|
Hm, so this is what we've got so far: Whoever killed Shoko Nadami also removed her left eye, apparently before she died. Boss thinks this might be a copy of a crime that occured six years ago. Date doesn't know about this crime, and Boss doesn't want to tell him. Date is missing his left eye, and had Aiba installed in its place five years ago. Date doesn't remember anything before six years ago. So... Date was the victim in an attempted murder six years ago, and that's how he lost his left eye? And his amnesia might be due to trauma from that attack? No idea why the incident would've been kept secret from from him if that was the case though, but all these parallels definitely feel like they're going somewhere. Thanks for doing this LP, I'm looking forward to seeing how ridiculous this game gets.
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2019 21:08
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 18, 2024 16:37 |
|
|
Cute little Easter egg I noticed: one of the images shown on the screen in the Lemniscate lobby is the scratch-off poster from Virtue's Last Reward.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 30, 2019 21:41
|
|
|
Ooookay, that certainly raised a lot of questions. Let me see here: Date knew Iris when she was a little kid, as shown both by his flashback after Iris gives her name and by Iris' remark that Date seems familiar. Given that, it makes sense that he also knew Hitomi and has been in their house before, as shown by his dream. That doesn't really give any clue as to how he knew them, though. The obvious possibility is that he's Iris' father (though he might be too young for that; I can't remember if Date's age has been mentioned), but there's really no way to tell yet. The contents of his dream is pretty interesting, too: after getting the door open, Aiba walked into the next room where she saw Hitomi lying dead on the floor and a man with a gun standing next to her. Hitomi is alive, obviously, but Date could very well be remembering an attack in which Hitomi lost the use of her right arm. I'm really not sure whether the man with the gun is Date or not, though. Perhaps Date remembered how he tried to kill Hitomi, or perhaps he remembered coming to the house and interrupting the would-be murderer. What I'm most curious about is Hitomi's reaction to Date's arrival. If Date is still recognizable enough that Iris finds him familiar, then surely Hitomi should know exactly who he is. So what gives? Also, just throwing this out there: I'm guessing that "Kaname Date" is an entirely constructed identity and Date went by another name until six years ago, mostly because Uchikoshi loves characters with hidden identities. One more thing that stood out to me: Kabasaki District was closed after an industrial accident eight years ago, which was before Date lost his memory. Might be an unimportant background detail, but maybe it'll come up again later.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 10, 2019 00:27
|
|
|
Whew, caught up again. Assorted thoughts: Mizuki is great, and I appreciate that the files list her skills as "martial arts" and "emotionally attacking Date". Clicks on item labeled "Flier": "A flyer." Really? So now we've got a character with hemispatial neglect. That's another missing eye, but inverted: Date and Shoko are missing their left eyes, Rohan was effectively missing his right eye. Hm. A lot of things seem to have happened about six years ago. Date lost his memory, Hitomi was attacked and lost the use of her right arm, Rohan shot "some guy" and was put on trial for premeditated murder, and Moma thus became the new head of the Kumakuras. There's no way to figure out how this is all related, though, not with the bits and pieces of information we've got so far. Something very strange is going on when Date first talks about Rohan. He says "That... can't be right. The chairman of the Kumakuras is Rohan.". This is immediately followed by the "flashback" effect, the same one used when Date remembered playing with Iris when she was a kid, but no flashback happens. He then says "You aren't the chairman." and for that line, and only that line, Date's left eye is closed. Through the entire game so far, Date's left eye has only been closed when Aiba is physically separated from him; this is the first (and so far only) exception. What does that signify? Did Aiba do something in that moment to prevent Date from remembering something? Is that why she's so quick to inform him of Rohan's death and Moma's succession, something that both of them really should have known before they even entered the building? (Edit: Just realized that I forgot one more thing that happened six years ago: the crime that Boss thinks Shoko's murder could be a copy of. Also, I'm guessing 91 crashes by the end of the LP.) Tau Wedel fucked around with this message at 22:16 on Jan 11, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2020 19:04
|
|
|
