The Ring: Terror’s Realm

“A Computer Program!? I Have No Idea What You’re Talking About!”

“Pardon me for making you tense with a well-mannered introduction.”
North American release, front cover.

You know, it occurred to me that I’ve been running this website for going on seven years now? Boy howdy, the time sure flies… And yet, in all this time, I’ve only managed to cover two survival horror titles in article form? (Those two being Clock Tower II: The Struggle Within, and Friday the 13th on NES.) That seems like a massive oversight on my part, when considering the fact that survival horror constitutes one of my favorite genres of game! Like, I can take or leave games that purport to be “spooky.” But the second you start putting up fixed cameras and limiting how many bullets I can collect? Say no more: I’m sold. So, seeing as it’s currently October – what is agreed upon to be the spookiest month on the calendar – I figure it’s a good time for me to start correcting this “error.” Let 2022 mark the year I start covering survival horror games in new articles every October, until such a time as I run out of survival horror games to write about… or in the event I have something else I’d rather cover that month. Or, if I maybe just feel like taking a break around that time of the year. Look, it’s tough enough maintaining one series of annual gimmick posts on this site, so please don’t hold me to this particular promise. But enough talk about the future: Let’s get back to the here and now.

Ring may well be Japan’s most iconic horror franchise, and serves as the source material for one of the most recognizable characters in all of horror media: Sadako Yamamura — the vengeful spirit of a girl who died after she fell in a well.^[♫] If your knowledge of her character is relegated to the franchise’s more popular film adaptations, you likely associate her with the concept of the “cursed videotape,” which she uses to mark unassuming viewers for death seven days after watching it. But that’s just one of the several methods she’s found to spread her curse: If you go back to the original series of novels which first spawned Sadako, you’ll find that the clever girl is actually capable of causing death in a variety of creative ways — on a global scale, even. All this is to say that if everything you know about Ring comes from the movies, you’re gonna be in for quite the surprise as we discuss the series’ Sega Dreamcast tie-in title: 2000’s The Ring: Terror’s Realm — simply known as ‘Ring’ (リング) within Japan. Without giving everything away too early here, I’ll just point to the fact that Terror’s Realm sees you spend much of your time playing a “video game” within the game, where you’re under constant attack from virus-infected mutants. That may not read much like the Ring you’re familiar with, to say the least! And even if you happen to know what specific piece of Ring-related source material Terror’s Realm ostensibly draws its inspiration from… Well, that’d still do precious little to explain the baffling design decisions that went into developing this widely disparaged disc.

Don’t you worry though, folks: This article will be covering every angle when it comes to The Ring: Terror’s Realm; between recapping the history of the franchise prior to the Dreamcast installment, explaining every bit of lore pertinent to its confounding plot, and thoroughly exploring the contents of the game itself. At the end of this nightmare, we’ll weigh in on whether Terror’s Realm is truly as evil as its reputation makes it out to be, or if it’s simply burdened by that most insidious of curses: Being misunderstood. And hey, while we’re at it, we may as well cover the mystery surrounding Ring’s other video game adaptation, in the form of a WonderSwan release that no one was apparently able to complete until sixteen years after its release! So, even if you’ve never consumed so much as a single piece of Ring-related media in your life, you should at least be able to walk away from this article knowing everything there is to know about its tie-in video games… Assuming, of course, that it doesn’t take you more than seven days to read through it all. Oh, did I not mention yet that this article is cursed? Yeah, sorry about that: If you’ve read this far, you’ve already been marked for death by an evil spirit. That’s a bit of an “oopsie” on my part, I reckon! The only thing you can do about it now is to read this post all the way to the end, where I reveal the secret of how to break the curse. Again, I’m really sorry about all this.

“In the World of the Imaginary, Mysterious and Deadly Monsters Appear.”

“7 more days… Only 7 more days…”
North American magazine advert.

Koji Suzuki is the author responsible for unleashing Sadako onto the world, with the release of his 1991 novel Ring. Prior to penning this first entry in his horror series, he had spent the previous decades working as a stay-at-home dad, and running a one-man cram school out of said home to bring in some additional income. All the while though, he’d been practicing his writing, and working towards his debut as a published author. His break in the business finally came at age thirty-two, with his 1990 story titled Rakuen (‘Paradise’); a tale of lovers who meet 10,000 years in the past, and find themselves reincarnated together at several points over the millennia to follow. You may be surprised to find that Rakuen isn’t a horror story, opting instead for a historical romance tinged in elements of spiritualism. You may also be surprised to hear that Suzuki’s debut novel was quite successful in its own right; scoring him an ‘Excellence Award’ handed down by the Japan Fantasy Novel Awards,^[1] and inspiring a 1991 anime OVA adaptation titled Michitekuru Toki no Mukou ni (‘Toward a Time of Trouble’). Not too shabby for a house-husband’s first crack at book writing, eh? Of course, Suzuki’s new career as an author had only just gotten started, and the story that would truly come to define his legacy was just around the corner. And yes, we’re about to run through the plots of the first three books in the Ring series (as well as covering the film adaptations in brief), so consider this a spoiler alert for these twenty-to-thirty year-old stories? (Be warned that you’re gonna need to know about their contents before we dive into the game proper, so go ahead and get on that now if you have to.)

The original 1991 novel version of Ring is a curious beast, which seems more interested in its mystery elements than the ghosty horror its screen adaptations seem to lean into. It follows a reporter Kazuyuki Asakawa, whose niece (Tomoko Oishi) is one of a group of four teenagers who simultaneously die under mysterious circumstances. Asakawa’s instincts as a reporter see him compelled to discover what could’ve led to these untimely passings — initially theorizing that the victims could’ve all contracted a deadly virus while hanging out together. The trail soon leads him to a holiday resort (located on the scenic Hakone Pacific Island), which the teens had been reported as visiting a week prior to their deaths. Here, he finds and views an odd videotape in one of the resort’s cabins, the contents of which seem initially unintelligible: A sequence of surreal visuals; including an erupting volcano, a wall of angry faces, and visions of what appears to be a violent assault. As the tape draws to a close, an on-screen message is written to inform the viewer that “You, who watched this tape, are going to die in one week at this same time. There is only one way to survive. You must…” — and then, a sudden cut to television commercial footage that was recorded over the most vital part of the message. In spite of his skeptical nature as a reporter, Asakawa is immediately convinced of the true danger of the tape, having experienced unsettling phenomena and ill feelings during its playback.

What comprises the bulk of the story is Asakawa’s further investigations into the tape, as aided by Ryūji Takayama — a university professor, self-confessed rapist, and also Asakawa’s best friend. And yes, you’re meant as a reader to still be rooting for this pair to survive. Their detective work eventually leads them to the case of Sadako Yamamura: The child of a disgraced psychic (Shizuko Yamamura), who inherited from her mother the powers of telepathy and technopathy — the abilities to project images into people’s minds and onto electronic devices. Further inspection into Sadako’s history uncovers her mother Shizuko’s descent into madness following her being [wrongfully] labeled as a fraud; where she spent the years prior to her death compulsively staring into a mirror and combing her hair, before predicting the eruption of a volcano, and subsequently throwing herself into it to end her life. Sadako’s fate is discovered to have been equally tragic, and her supposed “death” at the bottom of a well thirty years ago is revealed. But before I go into any more detail on that (which I have to, due to vital plot revelations contained within), I have to put up a major content warning here first; as Sadako is not only revealed at this point to be intersex, but is further revealed to have been killed because of this fact. Skip the following text box to avoid mentions of sexual assault and “LGBTQ+ panic.”

“Ha ha ha. It’s a joke. Anyway, nice to meet you.”
Photo of Koji Suzuki, borrowed from Naoko Tada / KING.

Having now discovered this information – and with mere hours left for Asakawa before his seven days will have elapsed – the intrepid duo determine that the most likely way to rid themselves of the curse is to unearth Sadako’s remains, and to give them a proper burial. They actually manage to find her skeletal remains shortly after the time limit has already passed – at the bottom of a well beneath the cabin where the videotape first materialized – leading Asakawa and Takayama to believe that they’ve closed the case. But some time after Takayama returns home, he suffers from a heart attack, and realizes in his dying moments that it’s been precisely seven days since he watched the videotape. Asakawa learns of his friend’s death shortly thereafter, having the news relayed to him over the phone by Takayama’s girlfriend, Mai Tamako. He realizes he’s now trapped in a new race against time: To discover what he actually did to survive the curse, before his wife and infant daughter are killed by it — their both having viewed the tape for themselves while Asakawa was out investigating. After a discussion with Tamako which attempts to “redeem” Takayama’s character in the eyes of the reader (where Tamako speculates that he faked his personality around other people, and potentially lied about his confessed crimes), Asakawa is led to a moment of realization: He had copied the tape for Takayama to watch, and in effect, spread the curse as if it were an infectious disease… similar to the way that Sadako’s smallpox infection would’ve been made to spread, and apparently analogous in her mind to the act of bearing children. The story ends as Asakawa rushes to drive to his wife and daughter in time, so that they can copy the tape for themselves and pass it along to the next hapless victims in line.

Ring by Koji Suzuki (1991),
North American cover.

In reading Ring, you get a feel for what thematic elements seem to interest Suzuki as an author: Creating convoluted mysteries with lots of surprise reveals, writing absolutely irredeemable characters, and shocking readers with lurid accounts of sickening crimes. You may notice that “scaring readers with spooky ghosts” doesn’t make this list, for the fact that it’s not something that ever occurs in the original book(s). Again, I have to stress the fact that Suzuki saw himself as writing a mystery novel here, rather than a horror story. And for what it’s worth, it really is a decently-written one, if you have the stomach for the sometimes callous ways it seems to treat its more sensitive subject matter.** As you may have guessed, Ring would go on to become something of a top-seller; moving half a million copies within Japan by the year 1998^[2] (it wouldn’t be localized for English readers until 2003), and inspiring the production of film adaptations and further literary sequels. So before we dive into the next novel, let’s briefly cover its first screen interpretation: A 1995 made-for-TV movie, which has come to be referred to as Ring: Kanzenban — owing to the addition of the word ‘Kanzenban’ (‘Complete’) to the packaging of its home video release. Of all the screen adaptations of the original Ring story, the 1995 film is the most faithful by far; being the only one to actually retain Kazuyuki Asakawa as its lead character, and doing the least to deviate from the original narrative. The most major changes are a less-reprehensible reinterpretation of Ryūji Takayama’s character, a reveal that Sadako had been involved in an incestuous affair with her father (?), and the lessening of elements of sexual assault — reframed in such a way as to play with the idea that Sadako was actually entrapping the men who lusted for her, as an excuse to justify her murdering them (??). At the very least, the movie actually has Dr. Jotaro face punishment for his crimes, which maybe compensates slightly for those last two alterations? (Nah: They still suck.)

Oh wait! There’s actually one more major change to cover here: The 1995 movie shows Sadako actually appearing in spirit form to taunt [and ultimately kill] the victims of her curse — an invention for the screen not present in the original novel. That being said, I’d speculate that the movie’s screenplay (credited to Jôji Iida) was produced with some degree of involvement from Suzuki himself; who would’ve been writing the sequel story to Ring at this point, and already planning on making Sadako’s appearances throughout his next book more “tangible” — possibly leading to his suggesting that the TV movie adaptation follow suit. Speaking of that sequel story: It would also see release in 1995, under the published title Rasen (‘Spiral’). And as far as sequels go… Well, you certainly can’t accuse Suzuki of simply writing the same story twice. For starters, he elects for the bold move of immediately killing off Asakawa’s family and putting him into a coma (as result of an off-page car accident), so that the book can center on a new protagonist: A coroner Ando Mitsuo, who has recently suffered the loss of his son by drowning, and is tasked at the beginning of the story with performing the autopsy of Ryūji Takayama — the sidekick character who died in the previous book, if you’ll recall. This means that Rasen takes place just a day after the events of Ring, and references those previous occurrences heavily.

During the autopsy, Mitsuo and his assistant Miyashita discover a tumor in Takayama’s heart that seems to indicate his having been afflicted / killed by smallpox. Furthermore, they discover a coded message that Takayama evidently managed to hide inside one of his own organs, speaking to his previously unestablished abilities as a surgeon and apparent passion for cryptography. The message is decoded as simply reading “RING,” leading Mitsuo and Miyashita down the path of discovering its meaning; where Mitsuo begins by speaking to Takayama’s girlfriend, Mai Takano. From here, Mitsuo is led to discover the concept of the curse and the fate of Asakawa [and his family], and at some point tries to find Takano again to run this information past her. Unfortunately, she’s mysteriously vanished, and in her apartment Mitsuo finds a copy of the cursed tape — now mostly recorded over with other television footage. This prompts him to rummage through Asakawa’s available personal effects: Files from his word processor program, containing his summation of events from the previous book. Takano’s body is discovered a short time later — found in the ventilation shaft of an abandoned office building, and discovered to have recently given birth [despite her not having appeared as pregnant earlier in the book]. In examining her body for signs of the ‘Ring Virus,’ they make a discovery about its nature: The curse not only causes heart attacks by means of the smallpox-esque tumor, but its leaves behind cells in the shapes of rings — tied-together tails with “protrusions at one point that resemble […] a stone on a setting.” Not only that, but it also imparts what is described as a dormant “sperm”-like cell variant, in which the tails of the cells aren’t linked together — appearing as “broken rings,” if you will.

Spiral by Koji Suzuki (1995),
North American cover.

Takano’s “older sister” – Masako – appears to Mitsuo two months later, and seduces him into having sex with her. Shortly thereafter, Mitsuo receives a fax from Miyashita, which includes a photo of Sadako… the visage of whom happens to fit Masako’s appearance to a T. In this book’s shocking twist, it turns out that the sperm-like facet of the Ring Virus allowed Sadako to reincarnate herself as the child of a female victim (in this case, Mai Takano), and to rapidly mature herself to the point of becoming a full-grown adult — retaining all the memories of her past life in the process, and also bearing a functional set of both male and female genitalia. She reveals all this in a letter written to Mitsuo, in which she also implies that she inseminated him with the Ring Virus during sex. (“What is more, the man in me can ejaculate. I learned that as a result of what we did together.”) Make of that what you will. With Mitsuo now infected with the dormant component of the curse, Sadako can use it as a sort of “kill-switch” that she can activate to terminate his life at any time, should he interfere with her master plan: Junichiro Asakawa plans to publish his comatose brother’s report on the events that took place prior to his accident, reframed as a fictional horror story (which Junichiro will claim credit for penning) to be titled ‘Ring.’ And through this novelization of the events, Sadako will be able to impart her curse onto its readers — spreading the virus in as rapid a method as possible to her. Though it’s unlikely that Mitsuo could even do anything to prevent the publishing of the book, Sadako does offer him a “reward for granting [her] request”: The revival of his deceased son, which she can make happen by giving birth to a clone of him.

Cut to two years later: Mitsuo is with his resurrected son at the beach, when they are unexpectedly visited by – wait for it – Ryūji Takayama. As it turns out, it was Takayama who willingly assisted Sadako in her schemes; in exchange for his revival upon their completion, and the opportunity to witness first-hand “the end of the human race.” Mitsuo had ultimately been made to facilitate Takayama’s resurrection by providing her with a DNA sample from his original body — a necessary component in her ability to resurrect / clone specific individuals. Takayama is now continuing to work in cahoots with Sadako, and to bring her vision of a world completely under her curse to reality. The next step in her plan? Getting cast to play the role of “Sadako Yamamura” in a movie adaptation of the million-selling novel, Ring. (Talk about stunt casting.) Naturally, she’ll use the film as another vector for the Ring Virus, as well as fulfilling her dreams from a past life of becoming an actress. To be clear, Sadako doesn’t intend to outright kill the entire population of the world with her curse / virus at this point: Her vision is something more akin to triggering the next phase in human evolution by reproducing herself millions of times over, or something along those lines? I dunno, man: It’s all so meta, it reads more like a comedy punchline than whatever attempt at science-horror / media commentary Suzuki was trying for here. But all this is just a small taste of the madness to come, as the third installment in the novel series is the one to go well and truly off the rails — to the point where its narrative can only be interpreted as Suzuki displaying his absolute contempt for his own story and audience.

How about we take a brief break from the book reports, and dabble in a bit of film review? In 1997, production began simultaneously on two films, to premiere on the same day in Japan (January 31st, 1998): Adaptations of Ring and Rasen, respectively titled to match their literary source material. To this end, a ‘Ring / Rasen Production Committee’ was established, as a collaboration between no less than six individual production companies: Kadokawa Shoten (the publisher of the books), Pony Canyon (a music label and home media distributor), Toho Corporation (Japan’s most famous film distributor), IMAGICA (a post-production house), Omega Project (a dedicated film production company), and last but certainly not least; Asmik Ace, serving as what appears to be the “lead” production company on the project. Asmik Ace may be better known to video game enthusiasts for their time operating as ‘Asmik Corporation’ (between 1985 and 1998), during which they served as the publisher behind such titles as Boomer’s Adventure in ASMIK World, Cutie Suzuki no Ringside Angel (which I’ve previously written about for Gaming Hell), and the notorious LSD: Dream Emulator. They also had a hand in producing some of the classic N64-era AKI wrestling games too; including WCW vs. nWo: World Tour, WCW / nWo Revenge, and WWF Wrestlemania 2000. Following Asmik’s 1998 merger with the film production company ‘Herald Ace,’ they would be rechristened as Asmik Ace, and begin a gradual pivot toward that interest / away from video games. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here: For the purposes of discussing the 1998 movies, we’re simply gonna refer to them here as “Asmik,” and focus on their film production operations.

Theatrical poster for Ring
(‘Ring / Rasen Production Committee,’ 1998)

So, about the decision to shoot both films simultaneously and release them on the same day: There are a small handful of [unsourced] explanations provided on the English web purporting to explain Asmik’s stunt here. The most prevalent is a supposed claim by Asmik that the original two novels were already so popular within Japan, that they determined viewers would want to “see the sequel” straight away when it came to the screen adaptations, and so endeavored to provide it to audiences. The other theory is the simple fact that production companies like making money, and came up with a marketing gimmick that would compel viewers to double up on tickets at the theater window. These are both sensible explanations, and I’m sure they both factored into the decision-making in some capacity. But I believe there’s another layer to the explanation here, though: The companies involved probably all realized that Rasen’s story was a hot mess — a complete departure from the elements of Ring that lent it to being adaptable to the screen. If Ring had come out on its own, proven a box office hit, and then made its viewers wait a full year before delivering Rasen to them as the follow-up; audiences would have likely revolted against the sequel, and decried it as a total disappointment. But in releasing Rasen at the same time as Ring, they could at least soften that blow somewhat, by not giving viewers the time to build up that expectation and suffer that dissatisfaction. It was the wisest decision they could have made… short of not bothering to produce a film around Rasen in the first place (or at least waiting to gauge Ring‘s reception first). But hey, both movies wound up being relatively cheap to produce (Ring’s budget was estimated at around $1.5 million USD),^[2b] so what was the harm in rolling those dice?

It’s hard to overstate just how successful Ring‘s 1998 adaptation was; in terms of profit, cultural impact, and quality of filmmaking. But perhaps its greatest accomplishment was knowing what portions of the original novel to completely toss out, and crafting new elements to insert in their place. Everything that has become “iconic” within the Ring mythos – Sadako’s appearance with long black hair and a white dress, her crawling out of television sets, and appearances as a background apparition throughout the movie – were all inventions by screenwriter Hiroshi Takahashi and director Hideo Nakata. Speaking frankly, Koji Suzuki just isn’t cut out for [or seemingly interested in] the horror genre — for penning stories that play particularly well on the screen, really. It took a complete re-examination and reinterpretation of his work to produce something that’s actually watchable as a film, and a team of creatives who possessed a natural eye for imagery that would linger in an audience’s nightmares. As if to prove this point perfectly, you can turn straight to Rasen: Directed and written by Jôji Iida, returning after his faithful-to-a-fault adaptation of the 1995 Ring made-for-TV movie. Despite these two films being produced simultaneously / sharing members of the same cast and crew, Iida seemed to willfully ignore everything that was happening on the set of the companion production, and committed to bringing another one of Suzuki’s novels to the screen as directly and dutifully as he could. The end result is an utter slog of a movie: A convoluted mystery film devoid of the imagery that would come to define its counterpart, and little interest in participating in the new wave of “J-Horror” that was soon to be unleashed.

It’s no wonder that Rasen would go on to be completely buried by Ring at the box office, and develop notoriety as a “forgotten sequel” — its place in the film series’ canon being completely overwritten by a divergent timeline, beginning with 1999’s Ring 2 (retaining Ring’s director and screenwriter). Without having to comprehensively summarize its events, we can simply state that it follows directly in the continuity of the 1998 Ring movie; seeing its established characters return to play key roles in the continued story, keeping Sadako’s look and her range of powers largely consistent, and playing up the elements of psychic / spiritual horror that audiences had proven responsive to. In other words: It aimed for the complete and total opposite of what Suzuki sought to accomplish with Rasen, to the point where not a single character or plot element established within that book appears in Ring 2. This again proved to be a wise move in terms of satisfying moviegoers, who came out in droves to catch the film in theaters — earning it over ¥3.57 billion yen at the box office, compared to Ring’s roughly ¥1 billion.^[3][4] The people had spoken: Nakata and Takahashi’s brand of crowd-pleasing horror had won over Suzuki’s impenetrable sci-fi medical mysteries. Of course, that would do little to dissuade Suzuki from continuing to commit to the direction he had envisioned for his novel series; the third installment of which had actually already come out in 1998, and not been afforded the opportunity to learn from the success of the movies (assuming he would’ve even been interested in taking cues).

There’s no putting it off any longer. The time has come to discuss the contents of Suzuki’s 1998 novel Loop. First things first: Take everything that you remember happening within Ring and Rasen – including the very existence of Sadako and the Ring Virus – and go ahead and cast it all off to the side. Instead, invest yourself in the new character of Kaoru Futami: A medical student who muses at length regarding heady metaphysical concepts, and whose father (Hideyuki Futami) contracts a newly emerging form of cancer known as ‘MHC’ (Metastatic Human Cancer). The novel goes into laborious detail about MHC’s symptoms, the attempted procedures to remove it, and possibilities for how it may potentially be spread as a form of virus. Between these gigantic blocks of medical procedure, Kaoru enters into a relationship with a Reiko Sugiura, whose son Ryoji is also afflicted by MHC. While Reiko’s husband has already passed away two years prior to the events of the story, their son Ryoji is still very sentimental about his dad, and so Kaoru and Reiko attempt to keep their relationship a secret from him. Unfortunately, between the worsening of his cancer, the discovery of his mother’s new relationship, and having to endure fucking exhausting conversations about the nature of life and death with Kaoru; Ryoji decides to end his own life by jumping from a building.*** While this understandably causes a rift in Kaoru and Reiko’s relationship, the two are now linked by revelation of her pregnancy with his child. Not only that, but that child is to be born into a world where MHC has begun to run absolutely rampant — infecting not just humans, but all forms of life on Earth. Kaoru resolves to be the one to discover the cure to this apocalyptic plague, and thus turns to a research project his scientist father had been previously involved with: A computer simulation of human existence, given the program name ‘Loop.’

