Re-release this: L.O.L.: Lack of Love
Re-release this: L.O.L.: Lack of Love
A masterpiece in a number of ways, but one that's largely unknown for just as many reasons. Lack of Love deserves a second chance in a time that might appreciate it far more.
This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
The only reason more people haven’t related to L.O.L.: Lack of Love’s narrative is because they have not experienced it firsthand. It’s a Japan-only Sega Dreamcast game, released during the holiday season of 2000, by a studio that most people who have picked up a video game controller in their lives have never heard of. Lack of Love was a commercial failure, hence the lack of a worldwide release, and ended up signaling the end of this studio, Love-de-Lic — but not the ends of the careers of those who developed it. You might not know about this game, specifically, but chances are good — or are at least better — that you’ve heard of Chulip, or Chibi-Robo!, or the Art Style series of games, or Moon: Remix RPG Adventure, thanks to the latter’s modern localization and release on the Nintendo Switch. Those titles were all developed either directly by Love-de-Lic, in the case of the original Moon, or by its successors, the studios Punchline, skip Ltd., and Onion Games.
Despite the sheer lack of people who have played L.O.L., though, I can confidently say that if more folks gave it a try, they would certainly relate. It is, at its core, a game about being born into a world that is already doomed. About not, on your own, having the power to stop the impending disaster that will rip the world you know away from you. If there is anything more relatable to the vast majority of the world’s population than this idea that you do not have the power to shape your own future, that forces too large to comprehend have stolen that from you, that you feel utterly alone despite the fact you’re facing down this horror along billions of others, well, I hope your alternative suggestion is more optimistic, because this one feels like you’re drowning even while your head is above water.
Luckily, Lack of Love serves more as a warning of what could be than as a definitive glimpse into an unavoidable future. Despite the above paragraph, it’s a more optimistic game than that, one that focuses on the idea of symbiosis, on what’s necessary to avoid what is, as of 2000 and to this day, impending doom due to the destruction and failure of the world’s ecosystems to prevent environmental disaster. While the level of environmental destruction and disaster and upheaval Earth is currently scheduled for is not unprecedented in its billions of years of history, that this particular extinction-level event has been caused directly by some of its lifeforms makes it stand out, and makes it terrifyingly unique. This is the backdrop of Lack of Love, though, and the reason for its name and its narrative: there is a lack of love out there in the world, for our fellow human, for our fellow creature, for the planet we live on and within. And this lack of love will lead to the destruction of it all.
Lack of Love was conceived by video game developer Kenichi Nishi — a former Square employee in the 90s who worked on Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG before founding Love-de-Lic with other former Square developers — and world-famous composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, after the two were introduced and began correspondence that would eventually result in discussion of the Gaia hypothesis. The merits of the Gaia hypothesis are, even now, roughly 50 years after its introduction, still debated, but the validity of its ideas are unimportant when it comes to its role in the creation of what would become Lack of Love. The basic idea behind the Gaia hypothesis is this: everything that exists on Earth does so as part of a single, self-regulating system that maintains the condition of the planet itself. And Earth is capable of doing this regulation on its own to counteract anything that is throwing a literal or figurative wrench into this system, like a living creature’s body attacking a virus to protect itself from harm and destruction, and bring balance back to its smaller-scale ecosystem.
(Speaking of Sakamoto, I highly suggest you listen to the hauntingly beautiful soundtrack for Lack of Love while you read.)
This latter portion only really comes up near the game’s end, but we’ll get to that. Lack of Love, for the most part, focuses heavily on the symbiosis that the Gaia hypothesis implies the existence of, on organisms living within an ecosystem, on their reliance on each other to get by. And what happens when an invasive force arises and sets about bringing ruin to all of that. And while the Gaia hypothesis gets mention as inspiration and guidance for Lack of Love’s creation by Nishi himself, it’s certainly not the only idea out there that was either directly drawn from or, at the least, whose subtle influence can be felt while playing. We’ll get to that later, too.
Lack of Love is a life simulation game that has also been described as an evolutionary sim by some, but that second description isn’t accurate to me. The mechanic being referenced there is much more akin to metamorphosis, like a caterpillar doing what needs to be done in order to begin its transformation into a butterfly. It’s about being able to change in a way that allows you — not your progeny — to better interact with, and survive in, your environment. How you go about surviving within Lack of Love is a bit up to you, but this isn’t a long-tail chance like evolution. It’s a series of life-altering changes that can be used selfishly or for the betterment of the environment — plant, animal, the planet itself — around you. Metamorphosis, used in the way Lack of Love does, carries with it a stronger relation, a stronger connection to the player, than simply being an evolutionary sim would have, since the unspoken lessons of the adaptability and survival inherent in metamorphosis can be better translated from the game to real life.
