My Favorite Books of 2021

2021 was a year of reading comfort fiction, mostly because I was in cancer treatment for so much of the year that I just wanted to read what I already knew I would enjoy. Hence, a lot of later volumes in various series.

Normally I list the twelve books I enjoyed the most, but this year because of all the series' reading and because I mostly read volumes back to back, I'm just going to group everything by series and include book/volume numbers. I didn't start any new series. This is all ongoing stuff.

My top three picks of the year are marked with an asterisk (*).

The Legend of the Galactic Heroes Vol 4: Strategem by Yoshiki Tanaka

We finally see all the politicking in the previous volume pay off as the Dominion of Phezzan makes its move and Reinhart decides to make use of their subterfuge, bringing him one step closer to claiming the imperial throne for himself. He feels a lot better in this book, less distant, perhaps because he's getting over his grief. Yang's chapters aren't quite as good this time around, perhaps because he has less to do. This isn't a particularly space battley volume and while his grand strategy insight is as good as ever, his government doesn't like to hear what he has to say, as usual.

My Next Life as a Villainess: All Roads Lead to Doom! Vols 2-3 by Satoru Yamaguchi

In Vol 2 Katarina continues her quest to avoid getting a "bad end" as the villainess of the otome video game she's been reincarnated into. Now that she's a teenager she finally goes off to the magic academy, beginning the game proper, but this time around due to her bond with her potential adversaries it's clear the story will play out differently. There is surprisingly a "bad guy" character who shows up to give the story a little oomph in the finale, but otherwise it ends just about the way you'd expect.

Vol 3 is a little stranger since Vol 2 wraps up the premise of the series, but it was clearly popular enough that the author or his editors wanted to continue so what we get is a stand alone volume of Katarina meeting new people, getting into more trouble, and causing more people to be smitten by her. It's all right, but feels a bit like filler.

Baccano! Vols 8-10 by Ryohgo Narita *

Baccano volumes 8-10 cover the 1934 Alcatraz storyline as well as Nebula Corporation shenanigans in Chicago. For anime-onlies, this arc covers where Ladd Russo wound up after he was pulled off the Flying Pussyfoot and finally puts Huey Laforet's plans into action. Firo gets some pretty awesome moments as he has to operate solo inside Alcatraz for much of this arc and he really gets to put his alchemic knowledge to good use. The best mostly new to us characters are probably the twin homunculi, Sham and Leeza, who have been mentioned before, but get to finally take the stage in this arc.

Shadow of the Fox Vols 2-3 by Julie Kagawa

Soul of the Sword and Night of the Dragon are the second and third books in the Shadow of the Fox trilogy, continuing and concluding Yumeko's journey to stop the summoning of the dragon god in a pseudo-medieval Japanese setting. We get more POVs as characters previously denied a spot in the narrative limelight get their own stories to tell, but I found I didn't like the diluted focus as much. The ending was similarly mixed for me. Parts I liked, parts I didn't, though the journey towards getting there was very good.

The Protectorate Vols 1-3 by Megan E. O'Keefe *

Velocity Weapon, Chaos Vector, and Catalyst Gate are the three books in the trilogy. If you like action sf with careful worldbuilding, this is an excellent choice. It's got spies, military operations, government conspiracies. The two timelines running through the first book are amazing as I couldn't help wondering how they were going to resolve. I love Sanda and Tomas, they have great chemistry together, even when things aren't working out, and Bero is possibly one of my favorite AI characters ever. (There's nothing quite like a sulky warship.) It's all quite good.

The Murderbot Diaries Vol 3 and 4 by Martha Wells *

Rogue Protocol and Exit Strategy are the third and fourth novellas in the The Murderbot Diaries, bringing the titular Murderbot full circle with the decisions it's made since the end of the first novella. It still hates caring about people, because oftentimes people are stupid and caring makes this hard, but it still cares anyway, making Murderbot highly relatable.

