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HIGASHI_NO_EDEN

                                                 October 19, 2013


"Higashi no Eden", or "Eden of the East" (2009)

A trend of late: stories based on what look like
game premises... they no doubt resonant with the       "Death Note"
young audience of game-players, and of course          and "Gantz"
this makes it far easier to design games to            come to mind.
release as product tie-ins.

And sometimes it goes the other way:
a "light novel" is transformed into        (I had the impression that the
manga and anime--                          "light novel" is essentially a
                                           computerized choose-your-own
                                           adventure... I may have the
                                           terminology wrong.)


   "Higashi no Eden" is an anime whose premise is
   that a mysterious rich man ("Mr Outside") has
   given a dozen or so players access to a huge
   amount of wealth, with which they're expected
   to attempt to Save Japan (whatever that means)
   or literally die trying.

   There are a bunch of game-like elements on top of
   this: each player accesses their cash via a special
   cell-phone, each player can track each others
   purchases via this gadget, there is one player who
   is secretly an enforcer that kills players who spend
   their cash down to zero without achieving the goal.


   The main character is a mercurial young man who
   bounces around doing various absurd things for
   reasons that are rarely obvious (but typically
   work out for the best in some way).  For some
   reason-- none we learn in this series-- he's
   had his own memory erased, and much of the
   story is about him learning about things that
   he's done.

   For example, he bought a shopping mall as-is to live
   in and use as a home base (shelves still stocked with
   clothes, etc); he gathered together a team of NEETs
   ("Not in Education Employment or Training",
   supposedly a great social problem in japan, ala the         OTAKU_REBELS
   delinquents of post-war America), he used the NEETs
   as a force of phoney cops and guards in order to
   direct large chunks of the population of Japan out of
   the way of incoming missles (sent by some other
   player), he then stripped them naked took their
   cellphones away, and stuck them on a ship he sent to
   Dubai (they're a bit annoyed about this)---

   At the climax of the series, faced with a problem
   he can't solve, he hands it off to this mob of
   naked geeks and gets them to figure it out.

       The revenge of the Otaku...



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