VN Talk: Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly - Part 1: Overview

In which I talk (write) about visual novels from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: PS Vita (also on Steam)
Release: 2018

Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly was the visual novel with the most votes during my Reader's Pick poll last year, and while it did not win the overall vote (that was Final Fantasy XV) that did bump it higher on the priority list for me to play, so here we are now.

I was surprised by the opening to this one, largely because I was expecting a period piece, or one set in a world similar to a historical part of our own due to the supernaturally infested gothic manor the characters are trapped inside. But no, it begins in modern day, as we start off with a fragment of a memory on a bus trip where a few friends are talking before our protagonist sinks into amnesia and wakes up alone inside a cavernous mansion.

Black Butterfly is gothic horror visual novel, though the horror elements are more of an atmosphere or a mood than something that will jump out at you from the shadows; things like a sobbing girl in a goat mask transforming into a clawed monster, the doors and windows to the outside that cannot be opened or broken, or the landscape that is always covered in fog.

It's very much a mystery waiting to be unraveled, but at the end of it, it's a story about dealing with grief and regret, and how each person chooses to bear the scars of their past.

Our five main characters awaken in the manor without memories of who they are and each of them has a text message on their phone giving them clues as to how to survive and escape. It quickly becomes apparent that there is a master to this mansion and he wants them to assemble a kaleidoscope, but shards of it are being held by the various monsters that wander the halls.

Though the five amnesiacs don't want to trust the mansion's master or the occasional masked people they find inside, they realize they don't really have a choice. They have a hideout where they appear to be safe from the monsters, but it only exists at the master's pleasure since it is kept stocked with food and supplies by his rabbit-masked servant.

Since they're without names, the five amnesiacs take nicknames from the name plates on the doors of the rooms they sleep in and settle into their new life; hunting monsters and collecting the shards they keep.

From there the game begins to unravel its mystery, and it's a good one. For this entry, I'd like to talk about the game's two major twists. Though I didn't see either of them coming, one of them was handled extremely well, and the other not so much.

For the first one, the master is a pretty deceptive bastard and it's unlikely that most players will discover his identity before the reveal. Though it's obvious that something is off about the character in question, there's a fair bit of misdirection both in game (and even in the title screen and box art) that keep the player pondering the wrong mystery.

From an outside standpoint, that the master is hiding among the amnesiacs is not an unusual twist, but as the characters get their memories back, they begin to realize that they aren't strangers at all. The group discovers a childhood photo taken at summer camp, and each of them are in it, making it seem like they all know each other.

However, there are a few things that are a bit off. We know from Yamato (who is not present during the photo discovery) that his younger twin brother had been in a coma for the past ten years. Given that the manor turns out to be a sort of in-between world for those on the border of life and death, it's not surprising that his brother would be one of their number, but Hikage's behavior doesn't come off like someone who's been in a coma since he was in elementary school.

It's not enough to doubt that Hikage is the long lost Kazuya, but the questions the player will have about him will be what happened in the ten years between then and now and when will we learn about it.

Which brings us to Monshiro.

Monshiro appears early on in the game as a mysterious person in a fox mask who saves Beniyuri and Hikage from monsters, and it's thanks to him that Beniyuri learns how to summon a gun to fight back. It's clear that he's existed in the mansion longer than any of the amnesiacs. When she meets Monshiro again, she's intrigued because he's not one of the monsters and he seems to be a nice person of few words. Eventually, Monshiro joins the team in their hideout, but he never removes his mask, making him an outsider.

When the twist comes out, Karasuba reveals that Monshiro is actually Kazuya (which fits with Monshiro's childlike behavior) which makes Hikage a fake, and Hikage owns up to it, announcing that he is in fact the master of the manor.

Hikage's reveal is a turning point in the game, and puts his previous actions in a new context.

Pragmatic and blunt, he had become the team leader. He's the first person Beniyuri, the protagonist, meets after she wakes in the manor. Though she's the first one in their group to figure out how to summon a weapon, Hikage masters it first and helps the rest of the team summon their own. Hikage was also the one who suggested they use the room names for themselves. He was surly and unapproachable as a part of their group, but he got the job done, and why would you suspect the group's ringleader of being a traitor when he's the one keeping everyone safe?

Unsurprisingly, he leaves the group at this point, but he also takes Kagiha with him as a hostage, and this is when the game changes focus to its second mystery. By this point, we know who the master is and what this world is, so the remaining mystery is what happened at summer camp.

When everyone sees the photo they get their memories of summer camp back, except for Beniyuri, and no one wants to talk about it with her. But given their ages, it's not a stretch to assume that whatever happened in Beniyuri's missing memories resulted in Monshiro/Kazuya's coma.

That turns out to be true, but it's not the whole story or even the real reason people are hiding the truth from her, and it's frustrating because everyone else knows but refuses to tell Beniyuri what really happened. Though they do this because they're aware of how she would take the news (badly), this results in a break in the otherwise excellent pacing of the story where Beniyuri spends an entire chapter of the game more or less wallowing in misery.

