Sugiyama's only lonely boy
Content warning: suicide, anti-queer violence, genocide denial.
This is an interactive essay. Click the bold text to continue.
Content warning: suicide, anti-queer violence, genocide denial.
This is an interactive essay. Click the bold text to continue.
I desperately press the headphones deeper into my ears. The “sound story” of Suite Dragon Quest II rumbles softly, blocking out the sound of my brother having sex in the other room.
It’s an import CD, composed and conducted by Dragon Quest royalty Koichi Sugiyama, a retelling of the entire plot of Dragon Quest II, “Only Lonely Boy” and all.
All my Dragon Quest CDs are in bed with me. I turn over Symphonic Suite Dragon Quest V and stare at the tiny portrait of Sugiyama, grinning, pleased with his own magic trick. As I shift, the CD player whirs, disturbed by my anxious turning. I scroll up the volume to max. I want to disappear.
It’s probably 2003.
If you talk to me for five minutes, I’m positive Dragon Quest will come up. I’ve been obsessed with the series since Dragon Warrior I and II was released on the Game Boy two decades ago. I’ve spent hundreds of hours performing real-time glitches inside Dragon Quest III, undoing its systems over and over. I don’t have the world’s largest Slime plushie collection, but I have a few. Shit, half of my MFA thesis presentation was about Dragon Quest.
One of my favorite video gaming memories is playing Dragon Quest VII for two hours and not getting into a single battle. My father comes in and asks “what kind of game is this, where are the battles?” It’s not about battling, dad! Square-Enix streamlined the intro for the 3DS version, but I prefer the original’s ponderous
A few things I love about Dragon Quest: the vibrant colors of the world (its ocean is blue, its field is green, it’s so simple, it’s stupid, it’s perfect); the black void beyond the dungeon walls; the heavy shonen myth. And the music. That fucking music. Sometimes grating, always repetitive, immediately out of date - the sound of Dragon Quest is perfect. It sounds like adventure; death and then life; the most poignant anime you’ve ever seen. It’s completely inane, baroque RPG magic.
While writing this, “Ramia’s Flight” from Dragon Quest III comes on. So full of possibility, so full of blasphemous nostalgia.
For years now, it has been well known that Dragon Quest composer Koichi Sugiyama is a Nanjing Massacre Denialist, a nationalistic, offensive belief that the massacre never took place and that the Imperial Japanese army did not murder hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers and civilians. In 2018, Sugiyama’s conservatism reached western headlines again when a video from 2015 resurfaced of him and Liberal Democratic Party member Mio Sugita dismissing the need to have queer education in schools, while making light of the high suicide rates among queer people.
It’s easy enough to tag Sugiyama in our brains as cancelled. To let all your friends know he’s cancelled, agree with everyone online that he’s cancelled, block him on Twitter and move on. I don’t want to support Sugiyama, I don’t tolerate intolerance. I’ll still buy the next Dragon Quest game, of course, but it’ll be with a heavy, broken heart.
It’s impossible to
I’m still listening to Sugiyama’s music. I hear it in the new Dragon Quest, while replaying Dragon Quest VII, when listening to a chill NES music playlist. I can’t unhear it, forget where it’s from, and who it was made by. I still hold that nostalgia, remembering what it’s like to play Dragon Quest, what it was like
Now I stand in the black void.
I see my queer friend who committed suicide, scenes of the absolute horrors I’ve read about the Nanjing Massacre, headlines by
I see
I see
I see my friend
I’ve had a two decades long relationship with the music of Dragon Quest, Sugiyama’s legacy. I love all these songs, more than I love a lot of people I know personally. I love how psychotic the dungeon theme is, how much the overture moves me, how the music never changes from game to game, era to era, completely fixed in time.
It is one of my most treasured relationships, and
I have a waning acre of nostalgia for a past relationship with an abusive partner. Not around the traumatic parts, but everything else. Before things completely fell apart, there was such a sense of (queer) possibility. Nostalgia is just that, remembering possibility, an opportunity, excitement for new things to come. The bad memories are still there alongside the nostalgia, but I can’t deny
How many times in my life will I quote this:
I single out moments […] that tell, remember, and reflect on public sex. I do not read these texts as nostalgic discourse but instead present them as moments in which queer utopian remembrance reenacts what Crimp has called a ‘culture of sexual possibility.’