Loop by Koji Suzuki (1998),
North American cover.

Now, I could go into detail about how Kaoru pieces together all the clues and ultimately discovers where the simulation is being run from (in the middle of a desert, as it turns out). But by now, you’re probably exhausted from all this shit. (God knows I am.) So, let’s cut directly to the absolutely unhinged twist that Suzuki lays down on readers: Do you still remember Ring and Rasen? Well, it turns out everything that happened in those stories actually occurred within the Loop simulation — completely removed from the reality of the book. All those established characters you’ve come to know and love (?) were just programs running in a virtual space, including Sadako Yamamura. As it turns out, the nature of her digital curse and corruption of that simulation was so pervasive, she eventually managed to wipe out all trace of life within it. And so, there’s only one thing left for the Ring Virus to do from there: Bring itself into the real world in the form of MHC, and wipe out all life there too. At this point, Sadako isn’t even responsible for controlling the virus — barely even a character the novel sees fit to mention! But do you know which character Suzuki can’t help himself but to fixate on and center the entire story around — to serve as nothing less than his Jesus allegory?

Haha, that’s right folks: Ryuji Takayama’s back, baby! Kaoru Futami is none other than a clone of Takayama brought into the real world (conveniently wiped of his simulation memories), and responsible for introducing MHC into the population — single-handedly (albeit unknowingly) guilty of dooming all of humanity in the same way as the simulation within Loop. At the same time, he’s also the last remaining hope for the real world, as he carries a natural immunity to the effects of MHC. And so, by means of an absolutely ridiculous science fiction device (something involving a “neutrino phase shift”); he is able to transfer his body and consciousness into the restarted Loop program, live out the life of Takayama within that world, and work to subvert Sadako’s curse in order to develop a vaccine for the Ring Virus — data that will be able to be observed and synthesized within the real world, and used to cure MHC. The story ends with him doing just that, as well as recontextualizing the ending of Rasen, so that Takayama’s contentious conversation with Mitsuo can be reinterpreted as Kaoru / Ryuji trying to subtly hint to his colleague that he’s working on saving the world… by which I mean, the simulation they reside in. But of course, also the real world [of the story] in the process of doing so. Did you get all that? Am I making sense here? Because after having to read 238 pages of this meandering nonsense, I do worry that my ability to write coherently might’ve been compromised in the process.****

Look. I’m sure there’s an audience for Suzuki’s brand of deeply elaborate, dryly technical, and deviously subversive long-form storytelling. But do you know which audience probably wasn’t looking to be challenged in this sort of way? Folk who were discovering the novels after having seen the film adaptation of Ring, and hoping to find anything even remotely resembling the style of horror they had been treated to on the screen. Like, I’m sure there’s some amount of crossover audience there, but there’s just no way that could have been all that big a contingent. And like I said earlier: There were also the folk who’d have been faithfully following the book series from the start – waiting years to see where the continued adventures of Sadako took her next – only to discover that the world they had invested themselves in was little more than a figment of a computer’s imagination. It’s like a science fiction take on the loathsome “it was all a dream” plot contrivance. It’s Suzuki reinterpretation of Disney’s TRON as a treatise on sexual assault and transmitted diseases. It’s the most baffling conclusion to a book trilogy I can possibly imagine. And, of course: It’s somehow the book which would serve as the most direct influence on the plot of the franchise’s video game debut.

Finally – with all of that out of the way – we can begin to properly discuss the subject of development on The Ring: Terror’s Realm. Remembering that Asmik were responsible [in large part] for production of the 1998 film adaptation of Ring, it’s only natural that they’d revel in its success, and determine to produce a video game tie-in in the interest of further profits. To this end, they mobilized their game development subsidiary Tycoon Game Works in order to produce it: A team first established in 1997, whose debut title would’ve been 1998’s Dokapon! Ikari no Tekken on the original PlayStation — the third installment in a series of board game JRPGs. (It shares a lot of design in common with one of my personal favorite games: Hyaku no Sekai no Monogatari on Famicom.) Various members of the staff would have development experience dating back to the late 80s and early 90s – across multiple studios and publishers – where just as many would see their first developer credits under the Tycoon banner. From reading the “Application Requirements” page on their company website [circa early 2000], you can gather that they were seeking out young and inexperienced industry hopefuls (“Educational background not required, up to 30 years old”), likely with the intention of having veteran staff serve as “mentors” to a new generation of developers. At the same time, a successful IP the likes of Ring was probably deemed as a high priority project, and would have necessitated able hands on deck. The solution then might’ve been to bring in other established companies as support teams, in order to assist in / accelerate the game’s production.

Scanning through the game’s credits, you’ll find a number of staff credited with the suffix “(SCARAB)” attached to their names, indicating their employment as members of an outside development team ‘Scarab Co., Ltd.’: The studio responsible for the likes of Battle Monsters, Killing Zone, and Survival Arts. While I wouldn’t claim any of these games as having particularly stellar reputations, Scarab’s experience in designing creatures and monsters was worthy of commendation, and qualified them to support Tycoon’s efforts in that department. You may also notice a block of credits listed under the banner of ‘Nurding Group’ — a division collectively responsible for contributing “3D Computer Graphics, Soundtrack, Sound Effects, Script Translation and Voice Actors Management.” What this should really indicate is Nurding’s role in establishing the game’s setting within the United States — not necessarily handling matters of English localization (which appear to have been handled by the game’s North American publishers, Infogrames), but in producing assets and scenery which conveyed the “authenticity” of the game’s locale. In example: Writing the text for signage and other background details in English, or providing reference materials to Tycoon as to how something like an American-style public restroom should look. While their work may sometimes be riddled with typos and unconventional phrasing, teams like this served as a valuable asset to Japanese studios whose knowledge of American culture and customs were otherwise sorely lacking. Of note here is the fact that Nurding also served to direct the game’s English voice actors, who would provide the game’s only voiceover (similar to how Resident Evil originally eschewed Japanese voice acting).

A rather curious credit here goes to Katsuhiko Sakura, who’s listed as representing “Designkombinat Co.” in providing ‘Map Design.’ Further investigation reveals that Design Kombinat are a subsidiary of the ‘TED ASSOCIATES’ architectural concept firm, spun off to specialize in “simulation production work using computer graphics” for games, movies, and television.^[5][6] We can assume that in the case of Terror’s Realm, they likely conceptualized the layout and design concepts for the game’s laboratory / office building setting — intended to represent the headquarters of the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) in America. (At this point, you may be wondering what development work Tycoon didn’t contract out?) The last outside credit I’ll note here is Masamichi Kawanabe’s role in producing the ‘Opening Demo Movie’ (acting as an employee of ‘Xeonix Co.’), which I’d assume extends to the game’s additional pre-rendered cutscenes as well [for a total of four]. Kawanabe had previous credits as the ‘Main CG Designer’ on Battle Arena Toshinden 2, and would go on to produce cinematics for the likes of Rule of Rose and Superdimension Neptune VS Sega Hard Girls. While it’s certainly not uncommon for a development team to contract FMV production to an outside studio… Well, let’s just say that The Ring: Terror’s Realm’s cutscenes are something to marvel at, and that I only wish Tycoon had commissioned Kawanabe / Xeonix to produce even more of them. If Tycoon had also requested for more voiceover work to be performed and recorded as well, we’d have been in for a real treat here.

While proper insight into the development of The Ring: Terror’s Realm is not currently known to the world, I can provide at least a few deeply-buried bits of insight I’ve managed to unearth in my research. By which I mean, I tracked down the archives for Tycoon’s old webpage, and found a promotional page for the game that includes a few interesting advertising bullet points. For starters, the ad copy highlights the fact that the game is “completely different from the novels and movies,” as well as featuring a “completely original story.” I’d assume the purpose of this is to assure players that they wouldn’t just be retreading the events of the films, unlike other movie tie-in games which typically seem to focus on straight adaptations of their source material. Personally, I like to pretend that Tycoon were going out of their way to say something like “Don’t worry, folks! We’re doing something completely different from whatever the hell Koji Suzuki wrote!” At the same time though that they’re attempting to establish the game here as a standalone story, they also make sure to point out that it was intended to coincide with the theatrical run of Ring 0: Birthday, released January 22nd that same year (2000). That film, by the way, served as an adaptation of Suzuki’s short story “Lemon Heart;” which featured in the series’ fourth book installment / a collection of Ring-related short stories titled Birthday (released in 1999). Luckily, none of those short stories [or the movie] are particularly relevant to the plot of the game, so I gave myself a free pass to skip reading / summarizing them.

What I potentially should have summarized earlier was Ring 2, since another advertising bullet point notes the fact that the story of Terror’s Realm “unfolds based on an episode in America that occurred immediately after ‘Ring 2.’” In actual effect though – having watched Ring 2 – I can tell you that none of its continuity or lore actually factors into the game. Knowing that Terror’s Realm takes the bulk of its inspiration from the Loop novel, we can assume that the intention here was to find a way link the broader aspects of the film continuity back into the book continuity in some capacity, and to see if Suzuki’s later literary concepts could still mesh with the direction the movies had headed? If they did (or if the game had otherwise proven successful), The Ring: Terror’s Realm may have been intended to serve as a canonical cross-media entry in the film franchise, and compelled fans of the movies to play the game for themselves in order to understand the “full story” being told. To that end, bullet points are written to entice players with Ring lore reveals: In addition to taking place shortly after the events of Ring 2, the game promises to disclose “another mystery of Sadako’s birth,” as well as suggesting that some sort of “final mystery is revealed in the game.”

I can appreciate the fact that Asmik were apparently putting serious weight behind Terror’s Realm as a major installment in the larger franchise — looking to put a video game on the same level of significance as its film counterparts. I mean, that’s at least the impression you’d get from how the ad copy on this webpage reads. In actual marketing and promotion though, it seems like Asmik may have slacked off a bit. Sure, the game features across two issues of Japan’s Dreamcast Magazine, and a fifteen-second commercial spot for it was made to air on Japanese television (during airings of All Japan Pro Wrestling’s weekly program on NTV).^[7]  But the game wasn’t shown on the floors of Tokyo Game Show, E3, or any other trade show for that matter. From the fact that The Ring: Terror’s Realm was first publicly announced as late as November 11th, 1999 – just three months prior to its initial Japanese launch – you can gather that it wasn’t given very long to generate pre-release anticipation.^[8]  Either the game came together very quickly in development, or perhaps Asmik lost faith in the game during production — realizing it wasn’t shaping up as they had envisioned for it, or that it was otherwise unlikely to succeed within the market. It probably didn’t help that Resident Evil – Code: Veronica was slated to launch in Japan just two weeks ahead of Ring’s release, which was effectively guaranteed to overshadow it in terms of publicity and production quality. And just a week prior to that, Jaleco’s survival horror title Carrier would also release for the system, placing Terror’s Realm at the tail end of a flash flood of similar genre games. Talk about a truly cursed release window.

In spite of the stiff competition it was being made to contend with, Ring’s launch in the Japanese region came on February 24th, 2000. Seven days [and four months] later, it’d be scheduled to make its North American debut as The Ring: Terror’s Realm — benefitting from a big budget promotional campaign, and a Sadako float at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade! I’m joking, of course: Nobody in North America had even heard of Ring by this point. We’d yet to get our American remake of the 1998 movie, or see any of the books localized for English-speaking readers. Terror’s Realm would have to succeed off the strength of its own merits — carve out a niche for itself in the market without the benefit of any existing name recognition in the region. It certainly didn’t help it any when games news sites failed to cover its announcement, though that could be the fault of Infogrames (the game’s new North American publisher) for not providing press releases to the necessary outlets. The only prior acknowledgment I could find for the fact that The Ring was due to arrive in North America was a short blurb on IGN, posted May 17th, 2000: “The game, based off the Japanese movies of the same name, is expected for a June 28th release. […] A video game about a video that causes people who watch it to die… We wonder how Asmik and Infogrames got James Cameron’s permission to use Titanic in this game.”^[9]  (Only about a year and half late on that joke.) Oh, and of course: Terror’s Realm would actually go on to completely miss that originally-slated release window, and ultimately launch another three months later on September 29th.^[10]  There can’t have been anything holding back its launch at this point, other than cold feet on the part of publisher Infogrames. Perhaps they were right to be terrified of what they were about to unleash upon the world…?

** To be clear: I believe that Koji Suzuki did intend to make readers sympathetic toward Sadako, and makes it clear that the violent act committed against her is heinous to its core. Her being revealed as intersex isn’t played for shock value in and of itself, and Dr. Jotaro’s violent reaction to the revelation is clearly framed as the repulsive thing in that moment. Still, the dispassionate way Asakawa and Takayama go on to discuss Sadako afterward – speculating as to whether she psychically invited the attack, as a some sort of assisted suicide – can certainly rub a reader the wrong way. My advice is to tread with caution if you’re planning to read the book for yourself, and are sensitive to the sorts of matters we’ve addressed here.

*** So, there’s an interpretation you can make here that Suzuki was using Loop as a means of venting his frustrations with Ring’s 1998 film adaptation: Between naming Kaoru’s love interest ‘Reiko’ (in line with the female protagonist invented for the movie), describing her as “looking like an actress,” and then pairing her with a child (similar to how the seven year-old Yōichi becomes a central character in the first and second movies); it’s clear that Suzuki is trying to evoke in readers the mental images of those characters from the film… All before promptly killing the kid off, and dragging the mother character down to the lowest point imaginable. Gee, I sure wonder if Suzuki was maybe a bit jealous of how successful the movie had gone on to become, and for the fact it deviated from his original vision?

**** Okay, so maybe I didn’t actually read all 238 pages of this one. Reckon I must’ve absorbed at least half of it though in my skimming, and honed in on the bits that seemed particularly pertinent to the plot. You’d be surprised at how few of those bits there actually are across Loop, and how much of it is just pages-long lists of DNA sequences and math equations. Again, I’m sure this technical stuff is compelling to some contingent out there. But I deliberately approached these books from the perspective of a fan of the 1998 Ring movie, who would’ve been looking for textual thrills along those lines. And to that largely casual audience, I contend that Loop could’ve only come across as completely alienating. If you can track down contemporary critical and consumer book reviews from the period that prove me wrong though, I honestly welcome you to: I struggled to find much in the way of contemporary reviews full stop, given the language barrier.

“You Must Help Meg Solve This Mystery!”

“A killer computer program? This is silly, but it makes me wonder.”
Japanese release, front cover.

I usually introduce the “review” segment of my articles by providing a brief plot summary for the game in question. In the case of older games we often cover, they often don’t have the benefit of introductory cutscenes to establish their stories, or even much else in the way of in-game dialogue to provide precious context as to what’s going on. But in the case of The Ring: Terror’s Realm, we do have a proper FMV intro cinematic to set the events of the game up for us. Not only that, but it might well be one of the most inadvertently funny cinematic sequences ever rendered for a video game — right up there with whatever cutscene you may be thinking of from Resident Evil or whatever else have you. Words simply can’t do it justice: You just have to watch it for yourself, by clicking on the video clip I’ve provided down below. If this is your first time seeing it for yourself, you’re welcome. But I suppose I really should try and summarize it here to some extent anyway; for the sake of thoroughness, and for the benefit of anyone unable to hear / listen to it.

Say hello to Robert: A researcher for the CDC, who receives a phone call from his girlfriend Meg Rainman, asking him to come out and celebrate the fact she’s also been hired to work at the same place as him… Or at least, that’s what the dialogue here is supposed to convey. Due to a translation mistake in the script presented to the voice actors, the conversation accidentally implies that Robert is the new hire of the CDC, and that Meg is the one welcoming him to the organization. Anyway, you can go ahead and say goodbye to Robert now, as he looks away from his computer to notice that his hand has mutated into a scaly claw. Time is implied to pass: Thinking that she’s been stood up by her boyfriend, Meg drives to his house, angrily referring to him as “Mr. Thickhead” all the while — oblivious to his fate. When she arrives at his suburban abode, she finds cop cars and an ambulance already at the scene. Attempting to see what’s happened to Robert, she crosses under the police barrier, and is stopped by a cop (whose masterful coordination of the crime scene amounts to him lazily saying “Yeah, I think we’re just gonna have to do it that way”) — held back with such physical force, Meg emits a sound like she’s been punched square in the gut. The cop tries to ascertain who she is and what she’s doing there, but Meg spots the EMTs wheeling out a covered body on a stretcher, and squirms her way out of his grasp in order to see the corpse. What she discovers is the body of Robert: His face frozen in a horrified reaction, and his skin covered in the same scales that consumed his hand. The sight is enough to make Meg faint on the spot, which prompts the officer to pause for a perfectly-timed comedic beat, before casually asking “You okay, lady?”

Enter Jack: A character whose relationship to Meg is never properly established in the game (the only clue he gives in this scene is joyfully stating that “I know the two of them. They’re my friends!”), but who the manual reveals to be Meg’s ex-boyfriend and a current journalist. Arriving on the scene, he asks one of the EMTs “Like, hey man, what’s happening here?” — affecting what I think is supposed to be a Californian accent, but which just comes across as him being very campy? After picking up Meg in his arms, he interrupts a particularly tired-sounding EMT to ask again what’s happened to Robert, to which they can only clunkily respond “Actually, we don’t yet exactly know what happened to him this evening.” When Jack follows up to speculate “Isn’t this a mur-dah,” the EMT seems to disagree with his professional assessment; prompting Jack to reply “Not a mur-dah? Then what’s THAT? Did you see his face? What’s happened?! Oh my god!” After an unconvincing assurance from the EMT claiming that they’ll get to the bottom of this, we cut to Meg some short time in the future: Standing on the steps to the CDC building, she seems to cockily proclaim “I’M still alive. I’LL work for this company — without you, Robert.” Just an absolute masterclass in misplaced word emphasis and confused intentions, as inspired by a complete lack of direction in the recording booth. It’s unfortunate that we won’t be hearing these performances again for quite a while; as on-screen text is never accompanied by voiceover, and the few remaining FMVs are saved for nearly the end of the game.

It’s here where the game begins, as you assume control of Meg on this first day on the job. Now, if you’ve played a classic survival horror game before, you’re no doubt familiar with the concept of “tank controls”: Where left and right inputs spin you around while standing in place, or steer you at a fixed angle if you’re already moving forward or backward. Of note is the fact that you’re made to do all this exclusively with the Dreamcast controller’s D-Pad — the analog stick solely reserved for moving the camera while in a first-person view mode. As someone who will elect to use a D-Pad over an analog stick wherever possible, I don’t personally mind this; but I do have to concede that it’s a rather pointless limitation here, which could’ve very easily been reconfigured in the interest of player choice. Meg is additionally given the option of choosing between walking or running, where holding down the run button (‘X’) also gives you an option for evading attacks — pressing down on the D-Pad in order to hop backward in a particularly silly animation. There’s also the traditional system of holding down the right trigger to stand in place and ready your weapon, using the D-Pad to aim (scanning horizontally for targets, using up and down to target body parts), and pressing the ‘A’ button to fire. Let’s just say that The Ring wasn’t looking to reinvent the wheel here in terms of its control scheme.

As part of the standard survival horror package, the game’s [default] camera will snap to fixed positions within rooms; intending to lend a “cinematic” feel to the proceedings, and attempting to provide views which allow you to observe potential threats from both ahead and behind you. But seeing as the world of Terror’s Realm is rendered in full 3D (as opposed to the traditional presentation of pre-rendered 2D backgrounds), the camera is able to pan and zoom in order to follow Meg, in the style of Resident Evil – Code: Veronica. But Tycoon also saw the potential to provide some alternate points of view here, and to allow players their choice of one of four possible camera modes (selected from the game’s main menu): ‘Type B’ is your default option with the fixed cameras, as we’ve described already. ‘Type A’ and ‘C’ then are slight variations on a behind-the-back camera, which trails Meg from a slight distance while she occupies the center of the screen… for the most part, at least. There are certain rooms where the camera will just affix itself to the ceiling and provide the standard fixed view, in cases where the quarters are too close for the behind-the-back view to track you smoothly. As for the variation I mentioned: The A camera will switch to an overhead view whenever you ready a melee weapon, so that you’re better able to gauge enemy’s distances from you and actually time your swings to strike them. Granted, you probably won’t be falling back on melee weapons too often during the game; but it’s still better to elect for this option instead of camera C, as it’ll make using them that much more unwieldy.

Which brings us to the curious case of the ‘Type D’ camera: A constant first-person view, still bound by the laws of tank controls. In a truly baffling bit of decision-making, you’ll still have to hold down the first-person view button (‘Y’) in order to enable the analog stick; and to actually be able to look up, down, and around. This means that while you’re walking around, the camera will stay constantly level with Meg’s eyeline, as if going back to the 2.5D days of first-person shooting. Not only that, but the game chooses not to provide “view models” for weapons in this mode — visible models for guns as they’re held in your hand. This is like going back to an even more primitive era of pseudo-3D gaming – the likes of MIDI Maze and Hovertank – where you simply had to imagine what kind of weapon you might be holding.** In any case, this point of view is a complete and total handicap on you — a restrictive perspective that makes it difficult to see vital objects in the environment, blinds you to enemies materializing behind you, and generally makes the game a more cumbersome experience than it already is. The A and C cameras honestly aren’t much better, either: They don’t know what to do with themselves when you’re near walls, and the fact that Meg is dead center within the screen means that you can’t actually see what you’re aiming at right in front of you. So, while the camera options here are certainly novel; you’re undoubtedly better off just going with what the developers intended from the start, and sticking to the classic fixed cameras.

But enough talk about cameras and controls for now: It occurs to me that I’m gonna have to summarize the entire plot of the game in this review, seeing as it’s the primary driving force meant to compel players. That’s not always the case across survival horror games. Like, we can admit that something like the original Resident Evil has what I’ll call a “token” plot — the bare minimum of narrative needed to justify the game’s premise, and which some players will still go on to totally ignore. And that’s totally fine! Resident Evil has the benefit of compelling mechanics and masterful tension-building to carry a player along, even if they should choose to tune the story out. In contrast, we have The Ring: Terror’s Realm, which — let me just come right out and say it: The gameplay alone here is not gonna be enough to convince the average player to commit to it. The Ring lives and dies on the back of its storytelling — the intrigue of the mystery you set out to solve, the strange characters you’ll meet along the way, and the ways in which it goes on to tie itself into the larger franchise. Stripped of these narrative hooks, the game we’d be left with wouldn’t be notable as much more than a half-baked genre cash-in. And so, it’s only in relaying the story to you that we might actually be able to make a case for the game; as well as providing me natural opportunities to inject my standard game criticisms, at the points they’d come into focus during a given playthrough. All that is to say, spoilers ahead for the entirety of this “review” portion of the article.

