Cuphead (

2017

)

The fact that we live in an age of shitty asset flip games, mobile games with shoddy graphics, and indie games that purposefully choose the worst looking art style they can get away with makes Cuphead all the more impressive. The developers of Cuphead decided that modern AAA graphics were just too easy and opted to instead hand-animate the whole damn game in the style of early Disney and Max Fleischer cartoons. So every frame of every character, NPC, boss, or enemy had to be hand-drawn, inked, and colored before being uploaded into the game. The hard work bears results though, Cuphead is as striking and as beautiful a game as any I've ever seen. The unique art style grabbed my attention the first time I saw the trailer, and I was hardly alone in that regard. In addition to copying the onerous methods of early animations, the developers of Cuphead have also lifted their wacky, expressive style. The bosses have tremendous personality that they can convey effortlessly through their fluid animation in a way that most game characters would struggle to do.

The actual mechanics of the game are less revolutionary than the art and will be instantly familiar to anyone who played Gunstar Heroes [1993] on the Sega Genesis. You control a small humanoid figure armed with a gun (a person in the older game and a sentient cup in Cuphead) fighting a series of huge, dangerous enemies. You can switch out your gun for a variety of upgrades (a homing shot that does less damage, a shotgun attack that deals massive damage at close range, etc) and a couple of passive bonuses to help you along the way. The biggest addition to the formula in Cuphead is the ability to parry certain attacks with a carefully timed jump. This fills up your special meter faster, and once the meter is filled you can use a super attack.

Like Gunstar Heroes [1993] Cuphead has a lot of bosses, but unlike the previous title Cuphead doesn't bother with the stages that usually precede said bosses. Instead, most levels dump you face-to-face with a boss enemy immediately. This is good because when you die (and you will die a lot) you'll just be kicked back to the start of the boss fight rather than the beginning of the stage. The bosses are, without exception, incredible. They are also quite a bit darker than you would expect for creatures ostensibly based on children's cartoons. But as we, in our more sheltered age sometimes forget, children's entertainment in the past (or indeed in foreign countries in Detective Conan is any indication) can be very dark by modern American standards. This notion that children need to be sheltered from all of life's harsh realities in their entertainment is truly a modern Western view. This is why films like Bambi (1942) and The Wizard of Oz (1939) scared many of us so much as children, they were darker and more twisted than anything the children's entertainment of our own time had to offer. Cuphead understands that and gives us swarms of ghosts, skeletons, and grim humor to match during its boss fights.

The story, like most good action platformers, serves as a simple premise for the action rather than and complex plot with a lot of moving pieces. Cuphead and his best buddy Mugman go to a casino and make a bet against the devil. This goes about as well as you would expect, so the devil charges the pair with hunting down and defeating a series of bosses that all owe the devil in some form or another. It's a perfect excuse for a long series of challenging boss fights, culminating in a showdown with The Devil himself.

In addition to a seemingly endless gauntlet of bosses, Cuphead also offers a few “run-and-gun” levels which play like slightly less punishing versions of Contra [1988] levels. These are far and away the least fun bits of the game, though they still have a nifty art style, some fun mechanics, and the usual excellent big-band soundtrack. It's just that after the non-stop thrills of Cuphead's inspired boss battles they feel more like a chore. These stages are all optional, fortunately, but they are also the only way to earn gold coins which you can use to purchase new weapons and power-ups. You can beat the game without any of these upgrades, but doing so will make the game more difficult, and Cuphead does not need any help in that department, so expect to have to slog through at least the first few run-and-gun stages before you get all the items you need. I would prefer no run-and-gun stages at all, and just another boss or two added into the roster. Coins could be earned by getting higher grades on the individual boss fights. Cuphead already does something extremely well, and it would have been better served by focusing on that rather than trying to add needless variety.

Upon release, Cuphead received a great deal of criticism for its frustrating difficulty, even though it is quite a bit easier than the classic run-and-gun platformers that inspired it (as far as I'm concerned: anyone who claims to have beaten Contra [1988] without using the Konami code or emulator save states is a damn liar). That's not to say that Cuphead is easy, quite the opposite in fact, this game is a real motherfucker at times. The penultimate boss Mr. King Dice is so difficult that I had to look up a guide because I kept spending about five to ten minutes reaching his final form only to die to the first attack. The game is hard no doubt, but therein lies much of the charm. Were this game a cakewalk you could clear it in an afternoon (there isn't much content). The demanding difficulty not only means that the game lasts longer but it makes the player savor every little detail. To dodge each attack you have to focus on the boss' animation, looking for all the little tells and telegraphs for their attacks. Meaning you'll appreciate every frame of hand-drawn animation all the more. Fair enough, Studio MDHR certainly worked hard enough on the game's art, the least I can do is appreciate it as I die to Dr. Kahl's Robot for the 12th time. Besides, there is a "simple" mode for each boss besides the last two if you need to practice dodging their attacks. Several professional journalists have demanded that the game be made easier in the name of accessibility, but perhaps we shouldn't be listening to the same people who struggled to complete the tutorial?

