Today I’d like to talk about The Missing: J. J. Macfield and the Island of Memories, a video game by Hidetaka “SWERY” Suehiro, creator of Deadly Premonition, The Good Life and more.
Thing is, this is one of those games that it is absolutely impossible to talk about effectively without getting deep into spoiler territory, so I am hereby using this bit to warn you that after the jump I will, without warning, be spoiling one of the most important plot points of this game.
I don’t necessarily feel like knowing this key piece of information before you play the game will necessarily “ruin” your enjoyment of The Missing, but I do know that some people are sensitive about such things. So consider yourself warned. Happy with that? If so, join me after the jump.
The Missing is a puzzle platformer in which you take on the role of the eponymous J. J. Macfield, a woman who has come to a mysterious island with her girlfriend Emily. Not long after the game’s story starts, Emily goes missing, and J. J. sets off in pursuit just as a storm starts brewing.
The storm gradually turns violent as J. J. proceeds deeper into the island, culminating in a sequence where she gets struck by lightning while running through an open field. Surprisingly, she doesn’t die; she finds herself able to regenerate, though her beloved plushie F. K. is beyond help. From hereon, J. J. must make her way through a variety of challenges, making use of her ability to regenerate after even the most horrific of injuries to progress.
There’s just one “rule” to her condition: her head has to survive. So long as her head isn’t destroyed, she can survive being dismembered, set on fire, electrocuted and decapitated, as well as having every bone in her body broken. And, rather peculiarly, each injury also provides certain benefits, meaning there are times when J. J. has to injure herself in order to proceed.
Suffering the loss of a limb allows J. J. to pick up and use the severed limb as an item for various purposes, but of course, also hampers her mobility. Being set on fire allows J. J. to burn other things, but means her body is a lot more fragile. Breaking her neck causes the entire world to invert, reversing gravity in the process, but she is unable to walk more than a few steps before tripping and falling.
Each of these injuries is accompanied by bloodcurdling screams from J. J. along with the sounds of flesh rending and bones snapping. You’re left in no doubt as to whether these incidents hurt or not — but just for good measure, J. J. makes sure to explain what it feels like in great detail during a certain moment later in the narrative.
As you might expect from the description, J. J.’s journey is anything but “normal”, despite often passing through locales that seem fairly ordinary at first glance. Stop to think, though, and the geography doesn’t entirely make sense; at the outset of the game, she’s supposed to be on this mysterious remote island, yet as she progresses further and further on her journey, she passes through locales such as a power station, a church, a diner and the grounds of her university.
We’re not immediately told that J. J. is in a dream, but most players will work it out well before things are explicitly spelled out to them, particularly given the recurring presence of a deer-headed character in a doctor’s coat who, in disturbingly distorted speech, continually says things about a “major haemorrhage” and “cardiac arrest”.
Yes, J. J. is dying, and her mind is taking her on a journey; one which will determine whether she clings to life or passes on. The exact reasons for this, again, aren’t immediately apparent, but as the game progresses and you start seeing numerous text message exchanges between J. J. and her friends, family and university professor, bits and pieces gradually start to fall into place.
J. J. is a transgender woman. This is not an interpretation; this is not “reading into” things; it is simply how it is. Specifically, she is a closeted transgender woman who, at the time we experience her story, is having difficulty coming to terms with both how she perceives herself and how others perceive her, and that ultimately led her to make an attempt on her own life. Her dream is unfolding as she lies bleeding on the floor of a lecture theatre in her university, and an emergency medical technician attempts to save her life.
Recognising and acknowledging everything in the last paragraph is critical to understanding almost everything about The Missing, because J. J.’s identity and the struggles that surround it inform both the unfolding narrative and the mechanics of the game itself.
Let’s take the most obvious part of the game first of all, which is J. J.’s ability to be utterly mutilated and yet regenerate. There are a lot of ways this can be taken.
Firstly, and least charitably, it can be looked upon as J. J. thinking about how people wilfully and maliciously misrepresent transgender people as “mutilating” themselves. This can be meant both figuratively and literally. In the former case, it stems from bigots refusing to understand (and/or acknowledge) that gender dysphoria is a real condition where transgender people feel their actual gender is different from the one they were assigned at birth. In the latter case, it relates to ignorant assumptions and misinformation about physical treatments such as hormone replacement therapy and gender reassignment surgery.
If we take that as a starting point, we can also interpret J. J.’s ability to regenerate as her ultimately being able to rise above all those assumptions. She knows herself better than anyone, so she knows that even if certain parts of the world will always misunderstand her, the most important thing for her is to be true to herself. She knows that she is a woman, so however much people (including, it transpires, her own mother) might try and convince her otherwise, she can always return to that single fact that she knows and understands about herself.
However, given what we know about the situation J. J. is actually in while the main game is unfolding, we can also interpret that this ability to “regenerate” is not entirely flawless, and that leads us onto the second possible meaning of J. J.’s injuries and mutilation: it’s a reflection of her own self-harm. An extreme reflection, to be sure — J. J.’s suicide attempt involved her slitting her wrists rather than dismembering herself — but dreams often place an extreme spin on things that have a basis in truth.
