A few weeks ago one of the big Japanese games companies announced a remake of a game I lost most of my childhood to. The boy in the green tunic, the horse, the fairy that wouldn’t stop shouting at you. You know the one, even if I’m not allowed to say it.
The internet did what the internet does. Within an hour people were posting their own “fixed” versions of the new character design, smoothing him out, sharpening him up, dragging him back towards whatever they remembered from 1998. Something about him looked off to them. Too stiff. Too carved. Too much like a thing rather than a person.
Then one of the company’s old hands — three decades in, the sort of designer whose name means something to people who read the credits — chimed in. Their most famous creator, he said, has always loved puppet shows, and it shows here too.
And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. The new boy isn’t a cartoon. He’s a marionette. The proportions, the solid, sculpted hair, the face that looks lacquered rather than rendered. He looks like he was built at a bench and lit on a stage. Somebody lined him up next to the old Japanese television marionettes and the resemblance is almost rude.
It isn’t even the first time. Years ago the same company promoted one of their space games with puppets — actual puppets, a fox in a flight suit and all. Nobody has ever let it go. So this wasn’t an accident or a trend. It was a man at the very top of one of the biggest entertainment companies on earth reaching for the thing he loved as a kid, and his team building it for him.
What gets me is the “fixing”. The instinct to sand the puppet out of him. People can feel that something is different — the weight, the woodenness, the way the light sits on him — and their first reaction is to call it a mistake. That’s puppetry’s whole problem in one comments section. When it works, nobody knows what they’re looking at. They just know they can’t stop looking.
Last week I was sat listening to Tashy tell the local news that nobody does this anymore. This week a games studio with more money than the Arts Council has ever seen chose the look of a marionette for one of its crown jewels, and millions of people are going to spend forty hours inside it without knowing why it feels the way it does.
Nobody’s cutting a string. Most people just haven’t spotted them yet.