VN Talk: The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve

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

Platform: Switch (also on PS4 and Windows)
Release: 2021

The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve is the second of the two games included in Capcom's The Great Ace Attorney: Chronicles collection, making its English language debut after originally appearing on the 3DS. I was originally thinking of saving this one for a rainy day since I don't know when we'll ever see another Ace Attorney game again, but the two-part nature of Adventures and Resolve left me wanting to know how the rest of the story plays out, so I played them back to back.

Since this game came out within the past year, this is your obligatory spoiler warning that I'll be covering most of the game including the ending and there will be spoilers for Adventures as well since it's impossible to talk about the second game without discussing the first!

The most pressing question I had when I started the game was: Does Resolve answer everything I was left wondering about in Adventures? And the answer is yes, it does. It doesn't always do it well, but it does. And for that, I'd like to give credit where credit is due, because I honestly thought they weren't going to get around to it with the plot thread pile-up they were having as even more story material is introduced in the second game!

VN Talk: The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures

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

Platform: Switch (also on PS4 and Windows)
Release: 2021

The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures is making its English language debut fairly late compared to its mainline cousins, being a port of the original 3DS and only as part of the The Great Ace Attorney: Chronicles collection, but that's not so bad because the GAA games are a paired set and an incomplete experience without each other. It's nice not to have to wait a couple years for the next installment.

On the other hand, because you have to play the sequel to see the resolution to questions brought up throughout Adventures, it can be disappointing to play as a stand alone experience. While the Ace Attorney games are a series, this is the first installment that requires you to play a sequel to complete the story.

Since this game came out within the past year, this is your obligatory spoiler warning that I'll be covering most of the game including the ending and the unresolved plot threads! I wrote this prior to playing Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve so everything brought up here are issues that a player might have when they have only experienced the first game.

VN Talk: Steam Prison - Part 8: Grand Ending

There is one more ending! The Grand Ending is the last to unlock and it's a romance agnostic golden route where Cyrus not only gets to prevent her parents' murder in the first place, but the primary cast comes together in pursuit of a common goal, making this the only route where all the love interests are ever in the same room together.

Normally Cyrus goes out to the dining room unarmed when she hears a noise the night of the murder, but in the Grand Ending she decides to take her sword with her, which means that would-be murderer Fitzgerald doesn't stand a chance. She arrests him, reads him his rights, and she and her family are left baffled as to why he would break in in the first place.

Warner Evans tries to get Cyrus to drop the charges against his son, offering her any favor she would like, but of course she's the one girl who can't be bribed, and when Yune finds out that Fitzgerald was acting on Warner's orders, Warner agrees to face the assembly for punishment, kicking off the meat of this route.

Yune decides that the Heights have gotten too corrupted and wants to rebuild the assembly with input from the Depths, who have been ignored and looked down upon for too long, and he decides to send Cyrus to find a good representative from the Depths who'd been willing to help with the reconstruction of the government.

It doesn't make much sense why he'd choose Cyrus, who he's met all of two times, briefly, but it does the job well enough, giving her an excuse to meet Ines again, who recommends Eltcreed as a knowledgeable person to bring back. But Eltcreed needs to bring a radio transmitter with him so Ulrik comes along to maintain it, and then they worry Eltcreed could get attacked in the Heights so they bring a doctor, Adage, to look after him, and before you know it, a crowd of five is stuffed in the elevator for four and they're heading up the Heights. Just in time to interrupt a coup.

Fin joins, betrays, fake betrays (I don't really understand it) the group to add himself to their number and the team does a pretty good job of rolling through the Temple, eventually freeing Yune and defeating Warner, who finally spills the beans on his side of the Tistella murder story.

I'd wondered how Warner's relationship with Glissade worked, and the answer is that Warner is the boss and Glissade his subordinate. Glissade keeps an eye on the HOUNDS and the Depths for Warner, and in return Warner sends him people to experiment on. He describes it as feeding a dog. I can kind of understand that Warner might have wanted someone who was not a part of the HOUNDS and not a criminal for his stooge, and there aren't many people who are neither who are willing to go down to the Depths, but I think he would have been better off finding a biddable HOUND and offering him a chance to return to the Heights in exchange for info. Sure, he'd probably have to get a new spy every few years, and eventually word might get around in the Heights that he sponsered a HOUND to come back, but it'd be more gray area legal rather than the outright illegal he's gotten for human trafficking.