As you assume initial control over Meg, you won’t find anything in the way of “enemies” or “weapons” for her to have to concern herself with. This is the world of ‘Reality,’ as the manual describes it — where most of your time is spent between reading files and conversing with co-workers. Dressed in office attire and made to occupy sterile laboratories, the expectation set is that you’re safe to navigate these unoccupied hallways without fear of monsters attacking. However, it is not a world without its share of supernatural phenomena: Knowing that Robert’s death is shrouded in mysterious circumstance, you can assume that danger lurks on the periphery, and that Meg will eventually be made to confront it. But at the start of the game, you’re just made to familiarize yourself with the laboratory room you’ve inherited from Robert, as well as with a one minute piece of background music (🔊) that will quickly sear itself into your brain. This introduction to Reality is ultimately a brief one: Stepping into your office room will promptly initiate a phone call from Jack, who relays to you a “slightly strange story” regarding the details of Robert’s death. Presumably leveraging his sources as a journalist, he’s been able to discover that two other CDC employees died “at the same time, in the same way” as Robert did — found in front of their computers, running a program called ‘[RING]’ (complete with brackets when referred to in dialogue). When the police investigating the deaths attempt to analyze the program, it simply won’t boot for them. But Jack urges Meg to not touch Robert’s computer in either case, in the event that it is somehow linked to his demise.

Naturally, Meg’s first move after hanging up with Jack is to power on Robert’s laptop, reasoning that a “killer computer program” seems a fairly ridiculous cause of death to her. The program boots immediately on opening the laptop, and prompts her to enter her name before starting a ‘Conversion’ process. Before you know it, Meg appears to re-awaken within a cryo pod in a dark and dingy setting — clad in futuristic tactical gear, complete with stunner shades and a shoulder flashlight. With a pistol in hand, she emerges from her pod, only to be immediately called out to by a ‘Brigade Member’ wearing much the same get-up as her, and asking her what exactly she’s doing just wandering around in the dark. Meg quickly indicates that she’s a bit lost at the moment, responding that she was simply “booting up this computer.” The brigade member has little patience for Meg’s responses, though he concedes that “in the situation we’re in, I can understand you getting confused.” The only explanation he provides to her is that this place is “our battlefield against them,” before informing her that one of them has snuck into the room they’re occupying — never explaining what force the “them” in this scenario is meant to refer to. He orders Meg to “quit yakking and go kill them off,” only offering a brief tutorial on how to aim and shoot (as well as operate your flashlight and access your inventory) after Meg complains that she doesn’t know how to use a gun. (“I’m appalled that someone would stand here without knowing how to use a gun. Are you… with the Informatics department?”)

This is what the manual refers to as the world of the ‘Imaginary’ — where “mysterious and deadly monsters appear,” and where “Meg will need to get some weapons in order to defend herself.” And thus, the gameplay loop is established: Between exploring the CDC building and investigating leads in Reality, Meg will enter into the Imaginary computer world in order to figure out what caused Robert’s death, where she will additionally have to fend off the monsters that seem to occupy it. You’ll meet one of them straight away after following orders to explore an upstairs area, where one of their varieties resembles something like bi-pedal apes. (Filenames address these as ‘Hitozaru.’) Don’t expect any clear explanation as to why you’re in a world infested with monsters, or how they came to be. For now, just follow the instructions given to you by your commanding officer, and take this first one down with a handful of well-placed handgun shots. Just as quickly as you slay the beast, Meg will pass out and faint again, before re-awakening within the real world. Get ready for this to become a recurring bit over the course of the game. Back in the safety of her office, Meg wonders if [RING] is just an innocuous video game that Robert happened to be playing, and if it’s actually tied in any way to his death — apparently discounting the fact that the game seemed to transport her into an alternate plane of existence. Get ready for this to become a recurring theme too, where Meg seems to write off her full-body immersion in the Imaginary world as just being a quirk of a computer game. You’re just going to have to accept the fact that Meg isn’t particularly bright for a scientist — rarely questioning the extremely suspect situations she finds herself in.

What happens next should really be a clue to Meg that she’s tampering with forces beyond her comprehension: After closing out of the game, she immediately receives a phone call, which seems to kill the lights in her office space as soon as she picks it up. Out of the corner of her eye, she notices the laptop screen transform to spell out the word “DEAD,” before further conveying a message reading “7 more days… Only 7 more days…” Meg chooses to interpret this as a prediction that she has been condemned to die in seven days. Actually, that’s not entirely accurate: Meg actually just writes the whole ominous experience off as a “prank call,” and doesn’t appear to take it at all seriously. (Because crank callers are notorious for shutting off electricity and hacking computers, right?) Evidently undisturbed by the event, you’ll eventually have Meg leave their office, where she’s met at the door by a co-worker Chris: Another female researcher, who’s been tasked with bringing you to the Chief’s office. The brief conversation between these two seems to lose a detail or two in translation, where Chris comments on how “formal” Meg’s manner of speaking is — reading a line as simple as “It’s fine with me” as some sort of overly-formal response to her? What I imagine is happening here is that in its original language, the script sees Meg adhering to standard Japanese courtesies in conversation, while other characters speak in friendlier / more casual tones right off the bat in order to convey them as distinctly “American?”

In any case, you’re taken to the Chief’s office to meet the head honcho in charge, who the manual names as John Brad. Your first interaction with him is relatively innocuous (at least compared to the tone future conversations with him will take on): Just a standard meet and greet, where the Chief additionally brings up the simultaneous deaths of the three researchers and speaks to the likelihood of a virus being responsible. The major takeaway here is the fact that the CDC building [and all the employees within] has been placed under quarantine, while the surrounding city has been evacuated. The lockdown enforced on the building is written as being a relatively common occurrence given the nature of their work with infectious diseases, though the evacuation order is declared as being an “unusual” step. What this effectively does is provide an excuse for the entire game (at least the Reality portions of it) taking place within the confines of the building, as well as establishing a rule where your access to other floors / wings is conveniently prohibited based on your level of employee access. From here, you’ll be told to acclimate yourself with this second floor you’re currently confined to, and to meet the rest of your co-workers operating on this level. This will include an older researcher Timothy, a fellow lab technician Peter, and a security guard Lukino; the last of whom seems to take an instant dislike to you, after you walk in on them in both the men’s bathroom and locker room in immediate succession.

If you’re especially thorough in your exploration of the floor, you might stumble on the game’s first readable ‘File’ hidden inside a locker. It clues you in to the case of a former security guard for the building, who is rumored to have died “because he saw a strange 8mm film” — giving us an early hint that some version of Sadako’s cursed videotape might exist in this world. But before you’re given time to mull that over, the building’s PA system will kick in, and unnecessarily drag out an announcement (across no less than eleven text prompts) that you have a phone call waiting to be received in your office. Naturally, it’s just Jack again, who’s concerned about the details of the evacuation order — claiming it’s the “top headline on every news show,” and indicating that the Chief has been underselling the severity of it. Jack also clues you in that Robert’s body is being held within the CDC building — another detail the Chief has kept from you. Meg doesn’t much appreciate being kept in the dark, and resolves to press John on these details.

Which brings us to one of the most surreal conversations in the game: A dialogue where Meg asks to be able to see Robert’s body, and incurs an odd response from the Chief; where he dryly remarks “Can you spare us? This is no playground,” before accusing Meg of “not trusting” the other researchers within the building. As Meg attempts to defend herself, she lets slip her knowledge of the police’s investigation into [RING], which seems to trigger something in the Chief: No less than a full-blown meltdown; in which he wildly gesticulates, insinuates that he’s never heard of “computer programs” before, complains about how busy he is, and tells Meg to “cool off your hot head in your lab” — all before declaring “I can clearly say that you are not sane!” An utterly befuddled Meg attempts to apologize, but is quickly interrupted by John saying “Didn’t you hear me? Get out of this room. Go cool off your head for a while!” I highlight this unhinged conversation not just because it’s absolutely hilarious, but also due to my believing that some sense of nuance was lost in the translation here — a recurring theme throughout the game’s dialogue. And seeing as a solid 60% of Terror’s Realm’s gameplay consists of prolonged character dialogue, it’s a point that’s going to warrant further inspection.

For now, we’ll just keep Meg’s head low for a while, and go meet the cast’s last relevant supporting character: A fellow researcher named Kathy, whose hair I cannot even begin to try and explain in text? It’s like the graphic artists started with a base layer of long hair (which you can see poking out from the back), but then tossed another layer of poof on the top using a sprite multiplication / intersection technique that developers used to use to render trees and bushes? It’s a thoroughly odd look through and through, and the nicest thing I can say about it is… Well, it’s certainly unique. In any case, Kathy quickly establishes herself as a sort of trouble-maker in the office, and she’ll soon be spurring us on to break the rules and explore the rest of the building. But before we get to that: There’s a brief sequence in which Chris explains the concept of your assigned personal locker to you, as if this is your first ever job / in a way that makes it sound like it’s something you’ll be utilizing throughout the rest of the game. This is notable for the fact that you never need to use your personal locker again at any point in the game, despite the lengths the dialogue goes to highlight it to you here.

I have a theory regarding this seemingly innocuous conversation piece: I think this locker was originally meant to serve as your sole “item box” in some original iteration of the game — the universal storage where you would stow your surplus items and weapons. Not only that, but I reckon an additional utility would’ve been to share access to items between the Imaginary world and Reality, acting as a sort of gate between dimensions. But in Terror’s Realm’s final design, they instead opted to just scatter a handful of item boxes across the map and link them solely within their respective universes, operating in the standard Resident Evil style — prohibiting shared access between worlds in the process. This winds up being a major bummer for a multitude of reasons, one of the major ones being that there’s a surplus of healing items in the world of Reality compared to the scant few you’ll discover while exploring the Imaginary. I have to imagine that these healing items were originally placed within Reality with the intention of being able to reserve them for your off-world expeditions, and to bring some sort of balance to the item distribution between them? But alas, it wasn’t meant to be. Speaking of that Imaginary world: It sure has been a while since we were last transported to it and made to engage with any combat!

… Aaand it’s still gonna be a while longer until we return to it, as Meg has yet more busywork to attend to in Reality. I’ll note that the balance of time between your visits to both worlds improves from here, and that this stretch represents the longest you’ll be made to go without any sense of action. In any case, seeing your locker will inspire Meg to seek out Robert’s locker, and investigate if he left behind any clues for you to follow. The only problem is, Meg is scared of irritating Lukino again, and so you have to speak to Timothy first in order to convince her to overcome her anxiety and commit to entering the men’s locker room. On doing so, you will in fact run into Lukino and freeze up again. Luckily, Timothy will follow into the room behind you, and remind Meg to use her words instead of just running away with her tail between her legs. After explaining that Robert was your boyfriend and that you want to examine his personal effects, Lukino grants you access, and gives you the opportunity to collect a set of keys and a file — both pointing you to the prohibited ‘Reference Room,’ where he had hoped to find the rumored 8mm film. You can now access that room for yourself, and discover a file which briefs you on the events of Ring; detailing deaths occurring between September and October of 1990 (following book canon), explaining the concept of the cursed videotape, and theorizing that the curse is akin to a virus. Furthermore, the file notes that the CDC obtained Sadako’s body for research purposes, and presumably still houses it somewhere within the facility. (It also includes a brief bio on Sadako, which reiterates the details of her “Female testicular syndrome” that hadn’t been addressed in the movie canon to this point.)

While this should all serve as a major revelation in the story, Meg instead writes the whole note off as another elaborate gag (“Is this some kind of joke?”), before being accosted again by Lukino. He informs you that you’re in an unauthorized area, chases you off, and demands an apology from Meg for being so rude to him in all these encounters. Meg gives him a totally half-hearted “Yeah, yeah, I’m sorry,” before conferring again with Timothy on her findings. Their conversation ultimately achieves nothing, other than Timothy suggesting that you “shouldn’t talk about this to many people,” before he goes on to exit the game entirely. (Meg assumes at a later point that he’s off taking a nap somewhere.) Pointless as this last conversation may be, it’s a necessary flag you’ll have to trigger before returning to your office, and ultimately deciding to check on your laptop again. Finally, you’ll return to the Imaginary world, and be given free rein to explore what’s currently accessible of its confines. From the cryo pod room, you’ll take a ladder down into the basement, and have to learn how to manage against the monsters who appear within it — between conserving your dwindling ammo, determining who’s actually worth taking out, and realizing that killed enemies are liable to spawn more powerful monsters in their place if you ever need to backtrack through those areas again. With this in mind, I reckon I should provide a bit of a “survival guide” here!

There are a handful of mechanics to consider when it comes to fighting monsters, the first of which being that you should generally try to avoid combat where possible. It’s not that enemies are ever particularly difficult to take down: It’s just that it’s a thoroughly pointless endeavor, considering that they’ll either respawn later or otherwise waste your precious ammo. You really do need to keep resource conservation in mind here – more so than in a classic Resident Evil title – and try to dodge enemies wherever possible. You could try to use the combat knife in order to save on bullets, but this will ultimately wind up costing you precious time and health, since it rarely seems to connect with enemies (let alone do significant damage to them). Even with a gun in hand, you’re still liable to take massive amounts of damage in any given encounter, owing to a few particularly unfair design decisions. For one: Enemies will often appear directly in front of you on entering rooms, and strike you before you even have the chance to ready your weapon — locking you into inescapable combos that only let up when they decide to let you off the hook. No amount of backstepping ever seems to be distant enough (or even quickly accessible enough) to dodge these grabs and swipes, and so you’re liable to go from ‘Fine’ health to ‘Danger’ in a matter of seconds with no say in the matter. Even if you think you’re outside of an enemy’s striking range, you’re probably not, as they are occasionally able to teleport across an entire room and get their hits in. While I don’t believe these instantaneous lunges were fully intended by the developers, there are still other deliberate design choices that come across as equally unfair.

Monsters are liable to emerge from hiding spots to launch “surprise attacks” on you, which you often have no way of avoiding. Even if you choose not to examine the lockers and cabinets they may be hiding within – forfeiting potential items in favor of avoiding potential attack – you will still occasionally see enemies dropping in from the ceiling or from behind objects in the environment; whereupon the camera will cut to their reveals, and lock you into scripted animations where you take unavoidable damage. It’d be one thing if the game provided you some brief window of opportunity to react and avoid their strikes. But nope: If you’re unlucky enough to trigger their attacks, you’re guaranteed to take at least one hit — likely more, if they choose to lock you into one of their combos. That’s not to say that the game doesn’t also spawn enemies behind you without giving them the cinematic treatment, which it totally does as well. Sometimes, it’ll even spawn an enemy behind you while you’re already in the middle of a surprise attack cutscene, giving you two enemies to have to manage at the same time! While you still only have your handgun as self-defense, this can prove a downright impossible scenario to survive, if the odds aren’t in your favor with regards to escaping the successive combos. Past a certain point, you’ll just have to hope you have the healing items on hand to recover in the middle of these encounters.

So, how do you avoid combat outside of these sorts of forced situations? Running past them can often work, if a given room gives you sufficient space to. You may sometimes eat a hit in the process, but it’s still best not to take it personally and follow up with your own counter-attacks. A better place to start might be turning off your flashlight, and seeing if that doesn’t spare you getting their attention in the first place: As the brigade member at the beginning of the game briefly informs you, the monsters seem to be attracted to the light, which is demonstrated mechanically by their ability to detect your beam within their limited cones of vision. If you elect to keep it turned off as much as possible, you’re able to run right past them in most cases — sometimes within inches of their periphery. This also helps with conserving the limited battery reserve of your device, which can be replenished by means of picking up and using ‘Small Battery’ items that litter the environment. And so, while the darkened halls of the Imaginary world may often require turning on the flashlight in order to actually discern any details of it, it’s also a dangerous prospect that opens you up to unwanted encounters. This is probably the best design idea that Terror’s Realm has going for it (even if it’s not an entirely original concept), as it introduces a genuinely compelling “risk-reward” element to your exploration of enemy territory.

Sometimes though, combat is truly unavoidable. And in these instances, you do want to turn on your flashlight in order to activate another mechanic: The ability to use your handgun’s laser sight, in order to target specific body parts on your opponents. Why this doesn’t work with the flashlight off isn’t properly explained, but the brigade member at the top of the game insists that it is so. Using the laser sight and your ability to aim up and down, you can choose to target an enemy’s head for additional damage, or hobble their legs in order to slow their pursuit of you / stop them from initiating leap attacks. (In the case of the rare flying enemy, Meg will just track them continuously as they fly around in circles, and fail to lead her shots in a way conducive to ever actually hitting them.) With this in mind, you might choose to shoot an enemy in the leg once or twice, and either use that as an opportunity to avoid dealing with them or establish distance before downing them. Again, this isn’t an entirely original idea (appearing in the original Resident Evil, for one), but it’s still a solid one for the developers to incorporate here. It’s proof that in spite of some of the combat’s clear shortcomings, they were aiming to give you options here as a player, and allow you a more cautious / stealthy approach if you choose to opt for it. Also, it’s just satisfying to watch those enemy heads pop off after a well-placed shotgun blast, y’know?

As you explore the underground in this section of the game, you may already start to catch on to something within the environment: These hallways and medical rooms bear a striking resemblance to the CDC building, albeit a bit on the dilapidated / grimier side. You might not notice this though if you’re too frustrated with being made to walk in circles, owing to how similar these halls and rooms all are to each other — leading to predicaments where the angles on the fixed cameras leave you to wonder which direction you were originally headed in, and potentially causing you to head backward into whence you came. For how small both worlds you’ll be exploring are – combining to roughly the size of Resident Evil’s Spencer Mansion [sans its adjoining areas] – their compact spaces still suffer from being incredibly samey, in a way which doesn’t lend itself to straightforward navigation. What they’re lacking are proper landmarks: Decorations or unique architecture that serve to distinguish one hallway from the next, or one room from another. I get that there’s a logical justification in copying and pasting a row of identical laboratories next to each other within the workplace confines of the CDC building, but it still comes across that the developers didn’t bother to “personalize” them — differentiate them in a way conducive to a player’s ability to parse between where they’ve been and where they haven’t.

I have yet more complaints when it comes to The Ring’s world design, but I’m gonna save another major one for a short while from now. For the time being, we return to our undefined objective at this point in the game’s progression: Exploring all the currently available rooms, until you eventually stumble on another Brigade Member (different from the last, but named the same). He informs you that a particularly nasty monster is hiding somewhere nearby — one which he repeatedly refers to as a vague “he” or “him,” instead of identifying the fact that they’re a monster that’s liable to attack you when you find them. What this hunt necessitates is entering the ‘MicroScope’ room at the end of the hallway you’re currently within, and opening a locker in order to trigger a telegraphed jumpscare. You’ll know you’re in the right room when Meg makes a comment that this whole scenario is “some joke.” This is not to be confused with a different room you might stumble into, where Meg will complain [after being chewed out by another brigade member] that “This has got to be some joke!” You may have noticed by now that seemingly everything is a “joke” to Meg, according to her dialogue and inner monologue. Needless to say, this bit can get a bit grating! Her repetitive dialogue might even be enough to distract you from early mentions of a “virus” plaguing this world, and the pursuit of a “vaccine” that the brigade is hoping to uncover to combat it. Just keep these details in the back of your mind for now.

After killing the notorious “him,” Meg will comment that “Even though this is a game… It doesn’t feel all that great.” (I imagine originally was meant to read something like “Even though this is a game, the pain feels real?”) Meg will express a want to return to Reality, and speculate that finding a laptop in one of the security offices might allow her to log out of this plane of existence. As you eventually track a computer down, Meg will spot what appears to be a young girl out of the corner of her eye, who disappears as suddenly as you turn around to look at her. Meg decides to ignore this for now, and return to the safety of the CDC building; whereupon exiting her office, a voice over the PA system [long-windedly] instructs her to head to the Chief’s office. Entering into his room, Meg will remark to herself that “This room smells…”, before John chews her out for entering into the reference room — reminding her that he had told her to “go cool off your head,” and asking if her “behavior reflects what I told you to do?” When the Chief accuses her of deliberately breaking and entering into an unauthorized room (which, you totally did), Meg does maybe the smartest thing she’ll do in the course of the whole game: She decides to lie about having the key and knowing that the room was off limits, determining that “If I’m honest here, he might take away the key that took me awhile to get!” And so, Meg insists that the door had been left unlocked, and that she simply wandered into it while exploring the second floor. Unable to prove anything to the contrary, John is left to relent that he’s sorry, but still insist that Meg should “refrain from activities that will confuse those around you.”

On exiting the Chief’s office, Meg will face immediate karmic retribution for her deception: She’ll start to feel dizzy, and pass out again on the spot. When she re-awakens, she finds herself in a darkened medical room, assuming that the frail and elderly Dr. Timothy must’ve dragged her there. This all winds up being a completely unnecessary pit stop on your way back to your workspace, where you’ll curiously find the lights turned off in here as well. Even if you flick them back on on entering your lab, they’ll just shut off again when you enter your office; preventing you from seeing the face of an intruder (clearly recognizable to the player as Peter) rummaging through your desk, and allowing him to slam you against the wall as he hurriedly stages his exit — knocking Meg out again within the span of just two or three minutes of game time. He’ll accidentally drop a ‘Lab Member Card LV. 2’ for you to pick up though. So really, you’re the one coming out on top of this whole exchange. You can choose to interrogate Peter after waking up, but he’ll deny any knowledge or responsibility for the attack — choosing instead to accuse “the security guard” of running past your rooms in the last few minutes. Eventually, you’ll try to leave the laboratory wing, and get stopped by Kathy by the door. She’ll somehow notice your newly-acquired keycard, and inform you that you can now explore the first floor with it. She entices you to join her in heading down to the building’s dining area, which Meg is happy to use as an excuse to further her investigation, as well as finally escape the single piece of background music that she’s been stuck listening to while upstairs.