I'd been wondering why Date was so focused on Iris' corpse in Mizuki's Somnium being a premonition. When I saw it, my immediate thought was that Mizuki had witnessed Iris being abused or attacked sometime in the past, and the corpse was metaphorical like so many other things in Somnium. But okay, apparently it was a premonition. I guess Mizuki is psychic now? I have no idea where this particular thread is going. Neat effect when Aiba is powered down: the pupil in Date's left eye is grey rather than bright yellow. (And this is "metagaming", I suppose, but I'm wondering why Aiba runs out of battery at this point. It seems oddly conspicuous for the game to declare that Aiba is powered down for this one scene, especially because it doesn't seem like her presence would have changed anything.) Iris is missing her right eye, not her left, so that's a difference from Shoko's murder. Might be important, might not be. Renju is looking really suspicious at this point. He sent Mizuki a message asking her to go to Bloom Park, he disappeared from the hospital after being involved in an accident, and as Iris' manager he could very well be the person who showed up in the middle of the night and got her to leave the house. We still haven't seen anything resembling a motive for Renju to commit murder, though. And there's still the question of how So Sejima fits into all this, but hopefully we'll get some answers to that from his Somnium.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 22, 2020 21:56
|
|
|
Karia posted:Hypothesis: are we actually sure that Iris is dead? The fact that Aiba was powered off means that there's no video evidence of the body. All we've got is Date's perception, which could easily be faulty (especially since he saw the "premonition" beforehand.) There's an autopsy report, but it's unclear whether the coroner actually did a real autopsy or if it's just based on what Date saw. We haven't gotten confirmation that anyone else has actually gone and collected the body yet. And So could be guessing that the body was stabbed because that's how Shoko was killed. Oh, that's a good point. I hadn't considered that Date might affect what he sees in someone else's Somnium. Alternatively to there being no body, it could also be that there was a body in the warehouse, but it isn't Iris. Date hallucinates that Iris is dead, as you suggested, and then someone else from the police collects the body and does an autopsy, and no one sees any reason to question Date's identification of the victim.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 25, 2020 19:46
|
|
|
Well, that was remarkably uninformative. But hey, there's Date's missing left eye again: at Warehouse Door G, after Aiba hears the sound of repeated stabbing (6:05 in the video), and again at Warehouse Door E, after Aiba hears a frightened woman (13:20). I suspect that it indicates that Date is remembering something from before six years ago, though I couldn't say why it's only those two doors that cause him to react like this. And then there's the shadowy figure that attacks Iris. Date and Aiba agree at the start that it's probably So, but of course it doesn't look like him, or like anyone at all, really. And at the end Date says "That shadow must be..." but doesn't complete the sentence, so who knows what he's thinking at that point. I'm sure this will all make sense in retrospect.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 3, 2020 18:46
|
|
|
Date: How does time travel work? Pewter: Imagine four balls on the edge of a cliff. Anyway, I think Karia is right that Iris was never killed. It is an Uchikoshi game, so dreams affecting reality is not completely impossible, but I'm more inclined to believe that Date's perception is faulty.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 10, 2020 18:19
|
|
|
Huh. Date asks Aiba whether #89 has any connection to "the Cyclops Serial Killings", and I'm pretty sure we haven't heard that term before. Presumably that's the crime that Boss thought Shoko's murder could be a copy of; the name would fit with a series of murders in which the victims had one eye removed. She very specifically didn't want to tell Date about it, though, so it's odd that he brings it up now. Maybe it would've come up earlier if we'd gone down another path? Feels like an oversight. The backstory for Iris' drawing seems helpful in pulling some loose threads together. Hitomi had a boyfriend six years ago who was hiding from the Yakuza (or some other criminal organization), and the break-in was an attempt to kill him. Since Date briefly remembered playing with Iris when she was younger, he is probably the boyfriend. That could also explain why he was so sure that Rohan was the chairman of the Kumakuras: last time Date had any dealings with them, Rohan was the chairman. (We also just saw the flashback effect in reaction to the code name "Falco", so the name is presumably familiar to Date.) The attacker could be #89/Falco, who was an assassin-for-hire for the underworld. Though Moma did say that Rohan "ended up shooting some guy in his house", so perhaps he was the attacker. Of course, all of this still doesn't explain why Hitomi doesn't recognize Date, or pretends not to.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 14, 2020 17:52
|
|
|
It really is incredible how this game keeps getting more and more ridiculous. I mean that in the best possible way.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 23, 2020 20:04
|
|
|
Well, uh... we learned something new, so I guess that counts as progress in the investigation? (Also I had to look up what exactly the deal with Renju's watch was, so if anyone else needs the reminder: Video 11, at 6:50.) It's rather frustrating that the game seems to have completely forgotten about one particular line of investigation: what happened the night Iris was killed/not killed. We know that she was streaming late at night, and someone came to her house and interrupted her. But we don't know who it was, or whether she left her house with that person, or what they talked about, or anything else. Iris refused to answer Date's questions about it because she wanted him to stick around and protect her, which is fair enough, but that's all out in the open now. There's no reason she couldn't tell Date about what happened that night. Instead, neither Iris nor Date have brought it up at all. I'm sure it'll come up again eventually, but still.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 2, 2020 19:00