That said, it was nice seeing all the love interests working together and interacting with each other in a way that they don't do in most routes. For some, this is the only time they're in the same room with each other. A lot of their personal storylines are touched upon, from Adage meeting his father and realizing he's no longer the man he loved, to Ulrik and Yune meeting each other as the last of the Ferries and one who had been adopted by the Ferries.

That alone makes the Grand Ending quite grand, but it goes a step further with Yune addressing both the people of the Heights and the Depths about his wish for them to cooperate again. The Heights has better agricultural technology and medicine. The Depths has better engineering. The lots of both could improve if they work together. I loved the unconventional ending credits which is simply Yune making a heartfelt speech about bridging the divide as someone who has lived through the flood that separated the two populations, and has lived in the both pre-flood Depths and the post-flood Heights.

Post-credits, we find out that a few months later the Heights now use an election system, ending lifelong appointments and propelling many people who were not previously politicians into government. The sanctuary district has reps in Adage, Ines, and Sachsen. I found Adage a bit odd since he's a criminal and there's no mention of his sentence being commuted, but I understand the sentiment of wanting all the love interests to be involved. Sachsen was also a surprise, mostly because enough people voted for him to win, but it's suggested that he's not as bad as he initially appeared in the prologue so maybe he's become more humane now that the system that exiled him is no longer around.

Oddly enough, half of the representatives are from the Depths, which includes the area outside the sanctuary district. Symbolically that's nice, but realistically makes no sense because the Heights does not govern beyond the sanctuary district. It would be nice to have their input, but that's not necessary for trade or cultural relations.

Perhaps most importantly though, the authoritarian laws binding the denizens of the Heights have been lifted, so the government no longer requires marriage nor selects a spouse for its citizens. Cyrus is thrilled. And you'd think that'd mean Fin would be ready to go with a love confession and marriage proposal, but he doesn't confess and goofs on the marriage proposal, which pretty much makes him want to curl up and die (though Cyrus is oblivious).

So the game ends with a look forward to what everyone does with their lives in the future and Cyrus still single without a care about romance.

And that's fine. She's a gal who loves her job and doesn't need a man to feel complete.

That said, it's worth playing the optional epilogue to the Grand Ending where the guys meet up a year later and Cyrus is delayed, leaving the six of them free to talk with each other. It ends with them dog-piling on Fin for having made zero progress with Cyrus even though he simultaneously makes it clear that he won't tolerate any weirdos trying to court her, which of course leads the other guys to suggest that maybe they could give it a shot, assuming he doesn't think they're weird too.

It's pure fluff, but a good laugh and nice way to close out the game.

VN Talk: Steam Prison - Part 7: Fin

Fin is the first love interest you meet in Steam Prison, and it's pretty clear from the get-go take he's nursing an unrequited crush on Cyrus that their society will not allow him to act on, but he was only added as a romantic option in later releases of the game. At first I thought it was because Cyrus gets exiled from the Heights at the start of the game so you simply don't get to see him again, but then he shows up later on most routes as a part of HOUNDS, so he's not entirely removed from the story. That said I can see why he might not have been a love interest the first time around, as he's pretty damn damaged in the base game.

His role on most routes other than his own is primarily an antagonistic one. After being transferred to the HOUNDS, Sachsen basically makes a personal torture project out of him to turn him into a killer. This mentally breaks Fin, and the only thing that keeps him going is the hope of meeting Cyrus again. He knows that as a criminal she should be somewhere within the sanctuary district he now patrols, but he's not mentally stable anymore so his feelings for her become twisted and possessive, making him an obstacle to avoid on multiple routes. That Cyrus might enter a relationship with another man (when he's been suffering all this time in hopes of seeing her again) is no longer acceptable.

My initial impression of him, prior to playing the game, was that he was sweet and if he wasn't route locked he would have been my first choice to play. Then he started killing people just for inconveniencing his potential reunion with Cyrus and, well, I wasn't thrilled. I don't like yandere characters (sweet on the outside, crazy on the inside). It bothers me that in a lot of scenes where Cyrus is confronted with how messed up he is, if she comes out of it okay all is forgiven no matter what he did. She even runs back to save his life in one ending after he bashed her over the head to knock her out and kidnap her.

