“Oh myyy…what
a disappointment.”
–Me
I’ll say
right away I bought Catherine,
because it was made by Atlus and I really enjoyed Persona 4. I know saying I bought this game for the story when the marketing had all the
erotic subtlety of Playboy would be something close to lying, but believe me
when I say: I bought this game because I believed (and it was advertised as such) it would break some new
storytelling ground in video games in terms of sex and relationships, topics
that aren’t exactly being dealt with on something approaching an intellectual
level in the video game industry, so yes, I was intrigued by this game. Sadly, it
disappointed me which was made all the worse by the fact I believed this game
would deal with the above topics with a modicum of taste and subtlety.
So, let’s quickly recap the story.
You’re Vincent, you’re afraid to commit, you’re in a relationship with
Katherine and you have a group of friends you see all the time in a local bar
who try to help you with your relationship issues. There’s been a series of
strange deaths with young men found dead with faces that look like something
out of The Ring. That evening
Catherine hooks up with you. Vincent wakes up the morning after all confused to
find Catherine in his bed. As you might expect, this kicks off the story where
you must choose in a variety of ways if he’ll maintain his relationship with
Katherine, despite his commitment issues, or say fuck it and hang out with
Catherine. This all has sorts of consequences. What makes this a game are the
choices you make and the platform puzzles you play in Vincent’s nightmares
every night. As it turns out, all those dead men died in their sleep when they
failed these puzzles, hence the other sheep in your nightmares; it’s a shared
nightmare. So, the puzzles symbolize his fears and desires as he struggles to
get to the top without succumbing to the pressure.
Before delving into the game’s
failings, I’ll get the things I liked about it out of the way. Despite its
repetitive nature, the platform puzzles were occasionally fun. I liked the colorful,
anime look, though the low frames per second (typical for Atlus) hurt my eyes.
I thought the text messaging component of the game was interesting. I also liked the notion of the bar as a central hub where you can hang out and inspire
other guys suffering from the same nightmares to keep their spirits up, thus
increasing their own chances of survival. I can’t think of anything else, unfortunately…
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| Subtle storytelling at its finest... |
Like I said, I went in expecting a
well-told, mature story about relationships, sex, fear of commitment and all
that jazz. What I got was over-the-top, supernatural nonsense. I was okay with
the puzzles, but toward the end, the story jumps the supernatural shark to such
a degree it’s not even funny. You’d think from the summary above, it couldn’t
be that bad. Well, it all takes a
turn for the worse when it turns out Catherine might not even have existed. The
photos Vincent has of her on his phone have disappeared and none of his friends
know what he’s talking about. He remembers though that the only person he saw
her talking to was the bartender. He confronts him and he is revealed to be the
orchestrator of the entire thing, of all the nightmares, murders, etc. Catherine
turns out to be a succubus, made to fulfill Vincent’s fantasies. Once he was
seduced, he was transported to the nightmare world. Because he was afraid to
commit to Katherine, having Vincent die in the nightmare world would free her
up for the good of the species, i.e. others could then…procreate with her. Yes,
you read that right. What starts as a story about relationships etc. quickly
turns into a supernatural nonsense fest that is as far removed as possible from
the core themes and anything resembling mature storytelling. Now, I get that it’s
a cultural thing, that the fear of low birth rates is a big deal in Japan, but
why does it have to be packaged in such an increasingly ridiculous story?
So, you beat the final stages and
you make some final choices which (combined with how your position on the
alignment meter) determine which ending you get. I got the True Katherine
ending which is ludicrous in and of itself. Though they’ve already broken up,
since she thought he was cheating, Vincent decides to tell Katherine the truth.
He tells her that he really thought he was cheating on her, but it was all in
his head. I’ll say that again: he tells her that he really thought he was
cheating on her, but it was all in his head…and Katherine actually falls for
this. Yeah, how about you don’t rekindle your relationship with the crazy man?
How does one actually fall for something like this? You break up with someone
in real life, only for them to come back to you saying, ‘no wait, it was all in
my head. I didn’t actually cheat on you.’ If I were Katherine, I’d tell Vincent
to seek help…of the psychiatric kind. Needless to say, I didn’t bother checking
out the other endings, though a quick glance on YouTube suggests they aren’t any
better; such artistic and classy endings also exist like hooking up with
Catherine the succubus and creating an entire harem thus becoming king of the
underworld; or hooking up with Trisha (the host seen in the beginning) who
actually reveals herself to be Ishtar, goddess of fertility. Not only that, she
also explains that the whole point of
the nightmare world was for you/Vincent to prove your worth, so that you could
replace the bartender as her consort. Apparently, he was cheating a lot.
Do I need to say it again? We were promised an adult-oriented
experience with themes like relationships, sex, fear of commitment and all that
jazz…and what we got was supernatural nonsense, a game that promises you to
push boundaries, only to fall back on tired (anime-influenced) clichés that say
nothing meaningful about relationships. My diagnosis is that the game itself and its creators are probably suffering
from fear of commitment, the fear that the game wouldn’t be a success if all it
had were ‘normal’ people trying to figure out life and relationships.
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| Captain obvious symbolism? Check... |
What triggered this review is the baffling
amount of positive reviews from the gaming press. A common phrase found time
and again is that “you’ve never played anything like this before.” Though
technically correct, it feels like a kneejerk response to convince ourselves and
the world that our beloved hobby is actually capable of boundary pushing feats.
On the surface it seems like a game dealing with topics not often found in
games (relationships, sex and so on), one of those games approaching ‘art’ that
we can show the world as one of the great gaming achievements. Only upon close
examination do you find out this game is flawed from every conceivable angle.
The story is uninspired, nudging along at a snail’s pace and betrays itself and
jumps the shark toward the end; the characters are one-note, uninteresting and
unsympathetic; the morality system is simplistic and feels tacked on; the
music, though occasionally pleasant rearranges classical music in a desperate attempt
to make the game feel artsy; the puzzle dreams feature symbolism as subtle as
Catherine’s marketing campaign; the puzzle gameplay gets repetitive; and, most
damningly, it’s a game that in the end has nothing interesting or meaningful to
say about its topics.
If you think I’m being too harsh, well, that’s
your own problem, but make no mistake, criticizing Catherine to such a degree as this isn’t exactly easy for someone who
enjoyed Atlus’s Persona 4. If you
think I’m wrong in bashing Catherine,
remember I judge the game based on the
standards it sets for itself. This game tries to be adult-oriented, to be
serious about relationships etc. but winds up as a supernatural clusterfuck whose
pretensions at mature storytelling are surpassed only by its countless clichés
and poor design choices.
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