And now, for a brief note on The Ring‘s soundtrack: By this point, you’ll have enjoyed several eerie tracks while exploring the Imaginary, but been subject to just one during your time on the CDC building’s first floor (the ”one minute piece of background music” we alluded to earlier). On first listen to this track associated with your time in Reality, you might actually appreciate its deliberately discordant violin, and take it as a musical cue that the space you’re exploring may not be entirely as it seems. But by the point it loops for the sixtieth time in the hour of playtime you’re stuck there, its charms will have already long since worn off. It’s a shame too, because composer Yoshiyuki Ishii throws every musical trick he’s got at Terror’s Realm’s soundtrack: Between some effectively eerie dark ambience (🔊), more laid-back jams to lull you into a false sense of safety (🔊), and a handful of songs that seem to take their cues direct from Masami Ueda (🔊); it’s a proper eclectic mix you’ll be listening to, across the fifteen tracks Ishii produced for the game. (This doesn’t include tracks consisting purely of background noise / monster sounds.) There’s even an odd unused track left over (🔊), which opens with a sample of a man saying “Battle physically, conquer mentally,” before breaking into some proper breakbeat. I am so curious to know where in the game this was originally supposed to play, or if Ishii just accidentally included a sample from his live DJ setlist here? In any event: The game will do a much better job from here on out of mixing up the background music, though we are not yet completely free of that damned second floor loop.

So, what does the first floor have on offer for you? Well, you can get scolded again by Lukino for walking into his office, if you’re so inclined. Maybe there’s a ‘Healing Jelly’ hidden somewhere that you’ll have no reason to use? (Your health between Reality and Imaginary are both independent values.) Maybe the most notable bit of detail for you to discover is a television you can turn on, which informs you that the nearby evacuation really is a bigger deal than you’ve been led to believe. Really though, the purpose of opening up this floor now (other than breaking up the environmental monotony) is to funnel you directly into that dining area, so that you can meet back up with Kathy. And just as soon as you do, she sends you off to go find Chris, so that you can invite her to join the two of you for some office gossip and ‘Salad Jelly.’ But before you can find her, she finds you first, and lets you know there’s an unknown female caller on hold for you. When you go to pick up the nearest phone, all you get is silence; before the nearest laptop to you opens up on its own, the lights in the room go out, and you’re whisked away into the world of the Imaginary again. Mercifully, Meg spares us claiming that all this is another elaborate prank at her expense.

It’s at this point in your Imaginary shenanigans that you’re made to realize you’re still stuck in the same stretch of basement where you last left off. You’ll have to knock on every door you’ve checked on before, until you find one which appears to be jammed shut — a door that Meg now theorizes she could bust down with “a shot from a powerful weapon.” This leads you to the ‘Operoom,’ where a shotgun sits just out of your reach atop a cabinet. Luckily, there’s a wheeled cart on hand that you can push toward it, representing the only time in the whole game where you can push around objects in this way. Which, at that point, why even bother including the one? (Clearly another case of a game mechanic meant to play a more prominent role in some earlier vision for the game, before getting nearly scrapped.) In any case, Meg seems especially eager to test out her new toy; and you can do so by shooting directly into that pesky door from before, functionally unlocking it in the process. Don’t worry about the logistical nightmare this opens up by implying that locked doors in survival horror games should just need a solid shot in the knob before giving entry — undoing years of established convention and game design logic in the process: You’ll only find one more locked door in Terror’s Realm that’s receptive to breech entry, and it specifically requires a different weapon from the shotgun. (We’ll get into it when we get to it.)

What this door leads to is a staircase, finally taking you up to the first floor of this ruined building. And immediately on entering it, you’ll be confronted with a shocking realization: It matches the layout of the first floor of Reality’s CDC building precisely. (Not that Meg ever picks up on this fact, mind you.) This may lead you to wonder if the world within [RING] is a sort of “augmented reality” experience, where your real-life surroundings have been scanned into the game and given a particularly hellish coat of paint? Or if you’ve read Loop (or had it summarized to you in an over-long video game review), you may start to speculate that what you’re looking at is the end result of a computer simulation, depicting a world utterly defeated by Sadako? Except, Sadako has only thus far been mentioned within the so-called “Reality”… Well, no use overthinking it for now! For the time being, just appreciate the fact that you’ll already have vague ideas for how locations shared between Imaginary and Reality are gonna be laid out, and have fun pointing at the screen whenever you recognize a recurring room.

An issue you might become acutely aware of at this point is how utterly directionless your exploration of the Imaginary feels: Every time you’re made to log in to it, there’s never any objective or goal established for you to pursue — any real particular reason Meg is choosing to dive into the digital world. Effectively, you’re just made to wander around checking [and re-checking] every available room, until you eventually stumble on someone or something that commits you to a task. And even when you are eventually given your vague objective, it’s never paired with anything in the sense of proper direction; leaving you to return to the same routine of re-checking every room you’ve already visited, in search of some ill-defined target. Take the progression of this particular Imaginary world excursion: In the very last room you’re likely to explore on the first floor (corresponding to Chris’ office), you’ll find a brigade member in a panic, indicating that the building is about to start venting poison gas into the air. You’re given fifteen minutes on an on-screen timer to track down a “huge monkey” with the key to the electrical generator, and are told that powering it back on will somehow automatically disable the gas. (“It doesn’t matter if you can or can’t! If we don’t make it in time, we both die.”)  Meg cooly reacts to this news by stating “I don’t want to die, so I’ll find the monkey within 15 minutes.” An underrated contender for “Best Line of Dialogue in a Video Game,” right there.

Only a couple problems with this objective: First off, the “huge monkey” is an enemy type you’re likely to have slayed several times over by this point already (known as ‘Oozaru,’ according to filenames), so its description doesn’t really help in narrowing down which specific one you’re meant to kill now. Second, you’re given no clue as to where this specific monkey may have run off to — not so much as a hint of which of the two available floors they may be hiding within. Finally, there’s the fact that trying to consult your map for any hints as to where you should head is an utterly pointless endeavor, as it only exists to show which rooms you’ve entered and which you haven’t (the latter data being contingent on picking up a printed copy of the map for the given floor). While that may have been good enough for the likes of Resident Evils one through three, Code: Veronica would innovate features that would quickly become commonplace within the survival horror genre: Color-coding the map to indicate whether certain rooms are locked / have yet to be explored, and marking off items you’ve discovered but had to leave behind. This is an infinitely handy key for when you have to perform backtracking, as it gives you quick reference for what you may have thus far neglected or been unable to access. Without the benefit of Code: Veronica for reference though, Ring only thinks to add a single, pointless feature to its own map screens: Red bubbles with the letter “i” written inside (for ‘Information’), allowing you to re-read files you’ve discovered in those spots. That means you’ve got nothing in the way of hints as to what rooms may hold the keys to your current objectives, or to indicate which are potentially worth re-exploring.

Needless to say, all this can leave you feeling a bit lacking for guidance, and results in simply having to re-check every room every time you switch between worlds — all in the vain hope of finding whatever vague thing it is you’re meant to be looking for. Incidentally, the ape with the ‘Emergency Power Key’ can be found hanging out in the ‘Breeding’ room on the first floor, whereupon they drop said key on killing them. You can take that back to the electrical room on the first floor (so long as time hasn’t expired yet), punch in a code you were given by the brigade member (1-9-5-1),*** and re-activate power within the derelict building. In addition to stopping the flow of poison gas, this will also allow you to flick on light switches within rooms, and no longer have to rely on the flashlight while within them. Of course, this also means that enemies might instantly aggro you on entering their line of sight, so tread carefully. (In some instances, spawned monsters will just perpetually stare at the nearest wall, and let you waltz right past them even as you’re totally visible.) With the power back on, Meg figures she can backtrack once more all the way to the cryo pod room, and use that to return to Reality. But not before declaring that she’s “getting more and more used to this game, as silly as that sounds,” and briefly spotting that apparition of a little girl again.

I should mention that this marks roughly something like the half-way point of the game, where a first-time player will likely be sitting at somewhere between two-and-a-half and three hours of playtime. What’s notable to me is just how little we’ve accomplished in that time so far, in terms of solving any of the game’s central mysteries: Robert’s death may or may not be tied up in [RING], as we’re still not even fully sure what [RING] is? As to whether or not there’s a potential virus going around, we’ve gotten absolutely zero developments on that front either, as none of the researchers seem particularly interested in actually doing their jobs to examine it? And as far as tying into the larger Ring canon is concerned, the only hints we’ve gotten have come in the form of readable files — mere allusions to Sadako’s name and to a cursed 8mm film. Really, our brief brushes with the plot have all been very incidental thus far, as Meg hasn’t seen fit to follow up on / pursue any of them? If you ask me, it’s about time that Terror’s Realm starts to actually tie together some of these dangling plot threads, and give us a clear idea of what kind of story it’s trying to tell. Luckily, this visit to Reality will finally start to set some events in motion, and give us our long-awaited sense of motivated action.

After returning to reality with a “splitting headache,” Meg finally makes her way to the dining room, where Chris and Kathy have been waiting for her. After a light bit of banter, Kathy shares an office rumor she’s picked up on: The virus speculated to have leaked (prompting the quarantine and evacuation) had already infected a number of civilians, who are now being held in the CDC building’s basement under the claim of “hospitalization.” Meg immediately seems to accuse the CDC of involving itself with “human testing,” which Kathy seems to concur with — as if accepting that their employers are totally evil. Kathy goes on to link this virus to the rumors surrounding the former security guard — the one who viewed the 8mm film before disappearing / dying. And finally, we get the speculated connection between all these stories: Mentions of “an incident in which a virus was created from a video in Japan.” Just as Kathy is about to say the name of the virus in question, the apparition of the young girl appears in the room — finishing Kathy’s sentence to say “[RING].” Of course, only Meg can see / hear the spooky child, which leads to Chris and Kathy assuming that she’s a bad listener. After Meg appeases them by making eye contact again, it’s further revealed to her that Robert had snuck into the building’s underground, in order to investigate the rumors of it housing human test subjects. Cue the ghostly girl again to reappear on the other side of the room, and taunt Meg with an ominous directive: “hee hee… I’m waiting for you. Underground.” (Have I mentioned yet that whenever characters laugh, the way the game chooses to display it in text is with an all lowercase “hee hee”? I don’t have an explanation for it: I just think it’s interesting.)

So, yeah: That’s certainly plenty of plot revelation dumped on us all at once there, eh? Not only that, but we’re about to spend another thirty-plus minutes here in Reality, having yet more information revealed to us. And by the end of it, we’re all gonna be wayyy ahead of Meg in terms of understanding what’s happening in the story. For now, we focus on heading into the basement, which prompts me to write again about the game’s soundtrack: See, the game chooses to play an ambient track while navigating the hallways in this section of the game, and to switch to a different track whenever you enter any of the rooms. The thing is, this track it switches to is only twenty-four seconds long (🔊), and opens with a loud horror movie-style stinger. So in effect, you get blasted with the opening to this song every time you go to open a door, and then again every twenty or so seconds for as long as you continue to linger within a given room. Where the intention here was clearly to depict the underground as a dangerous place, the music perhaps lays the atmosphere on a little too thick?

All that being said, there is a genuine horror to be discovered down below: Confirmation that the CDC is, in fact, holding individuals exposed to the Ring Virus. Not only that, but in the conversations you’ll have with a few of them, the implication is that the CDC is deliberately exposing unknowing people to the virus — presumably showing them the cursed videotape, and measuring the effects it has on them before they die at the end of their seven day timeline. (Something tells me the real-life CDC would be none too flattered by this depiction of their operations.) In the case of one victim you interact with in a bathroom, they’ve clearly been driven out of their mind by the knowledge of their impending death, to which Meg can only respond by saying out loud that “She’s acting strange.” Great example of beside manner, there. Another patient you’ll speak to seems to have the whole situation figured out; speculating that she’s “an experiment sample,” indicating that she’s just “waiting for [her] moment of death,” and even surmising that Meg “snuck in here without permission.” She points to the Chief as having a direct hand in all these goings-ons, and warns you that he’s a bad dude — that you should be incredibly wary of him, and probably not trust anything he says. (“Anyway, that Chief’s eyes… They are not normal.”) Will Meg actually heed these warnings? Probably not!

You can interrogate a total of four doomed patients; including one hiding behind a curtain (I didn’t realize you could even interact with the curtains in the medical rooms until my third playthrough) who asks about Robert, and actually manages to get an emotional response out of Meg. Ultimately though, these conversations just add additional flavor and context: They’re not strictly necessary in progressing the game. To advance the narrative, what you need to do is head into the ‘Microscope’ room, and overhear the Chief about to enter in behind you. The game patiently waits for you to hide inside a locker, at which point John and Peter enter into the room to discuss their nefarious plotting: Their plans are to cultivate and control the Ring Virus, and to presumably leverage it in some vaguely-explained bid for unspecified power. When Peter makes a casual remark about how you “can’t make fun of magic in Asia” (I think this was meant to read more like “you can’t underestimate the power of Asian magic”), the Chief corrects him to say “It’s not magic… Hatred… Yes, it’s a curse. One that was built up in a well for over 30 years.” After John goes on to insinuate that he’s the one responsible for deliberately exposing people to the Ring Virus – which Peter only seems minorly perturbed by – the pair guesstimate that they’ll have complete control over the virus in the next day or two, before they eventually leave the room. Is this finally enough to convince Meg that the Chief is bad news? Signs still point to no!

At the very least, Meg does decide that this is a good opportunity to snoop around the Chief’s office, prompting your return upstairs. There you’ll find a ‘Small Key’ in his desk drawer; which in addition to unlocking a drawer in the reference room (as Meg speculates aloud), it will also allow you to unlock roughly a half dozen other cabinets and drawers you’ll have found across the building — all containing additional healing items and handgun bullets. (Plus an extra file or two, maybe? It’s hard to keep track of what’s actually locked.) Opening that drawer will reveal to you none other than the ‘8mm Film,’ which Meg determines to watch despite the risks. (“If I watch this, I will — fine. In either case, I’ve come this far. I’ll stick it through to the end.”) This’ll eventually lead you back down to the first floor in search of a projector to play it on, but not before you pick up another phone call from Jack in your office: He’s eager to tell you about the connection between the Chief and the [RING] program, as well as the incidents which occurred in Japan surrounding the “video called RING.” Meg responds by telling Jack that she’s already well aware of all this, and that she even has the tape in her possession already; marking a rare instance in which Meg seems to actually be ahead of one of the other characters for a change. Score one for our leading lady! It’s at this point that Jack mentions that Sadako’s body is being held at the CDC — yet another piece of information that we already know from reading files. Naturally, Meg tells Jack that she’s still a couple steps ahe– wait, hold on. As it turns out, Meg seems completely taken aback by this news — like she hasn’t been paying attention to any of the files we’ve picked up? Go ahead and take that point back, I guess.

Jack still has more to say: “After all the incidents concerning RING in Japan, the curse changed shape into a virus, and caused another epidemic in Japan.” This is actually some key information, as I think it’s an attempt to tie the events of Rasen back into the movie canon; picking up with the proliferation of the Ring Virus at the end of the novel, and insinuating that was somehow happening at the same time as the events of the Ring 2 movie? Unfortunately, the events of the books simply don’t parse with how the films deviate: “Movie Sadako” is a completely different character from “Book Sadako” — the former completely lacking in the scheming and long-term plotting that the latter possesses. Before Jack can provide some sort of explanation that makes any of this make sense, he suddenly warns us not to mess around with [RING] any more, before just as quickly being cut off from the call — disconnected by the apparition of that young girl. As Meg attempts to figure out what just happened, Lukino walks into the room, and delivers a bluntly threatening message: “I’m sorry, but it’s the Chief’s orders. We need to hold you down for a while.” Meg is reasonably alarmed by this order, and speculates that the Chief is wise to her being in possession of the 8mm film. So, she does the only reasonable thing you can do when told you’re about to be held down / restrained against your will: She runs the hell away, while Lukino stays standing in Meg’s office shouting “Where do you think you’re going? Wait!”

It’s at this point that you need to make your way back downstairs, where you can find Chris still working in her office. Meg remarks to herself that Chris likely “hasn’t heard the Chief’s orders to hold me down,” and asks her if there’s a room where she can watch the film. Chris points her in the direction of the ‘Audio / Visual’ room on the second floor, and tells you that there’s “a key somewhere around here” that you’ll need to open up. Conveniently, you can actually see said key spinning around in clear view at the top of the frame during this entire conversation, sparing you a potentially tedious hunt for it. With the key in hand, you can now enter the A/V room, and finally view the infamous tape for yourself — Meg casually remarking “I wonder what’s on it… Although I don’t want to be cursed to death.” Before you get a chance to second-guess this whole plan, you’re thrust into a cutscene, where the cursed tape (ripped straight from the 1998 Ring movie) plays in its entirety. On completion, Meg seems reasonably flummoxed by its contents, as the young girl can again be seen standing behind her. Cue a fade to black, and Meg immediately re-awakening within the Imaginary world. Without any commentary on her part upon loading back into the [RING] game, you’re left again without any sense of direction or goal, and made to wander around aimlessly until you stumble into your next objective.

Eventually, you may attempt to explore a previously locked door within the basement, despite picking up nothing in the way of a new key for it. Behind it, you’ll find a brigade member standing in a combat pose in front of a room labeled as a ‘Chanel’ (presumably meant to read “Chapel”), who orders you to go fetch him a grenade launcher and its ammunition. Remarkably, he actually gives you clear directions on where they are: The ammo is “in the kitchen on the first floor,” while the launcher itself is “in that warehouse in the annex.” (The latter location is meant to correspond to the room above the cryo pod chamber.) While it’s nice to have a clear sense of direction for a change, there is a small problem here: There’s a good chance that you’ll have already explored both these rooms (if not every other room available to you) prior to finding this dude and getting your objective! Needless to say, the launcher and ammo aren’t there on these initial visits — not made visible within the environment until being told exactly where they are. On the bright side, at least the game’s giving you a grenade launcher here — as well as a Steyr AUG assault rifle you’ll find next to the grenade rounds in the kitchen. Bring these new armaments back to the basement as part of your round trip, and the brigade member will order you to “use it to blow away the enemies inside!” For some reason, Meg chooses this moment to get into an argument about why it’s her job to charge into a room and take down a particularly tough monster. The brigade member responds by telling her “If you don’t do it, you’re going to die. Just give up and shoot!” Still not understanding the full gravity of the situation, Meg will claim that “Even if it gets me, it’s not that I’m going to die.” Whatever you’ve gotta do to psych yourself up, I guess.

In any case, it’ll probably take all of the grenades you have on hand to destroy the foul beast — using up the only ‘Grenade Rounds’ you’ll have access to over the course of the game. (You’ll later find ‘Napalm Rounds’ that slot into the launcher just as readily, and which appear to do comparable damage.) Immediately after taking down the beast, the brigade member will walk in and thank you for saving everyone from certain doom, before further asking you to “help the guys on the upper floors.” This’ll bring you back to the first floor, where you’ll run into another brigade member who turns out to be… Jack? As in, your ex-boyfriend and frequent phone caller? He seems just as surprised as you to find you “inside that game,” with Meg only now speculating that [RING] might be “networked.” Jack will concur that “it’s a strange game,” and that he “doesn’t feel like I’m controlling anything…!” (Do yourself a favor and imagine Jack’s voice actor from the opening FMV reading all his lines here aloud.) It’s at this point that Jack will notice a monster sneak up behind Meg, and save her from it just in the nick of time! But Meg still seems to experience something like a panic attack as a result of this, and finds herself fainting once again. You know what that means, folks: It’s already time to head back to Reality.

Meg awakens on a medical table in the basement, with the Chief and Peter standing over her. Miraculously, they haven’t actually restrained her or done anything shady while she’s been unconscious: All they had wanted to do from the start is to draw some blood from her — to test for signs of “a particular virus” in her. When Meg mentions that Lukino had threatened to “hold her down,” the Chief responds by saying “Hold? I guess you could put it that way.” The idea had apparently been to have Lukino discreetly bring Meg down to the lab for testing in a way that wouldn’t cause panic among the rest of the staff, which would’ve entailed “holding” Meg in the room for a while longer as the other employees were receiving their own tests. Truly an incredible failure to communicate, which I am curious to know how it was originally phrased / written in Japanese? In any case, the trio go on to discuss the virus, where the Chief and Peter claim that they don’t yet know its infection method. Peter even goes on to “joke” that “There is no infection method… Perhaps there is no such thing for this virus.” (Ha! Scientist humor.) When Meg speculates that the virus might be a “curse,” this sets the Chief off on another one of his memorable meltdowns: “Meg! You’ve been mentioning programs and curses lately! And you call yourself a research scientist!” At a point during this tirade, the Chief even swats Peter’s arm away as his subordinate tries to calm him down. Great stuff all around.

The conversation ends with the Chief sending you back to your office, where you’re intended to stay until the rest of the testing is completed and the lockdown order is lifted. Can’t blame the boss for this one: Meg has been nothing but a huge pain in the ass on her first day on the job! On re-entering your office though, Lukino follows after you, so that he can apologize for his prior poor word choices. (“I’m sorry about earlier… I realize I phrased it badly.”) Not only that, but he has a confession to make: He was actually a good friend of Robert’s, and so he’s been trying to look out for you this whole time! (“You… were friends with Robert? Then… Then — You could have said so much earlier!”) The incident between you two in the reference room from earlier? That was just Lukino attempting to pull you out before the Chief found you in there, since he figures the room is likely under constant surveillance. After discussing how far Robert was able to get in his investigation, Lukino remarks that they weren’t able to get past a certain door down in the basement, and that Meg is likely to be confronted by the same roadblock. But Lukino has a plan in mind: To shut off power to the entire building – disabling its security in the process – and give Meg a three minute window to get from her office down into the temporarily unlocked area. You’ll only have the one chance to make it there in time though, and you’re both likely to lose your jobs if / when the Chief catches on to your scheming.

Recognizing the risks, Meg offers to be the one to drop the power, and to keep Lukino from putting himself on the line. But Lukino is adamant that he gets to play his part: “Robert died! Do you think I’m not regretting his death!? I’m regretting it too! I want to go through what he was investigating until the end… If I was smarter, I’d have done it myself!” Some clunky wording aside, I think this is a genuinely neat moment; where a character you’ve been misled into fearing turns out to be completely on your side, and helps you in a moment where you need it most. And so, you both commit to a plan in which Lukino will drop the power three hours from then, and provide Meg the opportunity to escape her office / sneak into the basement. Before heading off, Meg thanks Lukino for what he’s about to do for her. It’s here where Lukino makes another confession to Meg: “I’m doing it for Robert, and for myself. And I have a girlfriend named Kathy, too. I can’t do anything too drastic.” Finally putting the pieces together from a conversation Meg had with Kathy earlier, she tells Lukino “You guys are a great couple. I’m counting on you for her sake, too.” After he leaves, Meg has little else to do but head into her office, where she immediately receives a fax from Jack.

