Corpse Paper Final Paper
Starting out as a small RPG Marker (RPG Tsukūru Dante98) game by Makoto Kedouin while he was in college, the game Corpse Party has started to pick up traction within the macabre gaming world.
Corpse Party tells the story of a group of Japanese high school students that meet after their school’s spring cultural festival. One of the students in the group, Mayu, is transferring to another high school the following day, so she and her friends gather in their classroom to say goodbye. One of her friends, Ayumi, brings out a charm that she found online and asks everyone to follow the ritual. If performed correctly, then all of them will be friends forever. Mayu, Ayumi, their friends Satoshi, Naomi, Seiko, Morishige, and Yoshiki; Satoshi’s little sister Yuka; and their homeroom teacher Ms. Yui all complete the ritual. The ritual itself is a paper doll that they all pull apart at the same time, having a piece of the doll for themselves.
CptKiller. “Who Is Your Favourite Corpse Party Character? | Anime Amino.” Anime | Aminoapps.com, AminoApps, 2 Aug. 2015.
Unfortunately for the group, the ritual wasn’t performed correctly, and the group descends into a crumbling floor below. What follows is the students being split apart from each other and are forced to witness disturbing amounts of gore, death, and finding the remains of other students, as well as their friends.
The amount of horrific situations that the group gets thrusts into only becomes more terrifying through the franchise’s history. For example, the plotline told above only exists as the remake version of Corpse Party. The first game, built in 1996, shortens the list of characters to only five; Satoshi, Naomi, Ayumi, Yoshiki, and Yuka. As if to stay true to the original story, all of the characters added to the game’s story all, one way or another, end up being killed, making their existence in the game at all seem pointless other than to add to the bloodshed. So the question becomes, why create a game only for misery?
Geno. “Corpse Party – XSEED GAMES INVITES PC GAMERS TO BRAVE THE HORRORS – Video Game News.” SCARED STIFF REVIEWS, SCARED STIFF REVIEWS, 2016.
During its early years, Corpse Party remained underground for the most part, only existing online for users that had a PC-9801 system. Over time, the game started to pick up traction among international players as RPG Marker started to become accessible to Chinese, Korean, and English speakers. For overseas players that happened to stable upon Corpse Party, they would use game emulators in order to play the game to its fullest. The use of game emulators and recording devices helped bring Corpse Party into the modern spotlight, leading to a massive launch of the game in 2014 and 2015, when YouTubers started to record and post their emulated gameplay for all to see.
Due to this rise in popularity, more and more viewers, many the same age or younger than the teenagers portrayed in the game itself, were able to gain access to the games. Without any age restrictions to block access to the videos children and adults of all ages were able to witness what happened to these poor souls.
The group of students within school all face different scenarios of horror during their time in Heavenly Host Elementary School, the main setting of the game and playground for the murders, traps, and victims that fall into the “darkening,” all return with different levels of psyche still intact or missing. A perfect example of a student that is affected heavily by the school is Naomi, the game’s main female protagonist in the remake. Originally built in the first game to be displayed as a headstrong, strong-willed character, in the remake Naomi becomes more self-conscious. Her moxy is gone and her dependency on the other characters within the game becomes more pronounced throughout the series.
hotpink-jewel. “Naomi Nakashima – 2008 vs 1996.” DeviantArt, DeviantArt, 3 July 2014.
Naomi suffers from PTSD due to her time within Heavenly Host. In the original Corpse Party, Naomi is lucky enough to not experience any hardships, remaining headstrong until the end of the game and not letting fear get the best of her. In the remake, Naomi quickly is forced to witness and suffer from one of the worst deaths in the game’s history, the death of her best friend Seiko. It’s later revealed in the game that Naomi is the sole cause of Seiko’s death. First believed to be a suicide, through found footage Naomi is seen to be killing Seiko by forcing her to hang herself. Upon learning this, not only does Naomi suffer immense guilt for killing her best friend, she continues to suffer the reality of losing her best friend when she goes home.
Due to Heavenly Host’s curse, no one remembers that Seiko ever existed, causing Naomi to have episodes where she remains catatonic. Naomi’s behavior can be described as violent, motionless, at times rocking herself back and forth or allowing all of her muscles to go lump and hang from their own weight, all signs of extreme grief (Darwin, 176). Due to these episodes, Naomi has to be medicated by her mother and sees multiple therapists, all telling her that it’s just in her head.
Okaminarutofan999. “Seiko Shinohara/Gallery.” Corpse Party Wiki, Fandom.
“20 Quotes from Corpse Party about Fate and Fighting It.” MyAnimeList.net, MyAnimeList, LLC, 23 Oct. 2015.
For many of the viewers that first stumbled upon Corpse Party, through their favorite YouTuber or becoming inspired and playing the full game for themselves, what could playing a game filled with dead bodies, disturbing situations, the sounds of death and dying, and extreme stress do to such a person?
Despite the horrific nature of the games, anime, manga, and movies have been created to add to the game’s lore and to provide fan service to hardcore fanatics. Luckily enough, some of the manga titles were created by Makoto Kedouin himself so his titles can be seen as canon material that never made it into the game. On the other hand, are the anime and movies, which show alternative final endings of the game. In many cases, the episodes include fan service, false relationships, more horrific endings, and killing off of main characters that normally would be protected. Horror porn, essentially.
In the movie’s case, horror is replaced with a need to make everything a jump scare and focuses on the main villains without pointing out just how scary there are. For whatever reason they are made, the movies waste no time bringing more attention to the franchise.
Due to the graphic nature and the need to protect its citizens from such amounts of violence and horrific themes within the game, China’s Ministry of Culture has decided to ban the game completely from the country, as well as 37 other anime and manga. The Ministry of Culture was dissolved in March 2018 and replaced the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, so records of the exact list and whether the anime and manga are still banned have become harder to find.
Works Cited
Darwin, Charles. “Low Spirits, Anxiety, Grief, Dejection, Despair.” The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1965, pp. 176.
Kerr, Margee. “Memento Mori.” Scream: Chilling Adventures in the Science of Fear. 1st ed., New York, PublicAffairs, 2015, pp. 146–159.
—.“Wrong Turn.” Scream: Chilling Adventures in the Science of Fear. 1st ed., New York, PublicAffairs, 2015, pp. 164–179.
