It was by sheer chance that Noby Noby Boy and I crossed paths on that fateful January day. I was doing my usual perusing of PSN and thinking about buying Soldner-X: Himmelstürmer just so I can have something hardcore-sounding to stand out in my digital library, something that would make Xbox Live gamers and their precious little Ikaruga (I r jealous) red with impotent shame, a title that women would see and feel inclined to desperately claw their clothes off in lustful fervor via single-file line while dudes form their own to express their envy and give me high-fives. Well, you know what? There will be none of that tonight. No, it's more like me being relegated to the solitary confines of my claustrophobic room on a Friday playing...this.



"YOU MEET MY GAZE? WHAT BRAVE CREATURES YOU ARE!"

The candy-colored parasite is you. Your designated name is BOY, not unlike many other biological lifeforms sown into the Earth to someday wreak total planetwide destruction like SEED, JENOVA, MOTHER, etc.

A Wikipedia description brought to you with great effort to control the trembling of my hand: "The player takes control of a worm-like quadrupedal character referred to as BOY. Using the controller, the left analog stick moves the front of Boy while the right stick controls the back. By moving both ends in opposite directions, the player can stretch Boy's abdomen to great lengths."

It's as bad as it sounds. Even the creator of this atrocity, Keita Takahashi, called it "a stupid game" in an interview with Eurogamer. On the surface the objective is having no objective - it's supposed to be reminiscent of your childhood, when you didn't need to be given a strict set of rules to spend your time; you just sat down with your toys and had fun.

Charming. Except your "playground" here consists of quaint little areas with oblivious happy-go-lucky village people milling around. That's like arming a toddler with a 90-foot-tall mechanized deathbot in the middle of downtown Manhattan and telling him the goal is to do whatever he wants.



"I'm really, really sorry about what I said. Can I...live?"


I have a few conjectures about this. Firstly, I can see this as a kind of test on human behavior, like the Milgram experiment where they tested the limits of an unknowing subject given control over a shocking mechanism applied onto a resistant captive. Would the average upstanding citizen be eventually compelled to inflict sadistic acts of pain and suffering onto his or her fellow humans if given free reign with no supervision? The game's online and it records your score, after all.

Ah yes, your score. More copy-paste: "The player accumulates points by how much they stretch during gameplay. These points can be submitted online via a character called Sun to another character called GIRL. Points submitted online by players to Girl will be added cumulatively, causing Girl to stretch and unlock new levels. Beginning on Earth, Girl has stretched to the Moon, Mars, and Jupiter and will proceed to several other planets..."

This led me to my more convincing conclusion. The entire game is an allegory for fascism. Together, BOY and GIRL amass a movement that quickly sweeps the entire gameworld as the party seeks out new territory for expansion of the homeland.



The moon's forces surrender to GIRL


From then on it's Manifest Destiny. One by one, the surrounding planets fall as the Western allies pose no match for the industrial might of the Noby war machine. The phallic pink creatures are a psychological manifestation of Hitler's sexual frustrations, depicted seizing planets across the entire solar system in a vain attempt to overshadow the fascist state loss of inner virility.



The fall of Jupiter


So there goes my Friday night. What say you? Thoughts? Questions? Tears?


"NONE OF YOU ARE SAFE!"