Kill Your Past, Remake the World: Dehumanization in The 25th Ward
A man is investigating…something. He doesn’t know quite why or what it is he hopes to find, just that it will somehow lead him to his memories. He discovers a woman who runs a cam girl chat, and as he chats with her about some sort of dark secret, she’s killed on screen by an unknown weapon that used a green targeting laser. When he discovers why she was killed, he can hardly believe it.
She didn’t separate her flammable and inflammable trash correctly.
Grasshopper Manufacture and SUDA 51’s (No More Heroes, Killer7) The 25th Ward is a visual novel originally released for Japanese phones in 2005 and completely remastered with added chapters and proper localization in 2018. Much like its direct predecessor, The Silver Case, it remains almost disturbingly relevant in everything it says and explores.
The game is divided into three different stories. Correctness by SUDA 51 is a surreal tale about two detectives, rookie Shiroyabu and the hard-ass ace Kuroyanagi, as they investigate a powerful government conspiracy, one of them coming out of the events radically changed as a person. Masahi Ooka’s introspective Placebo continues from the same storyline from The Silver Case, as journalist Tokio Morishima finds himself with amnesia as he is hired by a mysterious party to look into a trio of cam girls. His story explodes in complexity fairly quickly as his story intertwines with the greater conspiracy, and Morishima’s own tragic past and traumas slowly starts to haunt him once more. Lastly, Masahiro Yuki’s Matchmaker follows a part of that wider conspiracy, as you follow two agents named Tsuki and Osato. They find themselves dealing with a group of people seemingly inspired by the criminal from the last game threatening the order of the 25th ward, while Tsuki ends up having to deal with some old faces who betrayed him and ruined his old life.
Each story is set in the fictional 25th Ward, a super city in Japan made with the goal of creating a perfectly functioning society. That goal is accomplished through a variety of ways, including the very architecture of the buildings themselves, but the main way the government tries to create an orderly, peaceful city is by removing those that don’t fit.
An organization called the Postal Federation is shown early on as a government sanctioned hit squad that kill those who don’t fit into the ideal of the perfect society, and those they target are usually responsible for only the most minor of annoyances. Their surveillance network is not based in technology, but on word of mouth. They decide who dies based on complaints sent in by neighbors, and some of the populace has become aware of the connection between filing complaints and these deaths. In fact, many have turned it into a game, betting to see who will die next in their apartment building, others cheating by filing complaints themselves.
The game captures this familiar, low key dread that comes from living within authoritarian societies. In cultures where contributing to society or fulfilling an expected role become the highest of virtues, lives become devalued if they don’t fit into these expectations. As a bisexual, Latino man living in Texas, I know this fear too well. I could be killed or removed from my normal life at any moment simply for being different from my neighbors. I know logically that this is incredibly unlikely where I live, but the fear remains whispering in the back of my skull, reminding me of my own mortality and how little I even understand my own “worth” as a person. Of course, maybe “worth” is better defined by one’s own understanding of themselves and not what the world deems them. Wouldn’t one of the strongest acts of rebellion we can make as people be to find our own worth instead of what these systems would say we should be? You could say the key to our own happiness is to break away from the us we are now, that the world has made us. We have to break away from the norms we were raised in — or as the game argues, “kill the past.”
The 25th Ward taps into our collective fear of “the other” in a distinctive way western audiences aren’t used too in order to explore these ideas. Instead of using people of different races or queer coded characters for fear-mongering, The 25th Ward instead has a poltergeist that doesn’t fit within the world. Kurumizawa, a man mentioned off hand early on as recently deceased, who ends up returning to the narrative as the closest thing to an antagonist SUDA’s Correctness chapters has. He’s radically different from every other character, as he rarely appears in the same art style as the others.
While other characters appear as 2D illustrations, he appears as a single animation cel with a different line and color style, or a man made entirely of PS1-era polygons. When you finally meet him in the forth Correctness chapter, he appears as an animated pixel sprite, in a world where everything is portrayed as a still image. Eventually, the game reveals him as the interface you’ve been using the whole game. He is beyond the world itself, beyond the horrific society he lived in and eventually succeeds in destroying it.
While you’d think this would make him some sort of god of revolution, he’s treated more as a god of madness and inevitability. He appears differently to different characters, such as one scene playing twice first having him appear polite and later as childish and petty, with his form never staying the same. He is called the “will of Kamui,” a criminal from The Silver Case who was significant not for who he was, but for what he inspired with his killings. He is the end of all things, and even the will of the developer if you want to really read into SUDA 51’s more meta themes in the story.
