VN Talk: Bad Apple Wars - Part 2: White Mask

As I mentioned, I started my first Bad Apples Wars playthrough as a Good Apple, which meant that I knew my options were going to be Satoru and the masked Prefect leader, who Rinka refers to as White Mask from the first time she sees him. (In practice all the Prefects wear white masks. What makes their leader different is that he also has white hair.)

I wasn't sure how route locks would work since it was my first playthrough, but I'd already had one scene with Satoru in Chapter 1, so I figured for Chapter 2 I'd see what White Mask was about. He starts off as an extremely rigid enforcer of the rules, but he never raises his voice and follows procedure to a T. Rinka even describes him as mechanical. He appears completely unflappable, and though he does not tolerate rule breakers, he doesn't get overtly frustrated with them either, repeating the same lines for them to desist or face correction countless times.

I figured depending on what I saw of White Mask in Chapter 2, I'd decide on him or Satoru, but it turned out that just meeting him in Chapter 2 locked me in his route. In the game's flowchart, my Chapter 2 was still part of the common Good Apple route, but in practice I was never given a choice to interact with Satoru again (though he still showed up as part of the story). All my scenes were with White Mask, but due to how the story played out, I was fine with that. Everything that happened felt like a natural flow of events rather than my choices being taken away from me.

Rinka is forced to become a Prefect in the Good Apple common route, so it's unsurprising that she would be placed under White Mask's wing and go on regular patrols with him. She's a terrible Prefect though, since she doesn't want to correct anybody (which involves hitting them with a correction tool and brainwashing them for what seems to be 10-15 minutes), and White Mask is surprisingly patient with her, even when he thinks that being new at her job shouldn't be an excuse anymore.

I'll be honest that I didn't really like a lot of his early scenes. The player is introduced to the Soul Touch system not because Rinka accidentally bumps into him, but because he corners her and touches her first. White Mask ends up being the love interest who crowds her space a lot, not because he is trying to be romantically aggressive with her, but because he asserting that he knows better than her and she should accept the status quo of the school. There are multiple times that he grabs her in a restraining or threatening manner, since as a Prefect he is bound to correct Bad Apples, and by questioning things and becoming friends with the rebelling students, she is marking herself as a potential Bad Apple herself.

White Mask is genuinely scary sometimes, and some of the tensest moments on his route are when he seems on the verge of correcting Rinka. Since his tone of voice doesn't change, a lot of the threat is conveyed by a change in music and/or his proximity to Rinka. Close is bad.

But that said, once I got more of his personal story, I found I liked him quite a bit.

As Rinka repeatedly comes into contact with White Mask, either by physically trying to stop him or because he's grabbing on to her, their souls intermingle and she gets various memories from when he was alive, enough to realize that he'd lived a pretty miserable life. Everyone who cared about him had an unfortunate tendency to die, so he tried to stop caring about other people and to get other people to stop caring about him, figuring that way they would live longer. But no matter what happened someone would always slip through, and then they would die.

It was a despairing way to live, and at NEVAEH he's been able to forget everything about who he was and starve the hope that he could ever love or be loved without consequence. But the thing is, even though he forgets so much about his past, there's a fundamental part of himself that never goes away. Rinka realizes that he's eager to punish the Bad Apples as a Prefect not because he hates them, so much as he hates himself for wanting to be like them. Possibly, for this reason, he is the only Prefect that anyone can tell apart from the others, because a part of his individuality remains. When Rinka calls him out on his hypocrisy, White Mask begins to crumble.

He's actually a boy named Watase, and in a nice touch, once the player knows his name, all interface boxes using the name White Mask switch over to his real name. After recovering his memories and realizing the true meaning behind his actions, Watase decides to quit the Prefects, asking the Bad Apples to look after Rinka and telling her good-bye. It's actually a pretty funny scene when he visits the Bad Apples' home base. Not only does he not attack them on sight like they expect, but he takes off his mask, which one of the Bad Apples humorously thought was permanently stuck to his face.

Watase is quite the self-flagellating type, believing himself to be the cause of the deaths of his family, classmates, teachers; and to be fair, he must have gone to a lot of funerals since I assume that we are only getting memories in regards to a portion of the people who have died around him. Other kids gave him the nickname "reaper" (in Japanese: "shinigami") while he was young enough that he sounded like he was in elementary school.

In a nice twist, we even learn that he had briefly met Rinka before either of them died. He'd seen her on the other side of the crosswalk on her first day of school and thought her soul was pretty, but he tried not to look at her when they passed each other in the street because he was afraid that if he looked at her, she would die. Of course, that's when her shoe came off in the prologue and she stopped in the middle of the street to pick it up. Watase turned around to see why she stumbled, and then she was hit by the truck, sending her into the afterlife, and pretty much shredding what remained of Watase's sanity.

I really wish the game had continued on with his memories though, because we don't know what Watase actually died from, and his last memory ends a few minutes after Rinka's own death, moments after he wished that someone would come and kill him to end his misery.