This is right after the master has revealed himself and he's taken Kagiha hostage. Beniyuri is terrified for her friend, and doesn't understand why no one else is having the same freak out she is, and once you know the truth you understand their perspective, but I had trouble being sympathetic towards the guys when she's breaking down and crying in front of them and they won't tell her the truth because they think it's better this way.

The reason the game does this is purely to hide a very important fact about Kagiha. He's already dead.

While everyone else is on the border of life and death and has the chance to return, there's no doubt that Kagiha is dead dead in the real world. At summer camp, Beniyuri and Monshiro were swept away into the lake during a torrential rain. Kagiha, being the eldest and most responsible of the kids, dove in to save them. He rescued Beniyuri, went back for Kazuya, and never returned.

Beniyuri's extended memory loss is not a defect of the memory restoration process so much as she's terrified of remembering the death of her childhood friend, especially since she was the one who suggested that they investigate the ruins of a lakeside manor even though they'd been warned away by the camp chaperone. In fact, if you view one of Kagiha's optional scenes in the main storyline, Beniyuri recognizes that she had lost someone important to her before, even though she lacks the specific memory.

Once she begins to get fragments of her memory back, it's pretty clear that Kagiha occupied a special place in her heart. They made a childhood marriage promise to each other, he gave her gifts that she treasured (in fact the final kaleidoscope shard was the last thing he gave her while they were still alive), and even years later when he asks, she realizes she's still happy at the thought of marrying him.

So the game hides his death until the climax, when the group faces off with Hikage, in order to inflict maximum pain on Beniyuri, who in the living world blamed herself for both Kagiha's death and Monshiro's coma.

Though it's not particularly clear why Hikage wanted to torment her with the revelation (other than he's a sadistic bastard), it sets up for the tragic finale where Kagiha sacrifices himself again so Beniyuri and his friends can come back to life.

Which brings the game back to the real world, where we learn that Yamato, Karasuba, and Beniyuri had been on a trip to pay their respects to Kagiha when their bus overturned, landing in the lake, which trapped them in the realm between life and death. Monshiro wakes up from his coma and a year later they all visit the lake to say good-bye to Kagiha and move on for good this time.

And that's really what this game is about. By going through the other story branches, flashbacks, and prologues, we learn that this game is about how the three survivors of the accident (Yamato, Karasuba, and Beniyuri) dealt with the loss of Kagiha and Monshiro. Beniyuri shut down, afraid of letting anyone get close to her again. Yamato feels guilt over his brother's coma. Karasuba wants to forget everything because he doesn't like the person he was in the past. As five they had been inseparable friends, but as three they are hollow and broken, their present overshadowed by the past.

Though Kagiha and Monshiro have been trapped in between for years, they have remained in purgatory primarily because they refused to lose their attachments to life; Kagiha fixated on a future with Beniyuri, and Monshiro wanting to return a ribbon to a girl he no longer remembered.

Perhaps because none of the endings based off the main storyline result in an all around happy ending (you can get various friends to survive, but Kagiha always remains dead) there is an alternate ending where you can replay the summer camp flashback and make a different choice that prevents the original accident.

This results in a happy ending where the five friends have remained close and intact, and perhaps knowing that its existence is a bit of fanservice, the ending reintroduces the characters in present day in the order we know of their well-being. Karasuba and Yamato greet Beniyuri in the morning before school, Monshiro appears in the afternoon after school, and of course Kagiha (who is never seen in the real world in any other ending) shows up last.

And for good measure, the childhood marriage promise comes up again, but unlike the main story, where the promise is a symbol of an opportunity lost, in the happy ending it's treated as a joke with Karasuba saying that childhood promises are past their expiration date.

I quite enjoyed this game, even though it wasn't quite what I expected. I refrained from mentioning this until now because it doesn't play like one, but Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly is actually billed as an otome game. However, the usual gameplay elements of choosing a character route barely exist (they don't have a common divergence point), and barring Kagiha's you can't actually access them until the self-labeled "best" ending is unlocked due to spoilers. In fact, in the best ending Beniyuri doesn't end up with anyone at all since Kagiha sacrifices himself and passes on to the afterlife.

Rather than having separate storylines that spin off into different directions depending on the player's choice in romantic lead, Black Butterfly is a single story that has a variety of alternate endings to fill out the details the player might not otherwise learn. With its easy to use flowchart for jumping around, revisiting scenes, and criteria for unlocking new ones, it feels structurally closer to Virtue's Last Reward.

As such, I debated whether or not to do the usual multi-part post I do for most otome. Kagiha's storyline is essentially the main one and if the game consisted only of that, it would still feel like a complete experience. But I decided that I did have more to say than I could fit in here, so this will be a series, but I'm structuring it differently this time.

Instead of looking at each character specific route (especially since some of them are quite short) I'll be taking a look at each character and their personal arcs over the course of the story.

Next week, I'll be writing about Kagiha.