Retro spotlight: Chulip

In order to kiss your love, you must first kiss everyone else.

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Let’s just get this out of the way to start: there are certainly video games with bad design. Horrid design, even. Systems that do not make any sense, or do not actually work together in concert, or that just kind of pile up to check off boxes and make a game sound deep and engaging when all that really happens is that the developers have made a slog. You can have intriguing ideas but fail to properly implement them. You can create something that on paper sounds good and exciting, but in practice is Battletoads for the NES.

Chulip, released in 2007 for the Playstation 2, was often cited for having bad or poor design in reviews of the game. Game Informer (issue 177) listed Chulip as one of the 10 worst games of the year, and the Ben Reeves, who reviewed it for the magazine (issue 168), wrote that, “Some games are just made broken. I don’t mean broken in the bug-riddled sense, but Chulip is probably one of the most poorly designed games I have ever played.” Reeves was certainly far from alone in this: Chulip has a score of 57 on Metacritic. Gamespot wrote that, “There's something to be said for Chulip's abject weirdness and purposefully awkward structure, but they don't translate into a rewarding game experience.” IGN concluded their review with, “While there are merits to the game, they are buried under a whole lot of tedious puzzle-solving and aimless meandering. Check out Chulip, only if you love anything off the beaten path, and can stomach a little irritation.” 1Up was the kindest to the game, saying (in a now erased-from-the-internet review), “Gameplay nags aside, we do want to make it clear that Chulip is certainly worth a look for purveyors of all things Japanese and indie. We can bandy about synonyms for "charming" and "stylish" all damn day, but the game makes an effort to resist labels, really becoming something in and of itself.”

I do not quite think these reviews, on the whole, are fair to Chulip and what it was designed to do (and I am not alone in this, considering the nine user score reviews are more ecstatic than the 10 critic reviews, and score an 8.1 average out of 10 — number reviews are limiting, yes, and boiling reviews down to a figure is often unhelpful, but at least in this instance you can see the chasm between critics and people who bought the game despite what critics said about it). There is a difference between bad design or poor design, and design that is simply not for you. If said design is not for you, then yeah, sure, it’s going to come off as poorly done. Chulip, though, is a game that does not want to hold your hand, that wants to encourage exploration and experimentation, that requires patience and perseverance. It actually gives you more hints and clues than those reviews suggest it does, but you have to go looking for those, too, and level up your character and their health to the point where you can experiment without fear of seeing that game over screen or losing progress. (And sure, there isn’t an autosave function, but you know where to save. Just be sure to do so regularly: your home and the save point within are at the center of the game world’s map, and the world ain’t that big.)

Image credit: Video Games Museum

A version of Chulip that outright tells you what to do removes much of the whimsy from the equation. There are times where it feels very Animal Crossing, but spliced with the town exploration, weirdness, and time mechanics of Majora’s Mask. Instead of going back in time when you miss an event or conversation or simply mess up at your attempt to succeed at a given goal, though, you just need to try again the next day at the same time. Both of those games give you plenty of hints, and in the case of Majora’s Mask, some direction, too, but, generally speaking, they leave you to your own devices. Chulip leans a little more Animal Crossing than Zelda in this regard, since you’re left to kind of poke around and discover the visible world and the less visible parts within it, but it’s also less generous with details than either.

Is this poor design? If you need a game to constantly reinforce what you are supposed to be doing and where you are supposed to be heading, sure. If you prefer a linear experience, then yes, Chulip will feel frustrating and like the developer, Punchline, had no idea what they were doing. This isn’t me knocking on anyone who does prefer these things, either. Sometimes I do just want a game to tell me exactly what I need to do so then I can go do it. Other times, though, I want a game to plop me down in its world, and leave me to discover what is to be discovered. Chulip is one such game: you are given a goal, you are introduced to the central premise of the gameplay, and you are shown one bit of direction for the main story of the game, and left to figure out the rest on your own through exploration, verbal, and visual clues. All of those clues and cues will be weird.

