NO RELATION with David Brothers is an excuse to talk about music, movies, life, and whatever else I find interesting. Think of it like a comic convention panel in the form of a video essay. Does that make the comments Q&A?
Either way, this NO RELATION is about storytelling in Moto Hagio’s A Cruel God Reigns, Kentaro Miura’s Berserk, and Akimi Yoshida’s Banana Fish, and the lessons that cartoonist Alissa Sallah has learned from the techniques used in their work.
0:00: Alissa Sallah, Weeaboo, & Bonfire Anthology
6:52: Moto Hagio’s A Cruel God Reigns
18:50: Kentaro Miura’s Berserk
34:23: Akimi Yoshida’s Banana Fish
NO RELATION with David Brothers
The Art of Storytelling
featuring Alissa Sallah
Works:
Sun Tribe: Waffle Shack Index (VizMedia),
Perfect Crime Party (Iron Circus Comics),
Weeaboo (Oni Press)
Discussed:
Moto Hagio’s A Cruel God Reigns, volume 2
Kentaro Miura’s Berserk, volume 9
Akimi Yoshida’s Banana Fish, volume 8
Mentioned, in order:
Bonfire Anthology
Floating World Comics
The Comics Journal 269
Moto Hagio’s Marginal, A Drunken Dream, Heart of Thomas, The Poe Clan, Otherworld Barbara
George Morikawa’s Hajime no Ippo
Masashi Kishimoto’s Naruto
Hiroaki Samura’s Blade of the Immortal
Usamaru Furuya’s No Longer Human
Mandy (2018)
Roger Ebert x Hayao Miyazaki, RogerEbert.com
Emma Riós’s Anzuelo
Kazune Kawahara & Aruko’s My Love Story
Berserk: The Golden Age Arc (2012)
Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics
Nier: Automata (2023)
Jerry Maguire (1996)
Berserk (1997)
Hirohiko Araki’s JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Part 2: Battle Tendency
W. David Marx’s Ametora
Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”
The Great Gatsby (2013)
Banana Fish (2018)
The Weekend’s “Out of Time”
I’ve had the pleasure of going to Korakuen Hall, near the Tokyo Dome in Tokyo, several times now to watch pro wrestling of all types live, and greatly enjoyed every visit. There’s no bad seats, the crowd loves the action, and every promotion treats Korakuen like it’s a big deal. I made a zine to show my appreciation, using photos I’ve taken from my first trip up until my most recent last year.
I first went to Korakuen Hall on a whim while on a trip with friends, with vague memories of George Morikawa’s Hajime no Ippo and blurry NJPW real media files in my head. I got convenience store chicken on the way in, and soon fell in love.
Oracle Arena in Oakland, California is my most favorite arena in the world, but when it comes to pro wrestling, no place is as cool as Korakuen Hall.
This one’s 64 pages, plus a legend. If you want to download it for free, you can go to my page on itch.io. With a little luck, though, you should be able check out an embed right here:
Above is a companion video to “Evil Mind, Evil Sword,” an AMV I cut to try to figure out some feelings about Armored Core 6. Previously, I wrote an essay about how moving I found the game, too. This video, “NO RELATION: Heroes Eventually Die,” is a close look at how I felt going after Tester AC over and over, racking up money to buy gear to go after bigger and badder enemies. I hope you dig it. It’s 9:30-ish. Transcript/essay below.
Are you there? This is No Relation, and I’m David Brothers.
“Kamina: Go on! I know you can do it, buddy!”
“Simon: Uhh, but I don’t!”
“Kamina: Listen, Simon. Don’t believe in yourself!”
“Simon: Huh?”
“Kamina: Believe in me! Believe in the Kamina who believes in you!”
“Yoko: What’s that mean…?”
“Simon: …right, I’ll try!”
I’ve been really thinking about overcoming in the mecha genre. Sometimes it’s a young pilot overcoming her past trauma in order to reach her peak, and, y’know, sometimes it’s a grizzled old vet proving that they are not past their useful season, that they have not become “winter men.” In Gurren Lagann, y’know, it’s a young boy learning to believe what others see inside him, instead of the doubt and insecurity that his heart is burdened with.
“COM: Main System. Activating Combat Mode.”
“Handler Walter: Commence mission.”
“Handler Walter: We’ve got a read on the target. Now’s the time, 621.”
Stories for me are about seeing a breadth of responses to the slings and arrows of the world, that’s what gets me fired up in mecha stories especially. I found FromSoftware’s Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon, directed by Masaru Yamamura and written by Yamamura and Kazuhiro Hamatani, it was a sensational playground for this kind of storytelling.