As I said before, in Lack of Love, you are born into a world that is already doomed. The game opens with a lengthy cutscene depicting a journey across space, in what ends up being a spaceship filled with robots. The one robot with feet and arms, that isn’t purely designed as a tool for digging, for terraforming, is looking for a habitable planet.
The implication here is that Earth has sent these robots to find a second home — why, exactly, another planet is needed is never directly addressed in-game: is it because Earth itself is “overpopulated,” which is not an actual thing despite the prevalence of neo-Malthusian dirtbags in the real world? Is it a space-age pilgrimage for religious reasons, like how the Mayflower’s journey to the Americas was mirrored in the far more technologically advanced world of The Expanse? Or is it more like in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, where Earth has simply become unlivable due to the powers that be and their refusal to do anything to avert a climate disaster that could be seen coming long before it arrived? Again, it’s never made clear which it is, but it could very well be any of those things, especially since it becomes very clear that Lack of Love is not concerned with the why of this space-age colonization so much as what will now happen to the colonized because of this search for a new homeworld.
Following the opening cutscene and the violent landing of the ship on the planet’s surface — it doesn’t land, really, so much as drill its way into the planet’s surface in a way that changes the ship from a flying object into a tall tower and central base for the terraforming project — you finally gain control… of something else entirely. You do not play as these robots: they are the antagonists of this story. You are a creature native to this unnamed world, and you take control at the moment of its birth. Encased within an egg residing in and slowly rising to the surface of a pool of water, your first actions in the game will be attempting to break out of this shell before a fish can eat you. Your siblings will be eaten, because they have either not yet awoken from their sleep, or haven’t developed the evolutionary quirk of limbs that you have, and therefore can’t break free from what quickly shifted from a warm, comforting cocoon into a watery prison that will end their life before it truly begins. You, though, have limbs, and once you figure out which button is the one that will let you do some kicking, you’ll free yourself, and then climb out of the pool of water and into the wider world.
Which, like this pool of water that moments ago looked like it encompassed the entire world, appears massive until you realize that you are just very tiny. That will change, though, as you make your way through the game. Through a visual cue, you see another creature that looks like you enter into a cocoon, and then break out of it changed: larger, stronger, faster. You must figure out how to do the same in order to leave this small area behind and see more of the world. You do this by carefully navigating and studying your environment and everything that lives within it, determining what and whom could be a friend, and who is more interested in eating you than napping next to you. And you must sort all of this out without a single word of dialogue or text, too: every cue in this game that gives you a clue about what you might need to do next is of the visual or audio variety. You will have to explore, to be patient, in order to discover that, say, one particular creature’s “mission” requires you see flies attacking it as it is trying to sleep, and you need to lure the flies away so that this animal can get a good night’s rest. Or that you need to urinate on a plant in order to water it, and cause it to grow into a platform you can traverse.
Yes, there is a button just for urinating: there aren’t a lot of games you can say that about, but it’s a button you’ll find useful for more than just watering the plants. How do you think you lure those aforementioned flies away?
All of your actions are context-sensitive. The X button is for communicating, which gets the attention of other creatures, can wake them up from sleep, can attract certain animals and bugs toward you, and so on. The A button is for attacking, either in self-defense or to protect another creature from a predator, for eating, or sometimes as kind of a confirmation of “yes, I want to interact with this creature directly,” such as with some animals that you will play games with, or “sumo wrestle” or what have you. The B button is for sleeping, which helps you regain your health so long as you have taken in enough nutrients to have the energy to do this — whether those nutrients come from your defeat of particularly aggressive species, from plants, or because you have aggressively decided to work your way to the top of the food chain is up to you, but if you don’t eat, you will die as surely as if you were killed by another creature. You’ll also go to sleep on save points in order to initiate saving, and certain creatures in the game will only approach you if you’re asleep, meaning you might not be able to even discover the existence of certain missions unless you take a nap in the right place.
Oh, and the Y button is for pissing.
Like I said, patience is required in a game where you are never explicitly told to do anything and have to figure it all out by paying careful attention to your environment and everything within it, but at least the game does not need you to complete anywhere near all of the game’s missions in order to progress through it, and the pause menu shows you a silhouette of each creature you’ll need to help in an area before you even bump into them on the map, so you’re not trying to figure it all out from nothing. You receive a symbolic reward for helping out these creatures, and when you have enough of these rewards, you can undergo metamorphosis and progress through the game: maybe you are now strong enough to take on a region’s apex predator, or maybe now your limbs are just long enough that you can climb over what used to be an impediment. If you had more rewards than you needed in order to undergo the metamorphosis, then you lose those. There are more creatures to help, more missions to complete, and the game never sets you up for failure in this regard, either, so rest easy. If you just can’t figure something out, then move on to the next.