Now, I will say, there are certainly times where a little more guidance would have been nice — you will not hear me say Chulip is a perfect experience, even if I believe it’s a worthwhile one. There are some interactions where you truly are just winging it, or need to be lucky about finding out when you need to be where. There’s enough help elsewhere here to lock you in to wanting to figure those parts out, however, so long as you don’t mind having to sort things out yourself. And if you do mind? There are plenty of other games out there just for you, which is kind of the beauty of the whole enterprise, don’t you think?

Per the previously linked IGN review, “Chulip” is a play on words, with “chu” being the Japanese onomatopoeia for the sound a kiss makes, combined with the English word “lip.” The point of Chulip is to kiss. A lot. You will kiss everyone, in your quest to kiss one special someone. You see, your character, whom you name, is a teenage boy who has just moved to Long Life Town. You are poor, and everyone knows it, and they blame you and your father for a crime that was recently committed in town simply because you are new and you are poor. Most importantly to your character, though, the fact you are poor makes you uncool to the literal girl of your dreams, and so even though you dreamt of kissing her under a tree in town before you ever saw the town, the girl, or said tree, she won’t give you the time of day. Try to kiss her, and she will rear back and knock you on your ass. Which you would deserve, show some respect for consent.

You are taught by a little Mr. Saturn-looking dude, a teacher named Mr. Suzuki, that your love letters are terrible and won’t work, and what you need to do is prove you are cool and desirable by kissing others, and then try writing a love letter (with the set of letter-writing tools that you will spend the main storyline of Chulip recovering). In time, your dream girl (who you also get to name) will see that there is something to you, and you can happily kiss under the tree with a face that I guess is going to watch y’all make out. The first character you will kiss is the “Onion Lady,” whose head looks like an onion until she pops her actual head out from under, at which point you can give her a smooch by pressing the triangle button. The world stops, the stars are shown, the music changes from its standard acapella to one with both vocals and instruments, and you are now one step closer to becoming a man. Your dad will be proud. No, really, you have to report your kisses to your dad.

This is how all of these interactions work. You must first find a character you can kiss, often near the hole they emerge from in the ground, and then study them to find your opening for said kiss. When they have little puffs of steam coming out of them, they’re angry — sometimes at you, sometimes in general — and are not going to be receptive to a kiss. They will react violently to your attempt to kiss, or sometimes even to enter their personal space. You’ll lose hearts when this happens, and as you begin the game weak of heart (and uncool), you can’t take many hits before you’ll earn that game over screen. As you successfully kiss more and more characters in the town, though — which you can do when you see those puffs of steam replaced with musical notes that signify happiness and a willingness to smooch with you — then you will level up, earning new ranks (you start out as “Poor Boy,” then move on to “Hard Worker,” etc.) and more hearts in the process. Which will let you kiss some of the tougher customers out there, who are more difficult to approach without you getting smacked around, or will simply allow you to try to kiss more villagers in a single day, so long as you can find them.

The characters you will be kissing tend to be on the odd side. Take, for instance, Mr. Apollo: he is a man with a rocket attached to him, who you can successfully kiss only if he successfully lands on his feet following a launch. There is Retired Bucket, who is literally a man living in a trash can — you see his legs sticking out the bottom when he walks from his hole to a row of other trash cans, and when he fully sticks his head out the top of the can, you’re supposed to plant a kiss on him. Miss Thick Glasses might seem comparatively normal, and even told you when to meet her, but she also warns you that she’s a very angry person, and is only willing to kiss you after she has fallen on the ground and successfully placed her glasses back on her face.

Mr. Apollo and his rocket, after emerging from his hole. Image credit: Hardcore Gaming 101

You find all of these people in holes in the ground: there is an entire underground population in the city, and it’s where all the oddballs of Long Life Town reside. It’s also part of the game’s undercurrent that focuses on economic disparity: the protagonist’s own situation has already been discussed, but there is also the teacher, Mr. Yamada, who demands to be paid for his work and quits when Mr. Suzuki can’t give it to him, whose story you will follow throughout in order to complete Chulip, as well as the town’s many, many citizens who live out of sight in their subterranean dwellings. To you, though, everyone is a person who deserves to be kissed, regardless of their economic status, their attitude, or that they are or are dressed as a person-sized Godzilla who will shoot flames at you if they make direct eye contact before you kiss.

