Writer’s Note: Catherine: Full Body has only officially been released in Japan at the time of this article. Therefore, this will contain spoilers, and the contents discussed are from that version. The game is slated to come to North America and Europe in September of this year, so it’s possible that the localization team(s) and/or publishing branches/partners of Atlus in those regions may in some ways address or alter the content discussed by the time of its worldwide release.
Despite being one of the bestselling authors in the world, Haruki Murakami hasn’t gotten a lot of adaptations of his work. There’s some, like the recent South Korean film, Burning, based on one of his short stories, or the 2010 adaptation of his most mainstream work, Norwegian Wood. By and large his works haven’t been adapted nearly as much as you’d expect from a writer so popular and prolific. I can somewhat understand, his work is often a mixture of mundane sprinkled with unexplained fantasy that rarely comes to a satisfying conclusion for the characters. That’s one of the reasons Catherine caught my attention when it first released in 2011. I don’t know if the the game was inspired by Murakami’s work, but I wouldn’t be surprised. It tackles one of Murakami’s largest fascinations, infidelity, and has tons of sheep people, reminiscent of the Sheep Man featured in a lot of his early works. Much like the novelist’s works there’s a dark side under the mundane, but unfortunately, it’s a darkness very present and there’s nothing too magical about it.
Catherine is the best story Atlus has ever done. Often times the company has great concepts, but never go past the shallow end of the pool. Persona 5, the latest in the series that’s elevated the company outside Japan, has a plot based on how adults use their power and privilege in a systemic away to manipulate children and the less fortunate into their bidding. It never goes past that surface level beyond a group of mostly normal kids (that we’re supposed to pretend isn’t normal) fighting various caricatures of adult villains. That’s what makes Catherine so special.
It features adults (that actually look like adults, a troubling part of many ‘anime’ styled games where many adult characters look like little kids) doing actual adult activities. The plot focuses on Vincent, a directionless 30-something, engaged to marry a woman he’s known since high school, Katherine. In a night of passion he has a one-night stand with a younger woman, Catherine, who latches onto him and his life becomes a lot more complicated. The plot is moved forward by the time Vincent spends out at night drinking with his buddies at their local bar. It’s an almost scarily normal story before we get to the nightmares where men turn into sheep people and have to play a massive life or death puzzle game.
Unlike Persona, the game goes pretty deep into its concept and characters. While it starts with a simple dynamic of immature Vincent wavering between a stable love interest and a younger femme fatale, things goes sideways when secrets come out about Katherine, and the story becomes one that explores infidelity and how society defines us by our relationships. The plot gets more supernatural as it progresses, but its themes feel real. While his romantic life falls apart, endangering his real life, he talks through it at the bar with his buddies as they drink and play darts. What’s more relatable than that?
It’s one of those buddies where things get dicey.
One of Vincent’s group is a trans woman named Erica. The narrative doesn’t reveal this, and you may never know unless you get a specific ending, but there’s enough poor jokes peppered throughout that you’ll get it in retrospect. She begins a sexual relationship with the youngest of the group, Toby, who isn’t aware that she’s trans. It’s revealed to him in the beforementioned ending, he acts distraught with saying he wants his ‘V-card back.’ The whole thing is played for laughs. To add a cherry on top they deadname her in the credits (and also later in an artbook) by identifying her old identity as her primary one: Eric Anderson (Erica).
Yeah, it’s bad.
The treatment of Erica has always been a black mark on the game. For something that manages to marry magic and slice of life so well, be unique in its setting and story, it’s disheartening that the game is anchored with that.
An updated version of the game called Full Body was announced in 2017 that would add new content and endings. Catherine would get its second chance (and remember I wrote before about giving storytellers that second chance). They could change these things, if nothing else remove or alter that terrible ending.
Oh boy, did that not happen.
