Background

For the readers to make sense of this article, I think it’s necessary to provide some background information beforehand.

I recently started playing a mobile rhythm game called Hatsune Miku: Colourful Stage (also known in Japan as Project Sekai: Colourful Stage feat. Hatsune Miku).

As a long-time Vocaloid and rhythm game fan, this game hits both of my sweet spots, yet for some reason I only started playing it two months ago despite its global version being launched since around 2021. Nonetheless, it’s better late than never, and I’m instantly hooked by the game for multiple reasons.

The variety in its game mechanics makes it appealing to a wide range of audience, regardless of age and preferences. In particular, its rhythm game mechanic is engaging in the best way possible: easy to learn yet challenging to master. The game also features a massive cast of 26 characters, featuring five original music groups, on top of the Cryptonloids¹, that represent a diverse range of musical genres. Their personalities are portrayed very realistically and compellingly, which are presented via a surprisingly prolific series of excellently written in-game stories (with more than 178 of them and counting), and this - the story part - will be the main focus of this article.

The story

Content warning: contains potential spoilers.

To be precise, this article focuses on a very specific part of the in-game stories, which is a particular event story called Star of Your Own Story, and how it provides us, situated in the position of an audience member, a valuable lesson in appreciating the hard work put through by actors behind the scenes, without judging their skills solely based on the characters they play.

This event story is just one of the many key stories in the game that talks about the journey of each member of one of the original music groups called Wonderlands×Showtime (or ‘Wondershow’ in short) in pursuing their respective dreams which are related to the acting and entertainment industry in some ways.

In this story, we learn that the Wondershow crew aims to gain further experience in acting by having an exchange training with a nationally renowned acting troupe called Shunmeiza. This story puts emphasis on one of the Wondershow members, Tsukasa Tenma, who is the troupe leader of the group, and his challenges in playing a minor character in a play - a book editor named Nakayama.

This was a first for him because before that he had only played fairly major characters in shows with hundreds if not thousands of lines of dialogue and lots of screen time. However, in this play, he only gets to appear for seconds and say merely three lines.

Upon seeing this, my initial reaction was, “This should be trivial to him,” which then led to, “Did he get looked down upon by getting assigned a minor character?” This brings us to one of the reasons I love this story: it plays with the readers’ potential stigma towards actors playing narratively insignificant roles, then subverts it by showcasing how Tsukasa later went to great lengths just to polish his performances in acting that said character, because the limited amount of material is the very reason that makes portraying this ordinary character in a realistic and emotionally impactful manner such a challenging task.

As expected, this is also given by the director of Shunmeiza, who holds a high standard, as Tsukasa’s task to be completed in this exchange training.

Throughout the story, we witness Tsukasa’s struggles in grasping the character’s personality and nuances, desperately looking for ways to act them out convincingly.

As you can see from the dialogue in the screenshot above, this story also features a side character who plays an important role in its development: Reki Bakuno, a troupe member of Shunmeiza and a highly talented actor, who interestingly only wants to play minor, supporting roles, despite multiple offers of major acting roles due to his immense acting skills. In the later stage of this story, we learn that his upbringing and introverted personality are the main factors that lead to such thinking.

Eventually, by taking advice from Bakuno and his Virtual Singer companions, Tsukasa arrived at a solution, i.e. he needs to approach the character from a different angle: instead of treating Nakayama as a negligible background element, he needs to place the character into the spotlight and imagine a full life story in order to shape a more realistic image of his.

In a nutshell, as we watch from a third-person perspective, we get the chance of seeing an actor’s thought process of perfecting their job and striving to portray a character to its fullest, regardless of its narrative significance. By seeing the effort paid into achieving these goals and how such efforts play out meaningfully in the story, we are able to gain respect towards the acting profession as a whole without brushing off such efforts as unnecessary overthinking.

In fact, at the end of this story, we get to see how Tsukasa’s hard work paid off. On top of that, we also learn that Tsukasa’s determination and unwavering resolve towards perfection has changed Bakuno’s attitude towards acting in a way. If you want to know what exactly the change is, instead of spoiling the surprise here, do play the game, read the whole story and see for yourself.

Conclusion

These two lines by Bakuno summarise the main theme of this story pretty well.

From this story, we also manage to get a glimpse of the amount of thought put into the plot of the game stories by the story writers which results in such masterful writing. They manage to make us empathise with the characters and become emotionally attached to them, via details that are supposedly small, obvious and easy to disregard, yet on second thoughts, we realise that they are actually significant to character development and serve as useful life lessons for us. The stories somehow have an ability to change our perceptions, sometimes even without us realising it, and that’s what I call natural storytelling.

In a world where actors and celebrities are often reduced by so-called ’entertainment news’ and paparazzi to simple-minded caricatures and merely subjects of gossip and ridicule, this story provides a breath of fresh air to us, as part of the audience. It’s a reminder for us that acting is in fact a profession not to be taken lightly: even a few seconds of screen time requires a serious amount of thoughts and effort to be executed well, and this is enough for them to deserve respect.