Watase's self-flagellation continues in his afterlife, as he feels he should be punished, not only for what he'd done in life, but for his actions as a Prefect. Though he's come to care for Rinka, he doesn't see himself as someone worth having, so he wants to send her off to the Bad Apples where she can be happy and find a way to return to life. In his mind, someone like him has no need to return since he would only be miserable and inflicting misery on others, and in fact he hands himself over to the creepy teacher, Mr. Gas Mask, to be experimented on and eventually have his soul obliterated.

Though I'd normally be annoyed by love interests who do this, Watase's bad behavior isn't well tolerated by the rest of the cast, with others calling him an "edgelord" or a "dumbass" for trying to get himself annihilated. Knowing that other characters think he's being incredibly stupid makes his stupidity easier to bear, and a lot more entertaining since they aren't shy about saying it. Rinka doesn't take his actions lying down either, calling him selfish to his face, and being willing to confront Mr. Gas Mask herself to get Watase back.

In fact the Watase rescue scene is probably one of the best in the game. After finally realizing that they can fight the system and that Rinka is willing to break all the rules for him (because she's joined the Bad Apples and that's what Bad Apples do), Watase and Rinka double-team Mr. Gas Mask to take him out. I know I shouldn't be celebrating every time an otome heroine gets to be an action girl, but it still feels like it happens too rarely. Rinka does start the game with a fair bit of ennui, but once she makes up her mind, that girl moves.

I have to admit that I'm surprised though that at no point in the story did Watase or Rinka bring up the fact that since they're dead he doesn't have to worry about killing her just by being around her. Later in the story when Rinka turns and becomes a Bad Apple to try giving Watase a second chance at life, it's understandable that he would be concerned about people dying around him again, but if they just never graduated, then he and Rinka could have stayed together without the premature death problem.

Though Watase's rescue is in the second to last chapter, it's really the climax of the romance, with Chapter 9 primarily serving as a way to wrap up the main story about the school, the unbreakable rules, and the forbidden apple. Rinka correctly answers the question about whether it's worth returning to life when it's also full of despair, and everyone in the school gets forbidden apples. Watase doesn't want to eat his right away, because he has some things to think about and he doesn't want to return to life until he sorts them out, but promises that he will, and asks Rinka to go ahead. Surprisingly, she does, considering that the guy has been pretty good about pushing her away most of the second half of his route (though I guess Watase has never outright lied to her).

Due to the apples returning them to the moments they died, Watase and Rinka revive within minutes of each other (so even if Watase sat on his butt for an additional six months in the afterlife, temporally it didn't matter). This is why I wish we knew what Watase had died from, because he immediately wakes up under the cherry tree he was crying under and then runs back to the accident site where Rinka was hit. Whatever killed him was so innocuous it wasn't worth mentioning and apparently no one around him noticed, which is weird since Rinka ends up in the hospital with a two month recovery time due to getting hit by a truck.

They reunite though and the translation does a bumpy job with names here, because it turns out that Watase is his surname, which makes sense given Japanese cultural context. His teacher called him Watase, and he was introduced to his classmates as Watase, because surnames are used in formal situations. Rinka knows this, even if it might whoosh by the American player, so when they reunite she asks for his "real name" in the English translation, but what she's asking for is his given name.

Then in another translation stumble, the translation gives it as "Shou," but when you listen to the audio, he says his name is "Iku." Since kanji have multiple readings, chances are whoever was translating his ending did not realize it was being voiced (it's not part of a dialogue box) otherwise his name probably would have been double checked against the audio, and this makes it maddening to read because Rinka keeps repeating the wrong name to herself in unspoken dialogue so she can remember it, while I was mentally repeating the correct name from the audio so I wouldn't forget it.

Something like this should have been a really easy catch if anyone with half an ear for Japanese had been listening to the audio while playing his ending towards the end of the QA cycle. It's not as egregious as some of the mistakes made in other Aksys translations, but since it's Watase's name and it's the ending scene it annoyed me more than it might have otherwise.

As for their happily ever after, I liked it, even though I had to work for it. (You need to do everything flawlessly to get the epilogue, even if you otherwise earn the good ending.) Watase visits Rinka during her recovery everyday after school and he's an embarrassing worrywart. They plan their first date for when she gets out of the hospital, and there's no more talk about people dying around him. We're never told whether Watase's curse is really the universe out to get him or it's just all in his head, but at least for now he's giving living a chance.

Despite being a pain in the neck, he was a lot of fun.

I wasn't sure who I would play after that, but I wanted to give the Good Apple side a rest since some of the scenes in the common route are likely to replay even if I'm not hanging out with Watase the next time around. That meant my second playthrough would be from the Bad Apple side, and given that Watase and Alma are portrayed as being opposed to each other in a lot of the artwork, I decided I would save Alma for last. Higa ended up being my second playthrough and I'll get to him next week.