VN Talk: Bad Apple Wars - Part 6: Alma

I'm really glad I saved Alma for last, because he comes off as distant and unapproachable in other routes. He's the unflappable leader of the Bad Apples, who never gets upset, never raises his voice, but never gives up. Alma works harder than anyone, and yet its rare to see him get emotional about anything and it's hard to tell what he's thinking. Even the few times he's surprised by something, his reactions are muted compared to the rest of the cast. You want quiet determination? Alma's your guy.

But it isn't as though he doesn't have feelings. On all the other routes it's fairly obvious that he struggles with the loss of Sanzu, and that causes him to pull back on Bad Apple activity out of fear he'll lose someone else.

There's also a unique facet to him that I wish the game had explored more. Alma is the oldest of the Bad Apples, in that he's been at NEVAEH the longest, which means that all the rule-breaking, the discovery of how to keep one's sense of self, was all started by him. In fact, once you start his route, it becomes obvious that Alma is not like the other students, even the other Bad Apples, and that's likely part of why he's an effective leader (though I wish the game explained how he knew the method by which Rinka had died).

It's also obvious upon starting his route that Alma has deep psychological issues that otherwise have no reason to come up. It's first hinted at in his first meeting with Rinka, but it makes his manner of death different from everyone else. Higa died when he was struck by a vehicle (like Rinka), Satoru overworked himself, Shikishima died from disease, and who knows what actually did in White Mask, but Alma is heavily implied to have committed suicide. And instead of escaping his pain in life, he found himself in an afterlife where he's now more afraid of forgetting what it's like to feel pain than the actual act of experiencing pain himself.

Unlike most routes, Alma gives Rinka the rundown on people's inability to die right away, and demonstrates it right in front of her by slitting his own throat. Pain can still be experienced at NEVAEH even if death cannot, but he behaves as if this is no big deal (and Rinka is rightly horrified).

Playing Alma's route answers questions about his behavior on most other routes (including why we don't see him eat his forbidden apple in Shikishima's ending) as we get a good deep dive into what makes him tick. For that reason I feel like he probably works best as either a first playthrough (so everything is on the table) or a last one (to answer questions), but not in the middle.

Though Alma gives off the appearance of constantly being in control of himself and his situation, he's really not. All the times he disappears on his own and in other routes is largely because he needs time to cope, which he tries to manage alone. He cares deeply about his role as the group's leader and sincerely wants to give everyone a chance to be reborn, even if he does not plan to return to life himself.

As Rinka learns from her Soul Touches with him, Alma was in love with a girl from a young age and she ended up spending all her time in the hospital before they even got to high school. Alma wanted to grow up and become a doctor so he could cure her, but he had attitude problems, so even though he was a brilliant student, nobody liked him and he was constantly getting into fights. His own father disowned him. The girl was the one bright spot in his life and he promised to be with her until the end, but he failed to do even that when a brawl kept him from getting the hospital before she died.

Alma takes his promises seriously, and was broken up by his failure to keep that one, and so he made another promise not to forget her, but the problem is that time takes away a lot of things, and a year after she died he realized he was starting to forget things about her. That led to him going to the roof of his school in an attempt to stop himself from losing any more memories of her (by killing himself).

His failures haunt him pretty badly, which is why Sanzu's graduation sinks him into such a great depression. Until that point it didn't appear to be possible to actually lose any of the Bad Apples, because no one could die.

And since Alma's own life ended on such a miserable note, he has no desire to go back. Like Yoh, he doesn't see the point in returning to a life without the one he loves, and he says this is why he had no words to console Yoh when Sanzu died, because he realized they were in much the same situation and Alma has no words to make his own pain disappear.

But there is a reincarnation wrinkle. As we know from other endings and from the graduation process itself, reincarnation happens and it's laid out fairly early along Alma's route that Rinka feels she has met him before. In fact a couple of her first few Soul Touches with him are uncommonly affectionate for someone she doesn't know well, patting his hair and touching his face, and she's not entirely sure why she wants to do that with him.

