Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 7 (Sweet Home)

PART 1: THE GAME

This has been a long time coming. I've wanted to play and cover this game for years on these marathons, but never got around to doing so. Part of this is procrastination, and part of it is intimidation: The mere thought of survival horror being a genre with risk of unwinnable fail states kept me off it. Fitting, then, that I finally give this a try in the year where I conquered my fear of Resident Evil. The two get compared quite a bit, this being the spiritual ancestor to Resident Evil and both sharing certain elements. In both you're trapped inside a deadly mansion of supernatural terrors, solving puzzles and piecing together clues about what happened here from disparate scraps left behind while carefully managing limited resources, both in quantity and what you can carry around at any one time.

For all their similarities, they are different. Treating Sweet Home as just the rough draft of Resident Evil would be doing it a disservice. The experience of playing Sweet Home was just as unique as my experience playing Resident Evil, and I will try to convey my main takeaway from going through the game. If anything, it's one of dissonance. I was dreading it a little, wondering just how mean the game would be... and it was not that bad, overall. At times, it's more generous than most survival horror experiences: Being able to save anywhere you like effectively means that you can be extra cautious and not encounter any real loss from stumbling into a trap, and removes the extra sense of tension Resident Evil attempts to give you by making saves a limited resource as well. Indeed, for the cautious hoarder player like I am, there's also the nature of the RPG and overleveling; you can just run around an explored hallway and fight enemies you know you can take on to make the stronger ones trivial as well.

At the same time, item management and the progression of the game are quite difficult. Two item slots per character, with a max of three characters per party, means that you run out of room real fast. Unlike Resident Evil, there is no handy item box in a safe room for you to draw from: the game is a careful dance of guessing what you'll need and what you can leave behind, and making a mental note of what's lying around where if you ever find yourself in a spot where you need some tool to progress and don't have it on you. Speaking of taking notes, this is definitely an old-school Famicom RPG where scribbling anything of import down onto physical paper is a necessity. I will admit to having used an FAQ to get myself unstuck at several occasions. It's not that Sweet Home is cryptic, but it is the kind of game where you are expected to have kept track of this stuff: what items you left where, what parts of the mansion remain locked for later exploration when you find a key, et cetera.

The final dissonance comes with the game's climax against the spectre which haunts this mansion, the lady Mamiya. For the entirety of the game, you will have been slashing your way through ghosts and zombies and other grotesque things which want you dead. It's kill or be killed. The final battle takes a different approach: you are not here to blast lady Mamiya like you're the fucking Ghostbusters. You are here to put her soul at rest, and you do this through nonviolent means: you show her things and objects from her life to give this vengeful ghost peace, and to help her move on to the afterlife. You survive the horrible night by healing, not hurting. Shockingly, this calls to mind another Famicom RPG which released only a few months before Sweet Home: Mother, the precursor to Earthbound. That game also has you take a nonviolent approach and use menu commands that aren't "Fight" in order to survive its final boss battle. I have to wonder if Sweet Home was inspired by Mother, or if this sort of pacifist swerve in Famicom RPGs was in the water at the time.

That's the dissonant paradox of Sweet Home. It's easier than later survival horror games, but also harder. It's nicer, but also meaner. It's lurid and violent and terrifying, but also serene and peaceful and soothing. Even the title itself creates dissonace, a wholesome phrase like Sweet Home used to describe a horror game filled with ghosts and monsters. It's one hell of a game, and writing about it has already ballooned well beyond the usual marathon writeup. The wild thing is... I'm only half done.

PART 2: THE MOVIE

The game was better. That's about all I want to say about that, save for the amusing reverse of me recognizing elements in the movie that popped up in the game and not the other way around. Barring one other thing which I will mention in a moment, the movie is just alright and the sort of spooky movie fare which would have slipped into the cracks of history were it not for its connection to the Famicom game and the Famicom game's connection to Resident Evil. Being that I found the film via subtitled Youtube upload that's been online for 8 years with no repercussions, Sweet Home seems to categorize itself nicely as a part of the archive of detritus.

And yet it was directed by one Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a filmmaker who I encountered last year on the blog with the movie Cure. Cure was a film I didn't quite know what to make of, and still don't with my hazy memory of it, but I remember moody and psychological and ambiguous. All very good things for a movie to be. Sweet Home, the film, is doing its best. It goes for a sweeter mood at times, and what's interesting is how film imitates the game... at least how I experienced it. The party pairing I ended up gravitating towards was Kazuo as the leader, with his team consisting of Akiko and Emi. Taguchi and Asuka made up the B team, being led by Kazuo when I needed to level them up to keep party levels even. In the movie, Kazuo is the father of Emi, and Akiko is his potential love interest. This was the team I beat the game with, and without even knowing it I was mirroring the film.

What stood out most to me about the film was its use of shadows. It opens on someone making shadow puppets, presumably lady Mamiya to entertain her infant son. The shadows are not just used to darken rooms and give atmosphere, but they are the main extension of the supernatural in this film. They creep about like a sentient thing, burning away all they touch with lady Mamiya's curse, and not even light can fight them: light sources only cast more shadows, after all. It's very low budget, but nonetheless effective as hell: all you need is disparate light sources and a few well-placed special effects, and you can turn the dark halls of the Mamiya mansion into something sinister.

Then there's the ending, and... hmm. Well, it does do like the game where instead of exorcising lady Mamiya (whose monstrous visage looks great as a practical effect, by the way) into oblivion, what lets her ascend to the afterlife is being reunited with her child. This is done by Emi, and there's a fitting mirroring to her doing it. Lady Mamiya is a mother who lost her child, and Emi is a child who lost her mother. There's something poetic there. On the other hand, we have Akiko, the potential romantic partner who ends up becoming part of Kazuo's family at the end. In order to save Emi from lady Mamiya, she has to put on Emi's mother's old dress, and only this literal acceptance of the role of new mother for the family is what enables her to rescue Emi. There's something very traditional Japanese gender role essentialist about all that, and I don't know how I feel about it. Hell, I don't even know if that's the right phrase to use. I could just be talking out of my ass.

That is Sweet Home, the film. It's like... okay. Not terrible, but no masterpiece. If you want a wild Japanese horror film, I'd still nudge you in the direction of Hausu. It's strange, because it's the exact inverse of the usual pitfall of a film and its video game adaptation. Usually, the film is the genius thing and it's the game that's the mediocrity. I guess for something as contradictory and strange as Sweet Home, though, that that's just on brand.