Your character is a mostly blank slate, y’know, very easy to imprint your self on, and the cast is filled with characters who range from violent sadists to people who kind of have a point, even if their execution leaves something to be desired.
“Dafeng Student Pilot: The Redguns need this AC. I…I can’t fail this mission!”
I said “your character is mostly a blank slate, easy to imprint your self on” but what I really should have was that “my character was a blank slate, easy to imprint my self on.” ’cause I played this game in character. I aligned myself with a different faction on each run and did my best to see things their way, to behave in the game as if I was working towards the same goals right alongside them instead of, y’know, pressing buttons on the couch.
I found myself empathizing with a lot of the characters in the game because of this, thanks to the fantastic writing and storytelling, but one caught me more than all the others. He’s only ever referred to as “Dafeng Student Pilot,” a representative of the company Dafeng, and he operates Tester AC, an armored core—a mobile suit, a giant robot—for just one mission in the game.
“Handler Walter: Got a job for you, 621. It’s an open call from the Arquebus Group.”
“Arquebus Corporation: To all independent mercenaries—this request comes from Schneider of the Arquebus Group.”
“Arquebus Corporation: Dafeng, one of our adversaries allied with Balam, has introduced a new tester AC.”
“Arquebus Corporation: It’s a sample model from an external architect, featuring extensive assembly optimizations.”
“Arquebus Corporation: In the hands of an experienced pilot, it will pose a threat far too great to ignore.”
“Arquebus Corporation: This brings me to the request.”
“Arquebus Corporation: Intercept delivery of the tester AC and destroy it.”
That one mission is called Destroy the Tester AC. In exchange for more or less a hundred thousand bucks, mostly less, you’re tasked with destroying the Dafeng Core Industry Tester AC. Your handler Walter needs the various corporations and factions that are battling on the planet Rubicon to move a certain way, to get into certain positions in order to achieve his own private goals. And calling Destroy the Tester AC an assassination mission is way too kind. Because you assassinate human beings and you destroy machines.
Dafeng Student Pilot isn’t even collateral damage when it comes to Handler Walter and everyone else giving orders on Rubicon. He’s nothing.
But, a quick sidebar about money farming in games. If I could play a video game and never spend even a single solitary second grinding, that is game of the year for me as far as I’m concerned. But money farms can be useful. You know, if I need money, if I need a quick payday of some type, then a money farm is a quick route to get the money that I need to make a later mission easier.
And…it’s a useless experience, is my thing. It’s tedious! Because you’re just exploiting a video game’s mechanics or doing something really repetitive, running forward and hitting the same button over and over. The art of video games is lost when it comes to grinding. It’s a distraction from what’s real about the video game.
In Armored Core 6, the money farm mission is Destroy the Tester AC. Dafeng Student Pilot doesn’t put up much of a fight, and it’s a quick in-and-out. Not a huge draw on your time or energy. You don’t even have to think too hard. You just get in there, hit him a few times, and you’re done. But the empathy I felt for the other characters in the game eventually extended to Dafeng Student Pilot as well.
“Dafeng Student Pilot: Damn it!”
“Dafeng Student Pilot: I… I just…”
He has a work ethic.
“Dafeng Student Pilot: I’ll deal with the merc! I’ve been training for this!”
He understands the stakes.
“Dafeng Student Pilot: The Redguns need this AC… I… I can’t fail this mission!”
And most striking to me, that he has skin in the game.
“Dafeng Student Pilot: I can’t die to a merc who only kills for credits!”
Our character, my character, 621, is not even from the planet Rubicon. Another character in the game calls him a tourist repeatedly and exclusively. But all of these are traits that Dafeng Student Pilot has are things that I would find admirable in a hero character, or a villain character, to be honest. But he’s not really either one of those. He’s worth a hundred thousand bucks, and I have a ton of equipment left to buy. I can’t get away with not grinding in this one.
“Handler Walter: That’s it for this job, 621. Return to base.”
I like that this money farm puts the cost of farming front and center. You have to listen to his screams before you get your little reward, before you can go off and buy a new shotgun or funnels. There’s something really nice about that.
But even still, I obliterated Dafeng Student Pilot over and over for my own benefit and the benefit of my handler. Each time, he insisted that he was ready for it, that he could keep up, and that he just can’t let it end like this.
One alternative to overcoming is surrender. And where overcoming is triumphant, surrender is cold, an acquiescence to the, the way of things. No matter how much our hearts, training, or willpower say otherwise. Sometimes you don’t get to win. Sometimes you’ve had enough, sometimes it’s easier to not do the hard thing. Sometimes the game’s mechanics point you right at the big bags of money even as the game says you’re evil for taking it. And sometimes you don’t like it, but do it anyway, because this is how video games work. You know. Very much “It is what it is” as a curse.
