Iyashikei: Japan’s Genre of “Healing Games” (2018)
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I play in survival mode mostly to make the world feel more grounded, but I sleep every night and rarely explore caverns. The game is mostly me building living spaces, mining for supplies, mapping the world, and collecting items. It's really satisfying.
I feel like that's what makes it feel so satisfying, engaging, and "real". You sleep every night and do only the "peaceful" world-building kind of things. But even when you sleep, you know there is still a whole world of caverns and action out there happening, even as you are ignoring it, that you can glimpse into and participate in whenever you want. Which is what makes it really engaging and believable, as the world goes on even without your participation.
Imo this is the same effect that makes some movie or book universes feel more "real" (but is achieved in different ways than with videogames, due to the medium itself). Their universes are built in such a way, it makes you believe that the world out there is still going on, even after you turn the TV off or close the book.
I think what makes minecraft great is that you can switch between spelunking, combat, farming and building so seamlessly and they all integrate with eachother well so when you get sick of one you just pick up the next.
I've had more pulse pounding game intensity in a turn-based roguelike with ASCII graphics than in any other game I've ever played.
I'm yet to find a roguelike where I can feel like I made serious progress without dumping many hours into learning all the mechanics. It's a fairly narrow window of punishing but fair that allows me to feel any intensity at all from games, most I just feel are too easy or too hard to produce it.
I can enjoy the crap out of easy ones, just not for the intensity, but hard ones like roguelikes I just give up on quickly. Dark Souls seems much less punishing to me than most roguelikes in this sense.
I mean people are still playing Skyrim for Pete's sake.
I have a very bad sense of direction in real life, and that applies to 3D games as well. I don't know if you've ever been lost before, like really lost lost. It is a panic-inducing experience. Most 3D games trigger that same sensation in me and are just totally unfun to play.
When I play Minecraft, I obsessively map the area, and I keep a textfile with coordinates of interesting places I find. Even so, I still spend like 90% of my time right around my main building or in the mine below it.
I remember building pillars in my constructions and other interesting places so I would be able to spot them from afar. It felt like a nice way to not get lost while still feeling like part of the game.
Not sure if filling out these maps is what they meant.
Such a sweet little game. I imagine you can still find it online and play it (if your browser supports Flash). Here's a Youtube run-through of it:
For example one of those games is Baby Quest, where you are a baby that can explore the town (https://rpgplayground.com/most-played/). You can find plenty more of such games on my website.
But since I support combat now, most of the newer games are not like this anymore, although there are exceptions.
My engine is https://rpgplayground.com
I'm really not sold about the game part. Like Shenmue is pretty much the quintessential ordinary life simulator but I'd not call it a iyashikei. Same with Ni No Kuni and Yokai Watch. Sure for Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon but once battle and fight involved then personally I think it's already another genre. And people wouldn't call Pokemon a iyashikei either yet Yokai is 'just' a more modern 'clone' of that
Many games contain aspects of 'iyashikei' games. Persona 5 is a good example. Half of the game is spent doing 'ordinary life simulation' activities - meeting friends, eating out at restaurants, going on dates, etc. This part of the game is focused on story-driven events, many of which could be classified as iyashikei (although there are certainly darker elements mixed in). The other half of the game is spent on RPG turn-based battles and puzzles.
The Shenmue series is the same. A lot of it is iyashikei - wandering around, talking to people, enjoying the sights. Along with that are battles and stressful mini-games.
Does it even apply for those?
In Animal Crossing there are two battles, wasp and tarantulas. Both have something at stake with both a win and loss condition.
In Harvest Moon you also have a battle against limits. Most of them don't have any sort of enemy units, but you do have tasks and you are doing them in a time limit where there is a failure condition (either running out of stamina or time), and in some cases there can be a big cost to failure (especially around harvesting crops right as the seasons change).
One game I think interesting to consider is Minecraft. There are three different takes.
* Normal (with Easy and Hard included) which has enemy mobs you must fight against and environmental traps.
* Peaceful, where there are no enemy mobs but environmental traps still pose a risk (though less of one).
* Creative, where you are fully immune even to lava or falling.
Each step down is progressively more relaxing as it removes even more conflicts from the equation. But even in creative, you can still have a conflict with the game rules or within yourself (consider someone trying to design some redstone contraption and getting frustrated that their design isn't functioning correctly).
I'm drawn to thinking about the following web comic on conflict in literature and how it parallels the different conflicts and battles that can occur in games and how some of these might not be possible to remove.
