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It was October 2001, and a twelve-year-old boy, after incessant pestering, had just received the newest giant-robot game for the PlayStation 2 as an early Christmas gift from his mother. This annoyed The Boy’s father, who never saw eye-to-eye with his ex-wife and preferred his son to stay focused on the three S’s: school, sports, and socializing; so it follows that The Boy lived two lives, switching back and forth monthly between his mother and father’s house. It was always autumnal during these split-custody blues.

Nearly ten months prior, in December 2000, Bandai released its first game for the PlayStation 2, Mobile Suit Gundam: Journey to Jaburo. The game is largely a retelling of the first half of the classic 1979 anime Mobile Suit Gundam. It follows the crew of the White Base – a military vessel of the Earth Federation – in their nigh-hopeless battle against the Principality of Zeon, a nation of space-Nazis that will do anything to achieve their fascist goals, notably: dropping populated space colonies on Earth thereby killing millions. Bright Noa, captain of the White Base, chances upon a special boy named Amuro Ray, who happens to be a natural when it comes to piloting the Earth Federation’s new experimental giant robot: The Gundam. These events kick off Amuro’s coming-of-age story as he finds himself in a tough-love father-son relationship with Bright Noa and develops a sibling-like rivalry with a Zeon commander as equally talented as he is effortlessly cool and mysterious and handsome and blonde: Char Aznable.

Childhood is wanting to be Char; adulthood is wanting to be Char, also. Which brings us to The Boy; and, of course, The Boy in this story wanted to be Char, but he was more of an Amuro-type: geeky, angsty, obsessive. The Boy’s father was most certainly a Bright Noa-type, both in his disciplinary approach, which leaned heavily towards mild forms of corporal punishment, and in his no-nonsense haircut. And the father just purchased a new home, which he treated like his own White Base.

The new White Base was as tall as a Gundam made of bricks with four exact ninety-degree angles, wearing a pyramid like a paper hat with such perfect folds that it must have been crafted by an origami master who knew all the ancient tricks but lacked any creativity whatsoever. The front door was mathematically placed in the precise middle of the home and was surrounded by exactly nine windows; this made the house appear as some sort of eldritch wall-of-eyes and simply walking by the place evoked an intense feeling of being-watched. The house had a modest front yard dotted with thin maples and, during these autumnal months, the lack of chlorophyll caused the decaying leaves to float down from the hormonal trees and blanket the yard in death both fragrant and fugacious. When the breeze came, the naked trees appeared like skeletal fingers casting curses upon the very land they sprouted from. This eyeball-window-skeleton-hand-tree dynamic caused the local kids to describe the home as a haunted painting of some long-dead person whose eyes actually followed you instead of fake followed you; The Boy just described the home as prison.

For reference, the original Gundam stood eighteen meters tall or fifty-nine feet high or ten-people-standing-on-each-other’s-shoulders, and weighed sixty metric tons or one-hundred-twenty-thousand pounds or half of a blue whale, which aligned closely with a standard-three-story-middle-class home built in the eighties but renovated and sold in the turn of the new millennium; the same type of home The Boy found himself living in every-other month after both his mom and dad and the child therapist told him that it was not his fault and that mommy and daddy just don’t love each other anymore and that, on the bright side, he might have two Christmases from now on.

*eyeball-window-skeleton-hand-tree dynamic with The Boy and The Father and The Gundam

The Boy’s father saw the new home as his own White Base to lead his family into a better life, only with a four-thousand-dollar-a-month price tag; but to The Boy, the new home meant sitting on a hardwood chair with approximately zero lumbar support at the kitchen table all afternoon because he had to finish his homework before he could do anything else and he didn’t know how to do the assignments because he didn’t pay attention in class and he was too ashamed to ask for help so he would only sit there doodling pictures of giant robots in the margins of his worksheets between poking small holes in the fruit placed in the decorative bowl at the middle of the glass table at which he sat for hours. And this infuriated The Boy’s father, who made The Boy sit there until the work was done and then went behind The Boy to check his accuracy, and if it was not correct – which it rarely ever was – he would make The Boy do it all over again. It was tough love for the greater good of the White Base; some real Bright Noa Stuff was going on in that kitchen with the glass table and the uncomfortable chairs. The Father, like all fathers, wanted his son to have a better life than he did – he didn’t want his son stuck in a dead-end sales job at forty, like he was – and this meant perfect grades and sports three days a week and absolutely no distractions.