Thirdly, we can take all the injury, mutilation and regeneration in a more metaphorical sense. From this perspective, we can interpret the violence in the game as a representation of how J. J., in coming to terms with her gender identity, has many struggles ahead of her, and they are going to hurt — but that she will also be able to heal and grow by surviving through those challenges. Her struggles may be mental rather than physical, but they are no less real. By representing her challenges as horrible physical injuries, we can get something approaching an understanding of what she is going through, even acting as an outside observer as we are by playing the game.
All this is brought to a head towards the climactic moments of J. J.’s dream, where she catches up with Emily only to discover that she has hanged herself — although the suicide note left nearby appears to be J. J.’s words. Utterly grief-stricken, J. J. hangs herself beside the girl she loves, but her regenerative powers refuse to allow her to die, causing a hundred years to pass and the rope holding her up to rot, causing her to crash back down to earth.
What then follows is a sequence in which a battered and utterly broken J. J. is forced to walk through the halls of her university while malicious, ignorant individuals hurl abuse (and objects) at her. During this sequence, she doesn’t regenerate fully, instead trudging through the halls slowly as a barely recognisable blood-soaked creature; it’s a reflection of how she believes others see her as a “monster”, and how this, in turn, has caused her to look upon herself as a monster. This culminates in a curious “inverted boss battle” sequence, during which you control the “boss” — actually J. J. in monstrous form — as you attempt to defeat a shotgun-wielding Emily, who seems none the worse for wear after a century of rotting in a hangman’s noose.
Remember, through all of this, we’ve been gradually seeing past text messages between J. J. and various people come to light, with some of the most significant being the ones between her and her mother.
J. J.’s mother is someone who holds, in polite terms, fairly traditional values, and as such is rather put out when she discovers women’s clothes while cleaning (read: searching) J. J.’s room. She then insists on J. J. coming to see a “counsellor” with her, and keeps talking about “curing” her and making her “normal” again. It doesn’t take a literary genius to recognise that she is clearly talking about conversion therapy here.
J. J. finds these exchanges difficult to reject outright because it’s clear that there’s some familial love there, even if her mother’s ignorance hurts her a great deal. But part of the problem also stems from J. J. still being in the closet which, in turn, means that she lies to her mother on multiple occasions — a fact which will ultimately just make telling the truth all the more difficult.
While one suspects her mother wouldn’t be immediately understanding were J. J. to fully come out to her, the final scenes of the game suggest that J. J. knows she needs to tell that truth to her once and for all. It’s a risk, to be sure, but it’s also a definitive statement by J. J.: “This is who I am, like it or not.” She’s not asking for approval; she’s not asking for acceptance. She’s simply standing her ground and living for herself; it’s up to those around her to choose how they respond to that, be they friends, family or those in charge of her education.
It’s not coincidental that immediately prior to J. J. taking this stance, the mechanics of the game change somewhat. For the vast majority of The Missing, J. J. gets injured when coming into contact with some form of hazard, and you must specifically tell her to regenerate. In the finale sequence, however, J. J. automatically regenerates almost immediately after suffering an injury, allowing her to leap headlong into danger without any fear for the consequences. Taken metaphorically, we can interpret this as her being much more willing to accept herself, flaws and all, and recognising that after all the challenges she has already overcome, she can likely face down any more difficulties that might await her in the future.
There are lots of other things to spot over the course of J. J.’s complete journey, too. On the few occasions J. J. encounters dead bodies, they’re always men, and she is usually rewarded for burying them or otherwise laying them to rest. This is a fairly unsubtle indication of how she recognises that laying her “assigned male at birth” side to rest is the main way in which she will be able to move forward with her life.
The skies throughout J. J.’s journey are always boiling, too, even once the thunderstorm that first triggered her regeneration ability is long gone. This helps emphasise how her heart is filled with turmoil and uncertainty, even as she presses onwards, overcoming countless challenges in her path.
There’s a lot to observe over the course of J. J.’s complete journey, but I should probably save some of those things for you to discover for yourself. Suffice it to say for now, then, that The Missing is a thoroughly fascinating, compelling, heartbreaking but ultimately uplifting story about some challenging subject matter. The game pulls no punches along the way, although thankfully it does stop short of ending things on a complete downer like some other titles exploring matters of gender and sexuality do.
On the contrary, by the time we leave J. J., we’re left feeling that she has sorted out some rather important things in her mind, and is ready to face the future with a spring in her step, a new-found sense of determination and a rapidly growing, entirely justifiable sense of pride in who she really is. And she’s most certainly earned it. Having taken that journey alongside her, I feel like I’ve learned some very important things, too. Our trip through the Island of Memories is certainly going to stick in my memory for quite some time to come, I feel.
More about The Missing: J. J. Macfield and the Island of Memories
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