Joker - 21/11/2016

PREMISE

As the opening crawl of every chapter informs you, "you" are ANON, the RED JOKER.

Like every anime protagonist ever, "you" are a perfectly generic 17-year-old Japanese schoolboy by day and an armored superhero by night. There's a parallel world variously referred to as the "Red World", the "Red", the "Shroud" and a whole host of other terms that are basically the same thing.

The "Red World" is a realm that is, in a very esoteric way that's never entirely clear, connected to the real world. "You" are forced into random deathmatches at any time of the day, where the only way out is to kill or be killed.

As "you" have the most powerful armor ever (Your basic sidearm is a pair of chainguns, in a world where most of your opponents rely primarily on hand-to-hand combat) you blow them away with very little difficulty and go through the motions of a subpar high-school romantic comedy where your primary worries are which blushing, doe-eyed girl to seduce next.

And then all hell breaks loose.

MECHANICS

Joker Quest uses a d100 system, which the QM has stated is his "own system". The QM has been exceptionally close-mouthed about it for five years, so I suppose the players have gotten used to it by now.

In a nutshell, combat (And there is a LOT of combat) relies on two important statistics. You have your HP (It hits 0, you die, obviously) and Meter. Meter is basically your Super Meter from any fighting game and it rises as you dish out or take damage. You can either use Meter to fire off larger, more powerful attacks (i.e. guns) or you can "bank" it to unlock access to even bigger guns.

It cannot be stressed enough that "you" have a lot of guns.

As stated above, in a world where everyone is using pointy sticks, their bare hands or the occasional rifle, this is a massive and unfair advantage. Early fights mostly involve "you" keeping your distance from an opponent and strafing the target repeatedly until you can unleash missiles, a gigantic building-destroying death laser or an instant-kill black hole cannon (!) on whatever you're fighting. Up close, "you" have a massive shotgun that incinerates targets and can be double-fired.

This is your STARTING KIT.

After you've curb-stomped enough targets, you gain "Essence" (XP), depicted here as glowing green motes of lights you absorb into your armor. The QM is clearly an old-school gamer, because you only gain Essence from killing. Get enough XP, you gain a level. Don't kill someone and you get jack shit. Obviously, this affects the plot, because now there's always the temptation to kill someone for all the sweet sweet XP you can wring out of him.

For /tg/, gaining a level in Joker Quest has always been a reason for much hype and to be frank I can see why. "You" have a sprawling, ambiguously-worded menu open up in front of you and you get to pick a single option. None of the options have any explanation besides their vague title (What does "FORCE" mean? Is "SURVIVE" better than "GUARD"? Look, I just want to increase my HP, man. Stop making me jump through hoops to do it.) but they're universally good anyway so what the hey.

But wait, that's not all. Sometimes, when you kill someone, they (very, very rarely) drop a piece of equipment (A "Relic") that "you" can use. "Relics" are the main form of "treasure" or "loot" or "pickups" in Joker Quest, and each and every one is a game-changer of some kind.

There's a cloak that lets you do the "afterimages with mass" thing from Gundam F91. There's a beam shield that becomes a grenade after you block an attack with it. There's a jetpack that can be "broken" to fire a single, obscenely powerful lightning bolt and there are so, so many guns that fire lightning, poison, swords, enraged spiders, tiny black holes (not to be confused with the gun that fires a giant black hole), cancer, bullets (if you're boring) and oh god, my eyes are watering a little. My personal favorite is the one that turns a target into TNT, so he has a moment to clutch himself and go all bug-eyed before he explodes. Always good for a laugh.

Later, you get a choice to turn people's SOULS into loot, which instantly has the question of "Do I want another level-up? Or do I want MORE LOOT, which I can use, NOW?" that appeals to the greed-crazed pack rat in all of us. It's very, very similar to a roguelike, or all those years spent playing Diablo II hoping for an ultra-rare drop.

Apart from Relics, "you" eventually learn how to use "Codebursts" which are look they're just magic spells. Yes, I know they're supposed to be flaws in the Matrix, but it doesn't change the fact that they're magic spells. "Codebursts" are obscenely expensive, but they're also obscenely powerful. Old favorites include a spell that creates a massive explosion with no warning at all right here right now, a spell that completely disarms a target for a not-inconsiderable period of time and a spell that allows you to give a target a one word command that MUST be obeyed.