You can thank (or curse, depending) Yoshiro Kimura for Chulip. Kimura wanted to design a game around the idea of kissing in public, a more western idea that is a rarity in Japan, and to set it in a Japan of the past for just that little extra bit of culture clash. Kimura’s career (and that of many of the team at Punchline) is a fascinating one. Kimura got his start at Square in the 90s, and Romancing SaGa 2 was his first-ever game. He was one of the developers who left Square to form the independent studio, Love-de-Lic, in 1995 along with Kenichi Nishi. There, he would work on games like Moon: Remix RPG Adventure, as well as his and the studio’s final game, L.O.L.: Lack of Love (which you can read more about — much more about — from me). Love-de-Lic would disband, with Kimura forming Punchline, Taro Kudou and Kazuyuki Kurashima founding Vanpool, which still exists and has developed and co-developed a lengthy list of games, many of them for Nintendo franchises or published by Nintendo. And others still, like Nishi and Keita Eto, would form skip Ltd., who would also work exceptionally closely with Nintendo, producing the bit Generations games, many of the Art Series’ games like PiCTOBiTS, as well as Chibi-Robo! and the Japan-only Captain Rainbow.

Skip might or might not be around anymore — it is genuinely unclear if they’ve officially closed their doors — but Vanpool is still going strong, with their most recent co-development work being on Kirby Fighters 2 and Super Kirby Clash on the Switch. Punchline did not manage similar results. Their first game was Chulip, which did not sell well in Japan and then, as a Gamestop-exclusive reviewers did not like when it hit North American shelves five years later, was also a disaster here. Their second game, Rule of Rose, was controversial to the point of not even being sold in a number of territories, and it is now one of the most expensive Playstation 2 games out there. That was the end for Punchline, but not the end for Kimura and crew. Kimura himself would work for Marvelous as a producer, and then join Grasshopper Manufacture following Marvelous’ run of publishing Grasshopper games that Kimura worked on, like No More Heroes. He would also contribute to its sequel, Desperate Struggle, as well as Shadow of the Damned, and Cing’s wonderfully underrated 2009 release, Little King’s Story.

Kimura once again has his own independent studio, Onion Games, which has released Love-de-Lic’s Moon in English for the first time, and also developed the original titles Black Bird, Million Onion Hotel, and Dandy Dungeon. The latter of these is flush with references and nods to other games and game franchises — and I do mean flush, since your main character has his game saved on the toilet, just like in Chulip and in the No More Heroes games Kimura worked on. The most overt reference, non-Dragon Quest division, is what happens to the screen when the protagonist, Yamada, sees the young woman he is infatuated with. The screen gets a dreamlike hue to it, and a ring of tulips now acts as a border. This is also what happened when the protagonist of Chulip first sees his dream girl in real life:

Image credit: Games from the Black Hole

It’s not quite Nishi’s dog Tao showing up in every game he worked on, but it’s still a lovely little nod to Kimura’s past life.

Chulip is not for everyone. It wasn’t designed to be. Romancing SaGa wasn’t for everyone, either, and neither was Moon, or L.O.L., or Vanpool’s Freshly-Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland, or skip’s Chibi-Robo!, or… are you sensing a theme here? This a group of developers, regardless of the banner they’re working under, whether they’re together or apart, that make games that are different, that say something different and play differently and ramp up the charm and the quirk and the weird until it’s occasionally all-encompassing. That’s great, though. It is obviously not a design philosophy that pays off at retail or even critically speaking, but that shouldn’t matter to you unless you’re on the board at EA or Ubisoft. Sometimes this philosophy creates some true masterpieces, like L.O.L., and sometimes just memorable experiences, like Chulip. These games always feel fresh and inventive and worthwhile, though, even when they don’t possess the friendliest game design you’ve ever encountered, and for that, I’m thankful that they get to exist at all.

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