27/30 What the Devil’s Diabolical Dick happened with DDD, a.k.a. D-Xhird?
The 1997 fighting game D-Xhird is frequently described as a second-rate, mediocre game. Here’s a review that’s fairly representative of the general opinion of the game (and spares me a long introduction).
All caught up? Good! For now is grand time to correct a grave injustice: D-Xhird absolutely does not deserve to be considered a mediocre game. D-Xhird deserves to be seen as a flabbergasting disaster of a game. An ambitious, pompous project developed by true animation greats, who really worked their butts off to come up with something so impressively meh.
Here’s how the mysterious DDD project first appeared in the Japanese media, just after its announcement at TGS 1996.
As you can probably tell without even speaking a lick of Japanese, this grand reveal only cares about sharing the tortured and bloody story of the game’s protagonist, BØY, without a single word or screenshot about what the game is actually about when you control it. There were early misconceptions in French press that DDD was a sort of RPG or adventure game.
A few months later, developers interviews explain the motivations and priorities of the team behind the game. We learn, for example, that the game will be more technical and complex than Tōshinden, because Tōshinden was designed with the suckers across the pond “beginners” in mind, whereas you, our dear Saturn owners, are real Gamers who must be respected with a real demanding #gitgud game. The charm act is subtle like a brick.
More importantly, these interviews reveal that almost all the important people who worked on D-Xhird were originally brilliant people from the animation scene. The producer at Nextech, for example, was one of the main lieutenants on Akira’s animation! He was the one who insisted on using motion capture for D-Xhird, and I’d love to see the footage for these live action recordings, because it must have been pretty difficult to shove a broom up everyone’s colon.
The game’s art lead was Minowa Yūtaka, the charadesigner for many of Kawajiri’s feature films (Ninja Scroll, Vampire Hunter D etc.) and a key animator for both Lodoss and the animated adaptation of Clamp’s X (a.k.a. X/1999 for you New World weirdos). Personally, I think the influence of X on the characters’ charadesign, motifs and story bits is immense.
Sidebar: X which ended up getting its own belated fighting game on the PS1, developed by Taito for Bandai in 2002, and I mention it here only because Wikipedia offers a very complete page in English on the game but manages the feat of never once mentioning (at least as I write this post) Psychic Force, of which this game is practically a simple reskin (or “unofficial third entry” if you wanna be generous), and this omission baffles me.
Not that I’d be the best judge of that but, to me, D-Xhird as a whole projects a weird queer coding “à la Clamp but thought up by a straight guy”, that seems to miss the mark with the various audiences usually attracted to BL contents. As a result, I’m not convinced it could even be belatedly rehabilitated as a yaoi icon by a younger audience in 2024, but what says LGBTQou?
In this respect, the only character who seems to have made any kind of breakthrough in the dōjin scene is Karen, the game’s budget burger version of Sakura. Smut never lies!