|
|
|
Tau Wedel posted:It's rather frustrating that the game seems to have completely forgotten about one particular line of investigation: what happened the night Iris was killed/not killed. Well, there we go. Still a bit irritated that Date apparently just forgot about that question for a while, but hey, we got some answers. So Falco was Hitomi's boyfriend. That fits with what little we knew of the boyfriend already, and with Hitomi and Renju being childhood friends, it also gives a connection between Renju and Falco. Still doesn't explain why Date apparently remembered playing with Iris back when she first told him her name, but this entire story revolves around a machine that connects minds. If Date psynched with Falco back during whatever happened six years ago, that could explain how he ended up with one of Falco's memories tucked away in his brain. On another note, the game really seems to be suggesting that Aiba and the Psync machine are not quite trustworthy. Iris thinks that the underlying Wadjet System is a living entity, and even if she's wrong about that, we now know that Pewter has been sabotaging the investigation. He created Aiba (and the Psync machine?), he's monitored Date's previous Psync sessions, and he's just demonstrated that he still has some sort of access to Aiba. Whatever the truth of it, that's another possible explanation for Iris' corpse in Mizuki's Somnium: it didn't come from either Mizuki or Date, but from the machine itself. I'm bringing this up because I'm feeling really suspicious of the idea that actions in Somnium can alter the real world. Date saved Iris through his actions in So Sejima's Somnium, but there's no actual evidence that Iris was ever dead -- only Date saw her corpse, and his perception could be faulty. And now, what, he'll go into a Somnium and do something that saves Iris, and when he comes back out she'll be fine? And again there will be no evidence that anything has actually changed -- we only have Aiba's word that Iris' sudden illness is life-threatening. On top of that, it's quite a coincidence that she's hit by this illness just when she and Date are too far from any hospital, but right next to a Psync machine. It kinda feels like a big, elaborate setup to convince Date that his actions in Somnium can change the real world, though I can't imagine what the purpose of such a trick would be. Oh well, we'll see where it goes.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2020 20:29
|
|
|
TheMcD posted:For what it's worth, it's not like the illness came completely out of nowhere. Iris did have some things happen that made it seem like something wasn't quite right with her. The one time she just kind of fainted out of nowhere, the one time she dropped her spoon for seemingly no reason and suddenly looked at her hand with a kind of sad look in her eyes, the time she suddenly started feeling cold for some reason (possibly a sign of a fever?), and the "motion sickness" she got after being rescued. I didn't consider the possibility that Iris was already ill because I'd forgotten about all of those events, other than the motion sickness.  Thanks for reminding me.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 8, 2020 15:58
|
|
|
Well. That was a perfectly reasonable result that fit logically with what has come before, except for the utterly baffling detail that raised a whole bunch of new questions out of nowhere. Uchikoshi! 
|
|
#
¿
Apr 12, 2020 19:25
|
|
|
I get the impression that Ota knows how strong Mizuki is because she has punched him before, with good reason. So that was a disaster, but it was a disaster in a way that doesn't quite fit with what we learned in the other branch. Iris told Date that Renju took her to the abandoned chemical plant in the Kabasaki district, but she got scared and ran away. If she's now gone with him willingly, it seems most likely that they'd go there again, not to the cold storage warehouse. It's also worth noting that when Iris died in the other branch she was missing her left eye, but this Iris is missing her right eye instead. I wonder, is what Date just found actually a corpse at all, or is it a model or effigy of some sort? This seems like a viable sequence of events: Pewter inserts the image of Iris' corpse into Mizuki's Somnium when Date is psyncing with her. When Date enters the cold storage warehouse after So has left, he sees the effigy of Iris. His examination is quick and superficial enough that he doesn't realize it's not a real corpse (this is also helped by the low temperature in the warehouse), and he then leaves to call Boss. Shortly after he leaves, someone goes into the warehouse and hides the effigy in the forklift. When the police arrive to the warehouse they find nothing other than shelves, a table, and an unremarkable-looking forklift.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 19, 2020 10:20
|
|
|
