Transcription
Near Automata is a 2017 action RPG developed by Platinum Games and published by Square Enix in which you play as an android protecting the last remnants of humanity in a post-apocalyptic world. Gamers and critics alike praised its fluid gameplay, nuanced storytelling, haunting environments, and uh thoughtful character design.
Near Automata was a massive success and went on to sell over 10 million copies across PlayStation, Windows, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch. Naturally, Square Enix saw this beloved franchise, this triumph of artistic vision, this once- in a generation masterpiece, and asked themselves the only question that mattered. How do we turn this into a phone game?
Near Reincarnation is a 2021 role-playing video game developed by Applybot for iOS and Android in which you perform quicktime events on a touchscreen in between buying upgrades in the Gotacha store. Bro, my hands are shaking, too. This game looks awesome.
Near Reincarnation was a critical and commercial flop. And 1 month after wrapping up its story on April 29th, 2024, Square Enix pulled the plug on the servers, rendering the game completely unplayable and royally screwing over every poor bastard who'd sunk money into it. So why am I talking about this failed gacha game that hasn't been playable in over 2 years?
Because for some ungodly reason, one absolute mad lad single-handedly brought the thing back from the dead. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Lunar Tier. User Walter Sparrow spent hundreds of hours painstakingly reverse engineering the game's entire infrastructure, implementing every single story line, every character, every item, every skin, all for free. This is without a doubt the single most inspiring thing to ever crawl out of the corporate garbage fire that was near reincarnation.
And Japan lost their minds. Foreigners truly have no morals. Man, these foreigners pirating near saying restoring and preserving lost artwork with other people's hands is common sense. You monkey js makes no sense to me. If the company has the data, even if you can't play it, it hasn't been lost, right? So, you're just stealing someone else's belongings, aren't you? So, the logic here is that as long as the game exists somewhere on a developer's hard drive, it can't be considered lost media. And yeah, that makes perfect sense, right? Like, how could you say the Titanic is lost? It's just spatially displaced on the ocean floor.
When people pointed that out to him, he did not take it well. I don't believe that the desire to play a game or the preservation of artwork or poverty are good reasons to trample on someone else's rights, and I have no intention of changing this stance. So, it didn't matter that the game was completely dead, nor that Square Enix had made millions of dollars on a product nobody could play anymore. They wanted the guy who single-handedly revived the dead game for free to be sued and forced to pay massive compensation.
There's only one problem here. One teeny tiny little problem. Uh, compensation for what? The game you're not selling. People started posting this meme saying, "Stop pirating our products, then sell them to me." And this angered a lot of Japanese people, saying things like, "So, you think that makes it okay? What the hell is wrong with your morals? Preserving games is more important than being a slave to a company. That doesn't justify ignoring the rules." Sounds reasonable.
I wonder what this gentleman thinks about slavery. Well, if it were legal, I would tolerate it, though I wouldn't necessarily support it. So, how did Japanese people end up like this? It's clear that there's an enormous cultural gap here because I think most English speakers who are watching this video probably think the solo developer is a hero. I mean, I know he only opensourced a gotcha game that I didn't even hear about until a month ago, but hero is the word that comes to mind because of figures like Edward Snowden or Aaron Schwarz. People who broke the law, but only to make information more free and accessible for everyone.
And you know, we already had this whole debate last year with the stop killing games movement. And the general consensus was that yeah, it is [ __ ] up for a company to take a game offline and make it forever unplayable the second it starts to hurt their bottom line. This also isn't the first time Japan has completely overreacted to copyright capers. The most absurd case happened in 2023 when a YouTuber uploaded gameplay footage of Stein's Gate, My Darling's Embrace, and was sentenced to 2 years in prison for it. 2 years of actual prison time for spoiling a game whose name took me three takes to say without laughing. You know, this pissed me off so much that I wanted to spoil it here out of spite, but I couldn't because the game has multiple endings. 2 years of hard time for telling people that yes, you can get with all six of the girls.
This apparently happens all the time. Like, Japan actually arrests and prosecutes people who upload movie recaps on YouTube and finds them for millions of dollars. That's crazy and unfathomable to most people outside of Japan, myself included. But in those cases, you could at least argue that maybe those YouTubers were taking away sales from the artists. I mean, it's a stupid argument, but you could make that argument. With Near Reincarnation, though, I don't see how anyone is being harmed by allowing people to play a game that isn't even on the market anymore. It doesn't make a lick of sense.
Now, if you ask a Japanese person why they hate piracy, they'll usually give you some tautology like stealing is illegal or it's immoral. But I think I've figured it out. So, let me explain. If you were with your American friends and you put on a pirated stream of One Piece, they'd say, "Hell yeah, dude." But if you did this with your Japanese friends, they'd look at you like you were kicking puppies. This wasn't always the case. Back in the Limewire days, Japan had a program called Winnie that was basically the same thing. And like Limewire, the Winnie creator was arrested in 2003 and hit with a massive copyright infringement suit, which he lost. Even though he was eventually acquitted on appeal, this was a wakeup call for the Japanese media industry, and they began aggressively lobbying to protect their IP.