“Chirico Cuvie: And, feeling as safe as a child held to its mother’s breast,”
“Chirico Cuvie: before I knew it, I was fast asleep.”
So, what was possible for Dafeng Student Pilot if it isn’t what it is? What’s likely? Would he have grown into Amuro Ray type of character, one of those heroes who finds a new path and doesn’t leave a trail of death and destruction behind them like I did on Rubicon? Does he become a symbol of hope for his community? An ace like Roy Fokker? A tyrant? Something else? What exactly am I crushing when I snuff out Dafeng Student Pilot’s light?
It doesn’t matter. I’ll never get to know. There’s only this moment, shared between us where I show up, he does his best, and it’s not enough. It reminded me of the first ending from Yoko Taro and PlatinumGames’s Nier Automata, when a character faces a great tragedy and, in a fourth-wall breaking moment, says, “It always ends like this,” just…bleeding despair.
“2B: It always ends like this.”
It always ends like this because it was written this way. It would take impossible effort to change it. So, if I can’t win, if Dafeng Student Pilot must die in order for me to achieve my goals, in order for things to proceed, then there has to be something that I can learn from what I’m taking from him. What does it mean for me, the nominal hero character of the game, the savior of Rubicon…what does it mean for me to punish Dafeng Student Pilot over and over again?
Questions like these are why I love Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon. It was hands down the best thing I played in 2023.
Further Reading:
Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon: Directed by Masaru Yamamura, written by M. Yamamura & Kazuhiro Hamatani. Dafeng Student Pilot voiced by Johnny Yong Bosch. FromSoftware (2023)
Armored Trooper VOTOMS Complete Collection: Directed by Ryosuke Takahashi Written by Soji Yoshikawa & Jinzo Toriumi. Sunrise (1983)
Gunbuster: The Complete OVA Series: Directed by Hideaki Anno Written by H. Anno, Toshio Okada, Hiroyuki Yamaga Gainax (1988)
Gundam: Reconguista in G Written and directed by Yoshiyuki Tomino. Sunrise (2014)
Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt & Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt: Side Story: Yasuo Ohtagaki (writer/artist) Shogakukan (2020)
Nier: Automata: Directed by Yoko Taro Written by Y. Taro, Hana Kikuchi, & Yoshiho Akabane PlatinumGames (2017)
Street Fighter 6: Directed by Takayuki Nakayama Designed by Mitsugu Ashida Capcom (2023)
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: Directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi Written by Kazuki Nakashima Gainax (2007)
The Winter Men: Brett Lewis (writer), John Paul Leon (artist), Dave Stewart & Melissa Edwards (colorists), John Workman & Jared K Fletcher (letterers) Wildstorm/DC Comics (2007)
In the first verse of “Tougher, Colder, Killer,” track six on his album Cancer 4 Cure, El-P sketches out the story of a man unmoored and eventually ruined by the aftermath of what his masters ask him to do in their name.
He delivers the verse in first person, inhabiting the character. The verse takes the form of a letter—it could be another type of message, but the most romantic option is a letter—to the mother of the deceased, describing how her son died and how it felt to kill him. El-P made the son dig his own grave at gunpoint, which implies that the son was unarmed and helpless. El-P describes the son as laughing to the gods as he dug, amused by his fate and his place in the wartime food chain. The son doesn’t fight his way to a valiant death. He doesn’t go out on his shield. He dies lost and exhausted, the victim of a particularly cruel war crime.
The son’s reaction, the fact that he died with no fear and full faith, utterly destroys El-P.
The laughter and grin combine with the son’s last words and transform into a lasting curse. You can feel El-P’s skin crawling now that he’s been forced to see the man’s humanity. You can feel the questions about what that means about El-P’s own humanity. El-P describes himself as “Pandemonium me,” a double reference to a state of utter confusion and the capital of Hell in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Imagine Hell as a city-state. Pandemonium is the seat of government, to use human terms, and when El-P says he’s fucked by decree, he’s coming to the understanding that he’s become a demon at someone else’s request and for someone else’s benefit.
He is lost, consumed by the atrocity his job demands and pushed to extreme lengths to kill the voice of the son in his head. There’s no justice in making someone dig his own grave, no balancing of the scales or protecting anyone. There’s just cruelty. And this time, the cruelty reflects back on El-P. Before the son dies, he tells El-P that there’s a tougher, colder killer than him, and that in just one day, a mere twenty-four hours at some point in the future, El-P will also learn to crawl before his own tougher, colder killer.