I don't think I'll ever get tired of Mizuki mocking Date.  So, math: Renju weighs 158 pounds and he was transported in an oil drum weighing 44 pounds, so that's 202 pounds the killer was moving around. The elevator's load was 310 pounds, meaning that the killer weighed (at most) 108 pounds (or 49 kg if, like me, you're more used to metric). That's low for an adult human, particularly one capable of moving such a heavy load around. Of course we do know of a person who is remarkably strong and weighs less than an adult, but I'm pretty sure we can rule out Mizuki as the culprit. TheMcD posted:So, given that we had been setting up Renju as our main suspect and then found Renju's corpse, we've been thrown for a bit of a loop. Nothing much we can do but keep investigating. It's pretty impressive how much of a surprise Renju's death is, really. There's a lot of unanswered questions in the other branch, but it really felt like the most secure conclusion you could draw was that Renju killed Shoko. The start of this branch even seems to support this: there was someone nearby when Mizuki found Shoko's corpse, and that person drove to and from Bloom Park in Renju's car. Then suddenly nope, Renju's dead. It can't be easy to construct a branching plot that keeps being surprising no matter what order you go through the branches, and also fits together in retrospect when the player has the full picture.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 26, 2020 20:35
|
|
|
Renju's connection with the Kumakuras is new in this branch, yeah. The other branch only had Shoko's connection. With So Sejima also being connected to the gang, it's really starting to feel like the Kumakuras are at the center of this whole mystery. The Sejima family backstory is interesting, too -- there's an obvious financial motive to selling off land before it's drastically devalued by a disaster, but why buy it back afterwards? The explanation of how Iris could have killed Renju makes sense, but I really feel like Date and Boss should have considered the why, also. I don't think we've seen anything that would give Iris a motive to kill Renju.
|
|
#
¿
May 1, 2020 15:24
|
|
|
TheMcD posted:Well, in a way, the Psync is how we might be able to get the "why" answered. The thing is that Iris hits a lot of the points for the "how" and also acts extremely suspicious with her texting Ota involving some weird secret that he is keeping to "protect" her, not to mention Ota also acting extremely suspicious in the first place when it comes to Iris being a person of interest. The texting is definitely suspicious as hell (and Iris is clearly trying to hide something, even if it isn't killing Renju), but it only shows up at the end of the interrogation. I was more thinking about why Iris is being questioned as a suspect at all. It's obviously worth talking to her since she was with Renju only a few hours before his death, but it seemed odd to jump from there to "she might have killed Renju" without suggesting a motive. And Ota's reaction could be explained as his usual protectiveness of Iris -- it's not that he knows anything specific, he just doesn't want Iris involved in the case at all. You're quite right that there are many possible motives for Iris to kill Renju, it just stood out to me that the game doesn't actually make any suggestions. In any case, this is just quibbling on my part -- given the available evidence, Date would've ended up with Iris as the main suspect one way or the other. Though even if Iris did kill Renju, that wouldn't close the case -- because she almost certainly didn't kill Shoko. She has no relationship with Shoko at all (did she even meet Renju before the divorce? I can't remember the timeline here), so her murder of Renju is more likely to be a deliberate copy to mislead the police into thinking the two murders are related. (It also just occured to me that there's a certain irony in Falco's call, now: we know from the other branch that Falco doesn't have any information, the call is just part of a scheme by Renju to get Falco out of prison, but instead a second murder actually does occur -- and Renju is the victim.)
|
|
#
¿
May 1, 2020 21:34
|
|
|
Wow, this Somnium would be really confusing if you went down this branch first. But luckily we've already seen the other branch, which clarifies absolutely nothing. (Why are we killing childish pictures of animals? When did Iris even see this place? Did she go here with Renju before he died in this timeline? Why did we see So Sejima at the end? Oh god I'm so confused.  )
|
|
#
¿
May 4, 2020 18:27
|
|
|
Holy poo poo that flashback just kept getting better and better.
|
|
#
¿
May 7, 2020 20:12
|
|
|
NeverHelm posted:The killer is So. Raise your hand if you saw this one coming. I certainly didn't. We still don't know much about So, but he hasn't struck me as the type to dress up in a polar bear costume and livestream a murder. I do wonder though. You noted earlier that the knife Ota was stabbed with has a floral pattern, so it's probably Mayumi's, and the game even gave us a nice closeup of it afterwards. There's also the package of candy that suggests that Mayumi was at the warehouse. That's still unexplained, and Mayumi's dementia makes it impossible to question her. We also haven't been able to talk to Iris, and there's an interval of several hours where Ota had no contact with her -- what happened to her during that time? It's also interesting that it was Pewter specifically who analyzed the DNA from the cigarette, rather than the anonymous forensics lab that handled the blood at the warehouse. Perhaps I'm just being overly paranoid, but I can't help but notice that in the other branch Iris was also kidnapped and taken to the warehouse, and Pewter was responsible. Can we actually trust his analysis, here?