And there are, of course, multiple endings where she does not come out of it okay. Particularly on Eltcreed's route, bad ends with Fin result in him imprisoning her with implied rape to convince her to return his affection.

But this may be one yandere I tolerate better than others, and the reason is that his obsession and potential to do damage is not hidden prior to playing his romance. Even if you skip all the bad ends, you'll at minimum see him killing fellow HOUNDS, attacking Eltcreed with a sword, dismembering a corpse, and punching Adage. Admittedly, it also helps that it's not his default state, but knowing what he's capable of in the name of devotion helps his actual route work.

Also, despite my dislike for yanderes, the more brutal, callous Fin still does a number of good things; from returning Cyrus's long lost pendant, which she trades away for medicine in the common route, to killing Glissade and Sachsen in Yune's good ending.

Fin's route splinters off early, before Cyrus can even be condemned, so he's not tortured into being a crazy person. Instead, when the police come to arrest her for the murder of her parents, Fin (falsely) confesses to the murder hoping to spare her. He even provides a believable motivation, that he's in love with her and wanted to take her away before she could get married.

Of course Cyrus doesn't want him to take the rap for a murder neither of them did, but Fin is pretty smart with his false confession. Because he admitted to another crime (unsanctioned love) there's no point to Cyrus trying to take the blame in his place. She can't save him.

Though Fin oddly gets a trial when she didn't, it still works out in Warner's favor as far as his agreement with Glissade. He knows Cyrus will be sent to work with the HOUNDS which will put her in reach of Glissade so there's no reason for him to fight whether it's Cyrus or Fin who gets pinned with the murder charge. HOUNDS members die for unsavory and certainly unethical reasons all the time.

This leads to a role reversal from most other routes. This time Fin is a prisoner and Cyrus becomes a member of HOUNDS, which quite frankly, was a concept I loved. But after playing the route, I had a lot of thoughts.

Foremost is who this route was written for. Fin was added later, which likely means he was added based on fan feedback. Some players like yanderes, but this route takes place before he's driven crazy. While he still shows signs of his potential to obsess over Cyrus, he never gets to the point where he imposes on her personal freedoms. He's even willing to step out of her life entirely (for his personal sanity and to avoid complicating her job with the HOUNDS). So his route doesn't seem satisfactory for those who loved the yandere side of him.

But he's still a darker and more romantically aggressive character (at least until Cyrus tells him to stop, which he respects) than his initial personality in the Heights suggests, so he doesn't quite feel right for those who liked him as he was at the start.

Also, he just seems to be written inconsistently. Early in the common route he's established as a guy who can be paralyzed by fear when he sees Cyrus and Sachsen duelling in a way that could get her killed. Yet he rescues her when they meet again in the Depths by stabbing one of her assailants with a knife, grabbing his sword, and laying into the others. This is shades of yandere Fin, not his pre-yandere self.

When they have a chance to talk in private about his attraction to her, he offers to teach her about love, starting with kissing and moving towards undressing her, but later on, when she suggests they share a bed (because it's big enough and the room only comes with one) he's suddenly not sure he's ready for that even though it's pretty obvious from context that she expects they will both be clothed.

Aside from that, his route doesn't really have a story. It's shorter than most other routes and follows the pair as they're exiled from the Heights and eventually escape from the sanctuary district (since Sachsen is making life miserable for them) to the Depths where Cyrus accepts work as Eltcreed's bodyguard and Fin opens a repair shop. There is no climax. There's no resolution to anything other than Cyrus and Fin's relationship. It felt like the writer just didn't know where to go with things and decided that now that they're away from Sachsen it was time to call it a day.

I suppose you could argue that Cyrus challenging Sachsen was the climax given what's at stake (certainly that's when a bad end branches off), but she ends up running away when Ulrik intervenes. I was looking forward to her kicking his ass! I thought it would have been great if she put him in his place as on Ines's route and brought about change to the sanctuary district.