In a written message, Jack goes over the details of his findings on Sadako; summarizing her backstory, theorizing as to the extent of her powers, and blaming the Chief of the CDC for “bringing havoc to our country” by meddling with the virus. Admitting that he’s unaware of a method to effectively lift the curse (“Apparently you need to help the curse propagate, but I can’t think of a way how”), he suggests that the next best thing would be for you to find Sadako’s body, and work to synthesize a vaccine from a sample of the Ring Virus in her. After reading Jack’s message, Meg enters deep into thought: “RING… Lift Sadako’s curse? Vaccine? A public experiment using her mother… Trapped in a well for 30 years… She hates humans this much?… It’s impossible for someone like me to lift her curse. At least if I had the virus… A vaccine. Even if I can’t lift the curse, if it’s a virus… A vaccine.” In case you’re having a hard time following along, let me break it down: See, a vaccine is a cure for a vir– wait, hold on. I’m actually being told by my editor that I shouldn’t explain the definition of a “vaccine” for a full paragraph as a drawn-out comedy bit? Oh well. Getting back on track: Meg decides to use her remaining time with the power still on to log back into [RING] one last time, so that she can “finish this game before nightfall” and perhaps “figure everything out” from within it.

This really will be our last excursion in the Imaginary world, and so we should really make the most of it. In exploring every available room for the fifth or sixth time, you’ll find many of them restocked with healing items and ammo to pick up, as well as some mysterious ‘Parts’ labeled ‘A’ through ‘C.’ One of these parts will be hidden in a bathroom on the first floor, which requires shooting the door with a grenade / napalm round in order to bust it down (I told you there’d be one more of these odd doors!) — providing ammo caches for every firearm in your possession, and ultimately allowing you to assemble the game’s ultimate weapon: A massive shoulder-mounted ‘Rocket Launcher,’ which fires rockets with a blast radius so large, you’re practically guaranteed to kill yourself in attempting to use it. It’s a truly baffling choice to have you assemble the weapon at this point in the game, as you’ll have to kill practically every enemy the game sees fit to populate this section of the game with in the process of collecting the parts — leaving you with no one left to even fire your rockets at! And it’s not like you can take the rocket launcher with you back into Reality, so really: What’s even the point here? Well, as it turns out, there is none: Assembling the rocket launcher is a completely optional pursuit, and so you’re totally free to skip it if you just wanna wrap this story up already.

On re-entering the first floor, Meg will notice the young girl appear again, and seem to encourage you to follow behind. She’ll phase right through a door leading to one of the office rooms, which you should head into for yourself. And it is here where you’ll find the last brigade member you’ll encounter, who proceeds to reveal the game’s big plot twist over the course of a conversation. Are y’all ready for this? I’m literally taking a deep breath on this end before I start trying to type this all out. Phew. Alright, here it goes: The brigade member asks Meg if she’s found the vaccine yet, which Meg somehow seems confused by the mention of. Blowing right past the question, Meg chooses to ask her own — inquiring as to what she “needs to do to finish this game?” This prompts the man to ask if there was “interference,” before laying down the hard truth: “Your mission was to enter the LOOP program, contact Sadako, and obtain the vaccine.” When Meg only demonstrates further confusion, the squaddie is left to admit that “Robert was worried. I guess his bad feelings came true.” With Meg now completely indignant and asking after Robert, the brigade member continues: “When you were converted into the LOOP world using a converter program called RING, your memory was jumbled up thanks to interference from Yamamura’s brain.” In other words: “[RING] is not a game. [RING] is a converter to enter the LOOP world… In other words, the past memory of Yamamura.”

As if your mind hasn’t already been blown by this point, there’s the coup de grâce: Remember the “prank call” you received at the beginning of the game, informing you that you’d be dead in seven days? That wasn’t Sadako’s doing: That was your team attempting to remind you that “We will die in 7 more days” — that the Ring Virus is already on the verge of wiping out all life as we know it, and that your finding the vaccine represents the last hope for humanity. Somehow, they thought the best way to convey all that was to simply message you with the word “DEAD” in huge letters? (“You saw the message that we wrote — [DEAD], right?”) With all revealed, the brigade member runs off to deal with some unseen / unheard enemy outside of the room, leaving you with one last reminder of your mission: Re-enter LOOP, make contact with Sadako, obtain a sample of her blood, and transport the “DNA sequence” back into true reality so that the vaccine can be synthesized. Naturally, Meg doesn’t seem to understand or accept a single word of this explanation, but we as players should recognize it to be the truth. And when I experienced this twist for myself the first time, I had but one reaction to it: A full uninterrupted minute of laughter.

So, let’s put aside for now how absolutely nonsensical this revelation truly is, and how the logic of it starts to fall apart under the most basic of scrutiny. For now, I just wanna focus on one aspect of it: The fact that it has almost nothing to actually do with the reveal seen in the original Loop novel, other than sharing the same codename in describing a supposed “simulation program.” The way that LOOP is described in the game, we’re not dealing with an computer-generated vision of the world: We’re exploring the memories stored within Sadako Yamamura’s brain, which means that Sadako actually exists in the real world — that she isn’t just the result of some computer program gone haywire. Not only does that mean that the Ring Virus that is currently threatening to destroy humanity must’ve come directly from Sadako (which would seem to pick up from where Rasen left the story off), but that this exploration of her memories is likely meant to correspond with a period in time shortly before the virus achieved its critical mass? So, in a sense, the “Reality” we’ve experienced is technically a vision of past events that also occurred in what we’ve been calling the “Imaginary” world? Does this mean that Meg and Robert actually worked at the CDC building back in the day, and were chosen to reinhabit their bodies within LOOP? Or are the “real” Meg and Robert just two randomly chosen members of the brigade — assigned to inhabit a pair of scientists within LOOP, in order to insert themselves as close to Sadako as they could manage? I certainly don’t think we’re dealing with any “clones” here, like how Kaoru Futami was particularly suited to take control of Ryuji Takayama in the novel’s version of Loop — where he represented an instance of the simulation manifesting something in the real world, allowing him to seamlessly re-assimilate himself within the simulation.

Perhaps you’re already beginning to see the cracks appearing in this flimsy attempt to tie Terror’s Realm to Loop. But believe it or not, there are still a few more plot twists left for us to uncover, as we prepare ourselves for the game’s final act. In the interest of clarity in the interim: From here on out, what we’ve previously referred to as ‘Reality’ will henceforth be known as “LOOP,” while what we once called the ‘Imaginary’ world will now be referred to by me as “shitty reality.” Got it? Good. So, after exploring the rest of the second floor for resources, you’ll inevitably wind up heading back downstairs. Here, you’ll spot the little girl again, and follow her into the chanel chapel from earlier. It’s at this point that she’ll finally deign to speak with you, and that Meg will ask her who she is. After remarking that Meg is “amazingly calm,” the girl will reveal herself as… Shizuko Yamamura? As in, the former disgraced psychic, and Sadako’s mother? She’ll “explain” her childlike appearance as the result of reincarnating herself “trying to protect Sadako” — lament that she somehow “ended up like this.” If I’m attempting to fill in the blanks for us here, I’d theorize that Shizuko shares some of the same powers as Sadako from the book — that she’s capable of making women give birth to clones or whatever. In any case, we’re apparently supposed to accept that this is – in fact – Shizuko, and not question why the developers chose to depict her in this form. (The answer is likely because they thought having a little girl follow you around would somehow be “creepier” than the apparition of a grown woman.)

Shizuko will go on to explain how she’s been attempting to manipulate events and communicate with you in LOOP, but that Sadako’s interference / control over that world has made it difficult for her. (Let that serve as a reminder that within shitty reality, ghosts are apparently very much real.) Shizuko will re-explain that LOOP is “a virtual world created by Sadako.” At the same time, she also refers to it as “a world of the past that you humans created using Sadako’s brain in order to survive;” implying that scientists within shitty reality kept hold of Sadako’s real-life corpse, and are using it to directly produce the LOOP simulation. (Again, this is completely different from how the simulation in the Loop novel works, and similar purely in name.) But these nuances are completely lost on Meg, who still has to ask Shizuko such basic questions as “What is a virtual world,” and “What is the RING?” Shizuko has to explain the answers to these questions again, before putting her foot down to say that she “won’t say anything back” (probably meant to read as “I’m done repeating myself”). All she really wants of you is for you to “save Sadako” — implying that she wants you to put her out of her misery. You’re meant to accomplish this by killing Sadako within LOOP, which conveniently aligns with the objective assigned to you by your brigade to obtain the digital “biological” sample from her. Of course, Meg will insist she “doesn’t have such a thing” as an objective, and that her only motivation is “to make clear why Robert died.”

Shizuko will try to tell Meg that getting into contact with Sadako will answer all of Meg’s questions, and that she’s only temporarily forgotten about her mission due to the effects of the LOOP interference. This will finally seem to make something click in Meg, as she goes on to respond: “… So you’re saying that what I think is reality is actually inside a game, and what I think is a game is reality? So your daughter, Sadako Yamamura… can control even the memories and emotions of humans? I… Why did Robert have to die, then!?” Meg is so close here to realizing the true import of her mission, but still hung up on such a trivial detail! So, Shizuko decides to throw her a bone, in the hopes that it might focus Meg on what she needs to do: She informs Meg that Robert is still alive “in reality, in this world.” After repeating Meg’s objective back to her for a third time in this conversation, and trying to remind her that the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, all Meg can think to do in response is demand that Shizuko show her proof that Robert’s still alive. Surely getting sick of Meg’s bullshit at this point, Shizuko explains that “Robert is infected with the virus. There’s no way he could be here. Two more days until the cursed virus covers the entire world, and destroys humanity. You have no time left.” When Meg seems to interpret this limited time as meaning that “there’s nothing [she] can do now,” Shizuko finally seems to run out of patience, insisting that “2 days is more than enough! All you need to do is come into contact with Sadako. Isn’t tha [sic] simple?” Frustratingly, Meg will still refuse to believe anything she’s hearing here; but go on to admit that she “doesn’t care anymore,” and that she’ll play along if it “means that Robert will be saved because of it.”

This is good enough for Shizuko – as close as she’ll get to making Meg understand, she reckons – and so she’s finally ready to take her leave. But not before telling Meg to return to the past version of this room within LOOP, where she’ll leave behind “something good” for her to pick up and use. This seems to be the moment where Meg finally realizes that the building she’s inside of in shitty reality is the same CDC building found in LOOP — finally catching her up to what we realized for ourselves three hours ago. Lastly, Shizuko mentions that she’s “unlocked the door to Sadako’s room” — at least within shitty reality. She suggests that before you see Sadako within LOOP, “it might be better if you met Sadako in this world” first, so that you can better understand “where Sadako’s hatred, where our hatred, comes from.” Having said her piece, Shizuko walks through the nearest wall, and puts you back in control over Meg. At this point, you might be tempted to make Meg just slam her head into the nearest wall repeatedly, in the hopes of cracking through her thick skull. There’s a fine line between a character who’s struggling to accept that “the world they know” isn’t real (à la Neo in The Matrix), and a character who’s just stubborn in their refusal to listen to what anyone else tells them. Meg seems to fall squarely under the latter, and it makes sympathizing with her plight and perspective at this point in the story increasingly difficult — to the point where it can be genuinely aggravating to have to endure these circular conversations. Maybe there’s a bit more nuance to how this all reads in its original Japanese? I somehow doubt it though: These seem like fundamental issues with how Meg is characterized.

As it turns out, you can totally skip visiting Sadako’s room within shitty reality, and miss out on a somewhat important cutscene. I know this because I accidentally walked right past it on my own first playthrough. (It’s a room just down the hall from the chapel.) But let’s assume that you remember to actually stop by Sadako’s room, and discover what remains of her: Two brains housed in glass jars (where I have to assume the second brain is probably meant to be Shizuko’s), hooked up to an elaborate machine. Nearing Sadako’s brain will trigger a telepathic vision in Meg, where she’s able to see the press event where Shizuko was declared a “fraud” — another scene ripped straight from the 1998 movie. The scene is intercut with / overlaid with commentary by Meg, as she watches the moment where Sadako psychically kills the reporter who leads the charge against her mother. Her voice-acted response to this revelation is particularly choice, in terms of both verbiage and performance: “Why?! Is it your nature, or have you been persecuted by the society and now you detest it? Is this how you feel about the human race?” Surprisingly, Sadako actually seems to answer back, communicating directly within Meg’s brain: “This is human race. Humans fear persecuting those with extraordinary powers to protect themself.” I’ll point out that this English-language voiceover is actually delivered by a Japanese seiyū (Sachiko Okada), and that much of what she says is difficult to clearly interpret. This would be an instance where having subtitles available for the cutscenes would really come in handy — a feature present in the game’s original Japanese release (albeit solely providing Japanese-language text).

You can choose at this point to continue exploring shitty reality — collecting all the resources available to you, assembling the rocket launcher, or whatever else strikes your fancy. But ultimately, it’s all a totally meaningless exercise, since you won’t be taking any of it with you back into LOOP. I’d recommend instead that you head directly for the cryo pod room from here, return to your tube, and re-awaken once more within the simulation. When Meg comes to, she’ll notice a handgun sitting on her desk, prompting her to deliver another frustrating line: “Which is the game world… I’m starting to completely lose track.” (For fuck’s sake, Meg!) In any case, this should clue you in to the fact that the LOOP world is about to become unsafe, and that you’ll need to keep that piece on you if you want to survive. You’ll have a chance here to save your game before approaching the exit to your lab, at which point Lukino will shut down the power as promised. This prompts a three minute on-screen timer, giving you just enough time in order to make it down to the basement and past the previously locked door — one that appears immediately before the chapel room, which would also prevent access to where Sadako’s corpse is being housed. Meg is clever enough to realize she should keep the door unlocked behind her, so that she can exit even after the security re-activates. It’s also at this point that the classic second floor exploration music kicks back in, almost like a final joke at the player’s expense! Do your best to endure it, though: The end is well and truly nigh.

You won’t be able to immediately enter into the chapel or Sadako’s room, and will instead have to search for an unlocked ‘Isolation’ room first. On finding the right room, you’ll discover a patient experiencing some sort of excruciating pain — screaming “GGG-BBBB… ARGH,” and generally not looking so great. Curiously, this will prompt Meg to ask “W-What are you?”, before demanding that the dying man “Give me a break!” Before you know it, the man will have transformed into the big ape-type enemy seen in shitty reality, prompting Meg to question if “this really is a virtual world?” Yes, Meg: It is! But also, remember that the monsters still exist in shitty reality too! After putting the monster down, Meg will enter into a full-blown existential crisis: “… This is the — This is the only way!” Shizuko will phase through the wall to reassure you that what you did is morally okay: “This is how humans stay alive. Besides, this is a virtual world. You have done nothing wrong.” This doesn’t stop Meg from continuing to blame herself for having to put down a killer creature: “… A murderer! Are you saying there is nothing wrong with a murderer!?” Shizuko has to remind you that the vicious mutant you defended yourself from “was no longer human,” and that this is – in fact – “a virtual world,” where absolutely nothing you’re doing even matters!

Meg will insist that Shizuko simply doesn’t understand because she’s “not human,” which seems to cut Shizuko deeply. She reaffirms that in life, neither she or her daughter were ever given the benefit of being treated like humans, and that it’s ridiculous that a human should dare to lecture her about how “murder is wrong” as the rest of the population continues “to kill each other to this day.” Realizing that Meg is probably too dense to keep up with anything she’s saying now, she takes the opportunity to remind you that “if you don’t get the vaccine soon, many more people will die in the real world.” After Shizuko walks away from Meg [and through another wall], the door to the chapel will unlock, where you can find a curious sight: Shizuko’s corpse in a bodybag, with an ‘Emergency Power Key’ hovering above her. On picking up the key Shizuko left behind, her ghost will appear again to Meg, prompting – you guessed it – another stupidly stubborn remark from Meg: “… I really don’t care which world is reality anymore. Anyway… Anyway, if I use this… If I use this to meet Sadako, Robert will be saved??” Shizuko informs you that in order to enter Sadako’s room within LOOP, you’ll have to take an elevator down from the Chief’s office upstairs, which necessitates turning the building’s power back on first. She’ll take her leave again at this point by phasing directly through the floor, which Meg seems strangely nonplussed by.

During this final act of the game, you’ll be able to revisit every room that’s been available to you during your previous time within LOOP, where you can stockpile handgun ammo and healing items. (You can also find a small handful of additional files, including a particularly touching one where Lukino entrusts you to keep Kathy safe in case something happens to him.) Note that the handgun is the only firearm you’ll have access to, and that the enemies you’ll be facing from here on out (mostly of the weakest variety, luckily) are liable to infinitely respawn as you explore the space. What’s curious to note is that monsters seem to demonstrate improved tactics during this phase of the game: In addition to the sneak attacks you’re already used to, they’re now able to shut the lights off as you explore rooms (after you reactivate the power, that is), and to emerge more suddenly from out of seemingly nowhere. I dare say that if they had been this capable through the previous segments where you explored shitty reality, it’d have made for a more intense / thrilling survival horror experience! But alas, the developers saw fit to save these behaviors for nearly the very end of the game. At the very least, the standard enemies you’ll face here tend to go down in just three or four handgun shots, so you can see that the developers are attempting to balance the scales here in a sense.

After turning the power back on in the electrical room [using the same 1-9-5-1 code from before], you’ll start to head down the first floor hallway, when Meg seems to hear screaming from an adjacent room. (Naturally, there’s no audio cue for this that the player will get to hear.) The game will automatically take control of Meg as she enters into the building’s courtyard, and finds Kathy being attacked by another one of the big ape enemies. Meg will tell Kathy to run, so that she can take care of the monster herself. After doing so, you won’t be able to find Kathy hiding out anywhere within the rest of the building, so don’t even bother trying to pursue her. Instead, you should carefully explore the rest of the courtyard, and find an especially well-hidden secret weapon behind a generator box: A ‘Japanese Katana,’ which the inventory info panel describes as “Very sharp, yet has high artistic value.” You can use this as a fallback weapon in case you run out of handgun ammo, or attempt to wield it as your primary weapon to try and conserve that ammo for the boss battles ahead. Either way, it’s not particularly practical due to its sluggish attack speed, even as it’s sometimes capable of killing monsters in a single strike. Your mileage may vary.

Your goal here, as Shizuko explained earlier, is to fight your way back up to the Chief’s office, and find an elevator hidden behind a bookcase. With the power on, you’ll be able to ride it down into an otherwise inaccessible area within the basement; but not before getting attacked by another monster while trapped inside the cramped cabin, in a uniquely cinematic little sequence. Stepping out of the elevator, you’ll find yourself in a large laboratory, where you’re given the opportunity to walk a brief distance within it. You’ll eventually be interrupted by another one of the game’s pre-rendered cutscenes, in which the Chief emerges from the elevator to confront you one last time. You’ll actually get to hear his voice here, as he frustratedly questions why “you and Robert want to have it your own way.” After claiming / bragging that he’ll soon be the “one to control the virus,” Meg demonstrates the full extent of her obliviousness in a final admission of stupidity: “Virus? What are you talking about Chief?” Hey, Meg? I’ve got a bit of news for you: THE CHIEF IS EVIL!! He’s the one responsible for trying to control the Ring Virus, and inadvertently dooming the entire planet! People have been telling you as much for the past four hours now! Holy shit, Meg: What’s it gonna take for you to accept that you’re dealing with a bad guy, here? Does he literally have to transform into a grotesque monster right in front of you? Because that’s obviously what’s about to happen right now.

To Meg’s credit, she does finally figure the Chief out slightly before he transforms: She accuses him of infecting Robert with the Ring Virus, which the Chief owns up to. (“Robert? Yeah, he wanted to know about the virus so I did him a favor: I gave him that virus to satisfy his curiosity.”) Afterwards, he explains that Meg will be “completely overtaken by the test virus” in the next 24 hours (obviously unaware that this is all a simulation), and that his plan to deliberately spread the Ring Virus into the population represents his vision for the future: “For our species sake – for humanity – Sadako’s curse will sweep all over the world transforming it! So why not improve yourself with the virus? The virus promotes us — allows us beings to evolve further.” Meg, for her part, seems unconvinced by this plan. After calling the Chief a “bastard” for killing Robert, she goes on to accuse him of just wanting to use the virus “only for [himself].” The Chief pretty much admits as much, which seems to prompt Sadako to involve herself in the situation: She triggers a transformation in the Chief, while telling him “No you can’t. You’ll never be able to control this force, ever ever ever!” Cue some good old-fashioned body horror, as the Chief succumbs to the Ring Virus he had convinced himself he had complete control over — transforming into an enemy type that you’ve already encountered / killed dozens of times before this point. (For posterity: Their filename refers to them as a ‘Kimaila.’) A truly ironic fate.

Of course, this is meant to be an climactic boss battle; so you’ll have appropriately intense music (🔊) to accompany it, while the monster is given extra health in order to drag the fight out for a while. Unfortunately, there’s an especially easy-to-trigger exploit you might stumble onto by accident here, which renders the whole battle a completely one-sided affair in your favor: If you circle behind the Chief’s desk in this room, the monster won’t be able to path-find their way around it, allowing you to shoot them uninterrupted by any of their attacks. If you don’t approach the fight in this way, you’ll just have to deal with it like a standard monster encounter; where you attempt to create distance between the two of you, and fire intermittent shots when you can. He’ll probably combo you a bunch of times if you attempt to fight “fairly” in this way, and give you occasion to actually consume some of those healing jellies you’ve been accumulating. So, go ahead and pick whichever method you prefer here, I guess? Either way, you’ll eventually triumph over the vile villain, and prompt Meg to reflect on this whole sordid ordeal: “… To think that someone like this can exist. Power, glory… it’s all stupid. It’s all stupid, don’t you think, Robert?” Credit where credit is due: Meg’s right on the money with this assessment.

From this laboratory, you can access the room in which Sadako Yamamura’s corpse is being held. What you’ll find within is a cryo pod not dissimilar to the ones seen in shitty reality, housing a red-headed Sadako clad in purple kimono. What might stand out to you is the fact that Sadako’s appearance here doesn’t match with any depiction of her seen on film, or even as she’s described within the books. If you didn’t know you were playing a game ostensibly meant to adapt Ring, you’d have no idea this model was meant to depict the iconic antagonist — that you’re looking at anything other than a generic character dressed in Japanese garb. Ideally, the developers could’ve dressed her in an all-white gown, and grimed it up with tattered ends and water damage. At the very least, her long hair should’ve been draped across her face, which would’ve also given them an excuse to not have to render those facial features. But alas: This is the Sadako we got, and we’re just gonna have to make due. At least when Meg lays eyes on her, she seems to immediately intuit that this is Sadako — without having to be told so by anyone else. Now that’s what I call character development.