—
“Tougher, Colder Killer” has stuck with me since I first heard it. The opening verse sets up a good story, and the revelation embedded in it is the type that fascinates me. (The rest of the track is normal rapping instead of pure storytelling.) It’s a song you can see as well as hear, and when I felt moved to make an Armored Core 6 music video to try and describe my experience a little bit, it quickly came to mind as the best option. Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon made me into a tougher, colder killer than every single boss I took down on my way to seeing all three endings.
—
Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon is my game of the year for 2023 and it’s not even close. I probably played Street Fighter 6, Final Fantasy XIV, and Apex Legends more frequently, but the most affecting, interesting, and melancholy experiences I had last year was playing Armored Core 6.
The game stars 621, a blank slate character who is an exceptional armored core pilot in my hands. I’m sent on missions by Handler Walter, serving an agenda that unveils itself over the course of the game. During that unveiling, I met the really fascinating and charismatic people that are fighting over the planet Rubicon and its mysterious energy source, folks like Cinder Carla, “Chatty” Stick, Ayre, G5 Iguazu, and V.IV Rusty. The cast is a mix of warriors, leaders, thralls, and those who seek to overcome every single one of their foes as a way of proving their self-worth.
The beauty of Armored Core 6 is that it imbues each of its characters with such life and perspective that I was constantly confronted by their own humanity while simultaneously trying to take it from them. It’s easy to see why the characters are the way they are, and that expectation of empathy is threaded throughout the game. Iguazu has been forced into a shape he cannot abide, fighting on behalf of another in order to clear unfair debts. Ayre would simply like her species to survive. Walter doesn’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past, and will go to extreme lengths to make it happen. “Chatty” Stick is an artificial intelligence that’s loyal to his boss, who has created as warm and welcoming an environment as you’ll find on Rubicon. I came to understand all of them.
At the same time, the characters frequently denigrate my reasons for being involved in the battle and almost never address me by name. I’m 621, I’m the merc, I’m a tourist. I’m a symbol of liberation or a divine punishment. I was repeatedly and explicitly defined as an outsider with no skin in the game, a nobody amongst titans and bloody warriors.
The meat of the narrative is delivered via dialogue, in the character’s own voices. I heard pilots mumbling as they struggled to eject before dying. I heard their surprise and shock at seeing 621 in action. I heard them hyping each other up before cutting them down like wheat. I heard sudden gasps when I betrayed them. I heard the supreme confidence in the voices of my friends when their gun turned in my direction. I heard friendly voices turn cold when our respective goals become incompatible.
Armored Core 6 asked me to commit to the bit, and then wanted me to sit with how I feel about that fact afterward.
—
When I was short on cash, the easiest mission to run for a quick but sizable check is against a student pilot from Dafeng Core Industry, one of many corporations in the game. The student pilot is assigned to transport a certain mech to another faction, Dafeng having modified, developed, or upgraded the gear attached to it. He dies easily, quickly transitioning from idealism (“I can’t die to a merc who only kills for credits!”) to regret as his dreams and machine are scattered to the wind (“I… I just… I just wanted a callsign of my own…”).
In my video, I paired El-P’s “Tougher, Colder Killer” with the death of the Dafeng student pilot. Replaying that mission and sitting with the vibe of it is a big part of what made Armored Core 6 open up to me and what made me open up to Armored Core 6. The student pilot is meat beneath tank treads in a war he’s trapped in but still cares deeply about. He’s not there for money. He wants the glory of having a call sign, of being an ace pilot. He wants to be a hero, and the only thing standing in his way is me and my desire for a hundred thousand credits.
When I killed him, over and over and over, I eradicated the Dafeng student pilot’s potential for my own benefit. I destroyed his future and I left with a little money in my pocket to upgrade my war machine. He’s not even a footnote. He’s a checked box on a spreadsheet. Something for the memo line on a check.
—
Each ending forced me to make decisions and align 621 with this faction or that faction. I was forced to choose between my friends and my cause, and even between my friends and their causes.
There is an all-time great older brother character in Armored Core 6. V.IV Rusty fights alongside the Vespers, an elite crew for the elite Arquebus Corporation. (He’s “vee four Rusty” when said aloud.) While fighting alongside him, I quickly realized that he’s like Kamina from Gurren Lagan in overdrive. It is a genuine delight to fight beside him. It’s the opposite of an escort mission, or maybe he’s the one escorting me. Either way, when he says, “We’re war buddies now” after one collaborative mission, I felt the honesty of it.