|
|
#
¿
May 21, 2020 19:18
|
|
|
Both good points. I guess that also explains why So was down at the warehouse just now: he wanted to see if he should be worried about the investigation. It'll be interesting to see if Date and Mizuki can learn anything useful -- we're clearly missing something major about So's relation to the case. (And maybe Aiba can finish that story about the Sejima family along the way, that'd be nice.)
|
|
#
¿
May 21, 2020 21:37
|
|
|
NeverHelm posted:Mizuki and Date's relationship feels very genuine and the voice acting really sells it. Agreed. The voice acting has been good throughout, but it really shines in these more emotional segments. So Sejima being Date's father doesn't really explain anything yet, but it does introduce more possible reasons for his actions. I've mostly been assuming that So just wanted the police to stay away from his affairs, and that he didn't have any interest in Date beyond this. With a direct relationship between them, though, it's possible that some of So's actions are motivated by wanting to manipulate Date specifically. Perhaps that's why he went to the warehouse in the beginning of the other branch -- he expected Date to follow him there and wanted him to see Iris' corpse for some reason? Also, we learned Boss' real name! "Shizue Kuranushi" -- I don't think we've heard either the given name or the surname before. Date specifically pointed out earlier that he doesn't know Boss' real name, and now it shows up when he's unconscious, so he still doesn't know. It feels like this will be significant. (Although it would be funny if there's no great secret and Boss just doesn't like her real name.)
|
|
#
¿
May 25, 2020 21:30
|
|
|
Aw, that was a nice scene to end with. 
|
|
#
¿
May 31, 2020 15:48
|
|
|
What happens if you call out to Renju or Shoko in the last scene of Date's Somnium? Is it just a game over with "Date never woke up, the end"?
|
|
#
¿
Jun 2, 2020 19:03
|
|
|
Well, that was easy. Case solved, great job team! We already know that Mayumi's memory is unreliable, though. She's been suffering from dementia for six years, and it's severe enough that she can't remember that her husband died five years ago. I'm going to guess that she's misremembering what exactly happened at the warehouse. Instead, she's mixing up the events of that night with events that happened six years ago, because she was the original Cyclops serial killer.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 7, 2020 12:36
|
|
|
Sindai posted:There's...Iris's mom? She's had some kind of unknown connection to So didn't she? She does, yeah. We saw her talk with So outside his mansion at some point in the Iris route, and Mizuki mentioned that she has seen them together near the end of the Mizuki route. If nothing else, she seems to be the most plausible candidate for the hijacker -- I don't think there's anyone else with a connection to Iris who might have a reason to bring her to So's mansion.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 11, 2020 17:10
|
|
|
NeverHelm posted:Some big reveals from Aiba at the end. Wonder what people will make of that. I wasn't really surprised by the first one, because I'd already noticed that the knife was oddly absent from Mayumi's explanation of what happened. I don't know what it means, but at this point it just feels like more confirmation that something strange is going on with Iris. The second one, though, I have no idea. What the gently caress.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 15, 2020 14:09
|
|
|
Oh, the calendar displays different dates depending on how far you've progressed in the Somnium when you look at it. I guess it shows you when the memory you're looking for took place? That's a neat detail.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 18, 2020 08:09
|
|
|
That escalated quickly.  This is the "complete disaster" route, I guess.We know that it's So Sejima in the polar bear costume, but why would he kill Iris? There doesn't seem to be any connection between them. Hitomi and So do apparently know each other, so perhaps the nature of that relationship is the key to this mystery. I've been thinking a bit about Hitomi's role in this case, wondering if she might be responsible for (some of) the killings. It occured to me that Falco's escape might actually have been the main purpose behind murdering Shoko. Commit a murder in a way that resembles a series of unsolved killings from some years ago, and have Falco call the police and offer information on this new "serial killer". That gets him out of prison and into an interrogation room, which he can escape from with Pewter's help. Renju would be able to devise this plan because of his relationship with Pewter, but Hitomi could also do it. She and Renju are longtime friends, so she might well know about his relationship with Pewter, and her relationship with Falco would give her a motive. Speculating wildly here, but: suppose that Hitomi killed Shoko. Renju is her only connection to Pewter, and he won't go along with the plan willingly since he's being set up to take the blame for Shoko's murder -- Hitomi is threatening him somehow. He tries to contact Iris because he thinks she knows something he can use as leverage against Hitomi. In the first branch we saw, that failed -- Renju did reach Iris and took her to the Psync machine in the warehouse in Kabasaki district, but she got scared and ran off. Being out of options, he contacts Pewter and sets up Falco's escape. He makes another attempt to gain leverage by having Pewter kidnap Iris, but is thwarted by the A-Set Fanclub. In the other branch, though, he