VN Talk: Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly - Part 3: Hikage

Continuing my character arc discussions for Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly, Hikage was the second of the characters whose character-specific ending I got.

His route is interesting in that it branches from the main story early on, and it has to in order for Beniyuri to get to know him while he's still a sympathetic character. Chronologically, it's the first alternate ending you can get.

Since he's such an effective villain and the main story makes no bones about how twisted he is, I was curious about how they would make him sympathetic. What they do is make it clear that even though Hikage is incredibly sadistic, there are still moments that reflect who he had been in life, giving him a chance to figuratively pet the dog and show a softer side.

Though I like the self-labeled best ending the most, because it wraps everything up, I think Hikage's is probably the most moving ending.

We don't get to know the mastermind in the main storyline, because his time with the group is a front to get his game going. He plays the pragmatic leader because he knows it's effective, but when it's time to drop the charade he becomes a completely different and arrogant personality, so we know him more by what he says and does than what motivates him in the first place.

He wants the kaleidoscope shards collected and gets a bunch of lost souls to work with him on it. Then he breaks them down until they're consumed with despair. He repeats this over and over again while waiting for the final shards to fall in his grasp and he clearly has no intention of helping anybody but himself. It makes him evil, but we don't really understand why he's like this in the first place. We don't even know if he's really human.

His storyline gives us that answer, as well as the story behind his rabbit-masked servant, Usagi.

Hikage's route plays the most like a traditional otome divergence in that it's a very long, fairly developed story branch, and it's only accessible after having completed the best ending, so when the player goes through it, they have the knowledge that he's the master of the manor, even though Beniyuri lacks it.

This gives us his first real pet the dog scene, when we see one of the masked children of the manor. She's scared of being left alone and latches on to Hikage thinking that he might be the older brother she's looking for, but then she realizes he's not. Hikage speaks gently to her and guides her to finding her way to her brother (who clearly has already passed on) and as a result she fades away peacefully to the afterlife.

The thing is, we know there are other souls trapped within the manor besides our main cast, but they're all children. They wear masks because they are so close to forgetting everything they were in life that they don't even have faces anymore, and they use the masks to hide that. Usagi makes it clear that the natural order of things is for souls to forget everything and depart for the afterlife.

This means that in most cases Hikage is allowing the process to proceed normally with children. He primarily incorporates teenagers and adults in his game, and by helping a little girl along after the player already knows he's the villain, we get to see another side of him. There's no advantage for him to be as helpful as he is in this situation as either Hikage the pragmatic leader or the manor's insane master, and it's the kindest we ever see him.

Aware that Hikage still needs to be revealed as the manor's master, the game also lays out a parallel story within the route itself to set him up as a sympathetic character. In one of Kagiha's childhood side episodes, we learn about a story where two white butterflies are separated by death and the living one goes on a journey to see the other again.

In Hikage's route, the title of that story is finally dropped and of course it's Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly. Beniyuri finds the book in the hideout and reads about the still living white butterfly who's looking for psychedelica, the place where the living can meet the dead. Over a long and arduous journey the white butterfly becomes black with dirt, but eventually it finds psychedelica. She's puzzled though when she discovers the end of the book has been torn out, so she doesn't know what the butterfly does once it actually gets there.

Hikage tells her the rest of the story and how it doesn't have a happy ending. Ashamed of how it looks, and fearing the other white butterfly would no longer accept it, the now-black butterfly turns away from psychedelica and dies alone in the desert. Beniyuri disagrees with the ending, thinking that the white butterfly wouldn't care what the other butterfly looked like, but Hikage says he understands how the black butterfly felt, which is important since his personal story parallels it.

(As a side note, the game does show where the last page of the book is. Hikage keeps it in his study! It's just you don't get that scene if you follow the chronology of his route.)

Since Hikage himself is not forthcoming about his true identity, his route handles this through getting to know Usagi. We've known that Usagi is different from the other masked children in that she's actively working on the master's behalf and that she still has a face even though she's wearing a mask. She comes and goes without fanfare to keep the hideout stocked with food or to deliver messages, and Beniyuri gets the idea that she can try plumbing Usagi for information by leaving notes for her in the food basket.

Initially their conversations are a bit silly, especially when Usagi learns that Beniyuri might be attracted to Hikage and tries to play matchmaker, but eventually Usagi decides to lay all the cards on the table in order to save her brother, who turns out to be the manor's master.

That's when Hikage's backstory comes into play.

Usagi was born to a wealthy merchant and his wife in what was probably Taisho era Japan, but was terribly sickly. Eventually, an older brother, Hikage, turned up at their manor, which caused a rift between her parents since Hikage was the child of a mistress and was presumably being brought into the household as an heir under the assumption that Usagi would die before adulthood. Because of this, her mother hated Hikage, but Hikage and Usagi got along well and became close.

Over time, their father's finances dried up, and along with it, the ability to pay for the medicine for Usagi's treatment. Hikage did everything he could to scrounge up the money for it, even debasing himself in front of relatives who hated him, but ultimately failed when the promised medication didn't arrive. Usagi died, and Hikage went insane with grief, killing the uncle who reneged on the promise of medication and then going full-on occult in search of a way to bring back the dead.