Shizuko does appear in the room shortly after Meg, in order to  confirm that this is her daughter’s body. When Meg presses Shizuko as to her and Sadako’s “objective,” Shizuko can only respond by saying “Who knows?” Clearly, she has no control or influence over Sadako at this point, for reasons the least of which include the fact that Sadako isn’t even a conscious being in this state. All Shizuko can do is speculate that after having spent thirty years at the bottom of a well, Sadako probably “doesn’t want humans, you humans, to do whatever you please” — that she likely “just hates humans” as a matter of general philosophy. When Meg is asked if she can even begin to understand what it must’ve been like for Sadako to be trapped within the well, Meg admits that she doesn’t (duh), but argues that Sadako’s torture still isn’t “an excuse to kill.” Before Shizuko can get into another prolonged argument with Meg, Sadako actually begins to “wake up” — moaning “UUUUUH” and “UUUGH,” before suddenly levitating and clipping through her cryo pod. Only saying the word “S K Y,” she floats through the ceiling, leaving Meg to scream in shock. (“AAAH…!”) Shizuko speculates that her daughter likely “wants to go someplace where she can see the sky,” and determines that the most likely spot is the building’s roof. Convenient, seeing as it’s also the last spot on the map we’ve yet to explore!

At this point, you’re probably not gonna wanna waste any time in heading up to the roof, and finally getting this story over with. But before you do, there is one last thing you might want to do: After that last cutscene plays out, the game automatically kicks you back out into the basement hallway, and probably expects you to head straight for your objective. But if you should turn back around and head back into Sadako’s chamber, you can investigate a desk drawer, and pick up a secret key item: A ‘Silver Ring,’ complete inside its box. On examining the item from your ‘S-Item’ menu (for key items), the description simply reads “Apparently this is Sadako Yamamura’s.” Curious, as Sadako is never actually seen to wear a ring in any of the Ring books or movies? Even more curious is the fact that this Silver Ring has absolutely no purpose in the final version of the game — no apparent function that players have been able to discover. And boy howdy, has this “easter egg” seemed to inspire some amount of curiosity in the past few years, after featuring in a countdown of the “10 Most Mysterious Unsolved Objects in Video Games” by the YouTuber oddheader. (Howdy, duder!) Where speculation as to its purpose ranges from the developers believing that the title “Ring” refers to an actual ring, all the way to theories that it was included as part of a real-life proposal by one of the developers to their partner; I’m just gonna go with the simple explanation of it being a remnant of cut content — possibly something that would’ve played a factor in determining one of multiple endings. As far as the final product is concerned though, we only get the one possible conclusion, and we’re just about to reach it.

The door at the top of the staircase that was once locked will be suddenly accessible, with an indication on first inspecting it that “the door is broken…” After picking up some final healing jellies and handgun ammo in a bulkhead room, you’ll emerge outside with Shizuko appearing by your side. Shizuko will admit that for as much as she hates humans – that despite the abhorrent way she and her daughter were treated in life – that doesn’t give Sadako “the right to annihilate humanity.” She’ll confess her guilt in not being able to teach her daughter what it means to love / be loved, and beg Meg to “release her soul.” As Shizuko fades away for the final time, and as Sadako locks eyes with Meg, our protagonist is left to deliver a final poignant observation: “Let her rest…? It’s just people killing each other.” For whatever it’s worth (and again, for as clunky as the translation here may be), this is another moment in the game that I rate as fairly effective: The shots of Sadako standing atop a water tower – cast in front of the full moon, observing the crows flying around her – do a lot to sell her as the tragic villain here. It’s clear that Meg has finally accepted what she must do, but that she isn’t particularly thrilled by the prospect. To save countless lives, you have no choice now but to take one.

Sadako will chase you around the rooftop while leaving an afterimage behind her. When she gets in close, she’ll attack you with her hair, and hop around like a jiāngshī to dodge your handgun shots. In fact, you’re actually better off using the katana in this battle, as it is actually capable of striking anywhere in a 360° circle surrounding you — able to hit Sadako even as she rotates behind you. After you inflict enough damage on her, she’ll dissipate into a swarm of crows, who you’ll have to swat down in order to force her to reappear in her human form. You may notice that none of these attacks / behaviors register as particularly “Sadako-esque!” One could make the argument that trying to translate Sadako’s jerky walk and deathly stare into a video game might not make for a compelling boss battle on its own, and that some creative liberty had to be taken here  to invent more conventional “attacks” for her. Hell, you could even make a case that anything goes in the virtual world here, and that Sadako is choosing to envision herself with the powers [and appearance] she wishes she had. If that latter explanation were the case though, I’d have to wonder why Sadako didn’t choose to make herself even more powerful — tough enough that an office worker with a pistol and decorative sword isn’t capable of single-handedly taking her down?

You’ll have to knock Sadako’s human form down a total of three times in order to end the fight and complete the game. It can get a bit dicey if your handgun ammo begins to dwindle, or if you’re not having luck with timing the katana swings. If you do find yourself struggling in this final battle, then you may want to consider seeking out a secret weapon hidden on the rooftop: A grenade launcher [and ammo] tucked away in a far corner, which can knock Sadako’s human form down in a single shot. I’m honestly surprised that Tycoon were able to demonstrate restraint in not just stashing the rocket launcher here, and making their homage to Resident Evil tradition that much more blatant. Whatever your weapon of choice may be in slaying Sadako, the result will remain the same: A final pre-rendered cutscene will play to close out the game, showing Meg by Sadako’s side. The accursed onryō will hand you a vial containing the vaccine, apparently having done you the favor of having it already synthesized? Meg will ask if Sadako has changed her mind on the human race — if she believes now that they “deserve to survive after this?” Despite handing you the cure that will ensure their continued survival, Sadako will reply “To me, to us, the answer is no.” It’s still her belief that humans “don’t care about anything other than themselves.” Meg will attempt to reassure Sadako that she cares about her, in what I guess is supposed to be a hopeful moment that might change Sadako’s mind about this whole “revenge against humankind” thing? Sadako will even admit that what Meg says “sounds like the truth,” but it honestly doesn’t really seem to affect her outlook either way.

As Sadako finally dies, her body dissipates once more, as a crow (either carrying or symbolizing her spirit) flies into the distance — a final line of voiceover from Sadako saying… Well, truthfully, I can’t quite make out what she’s saying here? There’s a few words that are mumbled to the point of being completely unintelligible, before finishing with “[…] to kill each other, until everybody’s gone.” A final scene plays out shortly after this, in which Meg is back in shitty reality listening to her radio: A news broadcast reports on the fact that the cure for the Ring Virus has been put into full mass production, implying that Meg’s mission was a success. Hooray! Unfortunately, it seems like the rollout isn’t quick enough to ensure that everyone will get their dosage in time; causing “citizens desperate for the vaccine” to begin rioting, resulting in injuries and fatalities. As if this desperation somehow proves Sadako’s point, a dejected Meg (still clad in her combat gear) mutters to herself: “Killing, until everybody’s gone…” For a moment, you can spot Sadako watching over Meg in the background, before a cut to television static followed by a half-second shot of Sadako’s eye from the cursed videotape. And with that, Terror’s Realm is a wrap: Credits roll over the same music track that played while battling Sadako just minutes prior (🔊), before the game returns to the main menu. Nothing in the way of “New Game +” for you here, folks. I think Tycoon realized full well that The Ring isn’t a game to be replayed. After all: What’s there to get out of the game after having experienced its story? Something tells me that just handing a player a rocket launcher with infinite ammo isn’t gonna be quite enough to compel them to dive back into this particular Imaginary world.

So, with the game and its narrative finally finished, we can begin to answer some of the big questions: Which continuity is Terror’s Realm intended to slot into in terms of the wider Ring franchise? What led Tycoon to choose to adapt elements of Loop – a relatively obscure / somewhat detested novel – rather than focusing on the aspects of the successful film series? What’s the deal with all the mutants and monsters, and how do they factor into Sadako and her established powers? Or, to combine all these questions into a more concise one: What kind of game were Tycoon were originally developing here, before Asmik ordered them to turn in a “Ring” tie-in game? Because make no mistake, folks: What we’re looking at here could not have possibly been intended from the beginning of its development to have tied into Asmik’s ongoing movie franchise. There’s absolutely no way you set out to make a game with that clear objective in mind, and wind up turning out something like this. The only explanation that makes any sense here is that Tycoon were already developing something else completely – some original survival horror game concept – when the call came down from Asmik that they needed a Ring game as soon as possible. And so, rather than put this existing project on pause or have to start development on a new game from scratch; Tycoon decided to get a “head start” on their new job, by taking what they had so far for their survival horror game concept and repurposing it for a Ring game.

So, here’s where I try my best at pulling off a Koji Suzuki-esque twist, and reveal something I’ve been keeping from my readers this whole time: There are unused assets for the game that serve to prove my theory here. I believe that they indicate more than just the game having its original scope cut down at some point mid-development, and demonstrate no less than a complete change made to the game’s story and progression. First things first: Remember when I mentioned Design Kombinat earlier, and how they were commissioned to contribute to the game’s map design? Well, what I didn’t mention is that if you visit their Web 1.0-looking website (which is still online as of the time of this writing), you can find a page titled ‘OTHERS’ containing samples of some of their work — screenshots of some of the CGI environments they’ve conceptualized, produced on behalf of their clients. For our purposes here though, there are four screenshots of particular interest, labeled ‘Ring-SF-01’ through 04. Seeming to depict an elaborate science fiction headquarters / conference room, these four different angles on the room each share the same caption (translated here into English): “DC game ‘Ring’ Special Force headquarters image (not used due to scenario change).”^[6b] In addition to confirming the fact that the game’s original narrative was upended at a point during development, these scenes provide a clue as to what that narrative might’ve entailed: A game more centered around the operations of that “Special Force,” and their mission to rid the world of monsters.

This is further confirmed by the presence of unused character models on the game’s disc (catalogued on The Cutting Room Floor), which features variants of Robert, Kathy, and the Chief in full “Special Force / Brigade Member” armor; as well as “civilian” models for Jack and Robert, which also go unused in the final game. What’s most notable here is the fact that the Chief can be interpreted here as being originally intended as a fellow squadmate, which would seem to indicate that his role in the story underwent a massive change from “ally” to “antagonist.” (Or perhaps it was always his destiny to turn on the player character past a certain point?) Additional unused assets on the disc include some unseen inventory items, including a couple of additional key cards and a collection of four “chemical” items (‘Nitric Acid,’ ‘Sulphuric Acid,’ ‘Glycerin’ and ‘Nitroglycerin’), which would’ve likely factored into some additional key-hunting / puzzle-solving elements. But really, I don’t think we need all these scrapped assets to figure out what Terror’s Realm might’ve originally been intended to be: All we really need to do is look at what got repurposed within the game itself — what likely existed before Tycoon had to reshape everything around the elements of Ring. From there, we can make some fairly well-educated guesses as to the ways in which the game was hastily reconfigured to accommodate its sudden licensed element. So, what I’m gonna briefly do here is speculate on what I imagine the vision for Tycoon’s original game might’ve looked like. Of course, the key word is “speculate” here: I’m not presenting this as absolute fact or anything. But for what it’s worth, I’d be willing to put money down on my being pretty damn close here to knowing what the developers probably had in mind. Maybe one day in the future, someone will crack this case and get the testimony directly from one of the original devs themselves — maybe get hold of some design document that clearly spells out the narrative beats they had initially wanted to hit? But until that day comes, all we can do is theorize.

I’d figure that the original game would’ve presented you with a choice of character between Meg and Robert, in the same way that Resident Evil let you pick between Jill and Chris. Obviously, you’d both be members of the Special Force; living in a future society and doing your best to deal with some sort of post-apocalypse scenario, involving people mysteriously transforming into monsters. Given the emphasis on primate-esque / lizard-like designs, my bet is that the virus in question is meant to tie into concepts of “de-evolution” — reverting mankind’s DNA or whatever back into a more primitive form. Naturally, it’d fall on your chosen character to attempt to trace the source of this virus, and shut it down in order to prevent further deaths. Now, here’s where I’m gonna roll the dice on a big gamble: I’d wager that your mission would involve time-travel, potentially involving that big circular structure in the center of the Special Force headquarters (as seen in the Design Kombinat renderings). In going backward and forward in time, you’d be able to affect things in the future by changing them in the past — potentially solving puzzles, unlocking areas for exploration, and even stashing items in spots within the past where you can pick them back up in the future. (In a personal locker, perhaps?) To that end: The CDC building would serve as one of potentially several locations you’d be made to explore in the original game — perhaps even the most important one. And in order for the developers to populate the past, they would’ve designed NPCs the likes of those unwitting test subjects you find in the basement in Terror’s Realm — characters who all seem unusually distinct in their designs, given what their role in the final game ultimately amounts to.

“I should stay away from the men’s restroom.”
Concept renders produced by Design Kombinat / Katsuhiko Sakura.

If you’re thinking that all this so far sounds like it’d be too far from the premise of the Ring to even be worth recycling / repurposing for that license, let me drop this theory on you: I reckon that in addition to the game’s sci-fi elements, it’d also explore elements of Japanese spiritualism, and attribute the spread of the virus to man’s attempting to meddle with the supernatural. In pursuing that purpose, I’d bet that the onryō-type character that went on to become “Sadako” was always present in the game’s design, and always meant to serve as the main antagonist / source of the monsters. Not only that, but it’s my belief that Shizuko being “reincarnated” as a little girl is a half-baked rewrite for what is meant to be the younger version of that onryō antagonist — their depiction as a child, before they died and became a source of supernatural death and destruction. Perhaps you’d find her in the “care” of the CDC in the past, being treated as a child for some unknown disease? Maybe it’d eventually transpire that the CDC sought to experiment on her and try to weaponize her disease, leading to her becoming a vengeful spirit and wreaking havoc on humankind.

With that sort of premise originally in place, you can see how Tycoon might think they could strategically reinterpret and rearrange it in order to try and match it to Ring; especially with the knowledge that Loop centers around the concept of a computer simulation, effectively giving Tycoon carte blanche to convey an “Imaginary” world in whichever way they please. And if nobody playing the game has actually read Loop, so that they’d be able to recognize how the game’s interpretation of it doesn’t really match up? All the better! It’s a trick that certainly worked on all of us in the Western hemisphere, who have taken it on faith for the last twenty-two years that the game is more or less “based on a book” that none of us have actually bothered to cross-reference. Bearing all this in mind, The Ring: Terror’s Realm serves as a truly fascinating insight into developer scrappiness: Given the directive from their publisher to turn around a major licensed title on a short deadline, and faced with the prospect of having to abandon a game they had already been working on – which they had already collaborated with the studio Scarab to design unique-looking monsters for – they instead found a way to put all that existing work toward their new assignment. What’s more, they didn’t even have to completely reimagine their core gameplay in order to accommodate this new narrative: Survival horror would’ve been “close enough” to what a Ring tie-in game called for.

As long as we’re back on the subject of gameplay here, let me make one thing very clear here: The game Tycoon were making was always going to rate as a sub-par Resident Evil clone — woefully outdated just four years out from that PlayStation original. I honestly don’t think the developers knew well enough to realize the ways in which their controls and camera were janky, or to recognize how momentum-destroying it is to force players to backtrack across the entire game world multiple times over. Sure, rearranging the game’s progression and having to condense everything into a singular setting probably exacerbated these issues; but I’d wager they’d have still been present in whatever initial vision they had for the game, and been just as prominent in a final product. None of this is to say that The Ring: Terror’s Realm is somehow “unplayable,” or that its gameplay ranks among the worst in the genre. It’s fine: All completely serviceable, owing to how closely it’s modeled after Resident Evil. With a little less in the way of backtracking, some better perspectives on the action, a few more puzzles for variety, and maybe a couple extra varieties of enemies? (Six standard enemy types exist in the final game, each with colored variants denoting differing amounts of health.) Yeah, maybe it could’ve gone on to compete more evenly with the likes of its inspiration, and proven a competent little survival horror title on its own.

“Is that gun you’re holding a fake? Quit yakking and go kill them off!”
Unused character models still present on the disc, ripped by ‘oakreef’ for The Models Resource.

On the other hand, none of that would have mattered much if the game still went on to get completely buried in the market by more established developers and IPs, and left it to wallow in total obscurity. Getting discovered as a “hidden gem” decades after the fact is all well and fine, but it doesn’t do much for a developer / publisher who has to sit by and watch their game wither and die in the retail market. To that end, Asmik forcing the Ring license on Tycoon might have been the best opportunity possible for the project: A method of making it far more marketable, and to put eyes on the game that might not have given it so much as a passing glance otherwise. It’s entirely possible that Tycoon were genuinely excited at the opportunity to reimagine their work-in-progress with a major license in mind, and saw it as a means of establishing themselves on a major stage. For a studio without many titles under their belt to that point, this may have well represented a golden opportunity to attach themselves to a project that could rapidly elevate their status, and guarantee them continued work in the years to follow. Unfortunately, where they wound up failing was in making all the disparate pieces fit together: Combining the licensed elements with their existing premise in a way that felt authentic to the Ring universe, or in a way that even feels cohesive in terms of gameplay.

If I had to further speculate here, I’d imagine that Tycoon weren’t given the benefits of time or budget in trying to make their concept work: There are definitely elements of Terror’s Realm that read as more hastily-assembled than others, as if the developers were struggling to meet a particularly tight deadline. The number of rooms within the Imaginary portions of the game (we’re gonna drop the “shitty reality” distinction from here on out) that are closed off to the player – despite their being fully explorable in Reality – indicate that Tycoon didn’t have the time to so much as retexture them, and to take advantage of their pre-existing level geometry. The number of mechanics that the game introduces just to wind up dropping them immediately thereafter (such as the breachable doors and the movable objects) signal that the programmers had already put in the work in coding these actions, but didn’t get the opportunity to implement them more evenly across the rest of the world. Ways in which the monsters are able to behave in the last act of the game seem to indicate a vision for them being more intelligent / threatening than your standard survival horror zombies, but which Tycoon weren’t afforded a window to script opportunities for them to shine in the earlier segments of the game.

Where the game most clearly demonstrates its lack of budget though is in its presentation: Its mish-mash of stylistically incongruous character designs, twitchy animations, copy-and-paste environments, and – perhaps most infamously – its downright laughable audio design. If you only knew one thing about Terror’s Realm coming into this article, it was most likely the comical “SPLAT” sound effect (🔊) that plays when selecting an option from the game’s main menu — a cartoonish squelch ripped straight from a CD of stock sound effects, which immediately puts you in a mindset for a comedy farce. The fact that the opening cutscene goes on to further deliver such comical voice acting immediately reinforces this impression, and sets you up to not take the game’s horror elements seriously at all. Not only does the SPLAT sound effect re-occur within the game as an indication for taking damage, but the rest of the game’s audio samples range from “equally low-quality” to outright “missing in action.” Games in the horror genre live and die on the strength of their soundscapes — in their ability to indicate danger, put players in a state of unease, and suddenly strike fear into them at whim. But between the over-repetition of music and the underwhelming sound effects present in Terror’s Realm, its auditory aspect somehow winds up imparting an unintended sense of comedy instead.

Of course, that’s not to say the whole game reads as cheap: There’s some eye-catching texture work on display here, as a result of digital photos / scans being for assets across the game. Unfortunately, these are often lessened / distracted from by comparatively low-resolution textures appearing right beside them — unintelligible bits of signage and office labeling, or stretched ceilings standing in stark contrast to tiled walls and floors. Where there’s also an effort to bake shadows into the environment in order to convey faux-lighting effects, this illusion is shattered by pear-shaped character shadows that fail to properly align with the models they appear under — let alone correlate with light sources in the environment. For every attempt made at doing something unique or impressive within its genre framework, Terror’s Realm is unfortunately made to pay for it at the expense of some other feature coming out sub-par. What we as the player are left with is the end product of some series of ill-advised trade-offs, resulting in a thoroughly underwhelming gameplay experience. It’s the sort of game you’d be liable to forget the second after you eject its disc from your Dreamcast… if not for how downright baffling its story is, and how it manages to sink its hooks into you from that very first FMV.

See, this is why the only way I could review this game was to walk through its story beat by beat: Without that cobbled-together narrative and its curious ties to the Ring franchise, it’d fly right under everybody’s radar. But owing to the circumstances of its last-minute rewrite, its insistence on an “American” setting, and the general sense of strangeness that permeates every minute of it; Terror’s Realm is [unintentionally] elevated to the level of a classic kusogē. Despite how tedious the gameplay loop is quickly established as being, and for as much time is spent without so much as the suggestion of action; I can’t help but fall under some sort of spell as I play it, and commit myself to seeing the whole story through. Every conversation comes with the chance of delivering some oddly-translated line of dialogue that’s liable to make you laugh, or to deliver a character moment that compels you to see what happens to this ensemble cast of oddballs. You’ll find yourself completely engaged in solving the mystery presented to you, as your brain desperately attempts to make any sort of sense of it all — even after it’s all plainly laid out in front of you. For as obvious as its major twist may be in hindsight, you still can’t help but be completely blindsided by it your first time through; as the game distracts you with so much other nonsense, you wind up forgetting all about the main plot thread, and wind up letting it get the better of you.

And to think: All this is owed to the fact that the developers had a movie license forced on them, and had to hastily retrofit an existing game in order to accommodate it. The Ring name is what draws you into the game, and waiting for it to deliver on its promised connection is a major part of what’ll keep you invested in it. It harkens back to a bygone era of movie tie-in games – the likes of Batman and Friday the 13th on NES, or Surf Ninjas on Amiga (a future article candidate for sure) – where interactive interpretations used to feel so disconnected as to barely resemble their supposed source material. And yet, The Ring appears to make a genuine attempt at making its connections make sense to you as a player; giving you pages upon pages of text to parse, as it tries to justify all its elements that feel so completely at odds with the established canon. It almost fools you into thinking it might actually pull it off, so that when you finally meet up with Sadako Yamamura, you’re expecting her to finally answer all your questions. But instead, she just leaves you with dozens more, as you struggle to reconcile the terrifying apparition you’ve come to expect with the hair-whipping goofball you’re made to battle — put down with a shot from an unexplained grenade launcher just laying around in the final arena. Across roughly five hours of gameplay, Terror’s Realm somehow manages to completely invest you in its nonsensical narrative, only to end on a baffling anticlimax that leaves you more confused than when you first started. And I, for one, wouldn’t change a single thing about it.

