The Magical Realism of Streets of Rage 3!

 A deep dive into the finer nuances of an oft-overlooked beat-em-up torch bearer

By: Toxicka Shock

ToxickaShock@gmail.com

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There’s a lot of definitions of what “magical realism” is out there. I always tend to simplify it into less than florid, academic terms: “fantastical shit that happens amidst realistic shit to amplify how fantastically horrible all the realistic shit actually is.”

We’ve all got out favorite comparison points. Pan’s Labyrinth is a good one, as is Tiger Are Not Afraid and pretty much everything Salmon Rushdie has ever written. Regardless of the medium or theme, the intent of magical realism as a narrative device is always the same: to emphasize grave realities through stark and outlandish surrealities.

Which brings us to a piece of pop culture ephemera I’ve long considered to be one of the greatest examples of magical realism in any type of media. And, of all possible fuckin’ things, would you believe it manifests itself in the form of a mid-1990s Sega Genesis game?

Move over, The Satanic Verses — it’s time Streets of Rage 3 finally got its due regards.

Yes, I know, on the surface level, such an assertion seems preposterous. Really, some random 16-bit beat-em-up game is on par with the work of Milan Kundera and Peter Handke? Well, trust me, if you’ve actually played Streets of Rage 3 before — and paid real close attention to its structure and imagery — you’d be singing a different tune.

Now, before we get into SOR 3 itself, we have to briefly discuss its origins. The original game, obviously, was Sega’s response to the arcade brawler craze of the late 1980s — typified by coin-op classics like Final Fight — which themselves were pretty much responses to the vigilante action movie explosion of the Reagan era. Looking back on games like Double Dragon and Crime Fighters, it’s hard to not interpret them as Moral Majority power fantasies — i.e., these quasi-racist indictments of urban living, where ineffective liberal policies have given criminals free rein to do whatever the want and the police are practically worthless … thus, leaving it in the hands of the ordinary working man to dispense some good, old fashioned extrajudicial justice. In some games, the messaging is so blunt, it’s literally stares you in the face. Bad Dudes, for example, actually ends with the player rescuing Ronnie Reagan himself from commie sympathizers.

Amazingly, GLAAD *DIDN't* celebrate Sega for this shit.

Of course, by the time the ‘90s rolled around, all of that stuff was woefully out of fashion. The original Streets of Rage very much felt like an outdated product, while the second game is more widely remembered for its incredible aesthetics and console generation-defining soundtrack than its otherwise mundane gameplay. In both cases, the games had excuse-plots that revolved around rogue cops going after monolithic criminal kingpins … who, for whatever reason, had a knack for hiring hundreds of goons who wore matching outfits. 

From a sociopolitical gaze, there isn’t much meat to SOR 1 or 2 — that is, unless you want to interpret a 12-year-old unaccompanied minor on rolling skates karate fighting a dominatrix in a Disney World pastiche as some sort of commentary on the meddling of Western corporations in Japanese interests.

But that all changed with SOR 3. And considering it came out in 1994 — when the U.S. was already a post-grunge and post-Pulp Fiction society — such a drastic shift in tone and undercurrents probably wasn’t a coincidence.

Now, before we get any further into the discussion, we’ve got to make something abundantly clear. Really, there are two different versions of SOR 3 out there, and despite the seeming visual similarities, they truly are two totally different games.

So over in Japan, the Mega Drive game was called Bare Knuckle 3. It has the same general gameplay, more or less, but the plot line is vastly different. That, a ton of characters were redesigned for the U.S. release of SOR 3, and at least one boss character was completely axed.

But we’ll get to that shortly. 

Beating women to death with baseball bats and lead pipes is alright, but scantily clad whores is just *too much* for American audiences.

As horrifically neutered as SOR 3 may be, however, it still makes its magical realism roots obvious from the get-go. After all, it IS a video game about a disgraced cop, a brunette who dresses like a hooker, an old white dude made out of machine parts, a Black middle school-aged kid and a goddamn kangaroo wearing boxing gloves waging war against the Yakuza … a Yakuza, by the way, that’s predominantly comprised of robots and is commanded by an evil brain in a fish tank.

Trust me, no premise can be THAT fuckin’ weird without their being an ulterior motive. 

Now, here’s where it’s super-important to differentiate SOR3 from BK3. In the former, the gist of the story revolves around some terrorist organization that’s planting time bombs all over some futuristic-but-not-that-futuristic metropolis. But in BK3, there’s a much deeper and intricate storyline about gangsters getting their hands on a synthetic radioactive material that’s already responsible for blowing up an entire city. And they use that nuclear paranoia as leverage against politicians, the police and the military.

what do you mean the game where you have to fight secret service agents is political?

And as anyone who has watched ANYTHING made by the Japanese since 1945, anytime there’s a direct or indirect reference to massive explosions, there’s bound to be some veiled commentary about the fear of encroaching American influence. With that in mind, it’s pretty easy to view SOR3 (and especially the uncut version of BK3) as a less-than-subtle metaphor for the Japanese’ distrust of American interests … indeed, the hyper-violent dystopia presented in the games is more or less a jab at American incivility as a whole. “If we don’t balance out these trade deals,” I can assume one of the game programmers thought out loud, “it’s only a matter of time until our children are having to eat fully cooked turkeys out of garbage cans and fight off Rastafarian ninjas with baseball bats, too.”

Now, in terms of gameplay, SOR 3 doesn’t deviate too much from its predecessors. By and large, you move from left to right beating the shit out of anybody and everybody onscreen, including women dressed like S&M strippers and morbidly obese boomers who spit fire at you (yet another parody of the unsightly American, I suspect.) 