When he appears the normalcy everyone knew dissipates, and even begins to break down. His first appearance proper cast him as the final encounter in one character’s quest against a No More Heroes style trail of bosses. This character could only meet Kurumizawa by becoming some sort of god of death, embracing a madness that rejects the reality of the world itself, treating the game world as a completely different genre. The same happens in the next chapter with a surprise appearance from a character in The Silver Case, the game that came before this one. It should be impossible that this character could even appear with continuity taken into account, let alone the fact he’s talking with strange monsters and little girls who seem to eldritch knowledge. Like the previous character, this one has somehow broken away from the reality and norms of the wards, and he sees the truth behind the chaos that threatens them. In the process, they’ve become like Kurumizawa — a former cog that rises above the system. The difference is that these two risen characters don’t follow Kurumizawa’s path. They retain their humanity, existing for themselves and not the system that would destroy their individuality or the purpose of destroying that system.
The game channels the works of David Lynch as Kurumizawa becomes central (including a direct homage to the red room from Twin Peaks in Placebo), becoming some sort of dream or nightmare that blends together the logical and the absurd. The normal order of the 25th ward comes to an end, and even the known reality the game has set up distorts. Most importantly, his manipulations force the powers that be to realize they lack the control they thought they had, and the protagonists begin to find themselves, as the cage that is the ward starts to rust and rot. In a way, the game argues that authoritarian rules are doomed to fail, but it argues that fighting that system requires personal fulfillment.
Every element of the game is part of a thematic puzzle, bringing up ideas of dehumanizing modern urban systems, the impact of technology on culture and society, and questioning how we can even break away from these deadly norms, or if it’s even possible. Ultimately, despite the violent, horrible things that happen throughout the game, it does end every story on a hopeful note that has something to take away from it, all tied to the main running theme of many of SUDA 51’s works — “Kill the Past.”
The meaning of this phrase shifts, but it ultimately comes down to destroying either your past or someone else’s. The heinous crimes unit of the Correctness story wipe away the trail of political criminals to stop their cultural influence, the wards desperately try to wipe away the memory of the infamous political assassin Kamui Uehara, and every major character in the story struggles with who they were, who they became, and how they can “kill their past” and reclaim who they are for themselves. They discover the system they serve is inherently corrupt, and many of them are the victims of unimaginable traumas they didn’t even fully realize shaped them into who they are. Even before the 25th ward was born, the twenty-four before it were training the populace to serve them and not live for themselves.
They awaken to the evil around them, some they already knew and much they didn’t, and struggle to find an answer to how to continue on. The villains always fail because they want to wipe away the pasts of others to dictate the future of the populace, both the powers in the government and the chaotic outliers who wants to find meaning in emulating a killer. The protagonists destroy their old selves, the broken people molded to serve conspiracies and plans of old men with too much money and power, to free themselves and become their best self.
Tokio Morishima succeeds in “purifying” his existence, moving on from the endless pain and sorrow that defined him to finally have power over his own destiny, becoming a guide for the young who share his strange powers. A former sleeper child agent of conspiratorial chaos finally finds the inner peace he so longer for. Tsuki sees his entire life destroyed, but he finally becomes honest to who he is for the first time in decades, comfortable in just enjoying some mont blanc, a dessert his old mentors deemed not properly masculine. His friends and job may be gone, but he no longer has to try and be someone he never was.
While it’s debatable who the protagonist in Correctness even is (the story is partly an examination of the concept of player characters and protagonists), Kuroyanagi sticks out as a former shut-in who has both kept true to herself and has managed to create a place for herself in a suffocating world through sheer will. She curses and is shown to be a huge pervert, friends with an openly gay man, but nobody questions that she’s one of the best detectives in her unit. She killed her past long ago, and she kills the past of killers to stop their influence upon the world — and that includes the Postal Federation, the supposed faction of order. She separates herself from forces of control, and does what she does for her own satisfaction, not for any ideal of order or lust for power.
The 25th Ward is almost uncomfortably grim, and far more resonant than it probably was on release as fascism makes a world-wide comeback, but it does see some sort of light at the end of the tunnel. Old men eventually die and the next generation gets their chance to change the world. The things that have been done to us don’t have to be shackles that hold us back. Kill the past, become your best self, and get ready to remake the world as it falls apart around you under its own weight.
Jonathan Kaharl is a freelance writer who mainly writes about videogames. Has written over a hundred pieces for Hardcore Gaming 101, runs his own blog with a long form essay series, and both takes part in an indie gaming podcast and his own video essay channel on Youtube. Has a Patreon and Ko-Fi as well.
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