This led him to the kaleidoscope, which can breach the barrier between the living and the dead, and he activated it, creating the manor world that now exists in-between. Because he did this on the shore by his manor, the in-between is like a surreal version of the manor he actually lived in (and the ruins the main cast explored as children at summer camp). Hikage shot himself in the head, killing himself, and fell into the water, entering the manor world the same way the rest of the cast did.

This also means like everybody else, he forgot who he was on entry, and the reason everyone's weapon manifests as a handgun is because he shot himself with a revolver.

However, because his intention was to meet with Usagi, she was also pulled into the manor world even though she had properly passed on. This makes her different from everyone else and is why she retains her memories. She would like for her brother to also pass on, but because of his strong attachment to the resentment he had in life, he's unable to fully let go even though he has otherwise forgotten enough that he's become faceless. Usagi hides her face because she doesn't want him to remember her since it makes it harder to move on.

Hikage eventually goes full-blown psychotic mastermind on his own route, but only after we know all of this, and because of Usagi's side of the story, there's now incentive to try to save this guy. The attempt goes poorly, though, and I respect the fact that Hikage's ending is not happy.

When Usagi and Beniyuri try confronting him, he decides they're conspiring against him and shoots at Beniyuri, only to be stopped by Usagi who takes the bullet for her. When Beniyuri removes Usagi's mask at her request, Hikage sees his sister's face and his memory comes back to him, causing him to effectively lose her all over again as she returns to the afterlife.

We also learn that Hikage, like the black butterfly, actually turned away from psychedelica once he found it. Even though he activated the kaleidoscope, he realized that everything he'd done to get that far had changed him into a kind of person he didn't want his sister to see, so he broke the kaleidoscope (yes, he's the reason it's broken in the first place) before shooting himself. Only he didn't realize its power was still active when he died and fell in.

With his memories back, Hikage bids farewell to Beniyuri, knowing she and her friends now have all the shard pieces they need to reassemble the kaleidoscope and leave, and shoots himself again to pass on to the afterlife.

Beniyuri does try to get him to go back with her, but Hikage quite rightly points out that his body has long since rotted so he couldn't go back even if he wanted. (Presumably this is the case for Kagiha as well, but Hikage's ending doesn't bother addressing what happens to him.)

His ending does have a bit of a hope spot, having Beniyuri meet a pair of siblings at the lake in the real world when she comes to say good-bye to Hikage. They're heavily implied to be the reincarnated Hikage and Usagi, and the brother is even wearing a shirt with a black butterfly monogram.

I was surprised by the amount of sympathy Hikage got from me considering what an absolute dirtbag he is in the main route. Even when he's playing the role of party leader, he's sexist early on towards Beniyuri and prickly about what's "manly" behavior. Though he has what as a stand alone piece of art looks like the most passionate kiss in the game, when you actually get to the scene it's a forced kiss with the implication that he could easily go further whether Beniyuri wants him to or not, and this is while he's still playing the part of group leader.

When I first started the game, I thought that I would like Hikage based on his personality type, but he constantly kept shooting himself in the foot as if to remind me that I really should not like this guy. So while I was shocked he was the mastermind, I wasn't dismayed about it.

In a way it's too bad though, because Hikage has some funny scenes where he's fairly likeable. Since he's so uptight as group leader, there's a side episode where everyone realizes that despite being seemingly proficient at everything, Hikage has no idea how a smartphone works. Though Kagiha doesn't either (which is likely because they've both been dead prior to the invention of smartphones), it's a lot funnier with Hikage trying to figure out how to type on a screen that has no buttons, and the eagerness with which he explains his newfound knowledge to Kagiha is charming.

Though it's not a trick of the written narration, there is one visual element of the storytelling that gives an extremely subtle hint that Hikage is not the Kazuya he pretends to be most of the game, and that's the two moles under his left eye. He's introduced as the Two-Moled Man prior to picking a door name and it's a facial feature only Hikage has. Kazuya doesn't have moles in any of his flashback images and once we learn Monshiro is the real Kazuya it's pretty clear that he doesn't have any either.

One thing that I kind of wish had come up regarding Hikage's disguise is that no one asks him what happened in between Kazuya falling into a coma and now. While his disguise is not perfect in other ways (he doesn't behave like Kazuya and there's the facial feature he apparently cannot or chose not to change), it seems asking about the coma ought to have been on people's minds, especially since Hikage says he arrived in the manor the same time as Beniyuri, Karasuba, and Yamato. Hikage doesn't behave like a six-year-old who's been unconscious for the past ten years.

In fact, what gives him away to Karasuba in one of the side episodes is that Hikage ends up answering a question as himself rather than as Kazuya, in regards to whether there's a girl he likes. While it's a nice catch, it's not the first thing I would have asked in Karasuba's place and it seems like Hikage should have expected someone to ask about the coma as part of his disguise. It wouldn't have had to be anything elaborate, he could even say he's not sure, which is why it's weird that the game dances around addressing it at all.