The robots keep their distance from you at first, but you’re never put in a position where you can simply forget about them. In the game’s second stage, you’ll find yourself walking over massive (to you) boot prints left behind by the robot that fancies itself in charge of your homeworld. Not all that long later, after a stage that sees you completing a series of games and helpful activities for the region’s ecosystem, you’ll have your first direct interaction with the terraforming robots: one arrives and begins to dig up the entire area, killing most of what lived there, be it plant or animal. You manage to survive, and work your way up a now crumbling rock face, only to be captured by bugs that, as you will see once you awake inside of their home, plan on eating you, or using your body to further build out their labyrinthian structure.
This isn’t Undertale: there is no pacifism route, no way to complete the game without enacting some level of violence on those around you. It is meant to be a representation of an ecosystem, of the environment, of nature. There are prey and predators, the hunted and the hunter. You get the choice of which you are — much like humanity does — and you have to live with your decision. Maybe you’ve tried to spend the whole game to this point being a pacifist, intimidating predators more than actually killing them, but you simply cannot here: you will be killed, and you will be eaten, if you do not do those things first. You have to fight your way out of your “cell,” and out of this nest, or it’s game over. Or “Life Over,” as Lack of Love displays whenever you die.
Symbiosis is what the game is going for, and symbiosis is not pacifism: nature is beautiful to behold, but as anyone who has ever watched a documentary on it knows, it’s also rife with violence. You will have to partake in the violence of nature, even as you go around helping as much of it live. Unnecessarily attack other species, other creatures, just because they happen to cross your path, and you’ll notice a dip in their populations, and an emptier, sadder world. Among other things, that’s going to be a real problem when it comes time to find something to eat. And it’s going to be a real problem for the planet, too: when the “self-regulation” portion of the Gaia hypothesis is on display in Lack of Love, it’s bad news for the robots whose terraforming and destruction of the planet’s native life and environments brought Gaia to the point where a cleansing counterstrike was necessary. Maybe the world can’t unleash a deadly organic virus on the robots, but it sure can open the earth up and swallow them whole to get them to stop.
While the Gaia hypothesis, as stated, was an inspiration for the development of this game, I spent much more of my time with it thinking about the Leopold Land Ethic, as well as how various Native American tribes acted as stewards of the land and all within it before the nations of Europe came to these shores and brought genocide and the seeds that would eventually sprout capitalism with them. How could I not, considering that the justification used by various European nations, in their seizure of the land and its resources from Native Americans in the name of colonization and an ever-shifting frontier, always centered around the idea that America’s Indians were not using the land correctly? They were not “exploiting” the land to its fullest, and therefore they were failing it, and themselves, and therefore, it would be better for everyone if Britain or whomever took control from here on out. We know the opposite to be true, of course, that living more harmoniously with the land and its creatures, as a citizen of it rather than its conqueror, as Leopold describes as the ideal, could have helped kept just about every major climate issue we’re dealing with in the present from even existing, but this is the reasoning the British and other European nations, and eventually the United States itself once that existed, used in their appropriation of the Americas.
In Ellen Meiksins Wood’s Empire of Capital, she focuses on the long history of Europe and how the world of the Romans and their empire eventually led to the rise of the imperialism we know today, an imperialism headed up by none other than the United States. By Wood’s reckoning, it was an economic imperative that drove various European thinkers like John Locke, Emeric de Vattel, and early 17th-century philosopher and political theorist Hugo Grotius to justify the seizure of [often American] lands from the people living there. Essentially, the land was not “fruitful” enough in its current state, with its current stewards: Grotius was at first giving the Dutch a justification for expansion, but later on, it was Ireland as a British testing ground for this kind of land seizure and commercialization of imperialism that took center stage, and when that proved successful enough, America’s lands were next for the budding worldwide empire.
The arguments of Locke, Vattel, and Grotius justified, either in the moment or retroactively, just about any war, any violence, so long as there was profit in it. If the empire was made stronger through land seizures and mass killings and wars that were not just wars of self-defense, then start declaring war, start killing, start taking what you want. This is the world we live in: this is the world Lack of Love was developed in. It is the world that influenced, whether directly or simply as a product of its environment, the creation of Lack of Love and its story. Of the game’s Earth deciding that they were going to program terraforming robots to show up on another habitable planet and just start killing off anything that stood in the way, be it plant, animal, or, well, anything. Whether it was, as mentioned, due to “overpopulation,” to ensure the survival of humanity, or simply a pilgrimage to open up new opportunities, is immaterial. What matters is that Earth’s people felt they deserved to live, to profit, at the expense of whatever was already living, already thriving, on the new home they decided actually belongs to them. A world full of life, treated as if it were as empty as too many European nations pretended the Americas were.
