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LIONKILLER: From watching the animated Mulan film to an IGF Award nomination

Photo credit: Sisi Jiang
Photo credit: Sisi Jiang

From Digital Spy

Many eyes are on Disney's big-budget Mulan remake coming out this spring, but there's an acclaimed Mulan story that you likely missed last year. Interactive fiction game LIONKILLER, developed by Sisi Jiang, is a retelling of the legend that takes place during the First Opium War in 1839, when the British Empire invaded China.

The full version launched last summer, and since then LIONKILLER has been nominated at the 2020 Independent Games Festival Awards for Excellence in Narrative.

During an interview with Digital Spy, Jiang explained that they were interested in adapting Mulan following their less-than-positive reaction to Disney's 1998 animated film.

Photo credit: Disney
Photo credit: Disney

"You know how a lot of fans are told, 'If you don't like an [intellectual property] out there, make your own'? My thing was, I didn't like the animated Mulan movie. I watched it for the first time three years ago," they said.

"I don't represent all the Chinese diaspora honestly. I know a lot of people who find Mulan very personally important to them. I'm not going to say it's inauthentic, but I look at the screen and I'm like, 'These are American characters with a little bit of Asian seasoning'. I can tell that they worked some Asian people into the creative process, but it still feels to me like it's an American story about girl power. I didn't connect with it at all.

"So I was like, I'm going to make my own thing. And it's going to be sick because it's going to have all of the historical research that I really liked. I was like, let's do this but remix it, so it's not just the same story that people have known for a long time."

LIONKILLER sees Hua Mulan conscripted into the army and experiencing war against the British Empire while disguising herself as a man. The writing doesn't shy away from themes such as British imperialism and the harsh realities of war, which came from researching the time period.

"I feel like a lot of people are going to say I made this game with a huge political agenda, but I have a history degree and I really like researching modern history a lot more than doing research for classical history," Jiang explained.

Photo credit: Sisi Jiang
Photo credit: Sisi Jiang

"I was looking at the centuries that I wanted to set a game in, and I was like, oh look, there was this one big baddie that gave an existential crisis to every country that they've ever invaded. Let's use that baddie, because it's really convenient.

"And then I did some more research, and it's not just [in China]. It's also in India. It's also in Afghanistan – the whole rivalry with Russia over Afghanistan.

"That kind of informed me when I was trying to scope out my project and really understand the significance of that period – because in order to sell people on a history game, you have to be really understanding about why is it that people should care, and why is everything that takes place really badass. I'm not going to lie, a lot of professors are not very good at that. I'm just like, take all the badass bits and all of the life-or-death existential parts, and stick that into the game."

Jiang also discussed the attention LIONKILLER has received over its prominent LGBTQ+ characters and storylines. Mulan's female love interest is trans, for example, but the developer said that there wasn't any political motivation behind it and feels a lot has been made out of it because LGBTQ+ game narratives are still rare.

"Can we just accept that we would get really bored if everyone was cis and straight?" they said. "I didn't have to have this whole political agenda going into it.

"For the love interest, my thought process at the time was, I was living in Chicago, Indiana. There were some queer devs - I had my own place but I bunked on their couch a little. And so when I started making this character, I was thinking, 'Does she have to be cis?'. I just thought about it and there's no story reason for her to be cis. So I went ahead and made her trans and kept going.

Photo credit: Sisi Jiang
Photo credit: Sisi Jiang

"Honestly, I think people are thinking way too much about it. I think it's because I've done a lot of things that games are not known for doing, that are 'bucking' against the establishment.

"I had no idea [LIONKILLER] would get this far – I was making a game that I wasn't planning to sell. I was just doing it as a portfolio piece until someone came and offered to cut me a cheque for it. And even then, my plans didn't really change. I had a much bigger project scoped out, and I still ended up cutting like 40% of it."

LIONKILLER is split into three parts. The first was developed and released in 2018, but Jiang put development on hold before Wattpad approached them and helped to fund the second and third parts.

Jiang pointed out the difficulty of breaking into the industry and the large disparity between a new developer with no name recognition and those who have enjoyed success and been around for a while.

"There are indies that are like depressed kids banging out games on their laptops," they said, "and then there are indies with tens of thousands of dollars of funding and a publisher to back them. They're ten people at an office and their game is probably going to launch on Steam. That's a whole different kind of indie."

Photo credit: Sisi Jiang
Photo credit: Sisi Jiang

Jiang said that cutting content from the game did "hurt" but was a necessity to ensure that LIONKILLER could be finished, pointing out that people generally only focus on what's in a game rather than what's missing. Ideas that were considered include "a whole arc of fighting the British Empire" and storylines for some of the British characters including one man who would have served as a rival.

"I always look at the title of the game and it's a little awkward, because there was a lot of gender angst but there wasn't a lot of actually fighting the Empire," Jiang said.

But it ended up working out – the storytelling resonated with a lot of people and earned LIONKILLER a nomination in this year's Independent Games Festival Awards, where it will be competing against the likes of Mutazione, Eliza, and Elsinore.

"It's just really surreal when you're in a category next to people who have been doing this for most of their careers," they said. "For a few days after [the nomination], the whole time I was trying not to think about this was probably a big mistake and they're probably going to send me an update email saying, 'Sorry, we meant to print someone else's game'.

"I've been filling out the forms for submitting to the exhibition, and I'm looking at the other nominees and seeing that they are full companies or indies who have been in the business for several years and have released several games."

Jiang will have to wait until March to find out the winner of the Excellence in Narrative category, but they've started work on their next game - Sic Semper Tyrannis - and been sharing work-in-progress images on Twitter.

Photo credit: Namco
Photo credit: Namco

Lastly, we asked if there were any games that were influential to Jiang. The developer immediately mentioned Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean for the GameCube. First released in 2003, the game had a prequel a few years later called Baten Kaitos Origins.

"I never get to talk about this game because nobody knows about it," they said. "It's honestly hands down the best JRPG and probably the best video game I've ever played. It was just so unapologetic for its weird pull. You have to play it to experience how weird the humour was.

"It just flaunted all of these JRPG conventions and it doesn't care what you thought about it. It operated under its own internal logic about how the game itself worked, and I respect the hell out of it. They didn't sell very many units or anything, but they didn't care. They were loyal and faithful to what they thought the game world should be.

"I think a lot of queer kids really related to it, because Baten Kaitos was just so weird - the fashion, the land, the creatures, it just didn't care. It was like, 'Here, take it or leave it'. It was really fantastic."

LIONKILLER is available now on itch.io.


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