These are actually great. All of them have the whole "big price, big reward" thing and they never go out of style. Think of Sorcery in Exalted, except far, far more useful in combat. But the method to obtain them is more obtuse than becoming a Jedi Knight in old-school Galaxies, so there's no consistent way of learning more. Again, they're not the piddling sorceries Reinhard learns in Princess Guard or whatever, each one is a game-ender right there like the Codeburst that effectively states "You can't hit me for a WHOLE ROUND, you faggot enabler" at the cost of draining all your Meter to nothing.

You're probably wondering if this becomes "powerlevels shit" but oddly it doesn't. "You" only have two hands, and your loadout gives you more options, not necessarily more power. Strangely, the most useful upgrades are the "utility" ones like the knee-rockets that allows for a free dash, the ability that allows you to move first in combat and the ability to hover with your jetpack so you can do the hovercraft-skimming move that all Japanese mecha somehow manage. I don't know if it was intentional, but "your" core kit remains the same for over a hundred chapters, but whether this means it was built to last or was overpowered from the beginning is really a matter of personal opinion.

Amid all the purple prose, combat is fun (but not fast) and dynamic. I can actually see it as a dedicated one-on-one fighting game, possibly without the RPG aspect to things. This system was built from the ground-up and it shows, with an escalation mechanic that apes the anime "style" of combat. You don't start by throwing big attacks at people, you beat them down a little so you can REALLY wreck them later

Where it breaks down is when there are many, many people fighting at once. But we'll get to that later.

Oh, sometimes you roll outside combat, too, but that usually isn't important. Moving on.

REVIEW

Joker Quest is a Quest where Things Go Wrong.

That's the Quest in a nutshell and I don't mean it in a bad way. You know how in Mad Max, there's never a clean miss? You know, when a grappling hook doesn't just fall short, it gets stuck in someone's leg and drags him screaming to his death under the wheels of a truck and creates a wreck the next roided-up muscle car smashes into?

Joker Quest is a lot like that and it's both the Quest's strongest and weakest aspect at once.

The story starts rough and by that I mean REALLY rough. It stays that way until Episode (Or Chapter, you do you) 19 and up until then the story is staunchly formulaic. "You" roam the city, fight whatever monster-of-the-week, maybe gain a level, then make time with one of several girls you have on the go.

"Who's it going to be, this week?" the Quest is flat-out asking as this point. "Is it going to be the childhood friend who not-so-secretly carries a torch for "You"? The sweet cosplay maid who keeps being bullied by the mean girls at school and needs a white knight to save her? The shy librarian with prophetic visions? The mysterious waif(u) who exists entirely in your head? Or wait, is it going to be the literal semen demon who dresses like a fetish model all the time?"

Three guesses who /tg/ goes for and the first one doesn't count.

So what happens in Episode 19? Well, there's a double-date and a big fight at an amusement park. The primary villain has just been introduced (and fan-favorite the unyieldingly implacable Rust Kaiser) and "you" have to flee after an inconclusive exchange of magic and gunfire. Because /tg/ can't resist getting in the last word, "you" stop to fire one last time at the villain.

Then one of the lesser villains shoots Hecate in the back and kills her.

This is THE watershed moment in Joker Quest, and it surprised the QM ("JQOP") as much as anyone else. This is especially so because, up to this point, "you" have not failed at anything. Ever.

JQOP, bless his misanthropic little heart, has staunchly stated that all dice are played as they are rolled and there are no takebacks. Even when it's not dramatically appropriate or flat-out ruins the mood, if it happens, it happens.

"You" (I'm calling "You" Joker for the sake of my punctuation keys) vow revenge because obviously that's what you do. But then an interesting thing happens.

Joker doesn't know who to hit.

Sure, he finds Hecate's killer soon enough and kills him, but that leaves him at a dead end. He doesn't know who he has to go after, and he actually has to start using whatever contacts he has to track them down. This is where the scope of the Quest widens MASSIVELY. In a very Persona-styled mood, he has to start canvassing the city, uncovering clues, doing favors, make alliances with other parties and gangs, then somehow unravel the mystery that is the great metaplot of the entire quest.

While making time with one of several girls that he has on the go. This is /tg/, after all.