succeeded. He brought Iris to Kabasaki district and Psynced with her, learning something useful. (Something like this must have happened in this branch, since Iris' Somnium shows that she's been to the warehouse where the Psync machine is.) Renju confronts Hitomi at her home and refuses to help with Falco's escape, and she kills him for this. I think this fits with what we know, but it doesn't explain So's involvement at all. Separately from that, there's something going on with Date and Falco, but I can't quite figure it out. Date seemed to remember playing with Iris when she was younger (and Iris found him vaguely familiar), but that wasn't him -- it was Falco. Iris' Somnium seems to indicate that Date was the original serial killer, and that actually fits quite well with what we know. Picture this: So Sejima and Rohan Kumakura are longtime friends. Through their friendship, Rohan meets So's son (let's call him Kaname, Date's given name). Rohan and Kaname find that they have a common interest, and together they commit the original serial killings. When the bodies are discovered, the police eventually come close to discovering the killers. Something goes down that results in Kaname losing his memory and Rohan being hospitalised. So Sejima has enough influence with the police that he can get the investigation classified, keeping the killers' identity secret from the general public. Kaname gets set up with a false identity, and the disappearance of So's son is explained by stating that he has moved abroad. This explains why Date expected to meet Rohan at the Kumakura office, and why he reacted oddly to stabbing sounds and a frightened woman during So's Somnium. But again, the killer wasn't Date -- it was Falco. There's something here, I'm sure of it, but I can't tell how it all fits together.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 6, 2020 22:10
|
|
|
Looks like this is the route where we focus on the events six years ago, so that should be interesting. According to Falco, the attack on Hitomi was ordered by Rohan, and he wanted both Hitomi and Iris dead. That's odd -- they don't seem to have any connection to the Kumakuras, and what reason could a Yakuza gang have to kill a 12-year-old? Maybe it's just Rohan's attempt to sabotage Falco's exit from the gang. Or perhaps So is behind it, considering that he attempts to kill Iris in the present day (and in this branch, succeeds).
|
|
#
¿
Jul 9, 2020 13:44
|
|
|
Well then. It's been obvious for a while now that Boss knows something that she doesn't want to tell Date about, but I wouldn't have guessed that she was directly involved in the events six years ago. She hasn't been present for either interrogation of Falco -- in this branch she's just gone, and in the other she had been called away by someone higher up in the hierarchy. I wonder if that was actually true. Perhaps she doesn't want to talk to Falco for some reason.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 13, 2020 20:04
|
|
|
Huh, the book at 19:50 is quite interesting: "Falco was in a bind, and turned to a trusted friend". Falco doesn't seem to have friends, so who could this be? Renju, maybe? We haven't heard much about his relationship with the Kumakuras. Also, a suggestion for the OP: It might be nice to have a separator reading "plot lock" after videos 31 and 64, similar to the "route end" separators. That way, all jumps to a different branch would be shown in the video list.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 19, 2020 20:27
|
|
|
... ...okay then! No wonder this mystery is so difficult to figure out: people might not be who they appear to be. Looking at the timeline for the branch we just left, the Psync machine in Kabasaki district seems to have been used twice. Shoko is killed, then Renju and Iris go to Kabasaki, shortly after that Renju is killed, Iris and Ota run from the police and are separated when Ota stops at a store, Iris goes to So's house in Ota's van, the van continues to Kabasaki and then to the cold storage warehouse, Iris and Ota are killed. From this timeline, it's actually possible that Renju committed all four murders: the first as himself, the second as Iris, and the third and fourth as So. I say "Renju" here, but we can't even be sure that the person living as Renju Okiura is actually him -- the Psync machine in Kabasaki was stolen six years ago, meaning that some of the cast may have been switched back then. If Iris and Renju were switched, that would mean that Date Psynced with Renju, not Iris. That seems viable: the memories we got from the Psync were of the original serial killings and of So Sejima together with someone else, and neither of those seem to have anything to do with Iris. Also, let me just mention the obvious: Manaka Iwai is presumably Iris' biological mother. She was killed 18 years ago shortly after giving birth, meaning that her child would be around Iris' age, and Manaka and Iris look very similar. The missing right eye is an interesting detail -- it resembles the original serial killings, but those didn't occur until twelve years later. There's probably a connection somehow, but I have no idea what it is.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 22, 2020 20:11
|
|
|
Mecca-Benghazi posted:Edit: beaten with more detail, dang if the chain of murders (going by body of the killer) was actually one mind Honestly it would be the funniest possible outcome if Uchikoshi spent most of the game demonstrating that these apparent "serial killings" must have been committed by different people just so he could drop this reveal and say "gotcha, it was the same person after all".
