No Sleep For Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files Doesn’t Even Understand Moma Kumakura’s Worst Bit

This text contains full spoilers for No Sleep For Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files, up to and including post-game bonus content. Reader discretion is advised.

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I love yakuza stories, as everyone who knows me knows very well by now. When a non-yakuza piece of fiction has characters from that walk of life, I’m extremely likely to be drawn to them. With the AI: The Somnium Files franchise, it happened pretty much as soon as I got to walk inside the messy, grayscale office of the Kumakura Family, an off-kilter criminal organization whose whimsical boss Moma attempts to run things as peacefully as one can when they’re part of the underworld.

The basic elevator pitch when it comes to Moma is that he’s that most classic of anime delinquent tropes: he talks a lot of smack, but his real personality is sweet and awkward. Keeping it to just that, however, would be missing a key part of what makes him such a controversial figure among fans: Moma, a 48-year-old man, is a huge fan of 18-year-old streamer/idol Iris “A-set” “Tesa” Sagan, something that starts off as gap moe yet takes a sharp turn towards sexual obsession later on.

It’s a little bit hard to admit, but he’s my favorite character in the series. In the beginning I walked out on him as soon as the disgusting parts made themselves known, but when the sequel to the first game dropped and showed his entire personality was now about that gag (because it is treated as hilarious; you are intended to think his delusional crush on a high schooler is the funniest thing you’ve ever seen), I picked Moma up as something of a labor of love. I adore him not for what the games make of him – rather, for what I know he could be, a figure of complicated morality marked by an abysmal relationship with his deceased older brother and a wish to be the opposite to that man’s senseless, cruel rule of the family named for both of them.

And then a new game dropped including him, and, while I trawled through the usual dreamscape scenarios and unfunny jokes about the proud city of Atami offered to me in No Sleep For Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files, my heart was overtaken by dread. What was it going to be this time? In my last visit to vaguely futuristic Tokyo, Moma was seen choking himself half to death out of misusing a device that allowed him to sound like Tesa and say unbecoming things in her voice. Surely it can’t be any worse than this.

I think Kazuya Yamada, the new man at the scriptwriting/directing dual wheels yet still being overseen by series creator Kotaro Uchikoshi, must have read my thoughts and taken them as a challenge.

The first time No Sleep For Kaname Date mentions Moma, it’s because the titular character, a cop considering candidates for the apparent kidnapping of Iris, lands on him as the most logical answer. I mean, a crime was committed, so who else could it have been other than the known criminal with plenty of motive for it?

As it turns out, that’s not what happened at all. The man himself has gone missing after a whole day of skulking about being an Iris fanboy, and he ends up surfacing in the main story via the escape game she is also trapped inside. The way he speaks of the situation, it doesn’t sound like anyone took him – he just seems to have walked right inside this mystery venue. Combined with footage Date digs up of Moma following a van Iris got on with a putrid grin on his face, the truth is revealed. He’s here because he stalked her. Different crime.

What he claims is that he did it out of worry, but everything else in the game, including the pretty anti-yakuza weight of the narrative, points, of course, to him doing this out of pedophilic obsession. Mind you, the game waves off Date’s lecherous quips about the same teenage girl with a “teehee he actually likes MILFs he doesn’t mean it” (then why on Earth did he say that?!). In fact, Iris is why Moma does anything in here – a particular piece of flavor text that keeps me up at night claims that the reason why he’s a criminal who tries not to do much crime relates back to her, not to the aforementioned evil older brother whose actions have deeply scared Moma.

Even if we’re to contend with reality and accept The Gag as something integral to Moma’s character, even if we’re to discard any mourning of potential squandered by it, the fact of the matter is that Kazuya Yamada does not understand how it functioned in the first place. He has claimed to have gone back and examined each character’s motivations and thought patterns, but I simply don’t think it’s true, not when he turned a by-all-accounts legit yakuza into a one-track-minded buffoon.

In the first two games, despite all of his posturing, Moma was defined by shame – initially, the root of the gap moe I spoke of. He had to express all of his revolting wishes (starting at “shaking her hand” and ending at “getting a faceful of her chest”) when it came to Iris through Date, more than likely painfully aware of the optics of what he was doing, but not enough to stop himself from lusting for a high schooler.

Save for a few slip-ups, his bastardization in nirvanA Initiative, his complete submission to The Gag, only makes itself clear because you can look inside his mind and thus get a front-row seat to his horrid fantasies of what it would be like if he married Iris. The game still attempts to convince you that his stanning is cute and silly, such as when he’s reduced to little giggles when she says his name, but it falls completely flat when you know what his lower head thinks of that. He still gets to retain more of his character than I originally gave the story credit for, though; he’s got a pseudo-daughter figure, minor plot relevance through non-Iris means, and even a Tamagotchi version that lets him talk more about his yakuza side.

In No Sleep, however, “business-minded tough guy with a kind heart” turns into “incompetent, delusional hypocrite with no moral compass”. Perhaps leaning into his being a criminal, the narrative starts to put him into increasingly more objectionable positions – his once heartfelt “clean gangster” schtick turns into something portrayed as purely self-indulgent and insincere, a man who loves to scream about how much of a good person he is at any opportunity (including a ridiculous bit where he makes sure to call his salt ramen “salt-of-the-earth ramen”) because there’s a teenager he needs to impress, while actively doing crime to get to her and even attempting to flat-out confess in the middle of a life-or-death situation.

Do you know what Kaname Date does about this? Nothing. He half-heartedly threatens to arrest him, but at the end of the day, he even slips Moma a little gift for stalking, it bears repeating, a teenage girl, because his pedophile antics were useful to the police and should be nurtured: a deepfake of her fawning over him and thanking him for being a fan. I guess it tracks with the franchise’s history of having its cop characters only deliver judgment upon criminals if they’re not useful (see the ever-controversial ending of nirvanA Initiative).

It’s like the fine folks at Spike Chunsoft have the mission statement of making Moma Kumakura more indefensible and uninteresting a character with every new game. Plenty of fans I know were repulsed by how he was written in the previous entry, so, within my bubble, it is all the more baffling that they have decided to triple down in response. I’d love to have the confidence to ask if there’s anyone who sincerely thinks this stuff is funny, but I’ve seen enough Redditors calling him a “man of culture” to know the answer.

All that in mind, the most irrational part of my brain still lit up in joy when we found out this wretch of a man, this shell of his hinted potential, this war-horse-turned-one-trick-pony was even going to be in No Sleep. I’d really like to someday have a leg to get those excited feelings to stand on, instead of restarting the press cycle game in and game out with the certainty that they’ll just keep showing him in a worse light – who cares about character consistency when we have to uphold The Gag?

Well, I do. I hope you do, now, too.

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Hiero de Lima is a Brazilian game journalist and critic obsessed with narrative analysis who will accept any amount of jank if the story’s good. You can find their games writing on Backloggd (short-form) and Medium (long-form), and their bilingual silliness is on Bluesky.