CHARACTERS (Or A WORD ON WAIFUS)

Joker Quest has a massive cast. One would say bloated, but that's not quite true as of recent chapters. Characters can be broadly separated into one of four categories as PLAYERS, VILLAINS, ADULTS and WAIFUS. "You" are a character all of your own, so we'll get to that in a bit.

PLAYERS are guys or girls in armor. Everyone of nominal plot importance is a Player, because everyone who isn't is either a waifu or a victim. Like Accel World, every Player has a unique gimmick that ranges from creating bombs, super-speed, or (most egregiously) being a Supreme Gentleman. This actually helps with identifying the cast a lot, because the Japanese names are so generic they just sort of blur together. "Bishamon" is a lot more distinctive than "Kouichi" anyway. They're a varied lot and the QM gives each of them a distinctive "voice". Palladium Rook is the edgiest little shit you'll ever see, Tyrian Edge is a gigantic nerd who is utterly out of his depth, etc etc.

You know how in every JRPG there's some ancient forerunner civilization that fucked everything up and left the survivors to pick up the pieces? Like every anime, Joker Quest has very few ADULTS, but they all have two things in common. They're 1.) incredibly powerful 2.) obtuse as hell. It is almost impossible to get a straight answer from ANY of them and nearly all of them are lying all the fucking time. They don't actually come off badly and there isn't an undercurrent of "fuck the grown-ups", but there's that circular talking again. NO ONE comes out and tells "you" anything ever, it's always allusions and veiled threats and constantly trying to get you to do something for them.

Joker spends most of the Quest fighting the VILLAINS, also known as the SMILERS. They're a weird cross between a Chaos cult and a flash mob and 90% are gun-fodder to be cut down en masse. "You" spend most of the Quest systematically wrecking their shit, but they ALWAYS ALWAYS think they can take Joker. You think they'd learn, after like several dozen of them die in increasingly horrible ways, but they're always defiant to the end and totally immune to reason.

The cult's inner circle comes down to around seven to eight individuals and that's where the interesting characterization is. It's never really in doubt who they are, because their disguises are usually paper-thin, but maybe that's the point. Who could ENFER, the mysterious smoker's-voice mad bomber be? Surely it can't be this one guy with the exact same voice and behavior! The big implacable RUST KAISER and the fast and zippy BELL ZEPHYR can't possibly be the big smashy guy and his busty younger sister!

The thing is, all of the bad guys have a lot going on. Every one has their own little subplot running and "You" actually interact with them (mostly the aforementioned busty younger sister) on a semi-regular basis. There's one whose mere presence created the largest amount of salt amongst /tg/ and he did it without ever being anything more than polite. Given some of /tg/'s responses, there are times where they seem too complex for the Quest they're actually in, because most of the social cues just fly overhead.

Well, mostly. The most weakly-characterized of the lot is also the sluttiest one, who seems to have no other motivation than "Antagonize everyone around me for NO APPARENT REASON."

WAIFUS

You guys were waiting for this and I now deliver.

You know how in Crusader Quest, there's a LOT of sex? Like, Game of Thrones-levels of sex?

Joker Quest doesn't have a lot of sex. There are, in total, two sexual encounters in one hundred chapters and both are deeply, deeply unpleasant with fittingly catastrophic consequences. The third one is a bonus chapter and doesn't really count, but it's like bodice-ripper tier.

What Joker Quest does have is sensuality and it has that in spades. JQOP puts a LOT of detail into the Quest's women, which is probably why the Quest spawned such a dedicated fanbase. It's never lewd, to the point that even the sex isn't explicit, but it's the emotional intensity that makes up for a lot. There's a scene where Joker is just sitting next to a relatively minor character and the subtext of the scene makes it instantly obvious that she's attracted to him.

But the thing about Joker Quest, possibly the thing that makes it really unique, is that there are no safe options. /tg/ has a tendency to collect NPCs like Pokemon, keeping them in a big floating circle of friends, or the kind of no-touching harem dynamic that shows up in every halfassed LN ever.

Here, the girls put pressure on "you". They pursue Joker of their own accord. They get hurt and upset when especially callous things are said to them and most of all they REMEMBER. They defy easy Visual Novel solutions and there's a whole mess of shoujo manga drama going on here. Except "you" get to play the bastard boyfriend.