Directly below The Boy’s cramp-inducing chair, in the basement, was the PlayStation 2; it was hooked up to a television set about the size of a Jackson Pollock canvas, which painted pictures of giant robots upon The Boy’s adolescent brain. Mobile Suit Gundam: Journey to Jaburo was down there in the basement, snapped into the disc tray like the neurons that snapped robots into The Boy’s mind at all hours of the day. The Boy had Gundams on the brain while he was in the classroom staring at the circle that ticked time in slow motion; during every breezy autumn Sunday when raking leaves into piles that were then tossed into metal garbage cans to be burned days later; when he was in the field during recess just-kind-of-wandering-around-looking-at-stuff while the other kids played kickball; during the basketball practices when The Father would desperately encourage him to put-in-even-the-smallest-amount-of-effort; and definitely during that time he was in the outfield when the pop fly crashed into his head like a small meteorite rendering him unconscious for several minutes; and especially while he was wide-eyed in bed, staring into darkness because the child-therapist-prescribed ADHD medication gave him robot-inspired bouts of insomnia.

Every night during these split-custody blues, The Boy would slink out of his bedroom, tiptoe down two flights of stairs, and plop himself on the couch in the basement, where he covered himself in the glow of Mobile Suit Gundam: Journey to Jaburo. There, The Boy would control The Gundam: a glistening white 18-meter-tall Minovsky-Ultracompact Fusion Reactor-powered robot with a state-of-the-art rocket-thruster backpack module that provided a maximum speed of 165 km/h, sporting an incredible 5700 meter sensor range, and boasting a swift 180-degree turning time of 1.1 seconds. It was armed with two gatling guns mounted in its kabuto-shaped head, alongside handheld armaments including a beam rifle, a 380mm hyper bazooka, something resembling a riot shield, and two beam sabers.

The Boy’s wishes were only one pink flash of a beam saber away from being fulfilled. He felt powerful, clever, needed, and completely understood when he climbed into the cockpit of that virtual Gundam. His real father didn’t get it, but Bright Noa did. Bright Noa pushed The Boy to be the best damn Gundam pilot there ever was, while his real father only pushed him to be a healthy, productive member of society – something as far from the mind of a twelve-year-old boy as Mercury is from Mars.

The Gundam, with its shogun-like presence, demanded respect, much like the controls of the game, which – being Bandai’s first game for the PlayStation 2 and their first three-dimensional game ever – were clunky, archaic, obtuse, and reminiscent of an airplane cockpit with lots of unlabeled buttons and switches. Considering the PlayStation 2 DualShock controller with its two analog sticks, d-pad, four face buttons – ECKS, OH, TRIANGLE, SQUARE – two right triggers, two left triggers, start and select, and two secret buttons in the clicking-in of either analog stick, one would assume that The Gundam is moved with the left analog stick while the right analog stick controls the camera, but this is not the case; instead, up and down on the d-pad move The Gundam forward and backward while left and right turn The Gundam left and right; the word “turn” is important here; note that the word is not “move” or “strafe,” because the left and right triggers strafe The Gundam left and right instead. As such, if one wanted to move The Gundam in a diagonal direction, they would need to hold both up on the d-pad and either the left or the right trigger. If one wanted to turn The Gundam 360 degrees, they would need to hold left or right on the d-pad for ten whole seconds while the robot awkwardly stomped around in a circle, which left the clumsy metal giant wide open to enemy attack. This resulted in something akin to piloting a bipedal tank with a Tonka-truck controller.

In Bandai’s three-dimensional naivety, they had accidentally created a control scheme that mirrored what it may actually feel like to control The Gundam: clunky, archaic, obtuse; as if the PlayStation 2 controller was an actual Gundam cockpit. Every button on the DualShock was utilized in some way. The difficulty of the controls made pulling off even basic feats feel like mastering advanced Taekwondo techniques.

Amuro may have read the manual before jumping into the cockpit of The Gundam, but The Boy did not. At first, The Boy was hopelessly wrecked by Zeon mobile suits, but as the nights passed and the homework piled up, he became more dexterous and more dangerous, and soon he was controlling The Gundam like a seasoned veteran. The Gundam became an extension of The Boy, and whenever The Boy successfully slashed through an enemy robot with a well-timed dash attack or boosted out of the way of oncoming bazooka fire, he felt immensely satisfied in a way that The Father’s three S’s could never provide.

*the cockpit of The Gundam

On the seventh night of basement slinking, The Boy had reached the last story-mode mission. The story mode included a meager nine missions, covering the first twenty-nine episodes of the anime, and culminated in a final showdown with Char Aznable at the Earth Federation military base of Jaburo. The final mission consisted of a sortie with several mobile suits before Char entered the fray; and as the game lacked ways to repair The Gundam mid-sortie, The Boy had to carefully eliminate each mobile suit without taking damage. Otherwise, he would have no health left for the showdown with Char, who piloted a deadly amphibious mobile suit painted red – the Z’Gok Commander Type – equipped with sharp claws that could be pointed into metal-piercing spikes or splayed like a starfish to reveal devastating laser cannons. Throughout the first half of the mission, the regiment of Zeon mobile suits – mostly Zakus of green coloring and shoulder pads that looked like something a post-apocalyptic biker gang would require their members to wear (spikes and all) – would extract a great toll on The Gundam’s armor. When Char appeared, The Boy would be easily defeated. It didn’t help that the stagger animation of The Gundam was such that it was far too easy to get caught in an endless loop of laser-beam stagger locks; this stun-lock effect drove The Boy to the edge of madness.