And the worst part is that I feel there was so much missed potential. Cyrus being part of the HOUNDS and hoping to go back to the Heights through hard work to correct an injustice is a fantastic parallel to Ines's story, but unlike him, she has an incredibly hard time overlooking cruelty, even when her boss expects it of her (and both Fin and Ines encourage her to do so as well, since Sachsen's rule is law).

We see a litany of things that Sachsen does wrong, but oddly he's the only member of HOUNDS who is blatantly doing bad things in front of Cyrus, whereas in the common route just about any HOUND who isn't Ines is a morally compromised individual. Does she go on a tear with her coworkers too?

I would have liked to have seen more of her daily life in HOUNDS, especially since she expresses solidarity with her comrades. The HOUNDS aren't well liked and are in danger of being overpowered by the vastly more numerous criminals if they aren't careful, so she completely understands that they have to have each other's backs even if she disagrees with Sachsen's methods. She views them as fellow police officers like they used to be, and even though she's the only woman in HOUNDS and a lot of them go out whoring, she doesn't experience any discrimination for her gender. None of them hit on her.

We could have had an inside take to see more of their side of the story, because even though they're the jailors, they're not there any more voluntarily than their prisoners, but we really don't get that.

If Fin's route was overstuffed I could see leaving that out. But his route is pretty bare bones as it is. The confrontation with Sachsen in the market feels like it should have been an escalation point, focusing on the route's central problem, the one that would have to be dealt with in the climax, instead of the high point in the story's tension.

And as with the two bodyguard routes, I'm disappointed that Cyrus doesn't get to avenge her parents, especially since finding the real culprit and clearing Fin's name is her driving motivation at the start of his route. She has every intention of serving as best she can in HOUNDS to get transferred back to the Heights. But it all gets thrown out the window.

If she consciously made that sacrifice when she confronted Sachsen, it would be understandable, but throwing that away and running from the fight because some stranger called out to her was weird.

I get that Cyrus and Fin can't have a happy ending in the Heights. None of the good endings end there, because they can't, but she doesn't even get any minor wins. None of the murder culprits are found out. Sachsen is still in command of the sanctuary district. Even if the bodyguard routes had nothing to do with her personal story, there were still people to foil.

Fin's route has none of that, so it relies entirely on romantic moments between Cyrus and Fin. Does it work?

If you like his character (either pre-yandere or both pre- and post-), then probably. I think his route is short and needed a plot, but it gets a surprising amount of mileage from the fact he's not new to the player.

Cyrus is shocked at the beginning of his route that he would take the blame for her, and if this was the player's first route, it would probably be a bit much as well. But because Fin can only be played last, the depths of his devotion to Cyrus are known. We know he will do anything to protect her. If being exiled in her place is the way, then so be it. (On any other route where she's sent to the sanctuary district, he comes charging in to stop her exile, and it's only because she tells him to drop it that nothing drastic happens.)

Aside from his initial forwardness in the Depths (see the written inconsistently part), Fin's romance is pretty much what I wanted. He loves Cyrus and when she admits she's willing to learn about love now that they're no longer in the Heights, he lets her move at her own pace to decide whether or not she feels the same.

His route is also the only one where we learn what motivates Fin and why he fell in love with Cyrus in the first place. Though she asks him on the common route why he became a police officer, their elevator ride ends before he can answer, and it's only in one of his bad ends that we get a flashback to what things were like for Fin in the Heights.

It turns out Fin suffers from self-esteem issues. He wasn't good at the family business, which he should have been the heir to being the eldest son, and he hated disappointing his father. So he decided to try to find some other work where he'd be useful to someone and became a police officer. But he wasn't very good at the entrance exam so it took him three tries.

Fin tends to view himself as lacking or useless, but Cyrus thinks the world of him. Even though he feels he can't keep up with her, she insists that they're a team and that he's a huge help to her. No one else had ever been so supportive of him before that poor Fin fell for her hard.

