If you’ve ever been teased, it can seem like the human beings making your life miserable are monsters. The developers behind an in-development anti-harassment game are getting literal with that feeling, turning the bullies in Sumoboy into actual demons.
As the name Sumoboy suggests, lead character Oji isn’t a buff, grizzled space war veteran. He’s a chubby orphan tormented by jerky peers who finds out his parents are a spirit princess and a bulky martial arts warrior. The developers are calling Sumoboy the “first anti-bullying inspired video game” on Kickstarter and the proposed missions give a taste of the emotional bent of the design ideas:
Travel with Oji through each elemental realm and set things right. Convince an enormous tree to let go of his greed and calm the tormented soul of a monstrous catfish. Break the cycle of bullying among sky-dwelling dragons while helping a nymph find her voice. Will Oji defeat the ultimate bully and heal the emotional and physical damage done to Seishin? Can he help the poor spirits to discover their inner courage, and can Oji summon his own courage and unleash his potential as heir to the elements? Help Oji on his journey to find his strength and stand up for good!
Sumoboy looks like it will have a lot of heart and a fetching art style that channels a hand-painted storybook aesthetic. The game’s crowdfunding campaign — which aims to put Sumoboy on PCs first with consoles to possibly follow — launched today. You can lend your support right here.
Comments
8 responses to “Mean Kids Become Demonic In Beautiful Anti-Bullying RPG”
Someone should make a game about those bullies and why they behave like that. Everyone is quick to judge them and call them the scum of the earth, but few bother to understand why they behave they way they do and what caused them to become such assholes.
Maybe then we can stop the bullies. Because we often fight the effect, not the actual cause of the problem.
Usually it’s a wrong percieved sense of masculinity.
They’re still kids though and there’s reasons why they behave they way they do – whether it’s genetic, their parents causing it (e.g. beating them up, teaching them to be assholes because they don’t know any better, etc).
When you have a 6 year old bully – I dare say masculinity doesn’t really play a big role per se.
I don’t really see 6 year old bullies or remember them. Bullying doesn’t really come into play until kids reach about 10.
‘Machoness’ alone doesn’t account for it and even that – can we ultimately blame them for too much testosterone? Is it society that’s causing them to think they need to be the top of the pecking order by putting everyone else down?
To fix the problem it’s more complex than just blaming it on them. We need to understand what the real root cause of the problem is and what drives them to become bullies in the first place.
A nice person doesn’t just wake up one morning and consciously decided they want to be a bully. It happens over many years, gradually since they’re kids. And even if you wake up one day and just ‘become a bully all of a sudden’ there’s a reason why that happens also.
Actually I do think it’s usually because of stuff like the belief in alpha males and such. Ideas like that that are constantly forced into their lifestyles, whether it would be from a parent who never got over it themselves, or because of peer pressure from similar people who are also pressured in by others and society to act that way. While I don’t see it in kids, I see that pressure on pre-teens, teenagers and really ramped up during those college years of fratboys/dudebros. Constantly living in that environment can really put a tonne of pressure on people to keep up with that attitude and believes, and gets worse when they do reach the top of the herd. As they now have to work harder at preventing themselves from dropping or falling from that point as doing so will be the worse thing to happen to their man-hood.
It’s also made a lot worse with media testosterone crap like Transformer movies constantly reinforcing that idea. Even good shows like Breaking Bad or Sons of Anarchy focus a lot on male pride which reinforces the idea that men have to act like that otherwise nobody will consider them men.
By the looks of it, the protagonist becomes a bully himself. Except he uses a sword instead of his fists… Maybe it’s a metaphorical sword for “sticking up for yourself,” or some bs, but from the looks of it he becomes just as bad as the bullies.
That is exactly what this game is doing. From what I understand, there is no actual combat between oji and the other children. The bullies are talked down, and it is explained why they were being a bully in the first place.
The centre bully reminds me of jack black.