Who Are You? by Alex Custodio

Author:Alex Custodio [Custodio, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Game Boy; Nintendo; SNES; NES
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2020-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

Boktai: The Sun Is in Your Hand

In 2003, Konami launched a peculiar series known as Boktai, from the Japanese ボクらの太陽 (Bokura no Taiyō). The first installment, Boktai: The Sun Is in Your Hand, follows a vampire hunter named Django the Solar Boy (the name is a nod to spaghetti Westerns) tasked with preserving the world from the undeadening of humanity. Armed with the Gun del Sol, Django must harness the power of the Sun to restore light to a postapocalyptic world. The action-adventure role-playing game (RPG) takes its cues from Hideo Kojima’s previous idiosyncratic work on the Metal Gear series, in that avoiding enemies is key. But, more important, Boktai challenges the way that we think about the spatial affordances of portable play.

Django’s ability to navigate cities ravaged by armies of reanimated corpses and his power to put an end to them are both dependent on the Sun. Like Twisted!, the transparent cartridge accommodates additional hardware—in this case, a solar sensor—to produce a different sensation of play. Distinct from photometric light sensors that respond to any ambient illumination, the solar sensor reacts specifically to ultraviolet (UV) radiation so that sunshine on the cartridge manifests as sunlight in the game. Beams of light pierce dungeon ceilings to damage undead enemies and allow Solar Boy to recharge his weapon at will. Depending on the strength of the Sun, Django’s magic power increases more or less quickly. Without it, he relies on limited banked currency (known as “soll”) to purchase goods and sustain his offensive prowess.

Although artificial sources of solar power coupled with stealth-focused navigation allow Django to get by during the dead of night, some aspects of the game make sunlight a necessity. Bosses can be purified only with a solar-powered device known as the Pile Driver, but until such time as they’ve been eviscerated, their spirits can exert agency. You can defeat a boss at night and drag its remains to the Pile Driver, but you won’t be able to use the instrument until your cartridge is in the Sun. In the meantime, the battery-backed real-time clock tracks how long it takes you to return with ambient sunlight. Take too long, and the boss will escape, crawling back to its lair by the time you turn the game back on.

As a result of the game’s unique mechanics, the setting is key to Boktai. It’s rare to find someone playing the game in most of the spaces we might expect to see the GBA. It’s ill suited for planes, subway platforms, and waiting rooms, and it’s not something that you can easily pick up at night after work for a couple of hours before bed. While you can orient yourself toward natural light indoors, Boktai is best enjoyed outside, in parks, backyards, or other open-air spaces. And because the GBA’s screen is uniquely suited for direct sunlight (unlike backlit screens, which get washed out), Boktai makes the most of the hardware’s greatest shortcoming. The hardware’s deficiencies become advantages through a clever hardware addition.

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