Lee Chong Defends The Ricefields

Review by 09w on Friday, February 10th 2017
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Lee Chong defends the Ricefields, a Diatribe by Konnichiha


Hello, everyone. It's been quite awhile since I last published a review. What reason do I have to do so? Geoff is inactive, the website is slowly declining in activity, and my life is a slow march towards death - that which I fear and yet simultaneously long for. Long winded harangues on flash games which will be forgotten quicker than the time spent creating them seems like a valueless task to tackle. That is, until I stumbled across this game.


I'm a woman of the arts; I pride myself in my eye for craftsmanship. All it took was a glance at the title: Lee Chong defends the Ricefields, and I was intrigued. Why would one name a Sploder game something like this? My immediate reaction was making the connection to Lee Chong Wei, the highly accomplished badminton player of Malaysian descent. Was this a sports related game? Wei was born in a middle class family and as such never worked in a rice field of any kind. In fact, his parents tried their best to keep him out of the heat, going as far as to ban him from playing basketball due to the high temperatures in his area. This is what lead him to picking up badminton as an alternative, since his dad was a fan of the game. Who could've guessed such circumstances would lead him to being one of the most successful professional players in the world today!


I sat there staring at the thumbnail and title of the game as I thought to myself. Was this perhaps a take on an alternate reality, where Lee Chong Wei was in fact forced to work in rice fields to support himself and his family, rather than becoming the badminton player he was today? My interest was piqued. The creator of this game must have a deep appreciation and knowledge of the sport to be able to craft a character study of this caliber. This was the point where I realized I didn't even know the name of the user who created this work. I looked below the title of the game to the username bolded in orange, and was taken aback -- Therealnigga187.


There I sat for 10 minutes, deep in thought. What could be the meaning behind a username such as "therealnigga187"? If the implications I had about the high artistic merit of the game was correct, surely his username was well thought out and backed by creative ideals as well. There was no way he's simply some preteen who believes mindless racial slurs have comedic value, being applauded and made into a meme by fellow edgelords on a discord server who enjoy beating the same joke into the ground until it's a disfigured pile of nothingness begging to be put out of it's misery. No, there was a deeper meaning behind his choice of username, and as a connoisseur of art I was determined to dig as deep as it took to uncover it.


As they always say, "the truth is in the numbers". So that's where I decided to start: 187. My immediate thought was 1 7 = 8. Hmm. Could it be that 8 represents humanity as a whole, and 7 represents the oppressors, with 1 representing the oppressed. When you bring both together, they're equal, but instead they're separated on each side of humanity. 187. However, another connection came to me. In the California Penal Code, section 187 refers to the crime of committing murder. This lead to confusion as I pondered which was the correct interpretation, until it hit me. Both were. As long as humanity separates itself rather than realizing we're all the same, we'll continue to slowly kill ourselves. This could also be why 'Ricefields' in the title incorrectly has rice and fields as one word, rather than the grammatically correct 'rice fields'; therealnigga187's narrative of uniting humans together, hidden in plain sight. Bravo, therealnigga187, bravo. From this point, it was simple to deduce that the 'therealnigga' portion of his username meant that his ideal vision of a perfect world was the real one. He truly is the real nigga.


I looked at my clock: 2AM. It had been three hours since I first found the game, I decided now was a good time to click on it. Before giving so much of a glance at the game, I scrolled down to the description as I always do, and encourage my readers to do the same. How can you expect to get the full experience the creator wishes to provide if you don't scan all facets of the game before diving in? In the description I was met with the following,


Lee Chong the Zipperhead prides himself in his happy fried rice shop. His rice sells so well that he was able to purchase a rice field, but it's constantly attacked. You must help him defend his life's work.


I sat at my desk in the Gendo pose, analyzing it, trying to piece it all together. For my readers who are unaware, 'zipperhead' is a derogatory slur used to refer to people of Asian descent. It came from the brutal slaughter of Korean troops who were run over by jeeps, leaving marks on their corpses that American soldiers claimed resembled a closed zipper. I was briefly taken aback, and slightly appalled by therealnigga187's use of such a tasteless slur. Could my high opinions of him and his intellect be misplaced...? No. Surely not. A quick scroll up to the game confirmed that, when I saw that the player's graphic quite literally had a zipper going vertically across his face. Despite his boundless artistic prosperity, therealnigga187 innocently made the player a cute doll-like creature with a zipper on its face, and affectionately coined it a "zipperhead", unaware of its racially insensitive origins. Adorable, indeed.