… Okay, maybe that last bit isn’t entirely true. If I had my way, I’d absolutely cut down on the needlessly frustrating “double-checking every room” aspect of its gameplay. I’d probably insist to Tycoon that they do what they could in order to at least make every one of their rooms as distinct as they could, between hiding more files inside them and scripting unique scares / encounters to occur within them. Ideally, I’d open up yet more spaces within the CDC building for players to explore (within both Reality and the Imaginary worlds), so that a player can always expect their next objective to take them to somewhere they haven’t yet visited — maintaining a better sense of forward momentum and progression. I do think that the game could’ve benefited from some classic survival horror puzzles as well: Tie them into Meg’s investigation, and have her decoding classified documents and testing different chemical combinations. It’d give her something to do besides running back and forth talking to people within the Reality portions of the game, and reinforce the fact she’s meant to be a scientist. Tycoon could also probably afford to make Sadako look a little more like her movie counterpart, even as she goes on to behave in a way that doesn’t necessarily match up with it. But as far as the story the game attempts to tell is concerned, though? Go ahead and keep that all “as is”: Let it shine in all its convoluted, tossed-together glory.

What we have here in The Ring: Terror’s Realm is a rare case where a game’s [presumably] turbulent production actually worked in its favor, in order to create something truly memorable. While I certainly hope that the team at Tycoon weren’t subjected to crunch, made to feel as if they lost control over their original vision, or otherwise left disillusioned by the process of their game’s production; there’s an argument to be made that this final product wouldn’t be quite as memorable if not for those unfortunate circumstances. It took a perfect storm to produce this beautiful disaster: A combination of publisher mandate, a high-pressure deadline, and resourcefulness on the part of a team making the best of a bad situation. While we may have missed out on whatever original game concept the developers had in mind, or the chance for them to build a Ring tie-in from scratch that may have better suited the franchise; the game we’re left with is deeply fascinating, and impossible to forget after experiencing it. You could attempt to refine and improve on it – make its disparate pieces fit more neatly together – but you’ll only wind up depriving it of its charm and identity. You can’t just deliberately craft a game like Terror’s Realm, nor should anyone attempt to: It exists as a work of accidental genius, forged by conditions outside of its own creators’ control. In all her years trapped at the bottom of a well, Sadako Yamamura herself couldn’t dream of something quite so insidious.

** Yes, I’m aware that some players actually prefer not to have their screens “obstructed” by weapons in first-person shooters. There was an era where every competitive FPS player elected to disable viewmodels (as well as enabling hideous “fullbright” textures on character models) in games the likes of Painkiller and Quake III Arena. And then there were tactical shooters the likes of Rainbow Six and SWAT 3 which decided not to include viewmodels in the first place, in order to free up screen space for elaborate HUDs and issuing squad commands. But for me, if I can’t see my gun on the screen in a game, I just feel completely disconnected from the action of firing it.

*** 1951 is the year in the film canon in which Sadako was conceived and born. (In the original novel canon, she was born in 1947.) I skipped over the exact circumstances of her birth earlier, but let it be known that Sadako [in the movie universe] was conceived by a sea demon communicating with her mother. This is a slight deviation / reinterpretation of the original book canon, in which Shizuko is “gifted” a statue from the sea that grants her psychic powers; leading to a hospital stay in which she enters into an affair with a Dr. Heihachiro Ikuma, who conceives Sadako with her. Take your pick as to which explanation of Shizuko’s powers / Sadako’s birth you prefer, since Terror’s Realm doesn’t specify which of the two it subscribes to (if either).

“You Okay, Lady?”

“I felt bad from a prank call: but you can’t kill someone with a movie.”
North American release, back cover.

With The Ring: Terror’s Realm‘s February 2000 release in Japan, games magazines may have been forgiven for losing sight of it in the wake of Resident Evil – Code: Veronica‘s launch earlier that same month. Luckily, the weekly publication schedule for many Japanese magazines of the era meant that new releases rarely slipped through the cracks in that way, and that Ring received its due reviews. We’ll only briefly mention Famitsu awarding the game a 24 out of 40,^[11]  seeing as the publication has spent the past several years discouraging folk from scanning / preserving their back issues — making it impossible for me to actually read their review for myself. Which brings us to SoftBank’s Dreamcast Magazine, and their panel of three reviewers averaging together for a score of 6.0 out of 10.^[12] The lowest individual rating was a 5 out of 10 from reviewer ‘REI,’ who seemed to take umbrage with a perceived “Western influence” on Terror’s Realm’s design: “It feels like a Japanese horror novel that’s been brought overseas and back. Still, if the game itself is good, I have no complaints. But the operability is so bad that it discourages me. […] The story is far from the original, lacking the atmosphere unique to Japanese horror, and it’s not so scary. As an action-adventure, it’s a mediocre piece of work, and you shouldn’t play it expecting the horror of the original.” By contrast, reviewer ‘Denpa’ was a bit more generous in awarding the game a 7 out of 10: “I was confused because it suddenly started with the popular gun action, but the ratio with the exploration scenes was about 50/50, so I wound up curious about the story and got hooked. I don’t think it was on purpose, but the poor control and the limited number of items make the game moderately difficult, and bring a sense of tension to the game. […] I couldn’t help but grin at the twisted story and the setting and characters that are unique to the series, but it’s a pity that the so-called sense of fear is weak.”

But that’s not where Dreamcast Magazine’s coverage of the game ends: In maintaining a tradition established by their predecessor publication (Sega Saturn Magazine), each weekly issue included updates to a running ‘Reader’s Race’ ranking, where every release on the console was listed in order of descending public survey scores. This was a tradition that Dreamcast Magazine maintained until their final issue, published in May of 2001; at which point, their successor publication Dorimaga picked up where they had left out, and continued to track Dreamcast rankings all the way through to October of 2002. In this final ranking, Ring would have to settle for 413th place out of a total of 422 entries — placing it within the system’s supposed ten worst titles by reader consensus, with an average rating of 4.3958 [out of 10].^[13] Clearly, consumers felt that the game failed to meet standards of the era; whether stacked up against other contemporary survival horror titles, or taken as a tie-in to a well-established licensed property. In either case, placing so low in the rankings would ensure the game a place in infamy, and firmly register its reputation as one of the worst titles the Dreamcast had to offer. Oh, and for historical reference: Last place (422nd) in the rankings would go to Micronet’s release of Heisei Mahjong Sou — a straightforward mahjong title with a microphone peripheral and online functionality, which earned itself a dismal reader rating of 2.13.

So, Terror’s Realm was a bust in its native Japan. But was there any chance that the English-speaking world might treat it a little more kindly? Unsurprisingly, the answer to that question would be “Nope.” We’ll start by looking at GameSpot’s 4.0-scoring review, as penned on their behalf by Brad Shoemaker. Posted to the site on July 12th, 2000 – indicating a delay between review copies being sent to press and the game actually appearing on retail shelves in August – Brad primarily chose to hone in on the game’s derivative nature and meandering progression: “Gameplay in The Ring is nothing new to survival-horror fans – movement, combat, mapping, and inventory are all identical to Resident Evil or any of its clones. […] Triggering a new event or story sequence is often dependent on being in the right room at the right time, and clues are rarely given about exactly what room that is. This leads to a fair amount of aimless wandering between some amazingly similar environments.”^[14] In addition to these complaints, Brad also highlights the static nature of character faces, and how it perhaps contributes to an unintentional kind of horror: “And finally, the question must be asked: What’s with that smile? Regardless of the situation, Meg wears a disturbing, Jokeresque leer throughout every scene of the game. Her boyfriend died the day before? She’s all smiles. She’s faced with a slobbering apelike creature? Big dopey grin. It’s kind of disturbing.”

In seeking out the lowest-scoring review of Terror’s Realm, you’ll find ‘Mad Carl’s write-up for PlanetDreamcast.com, where the final evaluation is rated as a 1 out of 10 — the lowest possible on their scoring scale.^[15] In describing their grievances, Carl provides a comprehensive breakdown of the first forty minutes of the game, as a demonstration of how little “action” takes place within that timeframe. Following that, they hyperbolically describe the game as being some sort of digital / physical manifestation of the developers’ hatred: “The Ring is not simply some hack job of a game like Spirit of Speed. (You can read our own review of that one here! ~ Cass) No, that would be belittling the sinister accomplishments of Asmik Ace Entertainment, the game’s developer. This game is a premeditated, heavily calculated, pile of pure, unadulterated evil, jammed into the double barrels of a shotgun and pointed squarely between the eyes of gamers everywhere. As much as I abhor The Ring, I have to admit that I admire any group of people who can pack this much hate onto one shiny little GD-ROM. I can only whimper in terror when I think of what they might accomplish with a DVD.” You’ve gotta love it when reviewers assume that “bad games” are the product of deliberate malice on the part of their creators, and not the end result of circumstances outside of their control.

While there’s plenty in the way of reviews to speak to The Ring’s chilly reception, there’s less in the way of available data to speak to its likely underwhelming sales… at least as far as sales within Japan are concerned. Somehow, between all the exhaustive documentation that exists around the Dreamcast online, one of the few mysteries which remains to be solved is the matter of how much software it managed to move within its native territory. The only indication we have for how Ring performed in Japan is the fact it debuted at a spot numbered 31st in Dreamcast sales the week of its release; where it proceeded to climb as high at 23rd in sales for the following week, before falling completely off the charts and never returning.^[16] At that brief peak position, it held 100 ‘Points’ by Dreamcast Magazine’s estimation — a metric used to obfuscate direct sales numbers. But for a potentially illuminating point of comparison: Resident Evil – Code: Veronica had managed to achieve 244,765 Points in its first week on the sales charts, on its road to becoming an eventual million-seller on Dreamcast.^[16b] For even further context we can derive from that same edition of weekly sales data: Undercover AD2025 Kei – another title which would quickly go on to take up residence near the bottom of the Reader’s Race – would somehow attain a week’s height of 11,109 Points near the time of its release! The fact that such a total obscurity could manage to completely dwarf Ring’s sales numbers (without the benefit of an established IP / license to its name, mind you) really goes to show how little interest there was in what Asmik and Tycoon were peddling here.

On the North American end of the Dreamcast market, we actually have the benefit of some concrete numbers to point to — collected as of January 2003 by the NPD Group, and more or less reflecting final sales numbers for the console’s software library. Here we can find Infogrames’ release of Terror’s Realm managed a whopping 14,238 units sold:^[17] A rather sorry showing, placing it squarely in the bottom twenty sellers of all time in the Dreamcast’s short lifespan. Providing some further context to this number, this same chart also tracks the average price per copy sold, serving as an indication as to how steeply discounted the games in question were by this final tally. By measure of this statistic, remaining stock of Terror’s Realm was likely being sold at around $10.35 USD per copy by retailers, and netting them a cumulative nation-wide total of just $126.53 in monthly revenue. And here’s something else to consider about these numbers: This data was collected in January of 2003, several months after Gore Verbinski’s English-language remake of The Ring had taken North American theaters by storm in October of 2002. There’s a high probability that prior to the release of the film, Terror’s Realm had been putting up even worse numbers over the course of the prior two years — likely drawing nothing in terms of its monthly revenue, and probably sitting below the 10,000 total units sold line. And so, the momentum of a film drawing hundreds of millions at the box office can be seen to have done almost nothing to shore up sales for the franchise’s video game tie-in.

Before we move on to what happened to Asmik and Tycoon, I do wanna take a detour here to cover 2000’s other Ring tie-in game. Because yes, there was a second Ring game released in the same year as Terror’s Realm, kept exclusively within Japan: Ring ∞ for the Bandai WonderSwan, as developed by studio ‘Megas’ on behalf of Kadokawa Shoten. You may remember Kadokawa from earlier as the original publisher of Suzuki’s Ring novel series, and for being a part of the ‘Ring / Rasen Production Committee.’ Evidently, their stake in the franchise entitled them to pursue development of their own video game installment, where they chose to take it in the direction of a handheld “sound novel”: A subgenre within the larger visual novel genre, where on-screen text and soundscapes take priority over in-game graphics — originally innovated by Chunsoft with 1992’s Otogirisou. Kadokawa’s developer of choice, Megas, had experience in producing a previous WonderSwan sound novel titled Terrors (released in 1999). Clearly impressed by their work, and imagining that Ring might fit neatly into that same design template; Kadokawa commissioned Megas to build their tie-in on top of “The Terrors System,” but with a few improvements implemented that they could brag up in ad copy (as seen on the game’s official webpage): “The key feature of Ring ∞ is the quality of graphics and sound, which is much more powerful than Terrors. […] In terms of mechanics, in addition to ‘normal branching’ and ‘terror point branching’; ‘branching by time’ has been added, and more thrilling improvements have been made.”

Japanese box art for Ring ∞, front cover.

What these “mechanics” refer to are the different methods of branching paths within Ring ∞, as it seeks to iterate on the “choose-your-own adventure” formula. Not only will you have to make decisions that affect what route your character pursues, and which will ultimately go on to determine the ending of the game: Some of those choices are also time-sensitive, and require making a call quickly in order to guarantee a positive outcome. Others contribute to an unseen ‘Terror Points’ counter, the end value of which also plays a role in determining your ending. There’s a few other layers to the branching paths beyond that, but we’ll get to them in a minute. For now, we should briefly summarize the game’s premise: You play as a highschool student with a small circle of friends, who you frequently trade CDs and videotapes between. One fateful day at school, you overhear a fellow student screaming from one of the classrooms, who goes on to die of a heart attack in front of you while calling desperately for help. The day afterward, you fall asleep while watching one of the videotapes you’ve traded for, and somehow experience the contents of Sadako’s cursed footage as you sleep. Understanding the seven day conceit, and believing the fatal consequence to be real; you must rely on your friends, your investigative skills, and the power of the early Internet in order to determine how to break the curse. Naturally, the choices you make will determine what information you’re able to discover, and which actions you take in your attempts to escape your demise.

However, there was apparently a slight problem with this implementation: No player in the course of sixteen years from the game’s release had been able to report online as to what the game’s “best ending” actually entailed, leading to the belief among posters that no player had yet to achieve it. This revelation occurred after a tweet from a Twitter user @b2949 on July 16th, 2016 brought renewed attention to Ring ∞, at just around the same time that Resident Evil 7 ’s “Teaser Demo” had become the subject of an Internet-wide collaboration to decode its secrets. This led to discussions of the game on ‘5ch’ (one of several textboards to splinter off from the former 2channel — neither of which should be confused with 2chan / Futaba Channel), where it was quickly realized that none of the posters could reach a consensus as to which of the game’s routes / endings could possibly constitute the “True” or “Best” outcome. The only pre-existing work that had been done in attempting to chart the game’s routes existed on a long-since abandoned fan page, where the webmaster had failed to find any way to survive by game’s end. (“No matter how many times I try, the well is closed and I die. Someone help!”) It was speculated among posters that the secret to unlocking the best ending might’ve been tied to the WonderSwan’s long-since deprecated ‘WonderGate’ peripheral for accessing the Internet, which was known to be used to unlock an additional scenario within the game. Others jokingly speculated that “Everyone who ever saw the ‘True End’ died,” having fallen victim to Sadako’s curse in real life.^[18]

Ultimately, it took someone capable of analyzing the game ROM’s contents to solve the mystery: The game’s best ending had already been achieved by some number of players! It was just a case where it was such a downer of a conclusion (SPOILER: Your best friend sacrifices her life for you by jumping into Sadako’s well), everyone assumed that there had to be some sort of “happier” coda to the game’s story. Further adding to the confusion is another unique feature of the game; wherein subsequent replay attempts generate new “rumors” you can hear among the students at the highschool, which reference the details of the last ending you earned. In this way, the “infinity” symbol in Ring ∞’s title is meant to refer to the perpetual cycle of Sadako’s curse; as you find yourself caught in an endless loop within the game, where your character’s death(s) serve to further spread fascination with the cursed videotape among the population. All told, it makes for an intriguing little WonderSwan title, which managed the rare feat of briefly stumping an entire segment of the Internet sixteen years out from its release. If you’re interested in further details as to how this whole saga started and ended, please to read this 2017 blog post by a user ‘redcapote.’

With that little mystery all sewn up, we return now to the subject of Terror’s Realm, and the continuing adventures of its developer Tycoon Corp. Now, if Tycoon had been a less fortunate studio, there’s the chance that their parent company Asmik Ace might’ve shut them down straight away following the failure of a game like Ring. Luckily, Asmik seemed to understand that they had been the ones to force Tycoon into such a precarious situation in the first place, and seemed to forgive them for not spinning straw into gold under those rough circumstances. And so, Tycoon continued in their work developing games on Asmik’s behalf — accepting the fact that they probably weren’t gonna be passed the proverbial ball again, or asked to participate in any further “major projects.” To that end, they were quickly put back on Dokapon duty, turning out a Game Boy Color entry titled Dokapon!? Millennium Quest for release on July 14th, 2000. This entry would appear to play as a more traditional dungeon-crawl RPG, dropping the party game elements in designing for a personal handheld. Not a particularly ambitious project, but one which might’ve helped the team to regroup after Terror’s Realm threw them all for a loop.

Tycoon’s next title would be decidedly more interesting: In stepping away from the Sega Dreamcast, the team looked back to Sony’s PlayStation, and determined to create something truly original for it. The result of that production is Oh No!, released on November 16th of the year 2000. (They really started knocking these games out in quick succession, huh?) Its premise centers on a family of perpetually snot-nosed malcontents, who travel together in horizontal and vertical configurations through busy streets and roads — never stopping until they reach their destination, and pumping their fists all the while. It’s effectively a proto-”runner” type game, with a series of ten stages all set to kick-ass original music composed for it. In the game’s story mode, these stages are broken up by dancing minigames [each involving different types of inputs], as well as animated FMV cutscenes produced in a charmingly low-rent style (the likes of Crayon Shin-chan). Oh No! even includes a couple variations on co-operative and competitive multiplayer, which seem like they’d make for a genuinely fun time with a friend. I honestly found myself having a lot of fun with this simple little game — charmed by its goofy aesthetic, and thoroughly entranced by its musical offerings. This one’s a proper hidden gem in the PlayStation library, and I seriously recommend giving it a shot if you’re able: It demonstrates what Tycoon were capable of when given free rein to bring one of their own concepts to fruition, and leaves you wishing for more of it.

Unfortunately, Tycoon weren’t allowed to continue much further down the road of producing original game ideas: The year 2001 saw them working to produce Dokapon: Monster Hunter on the Game Boy Advance (released August 3rd that year), continuing in the single-player RPG format established in Millennium Quest. The twist this time is, there’s evidently a bunch more Pokémon-style mechanics, and an option for link play against other monster hunters (via the GBA’s Game Link Cable). From here, it was off to work for Tycoon on yet another Dokapon title: 2003’s Dokapon DX on Nintendo’s GameCube, also released for PlayStation 2 the following year. This entry at least seems to return to the series’ board game style of party game, which is far more interesting to me than what the handheld spin-offs seemed to dabble in. Which brings us to Tycoon’s last run of games: A series of animated visual novels for GameCube and PlayStation 2, based on existing anime licenses. The first of these debuted July 17th of 2003, titled Kino’s Journey: The Beautiful World — a tie-in to the light novel series of the same name, which had just concluded a thirteen-episode anime a week prior to the game’s release. This was followed shortly thereafter by Lupin III: Lost Treasure Under the Sea, releasing on the 31st of that very same July. This one follows an original story in the Lupin the Third universe, which unfortunately involves having a precocious child sidekick trailing Arsène Lupin throughout the whole adventure.

Which brings us to Tycoon’s final game, as far as we’re aware: Kino’s Journey II: The Beautiful World, released December 1st, 2005 for PlayStation. And yeah, it’s just a sequel to their previous Kino’s Journey title — designed in the same visual novel style, with much the same cheap degree of production. As cool as it is that this Kino kid apparently carries around a Colt Walker as her weapon of choice, and for as great as I’m sure the story the whole series seeks to tell is; it all seems to make for a remarkably “basic” pair of PlayStation 2 games, which hardly feels like a fitting final output on the part of Tycoon Corp. A team like that deserves to flame out in spectacular fashion — to go out on one last attempt at producing something completely buck wild, the inevitable failure of which finally convinces Asmik to pull the plug on them! Instead of that well-deserved glorious demise though, they just wound up petering out producing cheapo text adventures? (For what it’s worth, those Kino’s Journey games do seem to be somewhat well-regarded, and evidently came packed with neat collectibles.) It just doesn’t seem fair to me, y’know? No justice in this world, I tell you.

A contributing factor to this unceremonious end for Tycoon may have been Asmik Ace’s own transition away from the games business, and the accompanying dissolution of all their interests in that industry. Their publishing output had already slowed dramatically moving into the 2000s, scaling back from as many as seven releases a year down to just one or two (if even that many). Though I couldn’t find an “official” explanation for this shift in focus, the reason seems pretty clear to me: Asmik were making way more money off of film production / distribution, and wanted to prioritize that revenue stream. At a point in 2004, they had brokered a deal with DreamWorks Pictures to serve as their exclusive distributor in Japan for a period of time, which would surely prove a profitable venture for the company. And so, that’d wind up being just around the same time that Asmik sold off their video game trademarks; signing the Dokapon series off to ‘Sting Co.,’^[19] splitting the Tokyo Majin Gakuen franchise between Atlus and Marvelous Entertainment, and leaving their Lethal Skies series (along with any other IPs they might’ve still owned) to wither away and die. While Asmik would go on to involve themselves in publishing for a small handful of titles in the years to follow, I’m still comfortable calling this the “end” of their involvement in the games industry — at least as far as it being a major pillar of their business.

Rather than attempt to track Asmik’s continued career in the movie business here, we’re gonna stick to the subject of video games for a while longer. On that subject, I wanna take a quick look at Scarab: The development house that Tycoon had asked for assistance in helping design Terror’s Realm’s cast of monsters. As it turns out, they would not exist for much longer under their original name, having been acquired by the studio Cavia in September of 2002. For a time, the Scarab staff helped contribute to games the likes of Drakengard and Resident Evil: Dead Aim; until May 2005, when they rebranded as Feelplus Inc. (stylized as ‘feelplus’) and returned to leading development on their own titles. You may recognize their work on titles the likes of Lost Odyssey and Infinite Undiscovery, or their contributions to N3II: Ninety-Nine Nights. However, I happen to know them best for two other titles.