|
|
#
¿
Jul 22, 2020 21:59
|
|
|
Hmm. A lot of interesting information from Hitomi. Let me draw together a few lines of speculation:Supersonic Shine posted:Well, things just got a whole lot trickier. This might explain why Date can't recall a thing past six years ago: maybe some of the egg white didn't make it inside his new head. Vil posted:- The killer is a third party who swapped with Shoko before the events of the game, and Shoko-in-another-body is most likely dead. I think these are both right. Moreover, I think Saito Sejima is the body-hopping murderer, that Saito was also Rohan's accomplice for the original Cyclops serial killings, and that Date's body was originally Saito's body. In the other branch, Pewter said that Rohan's accomplice was "born a murderous psychopath", which fits with a 12-year-old commiting a murder apparently for no reason. In Iris' Somnium in that branch (which was actually the killer's Somnium) we saw So Sejima with another person (who might have been Manaka Iwai) and we saw the original serial killings. Both of those fit with Saito being the killer, and the reason Date's face showed up in the Somnium is that it was in fact Saito's face. This also explains why the killer told Hitomi to bring Date with her to the abandoned factory: his goal is to get his body back. That same goal underlies the choice of Shoko Nadami as the first victim: the purpose of the killings is to get at Date, and the person closest to Date is Mizuki. Saito arranged for Mizuki to find Shoko's corpse because he wanted Date to take an immediate interest in the case. Date could've ended up in Saito's body if he Psynced with him six years ago, but there's no trace of Saito in the police records we've heard about. According to Pewter, Rohan's accomplice was Falco, not Saito. So how did this Psync happen? My guess would be that the police did investigate Saito Sejima, probably having learned of his involvement from Rohan after he was arrested for the attack on Hitomi. Date went against orders and stayed too long in Somnium, resulting in the switch. When covering up that mess, it was easier to not mention Saito Sejima at all, and So was probably also using his connections to push for this particular resolution. Pointing out Falco as Rohan's accomplice was just an easy and reasonably plausible way to tie up a loose end. Alternatively, So might've persuaded Falco to falsely confess to the killings, in exchange for a promise that he would protect Hitomi and Iris. On another note, it occured to me that in the branch we're going to, Boss might already be dead. We don't actually know whether Boss killed So because she wanted to close the case in a way that didn't expose the secrets of the Psync machine, or if the killer managed to pull off another switch.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 11, 2020 20:49
|
|
|
Bloody Emissary posted:In #89's Somnium, all of Falco's past is written down in books (which we're supposed to destroy to progress, natch) and not visually or metaphorically experienced like in other Somniums. The green curtain also obscures Falco until Rohan comes bursting into the room (I double-checked this; interestingly, the curtain disappears off-screen). I'm positive #89 is somebody other than Falco. I thought he was Saito at first, but looking back through that Somnium...maybe he's Rohan? As I said, Falco only becomes visible once Rohan enters the room, plus the big red eye outside the window belongs to Rohan, judging by the wrinkles. Hmm... An interesting detail here is that if Date is indeed Falco, he might have supplied some of the details in the Somnium. Date has amnesia, but he's remembered bits and pieces of his past occasionally. That might account for some of the oddities. quote:Unrelatedly, another small detail that bugged me since it appeared: the video in serial-killer-"Iris"'s Somnium that showed a blue figure kissing So. The body shown as the camera pans up to So's face is clearly female. When we went through the other branch of that Somnium, I noticed that it was the body of the fourth victim of the Cyclops Serial Killings—the only one we see in that branch as a Somnium reenactment and not a video on a TV screen. We know now that the one actually doing the killings was Saito, and Rohan just took the eyes out of the corpses afterwards. So the red figure watching the murders would be Rohan and the blue figure would be Saito...why is not-Iris' memory of the fourth victim so much clearer than the others, and why was her body combined with So's face in the other branch? I can't see any reason why Rohan would make that association, but Saito overlaying the face of his father on one of his victims seems more plausible, so is not-Iris actually Saito? Are you sure those two are the same woman? Supposing not-Iris is Saito, the first branch we saw could be showing his childhood. The way to progress in that branch was to violently destroy childish drawings of animals, which could correspond to Saito showing early tendencies to violence by harming or killing actual animals. The culmination of that development would be his murder of Manaka Iwai at the age of 12, and accordingly the memory we recover at the end is Manaka kissing So. Bloody Emissary posted:I do have one that's probably going to be confirmed once we get