When the winds changed and I was forced into combat against him, he said something that reoriented me once again. I’d already accepted the cyberpunk evil corpo storyline, but Rusty added another layer when he said, “Hate to say it, but Rubicon still needs me. So, buddy… who needs you?”
I laughed in surprise when I first heard it, but felt it bone deep all the same. It was expert writing, the kind that sounds like one thing but then clenches your heart once you let it in. The line and scene have only grown on me since.
It’s not “Who needs you?” in the sense of me being worthless. It’s “Who needs you?” as in “Who do you fight for, and do you really think that your dedication measures up to mine?”
Who was I fighting for? At that point, I was making decisions based on however I felt in that moment. I didn’t have a position on the plot so much as I was content experiencing the story as it unfolded at my fingertips. By the time I found a way to beat the brakes off Rusty, I’d recommitted myself to the game and to being 621. 621 is the crux of the story, and the choices I make in 621’s name lead directly to each of the three endings.
Rusty made me want to believe in the path I was walking rather than just walking it. I knew I wanted to see all three endings, but Rusty reminded me to live them, not just see them. To chase them. To commit. I needed to show him who needs me, and the only way to do that was by fighting him with everything I had.
—
I realized I loved the game, that it had truly captured me, when a mission required me to kill a friend. The dream we shared had been torn asunder by our circumstances and choices. My friend said, “I know that you… You’ve made your choice. Then I must do my duty…” and the battle began.
Most good/evil systems in video games are tedious. The evil is cartoonish or the good is a fantasy or the actual system is just another meter to min/max for later reward. Armored Core 6 leaves the definition of good and evil up to you, and only asks that you respond to the situations with your whole heart.
621’s friend needed to die for my goals to be achieved. That means that our shared history and our dreams did not matter in that moment. There was 621, a friend, and a need to complete the mission or risk losing everything. The end results are what they are. The game does a good job of creating a dilemma that doesn’t have an easy good/bad/true ending setup. It has a series of situations and perspectives that are presented to the player for judgment and contemplation.
I fought the friend with a guilty conscience, knowing that it was the wrong thing to do but necessary for the mission I was on. When that friend said that we could have walked together, but now there’s no reason to hold back, I responded in kind. I met their determination with my own. I love you, but goodbye. I’m needed.
The difficulty of the fight only added to the impact of the story. I could feel the resolve of my friend, how important it was to them that I die and how much they didn’t want that to be reality. I had to close my heart and focus on the mechanics. 621 is an ace pilot. Everyone who raises a hand against our machine dies. My advantage is that I can do the fight a thousand times, learning and changing each time. I am inevitable.
—
I felt that fight more than anything else in games this year. I was surprised at how much I needed this friend to die, and then elated and ashamed when it actually happened. I achieved my goals, simultaneously saved and ended countless lives, and annihilated a friendship in the process.
The three endings build on each other in interesting ways. When I got the third, “Alea Iacta Est,” the satisfaction felt incredible, like finishing a good novel or draining movie. Armored Core 6 pulled me out of my self and showed me three perspectives on ending one conflict with wildly different outcomes. Each ending hurt in different ways, and each ending delivered moments of triumph at the same time. I wanted and regretted each ending as I got them, and really thought about it before I made my decisions, knowing that I would have to disappoint and maybe battle any of the characters I really liked.
The combat in this game, combined with the customization system, fit into my brain like a key in a lock. Playing it feels good, angling to pull off all the moves and tricks I’ve seen in robot anime. The story is great, but the gameplay is on point too. Glories abound. Thrust vectoring and an Itano circus are cool forever.
Armored Core 6 was a beautiful experience, and rare. There are games I play because I love the story or the gameplay, but rarely in equal proportions. Apex Legends has my favorite FPS combat (melee aside), but I’m not playing that one a few hours a week every week for the story.
—
Calling Armored Core 6 an “exercise in empathy” would be overstating things a bit, but it’s not wrong. It’s a game that’s greatly improved if you take what the characters want and strive for seriously. It asks that you believe, and in exchange for that belief, it offers heartbreak and contemplation in equal measure.
NO RELATION with David Brothers is an excuse to talk about music, movies, life, and whatever else I find interesting. This first episode is with my longtime friend Jamila Rowser, founder of Black Josei Press, co-creator of Wash Day Diaries with Robyn Smith, and josei manga maniac. She texted me a link to Childish Gambino’s new music video and we chatted about it for a while, and then decided to freestyle a little show out of it.
I wanted practice editing videos and it’s always a good time talking to friends, and NO RELATION is a good way to get both. I’ve never done one of these before. You should pause it if you need to pause it and disagree with us out loud if you got a better take.