On July 30th, 2009, AQ Interactive would publish Kyōfu Taikan: Ju-On for Wii, as it had been developed by feeplus in celebration of the horror film franchise’s 10th anniversary. The game is better known in English-speaking territories as Ju-On: The Grudge, owing to the popularity of a series of American remake films beginning in 2004 [with the simply-titled The Grudge]. To say that the decision to bring Ju-On to the West was perhaps inspired by The Ring’s success as an American remake two years earlier is to barely scratch the surface of the country’s brief obsession with diluting J-Horror in the 2000s. But I said that we were gonna focus on video games here for the time being, so let’s not get too deep in those weeds just yet. The point to be made here is that the Ju-On video game would be marketed as a “Haunted House Simulator” in English-speaking territories — a subtitle stuck on the game’s North American box art. In actual execution, this refers to the fact that the game consists of a series of scavenger hunts in dark environments, where you slowly walk around with a flashlight and get repeatedly jump-scared. Outside of a handful of QTEs where you attempt to dodge attacks by the duo of Kayako and Toshi Saeki – the two primary apparitions appearing across the film franchise – that’s really all there is to do: Just wander around picking up batteries and scraps of notes, until you reach the end of a given level and get to watch your character get killed. (If you happen to die earlier than that, how is that not counted as a “win?”)

European box art for Ju-On: The Grudge,
front cover.

To say that critics were unimpressed by Ju-On: The Grudge would be an understatement: Its Metacritic average sits at 39 out of 100, placing it among the lowest-rated titles in the Wii’s entire software catalogue. I don’t wanna get too deep into the game’s reception or contents here, as I absolutely intend to cover it all in-depth in an upcoming October article. (In the meantime, you can watch this old stream archive of me playing through it.) But I’d be remiss to not address the subject of the game’s European box art: The work of distributor Rising Star Games, the composition features a photo of a woman hiding behind her couch — not meant to represent any character within the game, but to instead reflect a player who finds themselves terrified by the game. Near her face is a quote attributed to a ‘T. Kanazawa,’ which reads as such: “You’ll jump, laugh and cry… perfect fun!” Where one would assume this quote comes sourced from some review of the game, Kanazawa’s affiliation is oddly undisclosed here? This is because Tomio “T.” Kanazawa was no less than the senior producer for the game’s European localization, working on behalf of Rising Star Games. In other words: The publisher were trying to pass off a line from one of their own employees as a review quote on the box, in what has to be one of the most desperate marketing decisions of all time.

The other title I recognize feelplus for developing is 2011’s MindJack: A similarly-loathed third-person shooter for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, published by Square Enix. This is another title I intend to dedicate a full article to some day, so I’m not gonna go into too much depth on it here. For now, I’ll note the fact that it has some genuinely novel online multiplayer hooks, which are weaved into the single-player campaign to allow connecting players to control characters within levels — either assisting the individual attempting to progress the campaign, or playing the role of enemy in order to make things that much more difficult. This plays into the game’s central themes / mechanics around the idea of “hacking” into the minds of other characters and machines, and controlling them to assist you in combat; meaning you spend the bulk of your time in the game jumping between different NPCs, in order to protect your main character (‘Jim Corbjin’) and keep them from getting directly involved in combat. Again, this is a game with some truly unique ideas on display here, but with a decidedly uneven execution that led most critics to simply pan it. All will be told in time.

Welp. I reckon I’ve run out of video game companies to talk about here. I guess that means I have to get back to the subject of the Ring franchise, and where it went after Terror’s Realm. Of course, it’s not as if the failed Dreamcast title really did anything to derail (or so much as mildly disrupt) the unstoppable momentum of the larger franchise. Though the Japanese film series would take a break after 2000’s Ring 0: Birthday – the installment that the release of Terror’s Realm had been meant to coincide with, if you’ll remember – this was partially owed to the fact that Sadako was preparing to take America by storm: The already-alluded to American remake of Hideo Nakata’s Ring as Gore Verbinski’s The Ring released in theaters in 2002, and would go on to gross nearly $250 million USD at the box office — quintupling its $48 million dollar budget.^[20] In addition to guaranteeing further English-language sequels (The Ring Two in 2005, and later Rings in 2017), and seeing an effort made to localize Koji Suzuki’s published works for the region; this also marked the beginning of a trend of American remakes of Japanese horror movies, which went on to bring us the likes of 2004’s The Grudge, 2005’s Dark Water, 2006’s Pulse, 2008’s One Missed Call… and so on and so forth, until audiences finally said “enough is enough.” I suppose we should be grateful Hollywood were stopped before remaking the likes of Onibaba and Kuroneko.

So, interesting thing about that Dark Water movie: It was obviously based on an existing Japanese film, titled Honogurai Mizu no soko kara — directed by Ring’s Hideo Nakata, and released in 2002. But see, that original film had actually based its screenplay on another one of Koji Suzuki books — a 1996 collection of short horror stories, which all incorporate water as a recurring motif / supernatural element. Where both versions of the Dark Water movie draw their inspiration from the same first story in the book (titled “Floating Water”), other films and television shows have since gone on to adapt some of the collection’s other stories, making it a proper well of inspiration (pun intended). With this in mind, Suzuki has basically been able to secure his financial future on the back of perpetual royalty payments between Dark Water and Ring, as his literary backlog has continued to be mined for screenplays and teleplays. And yet, he continues to pen further works, spanning all manner of genre and format. At one point, he wrote a 2009 horror novel trilogy titled The Drop, the gimmick of which was that it was printed across three rolls of toilet paper and sold individually for ¥210 a pop. Evidently, this marketing stunt somehow managed to move over 200,000 rolls of toilet paper in Japan before the third installment had even been released,^[21] which prompted the “publishers” at the Hayashi Paper Company to attempt selling them in the United States through the domain “JapaneseToiletPaper.com” (as a package set for $10 USD). Koji Suzuki is an author to be taken completely seriously, and regarded as a master of horror unlike any other.

As a matter of fact, Suzuki has actually focused most of his writing towards essays for the past two decades; providing his perspective and parenting advice to Japanese fathers, and promoting his theory that “If you want to become macho, you have to become a feminist.”^[22]** But of course, when the film studios come knocking, Suzuki is always gonna be there to answer the door: In 2012, he published the fifth entry in the Ring book series (1999’s Birthday having been the fourth), simply titled ‘S.’ This was done so that publisher and production company Kadokawa Shoten could have a movie adaptation prepared to hit theaters on the same day the novel hit shelves, titled Sadako 3D. Not only that, but there was apparently enough material in the book to warrant a second part to this screen adaptation — 2013’s Sadako 3D 2. Yes, both films heavily leverage 3D film effects. Yes, their plots heavily center around modern technology and the Internet, in exactly as clumsy a manner as you’d expect. But do you wanna know what the most interesting thing about these two movies really is? (And the novel too, by extension?) Because Suzuki is back in charge of the timeline here, these are intended as direct sequels to Rasen — made to completely disregard the pre-established film canon! At the very least, Sadako’s design here is still heavily rooted in her 1998 Ring incarnation, so at least there’s some visual continuity here for audiences.

2013 brought what is currently the sixth and final installment in the Ring novel series, Tide. And because it’s written by Suzuki, you shouldn’t be surprised at this point when I tell you that it’s a direct sequel to Loop, which brings another one of Ryuji Takayama’s clones to the forefront of the plot. Surprisingly, Hideo Nakata returned to the director’s chair for its 2019 screen adaptation, now simply titled Sadako. And by all accounts, it is the loosest adaptation of its source material yet seen in the series — dropping all the LOOP and computer simulation elements, and not even giving Suzuki the satisfaction of seeing his golden boy Ryuji return to the screen. The movie’s sequel Sadako DX is due to debut just a week or so out from the day I’m posting this article, where Nakata has widely stepped back away from the franchise after the previous entry was critically lambasted. As a matter of fact, none of these post-2012 Ring movies (or should I call them “Sadako movies?”) seem to be any good at all: They make their money back at the box office, sure, but they’ve apparently diluted Sadako to the point of parody in the process. Where it comes to marketing in particular, her ghostly appearance is no longer intended or expected to deliver scares: She’s played for straight-up comedy more often than not, in the same way that Freddy Kreuger and Chucky eventually stopped being “scary” and started leaning more into their own goofiness.

Perhaps nowhere is this inherent silliness more clearly demonstrated than with the production of the 2016 crossover film, Sadako vs. Kayako. This is a movie in which Sadako is made to face off against the Ju-On antagonist Kayako (as well as her ever-present ghost son Toshio), in what can only be described as a total farce. As a matter of fact, folk were literally made to think the movie’s announcement was an April Fool’s joke when it was first introduced in 2015.^[24] But nope: It was a legitimate announcement for a real movie, which would go on to promote itself with ad spots played for further comedy. Of course, the most ridiculous stunt pulled to promote this movie was the appearance of Sadako and Kayako at a June 1st, 2016 match-up between Japan’s professional baseball teams the ‘Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters’ and the ‘Yakult Swallows’; where in throwing the game’s ceremonial pitch, Sadako took to the pitcher’s mound against Kayako.^[23b] For historical record: Kayako managed to hit the 96 km/h fastball thrown her way, but couldn’t quite muster up the leg strength to make it to first base — tagging her son in to finish the sprint in her stead. Is all this genuinely funny to watch? Sure, I’ll grant that. But that doesn’t change what it represents: The Ring franchise having long since jumped the proverbial shark, and Sadako Yamamura being rendered completely toothless as a horror villain.

To that point, I bring us back to the subject of video games: On March 8th, 2022, Sadako was introduced as the newest DLC character / ‘Killer’ in Dead by Daylight, alongside a ‘Survivor’ character Yoichi Asakawa (the child character from the 1998 Ring movie, now grown up). Referred to in-game as “The Onryō,” players can select Sadako as their Killer of choice, and play as her in order to terrorize and slay a team of Survivors. Now, I like to think I’ve given Dead by Daylight a couple fair shots, and simply not been able to get into it myself. I accept that while it’s not for me, there are folk who seem to really dig on this asymmetrical multiplayer title, and invest themselves in seeing who all the newest DLC characters are revealed to be (where the licensed likes of Leatherface, Michael Myers, Pyramid Head, and many more are already among the cast). But even bearing all that in mind, I’ve gotta ask the question here: Nobody actually gets scared playing Dead by Daylight, right? Like, even its most dedicated players would agree it’s a pretty goofy game, all told? And so, I see the ability for players to play as Sadako here, and I can’t help but think that whatever creepy mystique she once had about her is just gone. At this point, the Dead by Daylight developers might as well sell purple kimono and red wig cosmetics that Sadako can wear, and pay “tribute” to her video game debut. (If the 2017 Friday the 13th video game could get away with selling a ‘Retro Jason’ skin based on his NES game appearance, I won’t put anything past horror game developers.)

As of the time of this writing, there’s a still-currently active Android / iOS game by the name of Sadako M: Mikaiketsu Jiken Tantei Jimusho (developed by Gravity Games Arise), which has continued to update and release new chapters since its initial release on October 26th, 2021. It’s available exclusively in Japanese, all the characters are rendered in a cutesy chibi style, and its primary selling point seems to be the fact you can customize and dress up your own player character — giving the devs ample opportunity to incorporate plenty of hooks for microtransactions. At this point though, I don’t have the energy to get mad about it: As I’ve been saying, the Ring franchise is no longer meant to be taken seriously, or so much as associated with “horror” in my mind. That’s probably totally fine as far as Koji Suzuki is concerned, who never seemed to care much for that genre in the first place or believed that his original vision for Ring qualified as part of it. Maybe he’s so checked out at this point, he might not even give a shit that his original vision has been warped and distorted into total shlock over the course of the past twenty years. Even if he did care enough to want to bring Ring back to its roots and convince folk to take it seriously again, it’s already far too late: The bell cannot be unrung, and twenty years of ill-advised licensing deals and brand dilution can’t be undone. And if you wanna try to pinpoint the moment in time when this decline first began, there’s certainly a spot on the timeline that seems to stand out: The franchise’s video game debut, with the Dreamcast release of The Ring: Terror’s Realm in 2000.

“He likes horror movies, but he sure has weird tastes.”
Photo of Koji Suzuki, borrowed from Atsushi Ozaki / TV Guide Minidrama.

I stated earlier that Terror’s Realm’s failure didn’t do anything on its own to “derail the unstoppable momentum of the larger franchise.” And I still stand by that statement, considering how negligible an impact the game’s failure would’ve had on the financial futures of the continuing film and novel series. In that sense, it really is a relative non-factor — a historical curio that most don’t even think to associate with the larger franchise, for as little as it ultimately has to do with it. But that doesn’t speak to what the game represents in the timeline of the Ring franchise: The botched development and mishandled release of Terror’s Realm represents a moment where the company responsible for managing the brand took it for granted, and allowed it to be attached to a sub-par product in the pursuit of exploiting its name recognition for profit. Granted, it seemed to utterly fail in generating that expected cash flow, and seemed to inspire some measure of immediate course-correction for the brand. But how long were corporate suits able to resist temptation? How long could they wait before exploiting Sadako for all she was worth, and attach her name and likeness to every shlock movie and piece of novelty kitsch they could manage? The lesson they had all failed to learn from Terror’s Realm’s failure was the fact that you get too far away from a franchise’s core themes and identity, your audience too will begin to distance themselves from it.

In the case of the Ring franchise, Sadako was supposed to be a tragic villain — a deeply sympathetic spirit, whose original motivation can be interpreted as simply wanting her suffering to be acknowledged. For another interpretation, she embodies vengeance against a cruel and uncaring society — a society which instinctively fears her for having been born outside their established “norms,” and who would sentence her to death for it. (For a particularly compelling interpretation of Sadako’s character and motivations, I’d recommend the Cinema Cauldron podcast’s episode titled “‘The Ring’: Sadako, Trans panic, and Intersex Erasure.”) But somewhere between her digital depiction as a kimono-clad hopping zombie and pitching baseballs for television cameras, those aspects of her character seemed to get muddled along the way. In that sense, Tycoon Corp’s interpretation of Sadako is perhaps ahead of its time: A harbinger of the franchise’s future, where writers would be paid to scheme up half-baked scenarios in which she can kill indiscriminately, demonstrating little regard for her character or continued legacy. Bearing that in mind, the game’s mixing up the traits of an onryō with a jiāngshī wound up being surprisingly fitting: Sadako really would go on to become a mindless zombie, shambling her way through an perpetual procession of equally mindless shlock movies. At this point, she might well be begging for someone to just put her out of her misery with a well-placed grenade round, and put a stop to this endless LOOP she’s trapped in.

… Oh, that’s right! I nearly forgot about that curse I stuck you with! Again, I’m very sorry about all this, but my hands are kinda tied here: Y’all know how it goes when you wind up writing an article so long, some poor sod actually up and dies in the process of reading it, and their spirit takes vengeance on you for wasting their precious final hours. I mean, I totally get why I’m supposed to be made to suffer for that, but it just seems a bit mean to rope all you guys into this mess too. Anyway, about breaking the curse: As it turns out, all you’ve gotta do is send a link to it to someone, or post it anywhere else you might feel like online! Apparently, there’s something to do with “spreading the curse” among the population, and eventually tainting the DNA of the entire human race? Anyway, I wish ‘em all the best with that plan, since I definitely agree that humanity deserves to get taken down a peg or two. Best of luck to you dear reader in breaking your curse, and have yourself a Happy Halloween!

** This is my own translation of a line that seems to originate from Koji Suzuki’s essay collection published in 2000 (collectively titled The Birth of Fatherhood). The line in its original Japanese reads as follows: “マッチョを突き詰めれば、必ずフェミニズムにゆきつく.” Where it can potentially be translated more directly as something like “If you pursue macho, you will always end up with feminism,” there’s the chance that someone could potentially misread that as Suzuki denouncing feminism and a macho mentality, which I don’t believe to be the case. In fact, what seems to be the core of Suzuki’s entire philosophy of parenting is the idea of mothers and fathers standing on equal ground, and sharing in some of each other’s responsibilities. No word on how Suzuki weighs in on the subject of same-sex couples but it at least seems like he’s not a staunch traditionalist when it comes to marriage; so perhaps there’s reason to be optimistic here that he might be accepting? It’s always hard to say when it comes to this subject in Japan.

Acknowledgements

This article was NOT supposed to be this long. Including this postscript section will put us precariously close to a total count of 40,000 words, and make this the new longest article on the Bad Game Hall of Fame website — less than one month since our previous article [on Lula 3D] had established the previous record (coming in at 32,000 words). I worry that I’m establishing some dangerous sort of precedent here: An expectation that each new article I write will wind up being longer than the last, whether I start writing it with that intention or not. The truth is that I never start writing an article expecting to have as much to say about a given game as I inevitably wind up typing. Worse yet, I’ve got a few subjects in mind that I already know going in are gonna take a whole lot of words to write about, which of course means that even my wildest word count projections will wind up being way off the mark. I worry that there’s gonna come a point where these articles get to be so long, that even our most dedicated readers run out of patience, and this whole enterprise of mine falls apart? Either that, or I burn myself out in the middle of penning some million word treatise on a budget game from the mid-2000s that nobody has ever heard of? Whichever comes first, I reckon.

Anyway: I did intend to use this extra space to acknowledge a couple of folk who covered this game long before I got around to it, and who did a fine job in doing so. I’ll mention ‘supergreatfriend’ first, whose Let’s Play titled “Bumbling Through The Ring: Terror’s Realm” wound up being a lot of viewers’ first exposure to this odd GD-ROM. At the very least, it’s the first commentated playthrough I found that seems to give the game a fair shot, and which doesn’t immediately devolve into the player screaming swears and cliches into their microphone about how the game is “so bad it causes you to die seven days after playing it” or whatever. Kudos to a commentator who recognizes that sometimes, the funniest thing you can do is sit back and let a game speak for itself.

The second person I wanna acknowledge is the YouTuber ‘Grim Beard,’ whose channel I only discovered for myself in just the last few months. By contrast, their video review of Terror’s Realm is a meticulously scripted affair; which not only comprehensively covers the whole contents of the game, but is wildly entertaining in doing so. Since watching that review, a particularly choice bit from that video has been bouncing around in my head, and continued to sporadically crack me up in the whole course of writing this article. In my mind and in my heart, Grims dulcet tones are the true voice of the Chief. I seriously cannot recommend their video enough if you’re looking for a second opinion on Terror’s Realm, or if you simply still need another hour’s worth of content even after reading through this whole essay right here. In fact, I will endorse their channel as a whole, as it speaks to exactly the sort of video game video content I would be putting out if I had the chops for it.

I’ve also gotta shout out Tara A. Devlin on YouTube, who posted a verbal translation of a playthrough of Ring ∞. Her video was immensely handy in getting a sense for how the gameplay and story is presented, even as the route it follows unfortunately goes on to get one of the early / “bad” endings. (Beggars can’t be choosers.) I, for one, think it’d be rad as hell if someone out there attempted to produce a full English translation hack for the game, so that we in the West can fully experience the game for ourselves.

Final kudos are owed to my pals Brandon Sheffield and Luka Étoile, whose replies to a tweet of mine were what ultimately convinced me to pick out The Ring: Terror’s Realm as the game I’d wind up writing about here. I originally intended to keep filling this section out until we eventually broke the 40,000 word threshold, but I reckon it might be funnier to stop just a few hundred words short of it. We’re gonna cross this line eventually, but I am inexplicably resolute in not letting that happen today.

[1] (🇯🇵) “第2回 日本ファンタジーノベル大賞 (‘2nd Japan Fantasy Novel Award’).” Shinchosha Publishing. Page accessed October 20, 2022. Web.
[2] ^b Totaro, Donato. “The ‘Ring’ Master: Interview with Hideo Nakata.” Offscreen. Originally published July, 2000. Web.
[3] (🇯🇵) “リング (‘Ring’).” SF MOVIE DataBank. Page accessed October 20, 2022. Web.
[4] (🇯🇵) “リング2 (‘Ring 2’).” SF MOVIE DataBank. Page accessed October 20, 2022. Web.
[5] (🇯🇵) “Corporate Profile 2009.” TED ASSOCIATES. 2009. Web.
[6] (🇯🇵) ^b “DESIGN KOMBINAT – Home Page.” DESIGN KOMBINAT. Page accessed October 20, 2022. Web.
[7] (🇯🇵) “リングのCM (‘Ring CM’).” Tycoon’s BBS. January 24, 2000. Web. (Archive)
[8] (🇯🇵) “NEW! リング (‘NEW! Ring’)” Dreamcast Magazine, Issue 36 EX. SoftBank. November 26, 1999. Print. (Scan available)
[9] Kollin, Mike. “Infogrames Confirms The Ring For Stateside Release.” IGN (formerly IGNDC). May 17, 2000. Web.
[10] Gentry, Peter. “This Week’s New Releases.” CNET Gamecenter. September 29, 2000. Web. (Archived)
[11] (🇯🇵) Weekly Famitsu, Issue 585. Enterbrain. February 3, 2003. Print.
[12] (🇯🇵) “Dreamcast SOFT REVIEW — リング.” Dreamcast Magazine, Vol. 7-2000. SoftBank. March 3, 2000. Print. (Scan available)
[13] (🇯🇵) “ドリマガ読者レース PART 2 for ドリームキャスト (‘Dorimaga Reader Race Part 2 for Dreamcast’).” Dorimaga, Vol. 2-2002. SoftBank. October 10, 2002. Print. (Scan available)
[14] Shoemaker, Bard. “The Ring: Terror’s Realm Review.” GameSpot. July 12, 2000. Web.
[15] ‘Mad Carl.’ “Reviews – The Ring: Terror’s Realm.” PlanetDreamcast. October 24, 2000. Web. (Archived)
[16] (🇯🇵) “Weekly Data Station.” Dreamcast Magazine, Vol. 7-2000. SoftBank. March 3, 2000. Print. (Scan available)
[17] NPD Group North American sales data for the month of January 2003. Compiled / transcribed for Sega Retro.
[18] (🇯🇵) ‘redcapote.’ “16年間だれもクリアした事のなかったゲーム『リング∞』解析の末、遂にベストエンドが発見される。” red capote’s Hatena Blog. February 4, 2017. Web.
[19] (🇯🇵) “当社子会社にかかわる営業の譲受けに関するお知らせ (‘Notice regarding transfer of business related to our subsidiary’).” TYO Corp. Ltd. March 25, 2004. Business filing.
[20] “The Ring.” Box Office Mojo. Page accessed October 20, 2022. Web.
[21] (🇯🇵) “‘鈴木光司氏の小説入り’ホラートイレ紙”が完結 (‘Horror Toilet Paper’ with Koji Suzuki’s Novel Completed’).” Oricon Life News. June 5, 2010. Web.
[22] (🇯🇵) Suzuki, Koji. 父性の誕生 (‘The Birth of Fatherhood’). Kadokawa, 2000. Print.
[23] ^b Bellamy, Aubrey. “The Ring girl and The Grudge girl played baseball together.” The AV Club. June 2, 2016. Web.
[24] ‘Lynzee Lamb & Bamboo Dong.’ “The Joke’s On You — Anime Does April Fool’s Day – Part 1.” Anime News Network. March 31, 2015. Web.