Let’s go back to the Leopold Land Ethic for a moment. It is a posthumously published work by American Aldo Leopold, a giant in the field of ecology and conservationism, that sought to get into the ethics, the morality, of how we are meant to behave within our environment. “Within” is the key there — that’s where the citizen of, rather than conqueror of, idea came from. Leopold wanted us to think bigger than just humanity, to consider that “the land” is more than just what you walk on and construct your buildings on top of:
The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals; or collectively: the land. This sounds simple: do we not already sing our love for and obligation to the land of the free and the home of the brave? Yes, but just what and whom do we love? Certainly not the soil, which we are sending helter-skelter downriver. Certainly not the waters, which we assume have no function except to turn turbines, float barges, and carry off sewage. Certainly not the plants, of which we exterminate whole communities without batting an eye. Certainly not the animals, of which we have already extirpated many of the largest and most beautiful species. A land ethic of course cannot prevent the alteration, management, and use of these 'resources,' but it does affirm their right to continued existence, and, at least in spots, their continued existence in a natural state.
In Lack of Love, as the unnamed creature simply trying to survive in a world already full of violence and danger, you spend most of your time living symbiotically with your environment. Living within it, not just on it, learning from it, improving it where you can, and not just for your own benefit, but for the benefit of the environment at large. The robots, however, show no regard for this world, its soil, its creatures, its water. By the time you are approaching the end of the game, everything around the tower has been dug up and flattened: the only land receiving any attention whatsoever at this point, is some grass surrounding the tower, seemingly also brought from Earth, that is watered all day long by sprinklers.
Consider the lack of utility a watered and fertilized American lawn has, the foreignness of the kind of grass planted within it: it is not part of the environment, so much as it has replaced what was native to it, and all just so that it looks “nice,” so that someone can feel like their home is their own personal Versailles, so that someone driving by can comment on the uniformity of the grass length and what that says about the homeowner as a person and good American. As the lone decoration around the tower in Lack of Love, which, further out, is surrounded by unkempt and uncared for soil, and beyond even that, dust storms and desert created by terraforming that disrupted the natural environment of this planet, the grass and its watering was about as deliberate a design choice as you can make.
So, too, was the game’s decision to force your creature to comply with the robots. Eventually, when you are too large to ignore, you and a variety of other species are captured by the robots. The head robot essentially tortures and experiments on you, testing your intelligence and resilience, until it gets you to a point where you, the player, agree to “choose” a robotic facsimile of a human baby over a creature that is native to your world, that your species has had a relationship with. It was especially cutting to be forced into this decision — accept the fate of this planet, which is no longer yours, or simply be thrown away with the rest of the refuse again —since the game took the time, not long before, to show you that, even though your species and this other species did not necessarily have a spoken language to share, even though they did not erect buildings and monuments, they still clearly had communication, and budding culture, too. They worked in pairs, one of each species each. They danced together at night by the shore. You could even see some of them seemingly worshiping within this hidden-away community, and one of the smaller creatures can be seen mourning the death of its larger companion, too.
Then, the robots arrive, diggers rip up the whole “neighborhood,” and you and everyone else in the region that’s still alive is brought inside the tower for experimenting upon and what is essentially re-education for any species found to have intelligence that might cause a problem for the humans upon their eventual arrival. This is what the conquerors do to the conquered: allowing your creature to continue to live is supposed to be seen as a gift, a triumph for both parties when it was actually a clear victory for one and the end of a way of life for the other. It was violence, it was forced upon you, when the only alternative was further torture and the assurance of a cold, violent death inside the walls of the tower. At least, by choosing life, you could continue to live, and maybe even find a way to return the normalcy that the diggers crushed beneath their treads.
As alluded to previously, the planet — imbued by the powers of the Gaia hypothesis — put a stop to all of this with violence of its own, in the form of storms and earthquakes that ravage the machinery with as much savagery as they showed the land in their quest to terraform. The head robot survives, but is without its tools and its small army. It is now forced to live symbiotically with the healing planet, but as is seen in the post-credits cutscene, it is. The robot is pleased, to be discovering what the planet had to offer other than simply being what humanity planned to build on top of, and given the reemergence of vibrant life and ecosystems around the world, the planet, by Gaia’s reckoning, seems pleased, too.
