Kaiju All Over the World

Making DAWN feel international

Aliens always attack New York City and giant monsters always attack Tokyo.

And we up here in Toronto (often used for filming stories set in New York) miss being attacked as well, I guess.

We’re a team of developers with origin stories spread across five continents. It’s natural that we wanted the ongoing apocalyptic event in the kaiju-filled world of Dawn of the Monsters to feel like it spanned the whole planet. Including Toronto.

LOCATIONS

The most important factor to make this story feel international was which locations players would actually visit during the campaign. We were only going to have 4 main areas to smash around, so we had to choose them carefully. Tokyo was a no-brainer for a game so focused on referencing the kaiju classics. Toronto, 13AM Games' headquarters, was also an easy choice. But what about the other two?

We soon decided on Cairo for the third location. The city of the thousand minarets provided us with unique visuals, shaped by a rich cultural heritage. Being able to alternate between urban environments and the vast deserts surrounding the Nile valley was a big factor in the decision. Furthermore, Cairo is the Arab world's largest metropolis, which adds to the conflict feeling worldwide. I also think it's worth mentioning that our creative director Alex Rushdy has Egyptian roots, and we made sure to do as much research as possible about the location.

After considering many places for the remaining location, Foz do Iguaçu ended up being the one. It proved an interesting choice, where the rivers Paraná and Iguaçu meet, as do the borders of Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina. It let us set some of the action on a different continent (and hemisphere!) from the other three cities. It also gave us access to a distinct, greener environment, as well as the Iguaçu Falls themselves, where the epic clash with a Monarch was going to be set. Having a Brazilian art director who had actually been there in the past certainly helped with the research.

Besides those four locations, we also had room in the Archives to add some worldbuilding, so we made sure to sprinkle mentions to many places and cultures in them. This ranges from the original DAWN headquarters in Brussels and Beijing, events from years past in Israel and Syria, a mysterious German character, the many locations all over the world where Nephilim-related archaeological remains were found… and, of course, the hints at something going on in the Bermuda Triangle.

CHARACTERS

DAWN is the Defense Alliance Worldwide Network, an international effort to combat the Nephilim threat, and we wanted to make sure that its members lived up to the "Worldwide" part of it! People (and kaiju) of different origins coming together to fight for Earth was a big theme in the game, after all.

It was decided from the get-go that Eiji Murasame, alter ego of the playable giant hero Aegis Prime, was going to be Japanese, to honor the roots of the genre tropes that he references. We did deviate a bit from some of the tropes, however, and made him more of a rugged, cynical veteran; closer to Logan's Logan or The Last Jedi's Luke Skywalker than what one would expect just looking at his superheroic persona.

Jamila Senai, Tempest Galahad's pilot, was established as African-Canadian from early on. Although this didn't end up making it to the game itself, she is meant to have Eritrean roots. When the Triple Incident happened, Jamila and her parents were in the Cairo Airport, waiting for a connecting flight to Asmara, as seen in the short comic that you can read here.

Captain Claire Lionne was originally going to be German. However, I thought that her being French would be less stereotypical and cliché for a stern, military woman. As a little piece of trivia, she was originally called Clara Lein, and other last names we considered for her during the change included LeBlanc, Soule, Bastien, and Ducat.

We thought DAWN R&D’s Doctor Viktor Ivakin could come from one of three large countries that weren't really represented otherwise—China, Russia, or India. We ended up giving him a Russian name as a placeholder, and it stuck.

I’d like to talk a bit about how as a writer it can be challenging to write characters from such a diverse set of nations without dipping too deep into geopolitics. It’s easy to fall into reinforcing or endorsing existing divides, unintended ideologies, or other issues, even if unwillingly. I made sure to write Viktor and the rest of our characters as humans first and foremost. Their cultures add flavour to their personalities, but don’t determine them. At the end of the day, we are all human, for better or worse, regardless of where we come from.

For Doctor Sofia Cruces from the Archives, I knew I wanted her to be from Latin America. Before moving to Canada, I knew many people in Spain who had a harmful stereotype of latinoamericanos, seeing them as dumber and underdeveloped. My experience tells me that's far from the truth, and I wanted to reflect that by having one of the game’s smartest characters coming from a South American country, which ended up being Colombia.

The twins Kiwa and Kohara were first thought of as Japanese, for similar reasons as Eiji—having been inspired by tropes in Japanese movies. At the time, creative director Alex called them Mabo and Agedashi, after two types of tofu that he likes. We ended up making them Polynesian, specifically of Māori ethnicity. Their new names come from Māori deities, a god of the ocean and a goddess of tuna. I love the fact that there's a goddess of tuna.

If you want to know more about the tropes that inspired the twins, and much more about trivia and easter eggs in Dawn of the Monsters, make sure to check this article in Alex’s blog Control All Monsters!

Unlike some of the other characters, with Conrad Fosco we did embrace a certain stereotype and made him American. We generally appreciate our southern neighbours, but sometimes some of them can be a bit… a bit like Conrad Fosco. If someone wants to take revenge on us for this and make a Canadian villain for their stories, that'd be hilarious, please go ahead!

NEPHILIM NAMES

Although the game doesn't make it clear which Nephilim names come from ancient scriptures, and which are being made up by Sofia and her team (…and which are the team's interpretation of ancient scriptures), in either case the names should come from all over the world. After all, the Nephilim emerge all over the planet, and Sofia's department has members from many different countries.

I already wrote an article about Nephilim nomenclature and taxonomy, where you can see all the cultures and languages that inspired the Nephilim and ATOM names. If you haven’t already, you can read it here.

I believe that we accomplished our objective. Despite Dawn of the Monsters being a game that only visits 4 regions, with a genre that didn't really allow us to have a high word count, we made it feel like the whole Earth was in danger and people all over the world were coming together to fight for it.

Our favourite kaiju media have messages behind the monsters, and our game is no exception. Godzilla director Ishirō Honda believed in peace and unity between nations; and as a Baha’i, Alex believes that the earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens. We wrote this story from similar convictions, thinking about global issues such as climate change, which threaten a shared home that we must protect together—Earth.

We hope you enjoy the game, regardless of where you’re from!

Unai Cabezón (@Basquegeek) worked as Narrative Director and Programmer in Dawn of the Monsters, and Double Cross before.

He loves running Dungeons & Dragons games, consuming media in strict chronological order, and discussing the Star Wars Expanded Universe.