I also really liked his epilogue story. It requires knowing a little Japanese since the English translation doesn't quite convey what's going on, but Fin always speaks to Cyrus in keigo (formal Japanese), even though they're in a relationship, and he has no problem speaking informally to other people. (Though she doesn't get it, this is because Fin respects her so much, he can't help, but be formal.) Since she already speaks to him informally, she'd like him to be informal too, so they decide to play a game and switch speaking styles, where she'll be formal and he'll be informal.

The English translation goes pretty over the top for Cyrus's formal, more than Fin's casual, but the end result is that Cyrus is the first to screw up because she finds casual Fin's speaking style so damn sexy she forgets to be formal. Since he likes this effect on her, he decides to keep it for at least a little longer.

VN Talk: Steam Prison - Part 6: Yune

In the original Steam Prison release, Yune was the only locked route. Because of this, I expected that Yune's route would end up answering my remaining questions about the game; primarily why Cyrus's parents were killed instead of other options for framing Cyrus (Glissade says in Adage's route that he didn't expect murder specifically, so it was done at his associate's discretion), why Warner cooperates with Glissade in the first place (what's in it for him?), and why Cyrus's engagement with Fitzgerald was annuled the day before the murder (since it would be annuled anyway when she became a criminal, assuming Warner was behind the annulment).

Alas, his route doesn't answer any of that, even though there are otherwise signs of this being a last hurrah for the player. His route touches on things we learned on all the previous routes (even Adage's, though Adage himself does not show up), and this is probably the route with the largest number of cast present. We also spend a fair bit of time in all three locations in the game; the Heights, the sanctuary district, and the Depths.

So it's a little disappointing that despite being the former final route, most of the bad guys get away in his good ending. They do get caught in two of his normal endings though, if that's any consolation.

Yune himself is a much different sort of character than originally presented. Considering that he's fairly magnanimous in other routes and his intervention directly saves Cyrus and/or her current love interest, I was a little surprised that he's actually a bit of a pill at the start of his own route.

His route branches off early from the common route in that Cyrus gets physical in her protest about her innocence, and gets herself jailed on an entirely different charge in order to buy herself time before being exiled. That would have been a great ploy, if she'd actually been able to do anything with the extra time she bought. But it does buy her a reprieve in that Yune is able to discover her arrest and sentencing paperwork before she's sent to the Depths.

Because of the previous routes, one might expect that Yune realized something was wrong with the way her paperwork with filed without his consent and slated for destruction rather than archival, and that he changed her punishment from exile to being his attendant so he could look into what happened. But no. He actually doesn't question her crime. He wants her for his attendant because he believes he can use the services of a woman willing to kill the parents who raised her.

This leads to the main thrust of his story. Yune is immortal, but he's tired after living for four hundred years. Everybody he ever cared about is dead and he's unable to be viewed as a normal person by those around him because he's the immortal saint, which also turns out to have been a manufactured role to help manage the population and give them something to believe in. He is immortal, but it's due to his mechanical heart (powered by a sentient magic god stone) rather than because he's been blessed in any way. He and his adopted brother put the heart together when he was young and sickly, so he wouldn't die prematurely, but he didn't intend to live forever.

The stone in his mechanical heart is able to stop anything that would kill him because it loves him. (It tells him that, so he knows.) Poison turns to water. Poisonous plants wilt. Weapons turn against their wielders. Nearby glass will shatter to bury shards in would be assassins. It's no wonder the average person would believe the world itself loves him so much it would protect him. But for someone who wants to die, it leaves him with no clear way to do it. He physically can't hurt himself.

So Yune hopes that a woman cruel enough to kill her parents might be both creative enough to figure out how to kill him and willing to kill the most beloved person in the Heights, and he offers to leave posthumous instructions pardoning Cyrus should she manage to do so. However, he also gives her a one month timeline in which to kill him, otherwise he will kill her (since she is, after all, a criminal).

Though Cyrus is not thrilled with the bargain, she agrees and works as his attendant while trying to figure out how to kill him. The nice thing about this route is that she does intend to honor her promise instead of simply trying to buy time to get out of it. Of course she would rather not do it, but she doesn't shrink away from the possibility she'll have to follow through.