Now, we, in the real world, can’t simply hope that the Earth opens up and swallows every fossil fuel billionaire or American politician funneling more and more into a defense budget that causes more climate destruction than entire countries manage, but there is certainly a lesson to take from Lack of Love’s violent conclusion. Not one I can print here without being put on a list, but hey. I’m sure, like with the audio and visual cues of Lack of Love, you can work out what needs to be done to save the planet, to change the default from conqueror to citizen, yourself.
If it wasn’t clear from my suggestion that you listen to the game’s soundtrack as you read, Ryuishi Sakamoto did a tremendous job creating a haunting, atmospheric set of songs that make the game even more of a triumph than it already was. There is a constant undercurrent of something dark, something wrong beneath the surface of each song. It reminds me, in the way it so successfully and immediately meshes with the work it is scoring, of Twin Peaks, or even some of the works of John Carpenter, who does not just write and direct, but also composes for many of his films. I’m not saying it sounds like those things, so much as its mastery of creating tension, of attempting to strangle the sounds of hope and optimism with darkness that will only be revealed the more surface layers are pealed away, is similar.
Whenever the music moves away from atmosphere and ambiance, it feels alien, dangerous, like it's forced its way into an unsuspecting game, and that’s not an accident at all: whenever the music sounds this way, the terraforming robots are involved. Sakamoto knew what he was doing: he’s a composer with so much success in his career that his Wikipedia page doesn’t even mention Lack of Love, and instead just includes a vague “has worked in video games” reference that doesn’t get its own section. It’s even wilder to consider that nonchalance over his involvement when you discover he was also in charge of the scenario writing for Lack of Love, and Nishi has publicly stated this game is more Sakamoto’s than his own. The way the music blends perfectly into every beat of the game’s narrative makes Sakamoto’s dual role clearer than simply reading it as fact can.
Nishi believes that the world wasn’t quite ready for something like Lack of Love when it released back in 2000, and it’s hard to say he’s wrong about that, and not just because of the dismal sales figures for the game. In the same month Lack of Love released in Japan, the United States elected George W. Bush to be its president over Al Gore — Gore is the liberal’s version of a climate advocate, of course, one who believed and still believes in market solutions to the apocalypse, but even something as milquetoast as that ideology was rejected at the polls. Fictional characters like Batman’s Poison Ivy were pure villains, even though their insistence that humanity was at the root of ecological destruction and inevitable doom was correct. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy is considered an optimistic and utopian view of the future, even though it’s incredibly violent and destructive while being heavily rooted in actual science and the kind of real-world issues that were either already in existence or were bubbling just under the surface at the time of its publication. It’s not the “going to Mars” part of those books that made it seem like sci-fi to some, is what I’m trying to get at.
If you haven’t read those three books — Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars — I suggest you do so. Like with Lack of Love, it’s well before it’s time, in the sense that not enough people were willing to listen to what it had to say, which means it’s still extremely of the moment despite the fact the first book is approaching its 30th anniversary. And even though I did not know for sure, I still knew deep down that someone out there would have written a paper or article or whatever explaining the role of Leopold’s Land Ethic in that work, too, because its influence is clear, its optimism derived from a belief that humanity can shift from that of a profit-driven conqueror to a citizen of something much larger than the bank accounts of the world’s powers.
Anyway, the fact Lack of Love still speaks so much to this moment in time is one of the reasons it should be re-released. Or released for the first time, as it were, in North America. Nishi himself (p. 117) wants it to be given a second chance, in this era that’s more accepting of the existence of climate change and the idea that something needs to be done about it. Well, at least among people like you and I: those in charge care as much about the future of Earth as the robot violently following its orders from the fictional Earth’s most powerful people did.
While it’s unclear if that will ever happen — Moon was once unlikely to see the light of American day, too, so who knows for sure — you don’t need an official release or localization in order to understand Lack of Love, its message, or even its directions. The only text that exists in the game is on the menu screens, detailing what each button does, and you can figure that out simply by pressing them. Again, the game dedicated an entire button to taking a whiz, and another to just going to sleep. Controlling it isn’t all that difficult — if you want, however, there is a full English translation available as of last year (read: after I had already first played this game) that you can find with a quick Google search. You can either play on a Dreamcast emulator, or soft-mod your actual Dreamcast to play imports and burned CDs, in order to experience Lack of Love, translated or no. And regardless of how you go about playing it, or in what language, there is no question that you should. It’s a highly underrated gem on a console full of them, one of the best on the entire system, and it might never arrive on any other, either.
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