Before Street Fighter, before Megaman, before Resident Evil, Capcom had 1942. This game was Capcom’s first major hit, 1942 put them on the map and built the path to their future success. The game begins in, you guessed it, 1942, at the Pacific theater of World War II. The goal of the game is for the player, “Super Ace”, to reach Tokyo and slaughter as many Japanese soldiers as possible along the way.
At first glance, 1942 seems like an appeal to the American penchant for destroying and subjugating foreign countries, and many people may simply view 1942 as another stock-standard “America fights the bad guys and wins” style of game. However, this is far from the truth. While playing, I began to notice that very few enemies will actually stand and fight you. Almost every enemy quickly emerges to take a glancing shots at you, and then just as quickly flees like a scared dog. This contradicts the actual accounts of the actions of Japanese soldiers during WWII, who would fight tooth and nail until their last breath against their enemy. What this enemy behavior shows is that 1942 isn’t a game that wants to congratulate the US for its actions during WWII, it is in-fact a critique of their actions from the perspective of a Japanese native.
In 1942 you are dubbed Super Ace. Comically bad is an understatement for this name. It overtly asserts your prodigious flying skills in the most heavy handed way possible. The comic nature of this name is making fun of the US and our rather high opinions of ourselves and our military. In fact, the game’s harsh comedic critique doesn’t stop at the name “Super Ace”. In the course of the game you shoot down hundreds or planes, a feat surpassing that of the greatest pilots in history. Along with the over the top slaughter of the Japanese Air Force, your plane moves at a slow, nonchalant pace, symbolizing the inevitability of defeat that the Japanese faced during the onslaught of the American armed forces. As the Americans reached farther and farther into Japanese territory, the reality of defeat became more and more apparent for the Japanese, which resulted in their tactics becoming increasingly desperate, until finally any hope of the tide turning was demolished by the mighty atomic bomb.
1942 is a retelling of the Battle of the Pacific through the eyes of an everyday citizen of the Empire of the Rising Sun. The horror and destruction wrought upon these innocent bystanders, coupled with the constant propaganda of the Japanese Empire created a very horrific view of the United States for the commoners of Japan. As the US worked towards ending the war, more and more Japanese land was razed, desecrated, and destroyed. The dropping of the two atomic bombs solidified the United States as a land of monsters in the eyes of Japanese people.
In the game you, a lone pilot, shoots down and probably kills hundreds upon hundreds of Japanese pilots. This is not a suggestion that the Japanese Air Force is incompetent, or the impressive training and skill of the US’s, but serves rather as a metaphor, an allegory for one plane dropping one bomb and killing hundreds of thousands of people. 1942 is a plea from the Japanese.
Despite 1942′s rather cavalier and over the top atmosphere, the game is a harrowing interpretation of the Pacific War, through the eyes of the common Japanese native: the fear, the ominous presence of the United States bearing down, the attacks of desperation being thwarted again and again, and finally, the incredible destruction and death toll wrought by the Atomic Bomb. 1942 is one of the few windows into the life of the Japanese during WWII, and however simple it may be, it ranks up there with Grave of the Fireflys, and Letters From Iwo Jima in terms of showing the hopelessness and desperation of life in Japan during WWII.
So it wasn’t dolphin and whale all along?
Seriously, though, it is a bit amusing how a game like this can offer up (albeit jokingly) more interesting commentary than even CoD:MW2′s “No Russian” mission.
Yeah, I was trying to think of things to do for more modern games, but it would be something like “AMERICA IS THE BEST” “RELIGION IS STUPID” “RELIGION IS THE REASON FOR ALL SUFFERING” “RELIGION IS FOR THE IGNORANT”. The only thing I could really do is comment on how comically bad the writing is for most of those games and how they are actually saying the opposite by presenting such a poor case.
Probably because No Russian was a marketing trick, while this was actual steps in the development of video games as an artform.
“1942″ was released in 1984, meaning that the designers and programmers would not have remembered the events of the war, even if they had lived through them. They probably were not even old enough to have remembered much of the occupation period, which ended with the San Fransisco Peace Treaty in 1952. At the time the game was released, Japan was in the middle of an economic surge, brought on largely by its trade relationship with the US. Furthermore, let’s not forget that contemporary Japanese tend to think very poorly of their WWII-era military government. While the soldiers that fought and died are thought of as tragic heroes, mainstream Japanese culture reviles the WWII military government for forcing the country on a destructive, selfish war of expansion. But most damning for your interpretation of the game, the Japanese ‘home islands’ were never bombed or attacked by anyone in WWII until Doolittle’s famously daring raid, which was extremely risky for the pilots involved and dealt very minor damage to Tokyo, and occurred in… you guessed it, 1942 (look it up on Wikipedia, the raid was anything but an expression of ‘overwhelming American power.’) Regular bombing of the Japanese islands was not to begin until 1944, when newly-developed B-29 strategic bombers, based in China, were able to fly far enough and high enough to safely bomb Japan. These facts makes me doubt that the game’s creators were trying to portray Japan as begin mercilessly steamrolled by an all-powerful America. It would have made more sense to imagine that the game is about Doolittle, piloting his bomber across thousands of miles of Pacific ocean to just barely reach Japan and crash-land in China. Given that the game is filled with hundreds of enemies that all can kill you in one hit, including giant battleships, this seems a better fit. (Of course, I think both ‘interpretations’ are ridiculous. Enemy planes are only on the screen for a brief period of time as a scoring challenge – you only have a moment to destroy them all, or you miss out on points. This mechanic is used in every shooting game I can think of.)
I wanted to come up with some witty, long-winded response that would toe the line of admitting that this is a joke article series but not come right out and say it, but you put a lot of effort into proving me wrong, and I applaud you for it. You pretty much trumped everything I said and could have said in response. Well played sir, well played.
so this was a joke article? sorry, I’ve been reading Kotaku and I can’t tell the difference between sarcasm and sincerity anymore. either way, thanks for reading my super long comment.