Sounds stupid, and often is, but the gameplay is very similar to old-school point-and-click adventure games, and the dialogue can be surprisingly funny. The games are clearly set in Japan but, at least in the English translation, take place in fictional locations.
I’ve played through four games in this series now, and a couple of them make jokes about the police department having a silly-looking mascot - the “Blue Badger”. Here he is, in front of the police building, in the background from one of the games.
Well, the other week in Ginza I strolled past what seemed to be the police museum (fun for the whole family, right?), and it... er... just look:
Not hard to see where the video game designers’ grand inspiration came from. Here’s that pantsless police creature’s website, complete with theme song. Ah, Japan. Then the same thing happened the next day. Strange-looking stadium from the game:
Real stadium:
Now, I have no illusions that I’ve discovered something new here. I’m sure that Pipo-kun the haunting police beast and that strenuously architecture-y stadium are as familiar to Japanese people as an igloo to an Eskimo, and that’s why they were parodied in these games. It just makes me wonder how many other caricatured landmarks, celebrities, myths etc. from foreign cultures I’ve been exposed to for years without having the slightest clue. And somehow I feel slightly let down that the Blue Badger turned out to be biting real-world satire and not just a strange, random figment of someone’s imagination.
I guess most works of art are like that - you can always deepen your understanding of them by studying more about the context they were created in, but that knowledge can end up tainting your enthusiasm for the artwork in the first place.
Like how taking a good, close look at Jon Voight’s face explains so, so much about Angelina Jolie, but also utterly destroys her hotness.