I continued reading the description. Our player, Lee Chong Wei, a cute little puppet meant to represent the professional badminton player, prided himself in his rice shop. His rice sells so well that he purchased his own rice field. If you have forgotten, my interpretation of the game was that this alternate imagining of Lee Chong Wei was a less fortunate version of himself in which he was a poor boy working in a rice field to support himself, but it seems as though I misread. In fact, he was doing quite well for himself, and HE was the one who owned the rice field! I wondered, what would have led this timeline's Lee Chong Wei to being a successful rice vendor rather than a professional badminton player? Could it be that this game had an underlying message against badminton, and that taking up work as an entrepreneur was a more fruitful endeavor. Perhaps it wasn't speaking out only against badminton, but against sports as a whole. What possible reason could therealnigga187 have to hold such a low opinion of sports? There's nothing wrong with a little friendly competition, I say! But it occurred to me, maybe therealnigga187 held no issue against badminton or any other sport, and it was only a metaphor for the constant bickering between humanity. In sports, it's one side against the other, much like war. I believe therealnigga187 wishes to use Lee Chong Wei as an example to represent the concept of living a peaceful life and respecting all different cultures, rather than constantly going to war with those who are different than oneself. A brilliant inner narrative carefully crafted, intertwined with symbolism and social relevance.


I decided to start the game, with the final line of the description lodged in the back of my mind, "You must help him defend his life's work". From who, I contemplated. My question was swiftly met with an answer, as upon walking out of my house and to the right I was met with the dialogue, "Sir! The blacks our stealing our rice! Please do something!" An earlier me would have scoffed. Referring to a group of black people as 'the blacks' is a long outdated and crass phrasing. However, the wiser me that knows therealnigga187 knows that there's more to this dialogue than meets the eye. Some moron who just discovered shock humor from a Filthy Frank video and probably still thinks bleach memes are funny trying too hard to be 2edgy4you? Ha! I think not. There was something deeper here. My reading is that 'the blacks' refers to the darkness within us all, stealing our 'rice', which is our peaceful nature, and replacing it with violence.


I continued walking, and the next NPC spoke, "Oh, look behind the shop. The spoils from the last group of niggas we killed are still there." The niggas obviously representing fallen soldiers, and the spoils representing the broken hearts of their families, unable to ever be mended. More tragedies from the horror that is war. I looked at my radar, and sure enough there were power-ups located behind the shop you start out in. Unfortunately, the shop was too high for me to jump over and thus I had no idea how I could possibly get above it and receive my power-ups. Despite his artistic brilliance, it was possible that he lacked the basic knowledge needed for game design... Or not! After spending half an hour mindlessly jumping and banging on my keyboard out of frustration, I found myself on top of the shop! But what had happened? How did I get there? Let's rewind the footage. I had swung my sword with precise timing and hit it against the wall while in the air, propelling me upward and allowing me to scale up and over the wall. I was in awe, therealnigga187 had created a brand new puzzle. Not only is he a literary genius and a humanitarian, but a game designing prodigy as well.


I went to the other side of the shop, finding a few helpful power-ups and what looked to be a large blackberry lollipop dripping with strawberry syrup - delicious! I used therealnigga187's magnificent sword puzzle to get back over the shop and continued my journey through the game. What I found attacking the rice fields was something I didn't expect to see; multiple enemies cosplaying as Mr. Popo from Dragon Ball Z. If you're unfamiliar with the lore of DBZ, Mr. Popo is from the Other World, but was sent to Earth to assist each guardian of the planet. But in this game, he seemed to be an enemy. Despite being sent to Earth to help, instead he was harming it. Quite profound. Is therealnigga187 trying to say that humans being put on earth was a curse rather than a blessing? That the wonderful 'rice field' that is the planet is only being destroyed by the inherent evilness of humanity? A shocking and extreme stance to take. I respected therealnigga187's bravery in expressing such controversial themes through his game, but was also deeply saddened by them.


I made my way through the rice field, slaughtering cosplayer after cosplayer, falling deeper into despair as I pondered the abominable implications of the themes this game expressed. As I killed the fourteenth cosplayer, my pounding sadness came to a halt and settled into a deep and monotone lull of hopeless as the disgusting realization dawned upon me: In destroying that which is harming the earth, I'm partaking in the same violence I wished to protest against. I had been reduced to nothing but another gear in the endless mechanism that is human nature. We're all beyond saving, and we'll continue to destroy ourselves until the world is a bleak wasteland and humanity is nothing but a distant memory that's best worth forgetting. In that moment, I saw the face of God. His name was Therealnigga187, and he was weeping. I got the blue key, the same color as the tears that ceaselessly flowed down my face, and executed the final cosplayer. This time not out of malice, nor out of a desire to complete the game, but simply out of pity. This cosplayer was much larger than the others, as I believe it was therealnigga187 himself. With that, I had killed God. I grabbed my mouse with weak fingers, and with a quivering hand slowly moved the mouse across the screen and rated the game 5 stars, barely able to see through the tears that continued to flow down my face and sting my eyes. I sat in my chair in the fetal position for an hour or two before I composed myself and came here to write this review. I have nothing left to say. No final words of praise towards this game's artistry, no catchy one-liner to end the review with, nothing. None of it matters. It never did.