In addition to the absurd claims of being “too difficult,” critics have begun to attack the game for being racist. On the surface, this seems like a preposterous accusation, as Cuphead does not contain anything that is even remotely objectionable. There are no racist caricatures, hell the closest we get is Mr. Dice, one of the game’s innumerable villains, has a mustache patterned on Cab Calloway's. That's not a racial caricature, that's just a piece of jazz age fashion. Of course, just because something doesn't exist doesn't mean that some deluded individuals won't see it. People are always projecting their own issues onto art and seeing whatever they want to see or fear to see reflected at them. Hell, just look atthis idiot who thinks that the game is racist because the two protagonists Cuphead and Mugman (a pair of anthropomorphic teacups) are white and the main antagonist, the devil (a goat-man covered in fur), is black. Sane members of society can look at criticism like that and dismiss it with a roll of the eyes and an exasperated sigh.

It is for this reason, that the criticism of Cuphead does not focus on any objectionable image, but on the mere fact that the game does not include any objectionable images. No, I'm not joking; the argument really is the game is racist because it isn't racist. The argument goes, that by not including grotesque racial stereotypes, Cuphead is whitewashing history and writing away the parts of old cartoons that modern audiences would find troubling. This presents a rather absurd situation for the game’s developers; obviously, they are not racist and do not want their game to come across as such, but to avoid such accusations they would have to put racial caricatures in their game. However, nobody is so profoundly naive as to believe that this would silence Cuphead's critics; indeed if the game did have racist imagery I'm sure we would never hear the end of complaints about it. One has to wonder, what did they expect? That Cuphead, a game whose developers mortgaged their homes to finance, would include racist imagery that would cripple the game's sales, just to make it easier for them to write their inevitable hit-pieces?

Yussef Cole’s article at Unwinnable (an aptly named publication given the subject matter of his article) is emblematic of this critical trend. He argues that “By setting their game in this aesthetic, however, Studio MDHR also dredge up the bigotry and prejudice which had a strong influence on early animation.” However, only some of the early 20th century cartoons employed racist imagery. There is, for example, no racial caricatures in Plane Crazy a 1928 Disney animated short featuring Micky Mouse that predates the more famous Steamboat Willy (which is also free of racist caricatures). Certainly, some cartoons from the period were racist, relied on stereotypes to establish characters, and included caricatures that modern audiences would find odious and offensive. However, a survey of the films from the era would quickly show that these cartoons were hardly uniformly racist. Amusingly, Cole is guilty of the sin he attacks Cuphead for when he argues that Cuphead “brings along that particular queasiness one gets when being forced to ignore problematic parts of media in order to enjoy it… It’s a mistake to whitewash history, not if we hope to improve upon the present.” Cole is the one ignoring the countless animated shorts from the era that are not at all racist; he is the one whitewashing (or blackwashing as the case may be) history for his own purposes. If we're going to compare, then Cole's transgression is the worse of the two, because it's his job to wrestle with the difficult questions of history, art, and identity. Cuphead is under no such requirement, as its main objective is to be a fun video game with a unique art style.

Even if all the cartoons of the 1930s were uniformly racist, it wouldn’t make Cuphead itself racist if it were only drawing on the aesthetics of those old cartoons. There is no such thing as original sin in art; works do not inherit the prejudices and sins of their influences, as Cole seems to think they do. Applying the same logic to other mediums quickly reveals how absurd this demand is. Is all Japanese anime subliminally supporting violent imperialism because their first cartoons were used as wartime propaganda? What about modern Western cartoons that draw on anime art styles, is Avatar: The Last Airbender forever tainted by the horrors of The Rape of Nanking? Consider films, should Do The Right Thing (1989) be taken to account for using the same medium of expression as Birth of a Nation (1915)? Or TV shows, would any sane person argue that Jerry Seinfeld is just as racist as Archie Bunker because they both are the lead character in a sit-com set in New York City? No of course not, it is just as absurd in the examples I mentioned as it is with Cuphead.

