When I was a little boy, I thought Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, was the greatest hero of all. Stronger than Superman, sharper than Spider-Man, he fought, tricked, and joked his way across my father’s bedtime stories, freely borrowed from Xiyouji (Journey to the West), the classic 16th-century novel that defined the character for centuries of Chinese storytellers to come.
There are hundreds of adaptations, sequels, and spin-offs of Xiyouji: the latest of them is the Chinese video game Black Myth: Wukong. Since its launch by developer Game Science on Aug. 20, it has become one of the fastest selling video games of all time, making more than $700 million in less than three weeks and moving more than 20 million copies in its first month.
Three-quarters of these sales have been in China, where the game has become a point of pride in a country where video gaming often has a hard time getting the stamp of government approval. But the game’s rendition of China’s most iconic hero has also become caught up in familiar culture wars.
Xiyouji is, as the novel’s latest translator into English, Julia Lovell, told me, “a story about shapeshifting that itself shapeshifts.” Like the Monkey King himself, the story has wriggled between forms and remains difficult to pin down. It has no certain author: In the 1920s, Hu Shih, a great Chinese critic and journalist, attributed it to Wu Cheng’en, a then-obscure Ming dynasty author, quite possibly wrongly.
There is a distant historical reality to the book: the journey of the very real seventh-century Chinese monk Xuanzang (referred to in the text as Tang Sanzang, sometimes translated as Tripitaka) to India to recover important Buddhist scriptures. By the time Xiyouji was written, however, the historical monk had long become associated with the Monkey King, created from a variety of simian legends from across China and India.
Xiyouji itself is a gallimaufry text, throwing together poetry, demons, piety, banter, and satire. It invokes the salesmanship of serial storytellers, telling the reader, “And if you want to know what happened next, you’d better read the next chapter.” It is primarily Buddhist, freely satirizing the competing faith of Daoism; at one point, Sun and his companions trick evil Daoists into drinking their urine under the guise of holy water. But the novel happily throws Daoist and Confucian ideas into the mix when it suits the story.
The flexibility of the tale has made it interpretable as everything from a proto-Marxist attack on the ruling classes to a deep spiritual allegory to an astrological primer. It’s also very, very long: some 1,400 pages in a full English translation. Many versions in English, beginning with Arthur Waley’s 1942 Monkey, are abridgements that contain about a third of the text.
Yet at the heart of the story is the interplay between the four pilgrims (and their horse, a transformed and repentant dragon). Poor Xuanzang, in real life one of history’s greatest travelers, has become a damsel in distress, constantly in danger of being eaten or violated by a range of demons. The comic fuel of the book is the relationship between the Monkey King and his fellow pilgrim Pigsy (Zhu Bajie), a somewhat repentant hog-demon who loves food, women, and booze even more than Monkey does. Sandy (Sha Wujing) rounds out the party, a former ogre who acts as a straight man for his raucous colleagues.
After the book’s publication in 1592, the public demanded even more than Xiyouji’s hundred chapters. Ming dynasty publishers rushed to put out sequels or rename older texts with the Monkey King in them. In Journey to the South, he gets a fierce demon daughter; in Further Adventures on the Journey to the West, he wanders through a poetic dreamscape. The pilgrims became stock figures of Chinese drama and opera—and then of film and TV.
And with every version, the Monkey King was refitted for the times. My childhood images of the Monkey King were shaped by two of the dominant 20th-century adaptations: the 1978-1980 Japanese TV show Saiyuki, screened in the West in the early 1980s, and the Chinese animated film Havoc in Heaven, first screened in full in 1965. In the Japanese series, actor Masaaki Sakai’s raffish swashbuckler is the closest any actor has gotten to the spirit of the book’s Monkey King, bellowing “I love to fight!” in the opening credits, which also, in true 1970s fashion, proclaim him “the funkiest monkey that ever popped.”
Havoc in Heaven was a direct product of modern China’s history, made by the four Wan brothers who formed China’s first animation studio. Their first full-length feature,1941’s Princess Iron Fan, is also a Xiyouji adaptation, in which the four pilgrims have to learn to work together in an analogy of anti-Japanese resistance.
By 1961, when they started making Havoc in Heaven, the political demands were very different. Havoc in Heaven is based on the opening of Xiyouji, where the Monkey King rebels against Heaven and thrashes the gods. Originally the story was a Peking opera, and the film’s designs use the bright colors and sharp lines of stage makeup.
But whereas the novel and opera end with the Monkey King being subdued by the infinite power of the Buddha, the film finishes on a firm note of revolution, with Sun Wukong celebrating his overthrow of Heaven among the other monkeys. (That wasn’t enough to save the animation team, who, like most artists, were persecuted during the Cultural Revolution on the grounds that the film was anti-Maoist.)
So how does Black Myth fit into this long tradition of a shape-shifting story?
Well, first of all, it had to carry extra weight because it’s a video game. Film versions have become routine, almost expected, in the PRC over the last 30 years, but video games are on more uncertain ground. The Communist Party sees video gaming as a dangerous distraction for the young and, like other media, as a possible vector of foreign influence. Over the course of Black Myth’s development since 2018 there have been numerous crackdowns on video games, including a nine-month freeze on licenses for new games that helped drive 14,000 gaming companies out of business. Another set of measures wiped out over $100 billion in stock value this January until the government backpedaled.
And while the Chinese gaming industry is measured in the tens of billions of dollars and Chinese firms own substantial chunks of major gaming studios, China’s creative output in video gaming has been tiny by comparison. That’s different for smaller mobile platforms, where there are hundreds of Chinese-developed game apps, such as the massively popular Honor of Kings.