back to that locked branch: the victims have their left eyes removed because it's a side-effect of using the prototype Psync machine. Iris' left eye was suddenly missing after Date's last Psync with her during the Naix route. I remembered Pewter's (or was it Aiba's?) explanation of how the Psync machine connects to the people in the machine through nanothreads going into their eyeballs, and, well...unless somebody somehow pulled her eye out of its socket during the Psync, without interrupting it, the most plausible explanation is that a flaw in the prototype causes the Psyncee's left eye to get destroyed during the Psync process. Oh, good catch. I've been thinking along the same lines, but couldn't figure out how the machine could cause physical damage like that. Thanks for the reminder about the connection through the eye. This all fits together remarkably well, now. Suppose that Date is Falco, #89 is Rohan and the body-hopping killer is Saito. That would mean that Falco was an undercover police agent in the Kumakuras during Rohan's time. The recounting of Falco's backstory we get from #89 does not mention this, but that's because Rohan is telling the story, and he never learned that Falco was an agent. Thus he's playing the character of Falco to the best of his ability, but his story doesn't quite fit because he's missing a critical piece of information. We can also guess more precisely how Date lost his eye and his memory. The investigation six years ago started with the arrest of Rohan, as far as we know. Being a Yakuza boss, he might've been wanted for any number of reasons. But if the police connected him to the Cyclops killings, they would also be led towards Saito Sejima and his role in the killings. To protect his son, So Sejima used his influence to shut down the investigation into Saito. Date/Falco reacted to this by going renegade: he stole the prototype Psync machine and kidnapped Saito in an attempt to find clear evidence of his involvement. But he stayed too long in Somnium, because nobody had told him the reason for the time limit. That left him in Saito's body with one eye missing, and Saito in Falco's body. Not sure how we get from here to Rohan being in Falco's body, but the rest seems to fit.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 24, 2020 21:08
|
|
|
Bloody Emissary posted:Positive; they have the same outfit. Check PSYNCIN' IN THE VaiN Part 1 at 13:40 and Part 2 at 12:03. Huh, so they do. Interesting, though I can't think of what it might mean (other than not-Iris likely being Saito, as you said). Have we heard anything about the victims of the original Cyclops killings? I remember Boss and Pewter describing the overall pattern, but I don't think anything's been mentioned about the individual victims.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 24, 2020 22:21
|
|
|
Wow, starting right off with a 10x timie. Rude. Gameplay issues aside, I do like how adversarial this Somnium is. With pathways connecting in confusing and unpredictable ways and doors that require enormous effort to open, it really feels like the killer is doing their very best to prevent Date from discovering the truth. And the toppling line of mannequins at the end is a nice thematic detail.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 29, 2020 13:09
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 18, 2024 16:37 |
|
|
Ah, so we had the order of the body switching wrong: Date switched first with Rohan, then with Saito. That's interesting. I'm still inclined to think that the first switch was unintentional, but I can't piece together the sequence of events after that. We're probably missing some key information about the events six years ago -- Rohan's case of hemispatial neglect will likely be important to the story, but it hasn't come up yet (other than indirectly, in the fact that he only removed the victims' right eyes). I wonder when Falco/Date started working for the police. If what Rohan has told us of his backstory is accurate, then maybe it was shortly after he met Hitomi? He might have decided to go to the police in an attempt to find a way out of the Yakuza milieu. I'm really curious about the prototype Psync machine, now. Specifically, why did the police never find it? It was stolen six years ago, so it could have been used for one of the switches back then. If it was used for the second one, when Date-in-Rohan's-body switched with Saito, that would explain why Saito knew of it five years later. But why would Date not have told the police about it after the switch? It's not like it would be a secret that he had used it. Unless maybe he lost his memory in the second switch, and was unable to remember the location? On that note, I kinda feel like Pewter and Boss and whoever else knows about the Psync machine's secrets should have done more to investigate Rohan's suicide. I mean: Saito's been stuck in Rohan's body and hospitalised for five years, and then one day he leaves the hospital and commits suicide by jumping from a building shortly afterwards. And one of the machines that can be used to switch bodies is still missing. Did nobody think that maybe, just maybe, he'd managed to switch bodies with someone else and then thrown Rohan's body from a building to cover his tracks?
|
|
#
¿
Aug 29, 2020 19:02
|
|