A quick survey of Cole’s games journalism reveals why he is so desperate to cast Cuphead as racist propaganda. Consider his piece on Mafia III [2016] and Hitman [2016], which argues, based on those two games, that blacks in video games are not allowed to be invisible. Or take a look at his article complaining about the lack of political action in Prison Architect [2012]. An obvious pattern emerges very quickly; Cole is the sort of person who can only approach art and entertainment through the distorting lens of identity politics. Indeed, given his other journalism, one begins to get the impression that Cole is annoyed with Cuphead not for whitewashing history, but for not including racist caricatures that he could attack the game for having. Indeed, Cole’s perverse longing for Cuphead to include grotesque racial caricatures is not unique to him. Samantha Blackmon’s article on Cuphead mentions that while she was watching the trailer for the game “I got queasy and my head swam a bit. It was one of those moments when you are sure that your blood pressure has shot up 20 or 30 points, a true WTF moment. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. I kept waiting for the next boss to be a thick-lipped, black-faced, spittle-dripping caricature of an African American man (probably holding aloft a terrified, screaming, blonde, Caucasian woman just to show what a threat he actually was).” Blackmon, like Cole, seems genuinely disappointed that this boss, nor any other racist imagery for that matter, never appears. Indeed, she spends far more time imagining this horrific image than she does examining the actual content of the game. She critiques the game not based on what is there, but on what she imagines, castigating Cuphead for her own insecurities.

It seems absurd, that people who hate racism and discrimination would angrily denounce a game for not including racist imagery. Wouldn't they want fewer racist video games, not more? In order to understand where such self-contradictory logic comes from though, we must understand how writers like Blackmon and Cole are shaped and educated. While I cannot claim to know either writer personally, having spent a good deal of time in Western colleges, I can make some assumptions about how they were taught (or more likely not taught) the art of composition and persuasive writing. Modern western colleges emphasize textual analysis through the lens of identity politics, which generally translates into finding new and inventive ways to denounce all art with the misfortune of being made by a white man as some combination of sexist, racist, and homophobic. A whole generation of students has plowed through Othello, utterly indifferent to the beauty of Shakespeare’s language, the horrific tragedy of Othello’s suspicion of his wife, the brilliant skulking evil of Honest Iago, and opted to instead focus on how the play is racist for traditionally being played by a white actor in blackface (because there were so many African actors in Elizabethan England). As a result, neither Cole and Blackmom has any other means of analyzing a text. So naturally, they are enraged when Cuphead dares to be completely unobjectionable. If the game can not somehow be denounced as racist, they have no real way to approach it; a rather pitiful situation, but one that is hardly their fault. Sure, people of rare independence and ability can overcome the limits of their education, but I can't fault anyone for failing to be extraordinary.

Blackmon and Cole are doubly disadvantaged as well because while modern liberal arts education does all its students a disservice, it does not fail all students equally. Minority students in general and blacks, in particular, are all too often the victims of Academia's pervasive benevolent racism. Affirmative action policies are merely the most obvious manifestation of an attitude that colors (pun intended) the academic lives of minority students. In the classroom, people of color are held to a different and lower standard than their white peers. The same standard of logic and persuasion is just not demanded from their essays, and instead, minority students are taught to use their identity as a bludgeon to make their points for them. Their race becomes a trump card to shut down all criticism of their arguments, no matter how poorly supported or self-contradictory they are.

In both Blackmon and Cole’s essays, the author makes certain to note that they are black and that their race is why they have such a response to the video game. The implication being, if you are not the same race as them, then you cannot criticize their positions. This is an absurd position to hold, even if we ignore the fact that people of the same race can hold different viewpoints. The purpose of writing an essay is to convince the reader of the validity of your views. To make them see things from your perspective regardless of their background. By announcing that their race is the reason why they feel that way and that any whites reading their work could not possibly understand, they are effectively admitting that they cannot communicate any ideas. Which, because of the defective education they received, is sadly true. It's never too late to change this, but unfortunately, their peers are, by and large, afflicted by the same fears that wracked their professors. In the professional gaming press, the only engagement I have seen with either article takes the form of bland echoing.

I do not mean to single out these two writers for special castigation, as there is nothing special about their perspective or points of view. Indeed, I would argue that they are typical products of an education system that never took them seriously for fear that any constructive criticism would be labeled racist. There are plenty of Blackmons and Coles writing today, a whole generation of thinkers who have been taught to use their identity as a crutch. They mention that their viewpoints are informed by their race, or their gender, or their sexuality and then they can easily dismiss all future criticism of their arguments as veiled bigotry. Yet in truth, all they are doing is confessing their inability to write coherently about the topic at hand.

Video games deserve a better sort of critical analysis.