One of the interesting things we learn in Alma's route is that the longer someone is at NEVAEH, the more their memories of their previous life and their memories of school life bleed into each other. Since Alma has been around the longest, he suffers from episodes where he can't tell when or where he actually is, and this spills over on to Rinka, who he conflates with the girl he loved.

It doesn't take much to put two and two together to realize that Rinka is the reincarnation of his previous love, and if that's not enough, Alma all but spells it out in the graduation ceremony scene when he loses his Soul Totem. I kind of would have liked it if Rinka wasn't actually a reincarnation though. For a moment it looked like the story might go that route, and I think it would have been a nice change of pace of it did, but that would have broken the red string of fate motif running through his route. Alma's Soul Totem is a red thread and seems to be a literal manifestation of his tie to the love of his life.

Alma's ending is also different from the others. Unlike Shikishima and Higa who would be clearly too old (or dead) by the time Rinka is born, or White Mask and Satoru who are her contemporaries, Alma exists in a bubble between time periods. I was hoping there would be at least one of these where Rinka or her love interest had to wait a few years for the other to catch up (mostly I was hoping this would be the case with Satoru since he died in middle school), and Alma's mostly fits the bill. The age gap is on the large side, even if we're really generous about when he was born, but it allows him to be an adult when they meet up again.

The game is vague about Alma's birthdate, with the only mention being that he was born fifteen years after Higa, who in turn was born in the 1950s. This means if we want a young Alma and put Higa's birth in 1959, then Alma was born around 1974, give or take for rounding errors. Assuming Rinka dies in 2015 (the Japanese release date), this puts Alma in his 30s by the time Rinka is born and in his early 40s when they reunite, which he totally does not look like in the ending illustration.

If we ignore the suggestion of his birthdate, or run with the assumption that Rinka comes from a year earlier than 2015, Alma's love died when she was of high school age, making her at least fifteen. Allowing time for her to be reborn as Rinka and grow up, Alma is likely a minimum of sixteen years older than her, so he can't be anything less than his early 30s when they reunite.

So even though they see each other again in his ending, their meeting is very chaste. He's now a doctor and ends up being the surgeon in the emergency room when she's rushed in, and there's a nice comparison between the knife he used to fight with in NEVAEH and the scalpel he's now using to save her life. He's well aware that for her, NEVAEH is a recent battle she's still fighting. When she wakes, she sees him (no longer with dyed red hair since he's in a respectable profession now), and they're happy that they remember each other.

It's the epilogue three years later, after Rinka graduates, that is the real coda to their story. Alma, no doubt recognizing and caring about the age difference more than she does, puts off their relationship until after her high school graduation so the epilogue consists of Rinka rushing to the hospital to see him. That's when they finally spill the love confessions they couldn't say in NEVAEH and he asks Rinka to marry him.

Mind, there would still be external problems with their marriage. Even if we've seen their journey together, I'm sure Rinka's parents are going to have opinions if their newly graduated daughter is eager to marry a guy sixteen years older than her. And while we don't know what Alma's adult social network looks like I'm sure he'd get a lot of cradle-robbing comments.

I'm also a little disappointed that we don't seem to get Alma's real name, though this might have been a translation preference. Rinka calls him Dr. Alma Fudoh in the epilogue, but Alma is not a Japanese name. It's probably Aruma (which would be pronounced the same), but I was hoping there was a reason behind his unusual name in NEVAEH. This is compounded by the fact his former love called him "Al" which sounds completely weird when listening to the Japanese audio.

Still, this was a good note to end the game on, and as a whole I enjoyed Bad Apple Wars more than I though I would. If you enjoyed this blog series, please consider leaving a tip in the Ko-fi jar. Ko-fi followers get the first heads up when there's a poll to vote on what game I should cover next.