There are four dynamics that are especially interesting, so let's start with the big one.

CYBELE is a kind of holographic ghost known as a HYADES that's stuck in a kind of existential heaven "The Lovely Bones"-style. While it would be too complicated to explain exactly what the Hyades are, she needs Joker to kill a lot of people to get a new body for her. This will also make her the closest thing to a goddess the setting has. Since she's so isolated, Joker is the only person she can interact with (Literally, all she can do is to wait for him to visit her) and so she's pinning all her hopes on him. She's crazy (side-dialogue implies that she's either ten or sixteen years old, depending on the source) but she's willing to do anything to get out of her cage.

The problem is that Joker is going to betray her. He's going to betray the everliving FUCK out of her and make another girl a goddess instead. He doesn't particularly want to do it, but he's going to do it anyway and this hangs over every one of their interactions. The thing is that Cybele doesn't KNOW this and so every conversation with her has Joker aware of this while she isn't. There is no third option, there's no weaseling out of things, it's one or the other.

This is a great setup. There's so much going on here, it's a pleasingly melodramatic mess. How does /tg/ handle it?

By being as much of an asshole as possible.

It's a thing of beauty. /tg/ constantly fobs her off, leads her on and otherwise keeps her in the dark until she ends up on the verge of a complete breakdown. Then, to smooth over the resulting problems, they decide to sleep with her. This is actually the second watershed moment in Joker Quest, because holy fuck you guys. That is amazing in its sheer dickery.

You may be thinking, at this point, that Joker is something of a worm. You would be right.

Best of all, when she's dying, /tg/ tells her that they never loved her, ever. To her face.

NATSUMI is the childhood friend. A few episodes make it clear that 1.) She's in love with Joker. 2.) She has absolutely no chance at him. /tg/ tries to pair her off with Kazuya, another childhood friend, but it doesn't work. It absolutely does not work. More, she knows what he's trying to do and she goes along with it anyway because she knows she won't get him.

What makes the dynamic especially entertaining is that Natsumi is in fact Chrome Cypher, an elite guard for the only "good" faction of the setting. She's a hypercompetent professional and what we see bears that out, but that whole facade just collapses around Joker. /tg/ also manages to be stunningly callous to her on at least two occasions and Natsumi does something unexpected.

She gives up on him. She gives up on him as a romantic interest and tries her very best to move on because she can't pine over one guy forever. Her subplot, the little we see of it, is one of the most interesting things because so much of it happens by implication.

MIO is the backup. Look, there's no other way to describe it. After Hecate "dies", /tg/ starts scrambling around for a new waifu and they decide to settle on Mio because who can pass up the cosplay fox meido slut? The thing is Joker doesn't want to "commit" to her in case they can get Hecate back, which means they're constantly sending her mixed signals. She's a refreshing character to read about, because in each appearance she's just so damn HAPPY to see Joker that she brings much-needed levity to the Quest. Most of the light moments revolve entirely around her, which are the closest you can get to a breather from episodes involving torture, human experimentation, ritualized murder and technological necromancy.

Of course this goes wrong too, because everything good and happy in Joker Quest must eventually go wrong. But boy, is the breakdown worth the wait.

Through a long and complicated series of events, Joker (who is RED) ends up facing off against his counterpart, Joker (who is WHITE). They just had a duel and now they're fighting to convince Mio (who now have the powers of a goddess) to side with one of them. It's like pottery.

Then the bad guy drops the bombshell and describes how "you" fucked Cybele.

BAM, Mio snaps and unleashes the wrath of a woman scorned on both of them, gives it to them high and low.

Fuck it, this review is already far too long and I'm only halfway done and describing the highlights anyway. I'll do the second half when I can be arsed.

Bottom line for now is that Joker Quest is very good. Wade through the purple prose (more on that later) and you have a robust combat system with a long chain of dominoes set up to tumble. The takeaway is that this is a Quest that has gone wrong in the best way possible, enough to make things unpredictable and exciting. Cheap thrills? Maybe, but this is a product of the "shock" era where we're all so jaded that it takes unexpected shit to cut through the ennui. Joker Quest sets out to be the kind of anime series you watch each week because you have no idea what's going to happen next and it gets there.

7 to 8/10.