Catherine: Full Body released in Japan on February 14th, and it didn’t take long for people to dig into it. There had been concern on pre-release due to the addition of another character named Rin (a third Catherine, making the love triangle a square) who many suspected was also transgender and would be played for gags. Primarily it came from a scene in an early trailer when Rin hikes up her dress and Vincent looks at her genital region with shock.
We’ll get there in a minute, but first, Erica’s role got even worse. One of the added endings had Catherine go back in time to change the timeline. While it doesn’t explicitly say she goes back to make everyone happy, everyone is very happy, including a friend of the group who died before the events of the game being alive again. It’s very much a good ending.
And Erica is back to being male.
Rin did end up being a crossdresser (It’s never clear what Rin identifies as, the game starts with female pronouns and switches to male after the reveal so I’ll use she to avoid confusion). She’s also an alien, the humanoid form of a pink minion-like spacemen.
People have been twisting themselves trying to find ways these things aren’t that bad, whether through a hope to salvage something good from all that problematic mess, or in bad faith to minimize it. It could be that Erica hasn’t transitioned but well, there’s a (yet another poor) joke about how the right girl could be close for Toby. Rin has a good ending where Vincent overcomes his disgust and they get married, which is nice.
Still, you have two trans characters, one who was a gloried joke to begin with who gets sent back to her previous pretransition life in a happy ending, and the other who is literally inhuman. It’s a lot of terrible to unpack. It’s as if they weren’t happy with the game having a black mark so they took a marker and scribbled all over it for good measure.
Yet, from everything I’ve read Full Body maintains all the things I loved about the original, and that’s all too rare in games.
It’s something we have to face with a lot of art. Those things usually get classified as being ‘from a different time.’ That pile of things we like to pretend came from an era where people didn’t know any better to make ourselves feel okay for enjoying it. But when it’s something this new, it stares you in the face more and makes it harder to ignore.
I genuinely feel there’s a lot of warrant to Catherine, and it stands as a great contrast to a lot of Japanese games and how they deal with relationships and romance. There’s always talk about separating art from artist, which we see now with discussions of Michael Jackson and R. Kelly. But what about separating art from…itself?
Can we talk about the good parts of art, while ignoring the bad part? Can those good parts of a piece of art void out its bad parts?
There’s two Catherines, much like the story. There’s one that’s a wholly unique gaming experience that challenges why we chose the relationships we do even when they aren’t good for us. Then there’s the other that, at the very least, has serious issues with LBGT people. Part of Vincent’s struggle is there’s parts he likes about both girls but can only be with one. The player struggle is the opposite. There’s only one copy of Catherine or Catherine: Full Body. You can’t take your disc (or your digital download as is increasingly the case) and snap it in half and have all the things you like while exorcising the things you don’t. Catherine can be played in a non-linear way to sidetrack its questionable content, but that still requires you to actually know about it and the paths to avoid that.
There is a third option in the game, called the Freedom ending, where Vincent decides he won’t chose either girl and goes off to travel and find himself, which gives in to one of his worst character flaws in his flaky and directionless attitude in life. But maybe that’s the best way to handle this whole thing, and just forgo the whole thing and say it’s too much crap to salvage to recommend or enjoy. Yet, I find myself feeling that’s such a shame, because there’s so much good things the game does that almost none others do.
As it stands, I haven’t decided what I’ll do about Catherine: Full Body. Right now, I doubt I’ll buy it, because a lot of the content is terrible enough that I feel rewarding Atlus for it is just not something I should do. But there’s part of me torn about it, too. Catherine has such an interesting take on the genre.
Like Vincent, I feel trapped between two options I can’t really decide on. A love of art that blends mundane life and fantasy rare in the games medium, with my distaste at its treatment of trans individuals. Much like Murakami novels, there isn’t a solid conclusion here. Everyone has to decide on their own how much they’re willing to overlook in a piece of art. Maybe I’ll forget it all and wait for the next Murakami-esque game with real life mixed with frantic and flailing sheep men.