Japan at its peak had some advertising techniques that even agencies like Wieden+Kennedy could never touch. The idea of advertising a game like Mother in the West with a tagline “no crying until the end” was just lightyears ahead of the game. Nothing illustrates this gap in prowess like watching 12 minutes of bizarrely moving ads for the game Boku no Natsuyasumi 2: Umi no Bouken-hen for the PS2.
If you are not familiar with the Boku no Natsuyasumi AKA My Summer Vacation series, it’s a beautiful, open-ended series of games where you play a Japanese boy over the course of the 31 days of his summer break. Imagine the daily stuff of Persona 4 but without the monsters and RPG elements. You are just a normal kid, fishing and spending their time until the month is over (except in the one release where you aren’t).
The first game for the PS1 was a hit, and for the PS2 sequel in 2002 they decided to take an interesting approach to marketing the game, specifically aiming it at adults. The ads above (26 in all) take place from the perspective of a father writing in a series of journal entries about his son begging him to buy Boku No Natsuyasumi 2. The father describes his family not having a PS2, let alone a color TV. He turns 40, wants to buy a DVD player, but realizes it is not proper for an adult to buy a PS2. The following ads document his trepidation with getting over being a gamer, his difficulty at work, inevitably culminating in playing the game with his son and wife. By the end he is so enraptured with the experience that he wished, like a summer vacation, it could last forever.
Look, I’ll admit that if you emotionally connect to a commercial you should take a second to put things in perspective, but you have to really admire the dedication to craft here. It’s shockingly moving. Creating a narrative of that weight that takes place regularly over several days, laid out sequentially in tandem with the release of a game, was a very difficult task to pull off then, and is impossible now that the live TV market has scattered everyone’s attention. But the part that is real, once you move past the marketing, is the idea of connecting to a non-gamer parent out of the blue. This happened to me exactly once as a kid, when I rented Tetris Attack for the SNES and then woke up in the middle of the night to find that my sister and mom had been playing it for hours. That is a memory I will keep with me forever.
H/T to Hilltop, who is responsible for the excellent translation patch of the game recently.