Black Myth is the country’s first ever AAA game—meaning a blockbuster video game that takes years and $60 million or more to develop. As such, Chinese fans have been obsessing about the game since it was first announced, desperate for a big story all their own after years of playing Western and Japanese games.
Black Myth stages its story as a sequel, opening with the Monkey King still being pursued by his heavenly foes after the journey is over—and then being defeated and trapped. You don’t play as Sun Wukong, but as a random monkey chosen to inherit his legacy, known in the game as the Destined One. If you don’t know the Xiyouji story already, there’s no hand-holding here about who any of these characters are or what they’re doing.
All that time and money has paid off in a very good game, a solid A-, excellent but just short of being a masterpiece. The landscapes and characters are stunning, from mountain temples to murky swamps. Structurally, it’s a “boss rush” game featuring long fights with complicated and dramatic enemies; you bumble around the landscape a bit in between but mostly in search of more bosses to fight as you whack the minor baddies.
These are great boss fights. The enemies, many of them taken straight from the demons and dragons and gods of Xiyouji, are monstrously satisfying; tough to beat but not so frustratingly hard the player gives up.
Chinese games, like Chinese films, have often been hampered by the country’s spotty censorship of religious, magical, and fantastic themes; when magic makes an appearance in Chinese movies, for instance, it has to be explained away with pseudoscience or as Scooby-Doo style trickery. But Xiyouji is so embedded in the canon that it gets a free pass, and the monsters can be straightforwardly creepy, from twisting snake demons to giant scorpion-men.
And it’s very satisfying to feel like the Monkey King, or his non-union equivalent, the Destined One. The player’s arsenal is full of familiar powers, acquired over the course of the game: a giant staff or magic gourd that transform into multiple forms as you fight, or a handful of hairs that can be thrown into the air to become dozens of smaller Monkey Kings to batter your opponent.
Yet Black Myth is strangely lacking in the original tale’s humor. The protagonist is entirely silent. There’s an odd bit of dialogue, but you defeat bad guys by hitting them repeatedly—not, as Sun Wukong often does, by beating them with cunning or taunting them into mistakes. (One of the game’s few genuinely funny moments comes in an endgame fight that is a walking spoiler, but which uses both the story and the game to great effect.) You change forms to smash enemies, not to foil them.
Contrast this with the Spider-Man games, where the hero’s traditional quipping and trickiness is worked into both dialogue and gameplay. Black Myth’s voice acting, in both English and Chinese, is serviceable, but there’s nothing of the quality of Richard Schiff’s Odin as a New York huckster in God of War Ragnarök or Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson in The Last of Us.
The Destined One’s repeated deaths struck me as another missed opportunity to work in the spirit of the original story. Getting beaten over and over again is a staple of boss rush games, as is being whisked back to the nearest respawn point—shrines, in this case. But losing fights is also a staple of Xiyouji: Sun Wukong gets beaten, fools his opponent while running away in one of his disguises, and finds another angle. It would have been fun to have this kind of variation instead of the old die-and-respawn routine.
The animated sequences that play after chapters of the game, explaining the backstory of each segment’s chief villain, in different styles that evoke everything from hand-drawn scrolls to anime to the 1986 Chinese TV adaptation of Xiyoujji, offer a much more interesting artistic vision. It’s a shame that the quality of writing and lore evidenced in these sequences wasn’t brought into the main gameplay.
Yet for Chinese fans, it’s clear that what mattered wasn’t the quality of the story so much as it being a Chinese story, period. “The visuals are Chinese and have local characteristics,” writes one reviewer on the PC gaming platform Steam, “but can be compared to the most exquisite foreign ones.” Another writes: “It’s an Eastern fantasy masterpiece that stirs the DNA of our cultural sentiments.” The pleasure of seeing a story told with your heroes, instead of somebody else’s, is real.
An uglier side of video game culture has also emerged over Black Myth. Ever since an IGN report on Game Science’s history of sexism, some Chinese fans have used the new game to attack feminism—a line picked up by Western video gaming culture’s own rich crop of reactionary idiots. Game Science didn’t help by telling reviewers of the game that they couldn’t discuss “feminist propaganda,” echoing the Chinese government’s own repression of feminists online.
It’s not a problem with the original story. Compared to other classical Chinese novels, Xiyouji might not have the richness of women’s lives depicted in Dream of the Red Chamber, but it also doesn’t have the rank misogyny of The Water Margin. Lovell told me she’d thought about gender issues while picking the stories for her abridged translation, focusing on parts that Arthur Waley, a quintessential English gentleman of a translator, left out. “I really love when they go to the Land of Women,” she said, describing a long, satirical segment where the pilgrims find themselves the uncomfortable targets of the female gaze.
There’s little of this in Black Myth, but it is not worth criticizing the game for its relative lack of female characters. There’s just not that many characters of any kind, as opposed to enemies. I’m not certain that it’s a win for gender representation to know that the multi-armed spider demon you’re beating up is female. The game’s plot is largely an excuse for spectacle, not an exercise in storytelling.
And yet however lackluster Black Myth’s plot may be, the first entries in classic videogame franchises have often been far more clunky in their storytelling and dialogue. The first God of War is a melodramatic murder-fest, and subsequent entries were often deeply cringeworthy. Nearly two decades later, the games have become moving stories of grief, fatherhood, trauma, and hitting monsters in the face with an axe.
Sequels to Black Myth are already promised, and other studios are attempting their own AAA products. As Chinese games mature—and if the government lets them—the storytelling might start to live up to the visuals. We may even get a Monkey King worthy of the story’s legacy.
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