Some of the stages are hardly unfamiliar for the genre — i.e., the neon-pastel streetscapes and the boisterous techno dancehalls. But other levels are considerably less flashy. One stage has you traveling through a mine shaft before doing battle with what I guess you could describe (poorly) as samurai tree spirits or something. Another level has you riding up a slow-moving elevator before you go toe-to-toe with a robotic doppelgänger. And yet another involves the player being chased by a guy on a piece of shoddily engineered construction equipment.

if you grew up with a genesis, you can hear this picture.

It’s not the most explicit pro-ecological message you’ll find in a mid-90s video game (lest we forget, Awesome Possum Kicks Dr. Machino’s Butt exists), but it’s obviously a furtive “take-that” to industrialists and real estate developers who clearly don’t give a shit about dismantling the beauty of the countryside in the name of geopolitical gains. One level starts off like a traditional Japanese home — complete with the sliding door panels — before transmogrifying into a very New York-like cosmopolitan suite ahead of a boss battle.

Feel free to interpret that little parallel however you wish.

Now, from here it’s pretty hard to discuss the elements of magical realism in Streets of Rage 3 without getting into its dissimilarities with Bare Knuckle 3. The differences are quite stark, and not just on a superficial level. It’s not just that the sprites for some of the enemies in the Japanese version of the game are different (for one, the female rogues in BK3 show a lot more pixelated skin), but the entire core storyline diverges in a very interesting and telling way.

i wonder if mother brain from 'metroid' knows someone is stealing her shtick?

In both versions of the game, there’s a level where you have a finite amount of time to blow up some super computers and rescue a hostage. Now, in the North American release, the hostage is the captain of police, while in the Japanese version he’s a high-ranking military commander.

From there, the game branches off wildly. If you don’t save him in time in SOR3, you end up traveling your way through a row of hastily edited white buildings before going toe to toe with an evil robotic replicant. Well, in BK3, you have that same boss battle (in the coverage happy eyes of the press, no less) but it’s obviously meant to be Washington D.C.  — with all of those aforementioned white buildings meant to mimic historic landmarks throughout the city, including the White House itself.

So now we’re getting super-duper meta. In this sense, SOR3 basically turns into a magical realism take on BK3 — not just neutering the gameplay, but sort of obfuscating the intended reality of the situation altogether. The North American game has much lower stakes and scope (it’s one mad bomber in one city) than the Japanese game, which canonically covers several countries and involves a great deal of deeper geopolitical contexts. 

I'm sure the resemblance to dan quayle is totally coincidental.

Forget that old “lost in translation” canard, the vast deviation from BK3 to SOR3 is an intentional bastardization — a trimming that makes the game less controversial in most regards, but also deprives it of a richer and more nuanced adult story. Now, in hindsight, some of the changes can hardly be considered missteps. After all, this IS a game featuring one of the most brazen instances of homophobic “humor” in the annals of digital entertainment; whether or not it was worth sacrificing the rest of the BK3 content, however, is going to be debated for a long, long time.

The beauty of magical realism, as a narrative device, is that it lets creators delve into unsavory and uncomfortable waters without downplaying their significance and meaning. That creative “disruption” wasn’t really an element of the first two Streets of Rage games, but it’s downright unmistakable even in the bowdlerized North American iteration of the game. In one reading it’s unquestionably a criticism of American culture — with the nuclear paranoia and homophobia as “indicators” of U.S. imperialism, however misguided and unclear — but in another, it seems to reference a profound fear of the technological over the biological. There’s way more sci-fi elements in SOR 3 than its predecessors, suggesting that the implicit apprehension isn’t over incivility/street crime as much as it is the United States hegemony taking the lead in tech — that if the U.S. becomes the trendsetter in industrial sciences and cybernetics, it’s destined to become another subjugating force against Japanese interests. Lest we forget the presence of tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers in Japan on military bases throughout the country — the theoretical is already out the window on this one. It’s quite easy to view the “benign” occupiers as individuals who are less than trustworthy with their high-tech equipment, and for obvious reasons.

The multifaceted dread is a big part of what makes BK3 and SOR3 work, albeit on somewhat different levels. The level of urgency and uncertainty is obviously much greater in the Japanese game, but even in the heavily censored North American cartridge you can see the magical realism doing its thing.

this is the future liberals want. 

Like its Japanese counterpart, it too is a game that has anxieties over the direction of technology. By the mid 1990s, the entire global order had shifted with no obvious challenger to America’s military and economic might, and even the heated trade war with Japan was beginning to simmer down. Sort of the down played central message of SOR3 is that technology might advance faster than we can master it — and, figuratively speaking — it might be only a matter of time until we’re subservient to the whims of the smartest brain in a pickle jar. It’s a fascinating if murky observation, and one that’s especially interesting considering the social media/A.I./cloud computing/virtual reality for real zeitgeist we live in now. 

But that’s not the only reason SOR3 feels so oddly pessimistic and disenchanted (and, to a certain extent, even a little prophetic.) Perhaps the magical realism can also be read as a very meta-take on the trajectory of Sega, as a hardware manufacturer, itself. Remember, the game came out right at the start of the transition from the 16-bit era to the 32-bit/64-bit era, and the back-and-forth between Sega of America and Sega of Japan over which course the company should take moving forward is already the stuff of legend.

In that, perhaps it’s no surprise that SOR3 feels so defeated and fatigued and worried about the winds of technological change — because Sega itself knew it was only a matter of time until the “good times” of the early ‘90s were but a distant memory.  

XOXO, TOXICKA