Gyoza: Complete as One Part of a Series

My host mother surprised me with a gyoza making lesson the other day. Here’s how it went down:

Ingredients:  cabbage, chives, ginger, garlic, 1 package of gyoza wraps, ground meat of choice (we used pork, but lots of people use beef).

Seasonings: sake, sugar, soy sauce, sesame oil, and salt.

1. Check the back of the gyoza wraps to see just how much all of your wraps can hold. This will determine exactly how much of the other ingredients you will need.
2. Mince all ingredients and mix together in a large bowl.
3. Mix seasonings and pour over gyoza filling.
4. Mix again.
5. Ready a glass of water, and open your gyoza wrappers.
6. Make the dumplings!: Place your filling inside the wrapper. Then dip your finger in the water and moisten the edges of the wrapper. Close the wrapper to create a gyoza dumpling. You can try pinching the wrapper as you close it strategically to make little creases in the dumpling.
7. Cook in pans with olive oil in the bottom—covered!—until browned.

Here is a more exact recipe, and here is one with pretty pictures that covers the dumpling making process since I was too busy getting my hands dirty to take pictures.

The thing about gyoza is each dumpling is complete on its own. Served as an appetizer or a side, just one would be completely acceptable—but they’re so tasty that we often want more than one of these delicious dumplings to complement the last one.

And, what with Hanukkah happening as we speak, I’ve got series with stand-alone segments on the mind anyway. My two best examples of media that manages to pull off stand-alone segments are Mushishi and Undertale.

If you ever wondered what a Hayao Miyazaki movie might feel like it if it was packed into a twenty two minute anime episode, you need look no further than Mushishi.  Full of fairytale like mysteries and beautiful Meiji era Japanese nature scenery, the series sets a quiet, peaceful mood that allows the viewer to feel as if they’ve experienced a revelation that lasted longer than one episode of anime. The reason for this is because Mushishi is the story of… well, of the supernatural beings called mushi, really. In each episode a new set of people deal with some sort of effect of the creatures called mushi. Mushi as defined by the show are the most primitive form of life. They are like fairies or ghosts in a way, because not everyone can see them, and they often cause trouble for people without meaning to. The only consistent character is the traveling Mushi Master, Ginko. Because of this, every episode is very dense. There’s hardly any pre-existing knowledge necessary in order to watch each episode—except that Ginko knows a lot about mushi and how to deal with them, but that’s established in every episode anyway when he explains what he does to the new set of characters. There are some episodes that are connected and go further into the past of Ginko the Mushi Master, but every episode is filled with new characters, a different kind of mushi, and its own set of themes.

Mushishi is one of those shows you can accidentally watch out of order or skip episodes on and never even realize it because each episode stands on its own so well. When the second season of the show came out, I accidentally watched the second half of the season before watching the first half. The story is also available in manga form.

Mushishi screen cap. Mushi dealt with appears in the form of a reversed rainbow.

Undertale is a different breed of stand-alone from Mushishi. It seems like a nostalgic RPG when you first start playing. You play as a human child that has fallen into the sealed underground world of the monsters. Your goal is to get back to the surface. However, it very quickly becomes apparent that this game is nothing like the RPGs from your childhood. Whereas in something like Pokémon one would always fight the wild Pokémon and other trainers even if one intended to catch or befriend them, fighting is something you can’t do if you want to get the best ending for Undertale. In order to really understand everything that’s going on in the background of the game, the player must run through the game three times. Fortunately, Undertale is relatively short, and once you achieve the Neutral Ending—because I can almost guarantee that is the ending you will receive on your first run through of the game—it’s possible to run through the game again and get the Pacifist Ending (so called because in order to get it you mustn’t kill any of the monsters you encounter) in less than a day. From there I don’t recommend actually trying to get the Genocide Ending. In order to get that ending the player must kill every monster in the game and actually trigger a certain number of encounters in each area for the sole purpose of killing monsters. Aside from taking a lot of time and effort, there are consequences for completing a Genocide run of Undertale: it is impossible to ever truly receive a Pacifist Ending again.

But in order to truly understand everything that’s going on in the world of Undertale, it’s important to receive all of the information that exists in all three story lines. If you’re personally interested in playing the game and having all three experiences, I would recommend Youtube to you as a resource after completing a Neutral and then Pacifist run.

The reason each run of Undertale stands so well on its own is because of how the responses and futures of the characters and the world change based on the player’s actions. In a Neutral run, Undyne, the strongest monster in the land, will sneer at the player for having killed any monsters at all, telling them that they didn’t need to and that they only did it because it was easy for them. However, in a Pacifist run, she will sneer at the player for putting on a “goody-two shoes” act. In a Genocide run, she simply vows to kill you. Nothing is the same from run to run, and so each play through stands on its own to give the player a new experience and enlighten them to a new facet of the game.

Undyne’s dialogue, prefight on a Neutral run.

Undyne’s dialogue, prefight on a Pacifist run.

Undyne’s dialogue, prefight on a Genocide run.

Now you’ve got two new things you can do on those days when you only have time for a little bit of something. Enjoy your dumpling sized helpings of anime and video games!