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-FWszluTZTpM/U310wQoCMWI/AAAAAAAAE...
All that's at stake is you fainting and respawning in front of your house. The only thing that's lost is your opportunity to catch the tarantula that time.
If one were to take pokemon, it would be reduced to much the same where the penalty for loss is fainting and in rare cases losing a chance to catch a rare pokemon.
Even if one were to take something like Path of Exile, any failure only costs some amount of time to restore from that failure. Some cost more (a death on hardcore can mean dozens of hours while a death on normal can be recovered in minutes). In general, I think you can reduce most game conflicts/battles down to a time cost in the case of failure, with a few games introducing horror as the main alternative cost (any game where death involves a jump scare).
If I spend 3 hours looking for a tarantula and it wins, that is a cost of 3 hours compared to many games were losing a battle cost only a minute or two.
Dark Souls style games are another interesting look into this, as the first death generally has low cost (you have to go pick up the dropped souls), but if you die a second time before you pick them up, the cost is much heavier (the souls dropped are permanently lost). I notice when playing that I am more on edge when I'm trying to recover dropped souls than when I am not.
Why just the tarantula, then? If you see a rare beetle on a stump, you can re-interpret trying to catch it as a "battle" with a "winner" and a "loser".
When you break down a game into these many sorts of conflicts and see which ones the player feels joy for winning and which ones the players struggle against with no benefit even when they win, it hints at an interesting framework to evaluate games by. It feels deconstructionist almost to the point of absurdity, but so far I don't think it crosses that line.
A pure iyashikei game feels like an aspirational ideal and fairly rare.
https://gameappch.com/rank/category.html?category=%E7%99%92%... Here are some examples
it's a very nice game.
Attack of the Friday Monsters - it's a short 3DS game about children's fantasy merging their small town reality with a TV show
Barakamon - anime about a calligrapher who gets banished to a small island in the inland sea and comes to embrace rural life and playing with the local children. (Pictured but not mentioned in the article)
Rilakkuma and Kaoru - Stop motion TV show on Netflix about a woman who lives office lady life but also had two plush(?) bears and a chicken who live with her. Very relaxing.
Flying Witch - A witch goes to live in the countryside with her relatives as part of her training. Lovely world-building.
Girls' Last Tour - Two girls on a journey through a gigantic post-apocalyptic city. The setting is quite bleak but the story mostly focuses on how the main characters are finding joy in their world.
Aria - The daily lives of apprentice gondoliers in Neo-Venezia, a replica of Venice built on a terraformed Mars.
The manga and anime for all of these are available legally in English. Unfortunately you may have to jump through some hoops if you want to acquire their OSTs, which is a shame because they're all excellent.
Also a great guitar cover of Aria's "Rainbow"[2], most satisfying guitar tab I've had the chance to learn too.
[0] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Manga/YokohamaKaidash...
A Short Hike - PC/Linux/Mac you hike up a mountain and, discover things and people along the way.
Journey - PS4 game in which you travel through a beautiful dessert landscape.
Welcome to the NHK isn't one, but in the manga the game the two protagonists are working on is a healing/erogame, and the main protagonist goes into length about why he is making it.
Do you mean "Sound of the Sky", the post-apocalyptic Iyashikei?
EDIT: The anime community sometimes sticks with the Japanese title in Romanji, calling it "Sora no Woto". Same show, but depends on how various people feel like translating the title.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Walking-Man-Jiro-Taniguchi/dp/8493340...
[0]http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20200409-how-gaming-became-...
-Stardew Valley
-My time at Portia
-Euro/American Truck Simulator
-Anno series
I personally find snooker/pool simulations very soothing.
All the fighting in the mines also makes it clearly not a experience that fits the type of game we are discussing here.
Not really a surprise, as they are clones of harvest moon, a japanese iyashikei-franchise.
> -Euro/American Truck Simulator
Nice example. And probably also a good case of explaining the difference in pop-culture between east and west.
> -Anno series
I'm not so sure about that. Wouldn't than civlisation and basically every round-based paradox-game be an example?
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/its-literally-just-mowing/id14...
I find it soothing to do almost any well-defined task with well-defined progress (with bonus points if it's tactile). A lot of us have jobs where all of those properties are in short supply. Certainly most of my stress is due to uncertainty. My guess is that game works by giving you a nice well-defined task you can definitely accomplish.
