. Genta and Tabata are exceptional men in a state of exception, outside of the social order that produces samurai, yakuza, and peasant farmers. Their essence is incompatible with a society that is seemingly incapable of producing men like them, their own subjectivities emerging in some strange form of cultural immaculate conception. But all the strengths of Kill! are strengths shared by all the best samurai film. All but one: the performance of Takahashi. That will be what I remember most about this transcendent work.
Gacha Game Production Values Hit Their Peak
I am playing yet another gacha game, and this one has nearly nothing in common with Solo Leveling: Arise (2024). The entire design philosophy of Zenless Zone Zero (2024) is diametrically opposed to Solo Leveling. It comes simultaneously to consoles and mobile phones, having released last Thursday. And it has the production values of a console game. The story is not great, but it is okay enough that I haven’t started aggressively skipping the cut scenes yet. And the scenes deliver on the promise of the production values. Some of them are really good, good enough that they have parts I’d watch again.
Thinking about the design philosophy, Zenless is an action game, resembling an old school beat-em-up. It has no autoplay, is not turn based, and only has the (admittedly robust, with the perverse incentives of profit) usual RPG trappings for character growth. The enemy AI could use some serious work. As of now, monsters and antagonists in this game are just damage sponges. But the gameplay is good. The action is smooth and each character is unique. There is a clear fighting game influence on Zenless with character move sets and a three character tag team system. There are various conditions that trigger assists or longer cinematic combos involving multiple characters — pretty similar to assists and delayed hyper combos in the Marvel vs. Capcom series. Multiple characters can be active on the screen at once, with the character you are switching from completing their attack as the character you are switching to, and now control, can continue to combo from the previous character’s attack.
Everything feels smooth, which counts for a lot. I have been playing the game primarily on console. For content where I’m trying to punch above my weight class or new story stuff where I might see a cool cutscene, I think playing on my PS5 is a far better experience. But it is also nice to run through some of the easier or more repetitive gameplay on my phone. It doesn’t play too bad on a touch screen despite the fast paced action, but there’s no chance this game would have stuck without the ability to play it on the bigger screen.
I like Zenless a lot. Right now, I am playing both it and Solo Leveling at once. I have no plans to drop either, but the daily demands of a gacha game are more time intensive than they perhaps should be. Each game scratches a different itch for me and I am curious to see how miHoYo team can iterate on the strong foundation they have with this game. F2P btw.
The Outliers of SGDQ
Last week, I spotlighted the ongoing SGDQ charity speedrunning marathon. Now, SGDQ has concluded, closing at a $2,546,290 donation total for Médecins Sans Frontières. This SGDQ was unique, however. A lot more unusual than I thought. GDQ personnel would repeatedly call the schedule “ambitious,” and their ambition was to bring experiences to the GDQ main stage that are vastly different from anything they have spotlighted before. I had the pleasure of viewing the live streams of a few of these particularly unique events. One was an arcade showcase of Wacca (2019), a rhythm game, using the arcade hardware. Just take a look for yourself:
Rhythm games are, in essence, the exact opposite of speedrunning games. They are score attack driven but are more akin to the reviled “auto scroller” in speedrunning. A rhythm game chart delivers the exact same challenge at the exact same interval and concludes in the length of the song, no sooner and no later. There are no optimizations for speed or tricks to bypass lengthy gameplay segments. The Wacca commentators didn’t emphasizes these differences, though. Nonetheless, they provided an awesome primer of rhythm games in general. There are similarities to speedrunning, too, such as extremely high barrier to entry, stringent dexterity requirements, and the necessity of endless reps.
I have never played Wacca myself, but it has a passing resemblance to long-running rhythm game franchise maimai. Even still, the spirit that guides Wacca at GDQ is the spirit of spotlighting gaming communities that are small, obscure, or under appreciated. I can certainly get behind that. That same spirit is what dictated the inclusion of Evil Zone (1999).
Evil Zone is a 1 vs. 1 fighting game, not impossible to speedrun in a single player capacity. But what SGDQ showed was the finals of a tournament, usually a side event for in-person GDQ attendees. Evil Zone is a two button 3D fighting game. Its legacy as a side tournament game at GDQ events is nearly a decade long. It has been regularly mentioned on stream and aired on unofficial or spin-off GDQ streams, but never hit the main stage. Until now.
One of the funnier elements of this tournament, aside from the absurdity of the game itself, is that the tournament organizer was also part of the finals. How did he do? You’ll have to watch and see.
I like the idea of GDQ branching out to look at non-speed games that don’t really have the profile to hold their own major events. Personally, I’m shopping for a Wacca cabinet after that showcase. And competitive Evil Zone has had a huge influx of players since Saturday. These are the kinds of unique and insular games I really appreciate being presented to such a large audience.
Weekly Reading List
https://kotaku.com/the-curse-of-kiseki-how-one-of-japans-biggest-rpgs-bar-1740055631 — How much is three million Japanese characters? It is enough to overwhelm a small translating duo, as was the case with Carpe Fulgur contracted to work on The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC (2006) 2011. Carpe Fulgur is a team of two, Andrew Dice and Robin Light-Williams, with the unenviable task of localizing this behemoth of a script. Jason Schreier’s story, from 2015, is really just necessary context for some more exciting and uplifting news.
Last week, Trails Through Daybreak (2021), the beginning of the newest story arc in the Trails series, released in the U.S. Among the staff that helped localize the game, Dice and Light-Williams.
This is, to me, a really big deal. I have always admired Dice and Light-Williams. They sacrificed a lot to bring a game to the United States market that had minimal chance of making it here otherwise. Without it, there might not be any Trails Through Daybreak or Trails of Cold Steel, and we certainly would have never seen the Crossbell arc (Trails from Zero [2010] and Trails to Azure [2011]) which released in North America last year.
Above all, the team did an amazing job on SC with no resources. I can’t think of anyone I would rather have working on making the Daybreak translation the best it could be.
Witness Kai Budde in his prime in this ancient Magic PT video.
Until next time.