After multiple failed attempts at defeating Char, The Boy lost all pretense of being twelve-years-old and needing-to-be-quiet: he howled as if he was the one getting hurt instead of the facsimilized samurai robot behind the phosphor. Each time The Boy failed the mission, he had to start over from the beginning; this improved his ability to complete the first-half of the sortie – battling over ten Zakus while not getting hit a single time – but ultimately resulted in CONTINUE? when Char locked The Boy in another laser-loop lock of death.

The Boy’s howling traveled through the home’s ductwork and echoed out of the ventilation shafts, alerting The Father, who was reading a Civil War novel in the spare bedroom, as he was prone to do every night. The Father promptly got out of bed, discovered The Boy’s empty room, and made his way down the many flights of stairs into the basement. His fists clenched in paternal frustration as he considered all the ways he would discipline his son. Bright Noa would often slap Amuro right on the face, but The Father preferred the buttocks as it was more socially acceptable. He mentally prepared himself to deliver this proper spanking, preemptively erecting mental bulwarks to deal with The Boy’s inevitable tears.

It was at this time that The Boy really wanted to be Char Aznable. He placed the DualShock on the coffee table in front of him, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath; he imagined that the air he was inhaling was actually the comet trail left by the Red Comet himself. Now serene – and very stubborn – The Boy picked up the controller and became one with The Gundam; he precisely maneuvered his way through the military base of Jaburo, slicing through Zakus as if he were practicing iaijutsu in a bamboo forest. The Boy had mastered the first half of the mission, but it was still not enough. When Char showed up in his crimson robot, The Boy was abruptly snapped back to reality with another CONTINUE? But The Boy was nonplussed. In his channeling of fictitious masked anti-heroes, he had become zen with calm determination, and it showed on his smiling face, all aglow with Mobile Suit Gundam: Journey to Jaburo.

*Char and his crimson Z’gok

The Father silently stood behind the basement couch for minutes, watching his son. At first, The Father was angry; after all, The Boy was sneaking downstairs, breaking the household rules, and it was clear that he had been doing this for a while, as he lacked the nervousness typically associated with burgeoning troublemakers. The Father had tried his damnedest to make The Boy a better version of himself; he had visions of his son becoming a star athlete: tennis and basketball and football and baseball. He even coached The Boy’s sports teams himself. But The Boy was clumsy, uninterested, and unhappy with everything that was thrust upon him. The Father had forgotten what The Boy’s smile looked like during these split-custody blues.

The Boy, now beaming with a huge smile on his face as he edged closer to victory, reloaded the mission once more full of confidence and verve. The screen went black for several seconds while the PlayStation 2 whirred and read the disc; and just as the screen went black, The Boy caught a glimpse of a shadowy figure in the reflection of the television’s leaded glass. The Boy’s stomach dropped and an audible gulp could be heard as he turned to face his father.

But The Father lacked his typical scowl; instead, there was a single hot tear rolling down his cheek. In the reflection of the television screen, The Father had seen his son’s smile for the first time since the divorce, and suddenly, everything made sense. He wiped the tear from his face and sat on the couch next to The Boy.

The Boy trembled in fear. He thought he was surely going to be punished for this transgression and had already started formulating some sort of lie in his head about how this was the first time he had ever come down here and how he might have sleepwalked or how he heard something weird and had to investigate; but The Father, as if reading The Boy’s mind, let out a light chuckle before placing his large hand on his son’s shoulder.

“What are you playing, son?”

The Boy, amidst a sea of stuttering, uttered something that sounded like the word Gundam being fired from a machine gun.

“Mind if I try?”

The Boy responded by staring at his father through dilated pupils swirling with confusion and faint computer-game photons. Then, suddenly, something clicked. The Boy’s lips curved like a rainbow turning upside as he relinquished control of the DualShock controller. The Father eyed the boomerang-like device in his hands, twisted and turned it, and then pressed all the wrong buttons, causing the television screen to go wild with menus and laser beams. This only caused The Boy’s smile to widen – and this smile was like a golden contagion, as The Father could not help but smile himself.

The Boy laughed a cherub’s laugh, placed his hand on his father’s, and spoke without a single stutter,

“No, Dad, not that way. Here, let me show you.”

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(Originally published on 7/7/2024)

#ComputerGames #MobileSuitGundamJourneyToJaburo #Autobiographical