In 2012, Japan criminalized downloading copyrighted material with penalties of up to two years in prison or 2 million yen in fines. In 2021, they actually expanded the law so that print media like manga or magazines are also illegal to download. The law is so strict that you could go to prison for posting a screenshot of copyrighted material. Honestly, this [ __ ] is crazy. And if you get on a media company's bad side, they will find something to you over. Like a few weeks ago, some guy got arrested and sentenced to prison for writing a blog with movie spoilers on it. Yeah, you heard that right. Arrested for spoiling movies. Like one of your annoying friends. You know who would get a death sentence in Japan? The guys who have that website uh does the dog die.com. Actually, these guys would probably sending Jimmy Wales to prison if they could.
And that's not a joke. Unlike English Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia has no fair use, so it can't use official box art, cover art, and a lot of pages have no images at all, or they have to resort to strange workarounds like they're trying to avoid showing a picture of the prophet Muhammad. Like the English Wikipedia page for Squirtle has, you know, a picture of Squirtle, but the Japanese Wikipedia page has a guy in a Squirtle costume. And when it comes to gaming, basically any mod or customization has a chance to send you straight to prison. My favorite example of this was back in 2024 when a guy got arrested for modifying his Pokemon save data. Yeah, buddy went to prison for telling his friends he found Pikabloo.
In addition to these draconian and frankly just insane laws, Japanese companies also invest a lot into what can only be described as antipiriracy propaganda. Like before every single movie, they play this ad. which ironically I now realize that I'm pirating, but this kind of you wouldn't download a car didn't work in the rest of the world. So there has to be something more about why Japanese people detest piracy so much. And the main reason is that Japan views creators and artists differently than we do.
Historically, cultural exports have always been a major pillar of the Japanese economy and artists are a highly respected class in Japanese society. Japanese law doesn't even have a fair use clause. So these creators essentially have absolute control over their intellectual property. Japanese people generally view large collaborative media projects as the fruit of a single person's creative vision. And I bet you already kind of knew this. Like when you think of Metal Gear Solid, you think of Hideo Kojima, Mario and Zelda, Miiamoto, Dark Souls and Elden Ring, Miyazaki. Fairly or unfairly, we recognize these figures as the sole creative force behind these masterpieces. So when people pirate, it's seen as a direct personal attack against a single individual, not a nameless company. you're spitting in the face of an artist who put their sweat and tears into their work.
When it comes to lower budget media like manga, fans are even more protective of creators since most manga artists really are hardworking and poor, even by artist standards. And this becomes even more obvious when you realize that in Japan there is one type of media where intellectual property enforcement is actually surprisingly lax and that's dojene. Dojene are basically unofficial fanfiction mangas that borrow from any IP and they're extremely popular in Japan to the point where tens of thousands of people go to conventions like comic comic market where dojene are bought and sold and generally the original manga creators don't care about dojene and they just turn a blind eye to them even when they get a little spicy and they got a lot of spicy like uh Yugi and Kaiba Bucky and Cap two pizza loving turtles that are also brothers, you name it. And many professional manga authors got their start drawing dojene of other people's characters before going pro. Dojene culture is tolerated because dojene artists are viewed as fellow creators, not thieves trying to take food out of the artist's mouths.
So this creator ccentric view of giant media corporations has prevented the adversarial relationship between consumers and game publishers that we see in the west. Like, I don't think most gamers would lift a finger to help the CEO of Ubisoft or Activision, even if they were dying in a ditch. And that relationship works, which is why Japanese people oppose piracy so vehemently. But is that zealatry starting to hurt both Japanese companies and their fans?
Just look at Square Enix, the company that published Near. When they went to remaster Final Fantasy Tactics, they realized they had lost the source code over time. So, what did they do? They scraped fan sites for data ripped straight from ROMs. That's right. The exact kind of pirates their lawyers would sue were the only reason this remaster exists at all, and the director publicly thanked them for it. So, the devs clearly don't give a [ __ ] They're not losing sleep over a near fan server.
More broadly speaking, the extreme stance Japan holds towards piracy is really a detriment to the gaming industry, and most developers secretly know it. Fan content like streaming and mods not only make the player experience better, they're just free marketing. Companies that don't hold such an adversarial view towards their fans often benefit tremendously from word of mouth advertising. So, ironically, Japan's respect for artists actually creates an oppressive social stigma and atmosphere of fear that reduces fan engagement, inhibits viral marketing, and ultimately harms the creators Japan seeks to empower.
One of my other favorite examples of this is when Japan basically went to war with three different cities in Mexico over Dragon Ball. I put that story into part two along with a bunch of AMA questions that I answered from you guys. So check it out. It's free on Patreon. It's free. You don't have to sign up. You don't have to pay or anything. Just click the link in the description. See you guys there. Thank you so much to my patrons who make this stuff possible. And yeah, I'll see you guys next time.