You can also try paper planes, or origami in general. I find it's just enough challenge to get me to focus for a little bit. :)
1. Florence - A love story. The artwork is gorgeous and the soundtrack is beautiful
2. Assemble With Care - Simple puzzle game with a nice light story.
[1] http://annapurna.pictures/interactive/florence [2] https://www.assemblegame.com/
I mostly just build different little planes and fly them around or stay in low kerbin (earth) orbit and near the mun, but its just a very relaxing simple game with as much complexity as you want to add.
"The Sims" and "Sim City" would fall under Iyashikei. But most people aren't space astronauts. So KSP can't celebrate normalcy because you're pretending to be something you're not.
Persona 5 has Iyashikei elements, as the main character interacts with day-to-day school life. Even if there's an element of supernatural / battling involved, there's an Iyashikei part of the game. Most people have been a student at school. And that's the "celebration of normalcy" that Persona 5 brings forth.
> Japan loves making shows and games about childhood. Specifically about childhood summers spent catching bugs, fishing, going to festivals, sharing meals with family, and, of course, trips to the beach.
These things are present in "The Sims". But not KSP. If you watch a lot of Iyashikei anime, you'll know what this article is going for. KSP doesn't seem to be in that direction.
There is a similar genre in Western games (mostly indie) of these sorts of types of games, filed under 'cozy'.
Anyone know the easiest way for a non-gamer without a console system in the USA to get any of em, that might be figure-out-able for a non-Japanese speaker?
Animal Crossing is Nintendo's take on the genre, and is popular right now. For PC gamers, Stardew Valley is English-native, but based on the Harvest Moon series (which is almost certainly Iyashikei).
If you dial the stress up a bit, there's Yoshi Woolly world, and a few others of that type. Its more traditional video game with dangers, but its low-stress compared to most video games.
Don't confuse the static, hand-drawn artwork with the actual games. In my experience, Iyashikei games are overly cartoony, and often low-polygon count, to focus on the simplistic nature of the game. Its rare for this genre to really blow me away with their graphics... but the simple cel-shaded cartoon style (or low-poly style, in the case of Animal Crossing) gets the job done.
for older consoles like the nintendo ds, you can emulate, like dolphin emulator for pc. i can even emulate a ps2 on my beefed up gaming pc. nevermind that though, any modern laptop or pc should be able to handle nintendo ds games on an emulator. i think that'd be a good start for you. in fact, even android phones can emulate it.
Laptops in general are prone to overheating which leads to lower performance. Mine has an i7-8750H CPU and it can't play many Nintendo DS games. RetroArch and its A/V synchronization contribute to the CPU load as well.
Perhaps a small form factor PC would be best suited for this purpose.
My best experience was a gba emulator on android. I played through 2 castlevania games throughout my commutes last year.
During this pandemic many people are for the first time faced with the fact that, after taking precautions and staying healthy, nothing is to be done other than sit it out, healing does indeed simply take time and waiting and not doing anything.
I think these games remind people of that fact. If someone you know dies you can run a hundred laps and read 15 self-help books, but at the end of the day recovering just takes time and doesn't involve 'doing' anything. In that sense those games are just like meditating and being mindful.
However, there are many video games that have Iyashikei elements. Even the quintessential "save the world epic" Final Fantasy has Iyashikei elements. With FF-VII Cloud Strife playing video games at the Golden Saucer, or FF-XV having a road-trip with bros. Some of the most celebrated parts of the games are Iyashikei, the low-stress parts of the game that were in-between the battle sequences.
Leaving Square/Enix for a second... there's also Nintendo's "Fire Emblem" series. The characters always talk about their personal life. And the player plays matchmaker, trying to get different characters to talk with each other, to discover their personalities. The most recent Fire Emblem: Three Houses, has an entire School-simulator where you set up the curriculum of your students.
Almost all Japanese stories seem to have a part where Iyashikei comes out to destress the main character (and the player).
So the question is, are you interested in games with Iyashikei elements (which IMO, includes almost all Japanese games worth talking about...), or are you interested in games that solely are Iyashikei? The genre exists on a spectrum, from games like Animal Crossing (mostly Iyashikei), to Atelier Sophie (More Iyashikei than not), to Fire Emblem / Final Fantasy ("save the world" epic plot lines, that visit Iyashikei at certain parts of the plot).
Also I think Skyrim fits a similar bill, with most of what people enjoy seemingly being the wandering around and taking in the world.