'Left 4 Dead' Rises Again In Japan

​Left 4 Dead was exactly what co-op chums needed in an age of competitive multiplayer games. Reliant on teamwork, communication as key as ammunition, paranoid environments and riffing character dialogue that encouraged similar chummery from its players. The 2008 first person shooter was a care parcel for those standing on the roof of a mall, dreading the masses of teabagging triggerhounds below.

My brother and I played both together in their entirety. Both, excluding a surprise new iteration that has begun popping up in Japanese arcades this year,​Left 4 Dead Survivors.

When I first heard about the arcade version of the series, I suppose I anticipated something a lil' similar to my preconceived notions of what kind of games appear in arcades. Maybe a four-person lightgun shooter. That would be neat. Having experienced Japan's arcades in person I know, now, that while traditional games are here, so are more decadent cabinets. While Survivors isn't outfitted with any giant animatronic Smokers wriggling its tongue around like a car lot wavy man, it isn't exactly what I expected for the public outing either.

The most noticeable change up from the original is the anime-washing of the characters. Gone are the diverse near-cartoon mixup cast of bikers, businessmen, survivalists, sasshounds and hicks. Instead, in comes Kudo, Blake, Sara, and Haruka, half who look like Supernatural fan art and three out of four are students, Haruka donning traditional school girl attire.

The zombies, the Boomers, the Witches, the Smokers, the Tanks, the Hunters, the Jockeys, the Spitters, the Chargers—all return in their original form. Disappointing only because I guess the Witch could be wearing a kawaii Halloween hat or something.

The noticeable change up from other arcade machines, however, is much more substantial. I've seen the set of four screens in a row and back-to-back, but they can be described as dedicated cyber café booths. Each have a screen, a mouse, a control stick and, of course, a coin slot. There are even headsets to hear and communicate with the other three more clearly, hypothetically, as the wall of sound usually found in these game centers creates a thick blanket of messy white noise. There are even card scanners for the players who like to carry their profiles for the long haul.

Each of the survivors could be wearing a plaid skirt, and this Left 4 Dead would feel essentially familiar. Scurrying around the night, weaving through abandoned cars and ghost town motels, seeing each undead and wondering if they're worth the bullets and commotion.

The character's are riffing, though in Japanese, so I can neither confirm nor deny if they are also talking about chocolate helicopters. There's also a fairly limiting time limit going on a single credit, at least on the mode we could navigate to, as if the series needed anything else to be anxious about.

Left 4 Dead in the arcade feels weird, because it doesn't feel like an arcade game. It is the regular console version relocated, it's Left 4 Dead backpacking in Japan. Even the Half-Life arcade machine, strangely also named Survivor, was refitted with controls that make sense for an individual arcade cabinet. Left 4 Dead Survivors is curiously unaltered in both formula and form.

Though Survivors was released a little earlier this year, each arcade is putting it into heavy promotion. Banners for Left 4 Dead hang from the entrance of most of Taito's arcades in Japan, getting full video promos on the building fronts with available space. They're handing out little promotional booklets. But you can feel this is a hard sell, and every time my brother and I have encountered the machines (and I assure you I've been hitting these arcades like a mother fucker since travelling to Japan for the month) they have been as vacant as the small towns the game takes place in.

Japanese players have never traditionally been big on first person shooters. A Left 4 Dead for arcades that plays exactly like Left 4 Dead, is an odd ballsy endeavour. And while the Kotzer brothers enjoyed cracking some undead skulls, even momentarily, it doesn't seem to be a taste shared by the local patrons, who hover around native installations like fighters, various kinds of Gundam battle games, horse betting and crane machines instead.

Left 4 Dead was exactly what shooter players needed when it first came out, but I'm not sure what space it hopes to fill in Japan. I suppose when there's no more room in hell, the dead shall walk Akihabara.