José Esteban Muñoz, from
I take this further. I make a claim that “nostalgia” isn’t a real value. I write something like “the nostalgia we have for the games we played as young people, the memories of these magic encounters, represent a dream culture of the possibilities of play.”
Dragon Quest may seem rote now, but it comes from a rich tradition full of possibilities, of new types of play, of new adventure - myths for kids imagining growing up and experiencing something juicy,
Critics and forum dwellers alike are quick to dismiss “nostalgia” as being overly personal and abstract. This attitude forgets, though, that all we truly have are our emotions, perspectives, and dreams.
Here, only Muñoz, Douglas Crimp (rest in power), and the legacy of queer theory can begin to
“Colosseum Back Stage” from Dragon Quest IV is playing, a curious waiting song,
Growing up, I was a complete Nintendo-phile (and by extension, Japanophile). I saw that Nintendo of America was headquartered in Redmond, Washington, and planned to move there as soon as my nine-year-old self learned to drive. How many of the creators of my favorite games are racist, homophobic, and/or borderline fascist? How many have changed since 199X? One might read this and say “well, the music of Dragon Quest always sucked,” but this goes beyond Sugiyama.
Would consumers feel better about voting with their dollars if Sugiyama was replaced with another composer? Does that make consumption of a new Dragon Quest more ethical? I know that Dragon Quest fans would let out a collective sigh of relief, but it wouldn’t change our relationships to these past works. I can break up with Sugiyama all I want, tell him to never text me again, bury all the notes he left me, throw all his mix CDs into the abyss, but
I’m thinking about my father, and how I often scorn a father’s cursed legacy (my very own shonen complex). For once, I recognize that my father too is under the same curse as me (the poisons of patriarchy and imperialism), an even deeper, festering curse. I’d be petrified to learn what my own father thinks about the high suicide rate among queer people.
This isn’t to say Sugiyama isn’t at fault, that it’s “just his generation,” because that’s bullshit logic. We don’t tolerate intolerance, period. If Sugiyama composed the Dragon Quest “Overture” and his subconscious made it for “straight people only,” well,
Back in bed, all the rubbery souls on the CD stare up at me. The smiling slimes, Toriyama’s grinning cast, even the wily villains ready to pat me on the back. My friends. Somewhere, in a different country, Yuji Horii writes notes on a napkin about a depressed sculptor who worked so hard he forgot his wife, who then left him, and the subsequent sculpture park the sculptor builds
I played Moon RPG Remix a year ago. It’s a game I recommend endlessly, but a game whose ending I don’t buy. For a game whose thesis is to problematize the metaphors of Dragon Quest's game mechanics, it’s strange to me that the ultimate act to undo evil is to simply turn the game off. Those problems are still real, they still exist, even if
Sugiyama’s music played at the 2021 Olympics, and a slew of articles and forum posts rightfully called out the organizers’ poor choice, especially in light of their stated value of “diversity.” My friends asked me what the context was. “But isn’t that like your favorite series?” one of them asked, confused. “Yeah, it is, but...”
Last summer I managed to corrupt my way through a Dragon Quest III ROM just enough to break into one of its final sequences, the raising of the rainbow bridge. Surrounded by glowing water, I raise the rainbow drop into the air, and the screen briefly glows the colors of liberation.
Dragon Quest, at its heart, is about liberation. It’s about plunging down into the deepest pits of hell to sever the roots of injustice and hatred, about removing literal poison seeped into the land. Sugiyama’s music carries this myth, but now is burdened with the composer’s own baggage, adding a translucent film atop it, weighing it down, introducing new toxins. I can’t not take this to heart.
A fractured anime, a worn-down legacy, eight useless orbs, tile-sets
As I decide to be finished, exhausted, no closer to an answer than when I began, the Symphonic Suite version of “Sea Breeze” from Dragon Quest IV comes through the speakers. I turn it up, max out the volume, bathe in its sublime light. Crushed and teary-eyed, I go to sleep.
nilson carroll (he/him) is a queer video game artist and writer based in Rochester, New York. He is a champion and curator of anti-fascist, feminist, pro-affection new media and games, and is the founder of DIY queer art games collective
If you enjoyed this post, consider sharing it with a friend. If you'd like to help keep the lights on you can buy me a