What makes Yune a bit of a pill early on though is that he immediately shuts down any possibility of Cyrus being innocent. As he tells her, that possibility works against his interests, because if she isn't capable of killing, then how can he expect her to kill him?

Eventually though, after he's particularly happy with a trip to the Depths, he does ask Warner to reopen the investigation into the murder of Cyrus's parents, which is pretty funny since he was the one who ordered them killed. In fact every time Warner shows up to complain about Yune keeping Cyrus around entertained me because it was a constant reminder that Yune's death wish is unintentionally foiling Warner and Glissade's plan to send her to the Depths.

That's why I was a bit disappointed that the culprits get away scot free. It's possible to play Yune's route without having the culprits revealed, since it only requires one of Ulrik's bad endings to unlock, but because you get a lot of mileage out of knowing who the villains are, it's a shame that we don't get to see their comeuppance as well, at least in the good ending.

Before Yune can do his own independant investigation, his real relationship with Cyrus comes out, and the assembly hauls him out for the crime of being in love outside of a relationship.

You see, Yune eventually figures out how to kill himself. When he and Cyrus go down to the Depths they meet Fin and Yune realizes that he's jealous over how close Cyrus and Fin are, even though Cyrus insists it's platonic. This jealousy makes his heart hurt for the first time in centuries, and though he doesn't like the pain spikes in his chest (they hurt!), he concludes that falling deep enough in love with Cyrus should be enough to kill him. In a nutshell, by falling in love with Cyrus, he's forcing out any love from the sentient stone, so it can no longer keep him alive.

Since it's against the law, Cyrus is not thrilled with falling in love with Yune, but she knew when she entered the bargain with him that one or the other of them would die before they parted ways, so she agrees, and if their mutual affection is high enough for the good ending, they're found out and Yune is banished to the Depths; no longer a saint. (And it's rather funny that when he arrives Sachsen initially has no idea what to do with him. I mean, what would you do as a warden when Jesus shows up to serve time in your prison?)

For two of the normal endings, I suppose their relationship is not blatant enough for them to get caught so Yune is able to clear her name and she is left with a choice to stay with him or not. If she does, Yune eventually expires as planned, and Cyrus becomes a politician like her father to help lead people in the future. If she doesn't, she leaves Yune's service, gets an exception to getting married, and becomes a swordfighting instructor. Eventually she passes away from old age, leaving Yune behind and sad that it didn't work out.

As for the rest of the good ending, it was messy. Cyrus misses Yune's meeting with the assembly because she's explicitly told not to go and meets up with Fitzgerald, who admits to killing her parents before stabbing her in the stomach and leaving her to bleed out. So when Yune departs the Heights, voluntarily accepting his punishment, the expectation is that Cyrus is dead! Glissade is only too happy to experiment on Yune's immortality (and given that he loves Cyrus so much now he's no longer invulnerable) so the happy ending credits roll while Cyrus seems to be dead and Yune is facing life as a guinea pig. It's really quite jarring.

The post-credits scene is unusually lengthy as a result of needing to pull a happy ending out of that. Cyrus survives, somehow. I don't know why she got patched up instead of being finished off (if Fitzgerald or Warner still cared about the agreement with Glissade at this point they wouldn't have tried killing her), but she got sent to the Depths like she was originally supposed to be, and then teams up with Eltcreed and Ulrik to rescue Yune. Unfortunately most of that was told in summary in favor of a "Surprise! She lives moment!" when she and Ulrik sneak into Glissade's lab to do the rescue, so her survival felt confusing rather than a moment earned.

Then at Ulrik's hideout he gives Yune a box that's been in his family for ages and turns out to have the key that will stop Yune's mechanical heart, allowing his natural one to beat in its place again. That's not entirely dumb, since Ulrik's ancestor was Yune's adopted brother, but you'd think at some point Arcenclimb should have given it to Yune while they were still living together. What would have Arcenclimb done with it? It's only useful to Yune. But this paves the way for Yune to live out the remainder of his natural life with Cyrus in the Depths, however long that turns out to be (since he was expected to die young).

Fin is the last love interest and I'll get to him next week!

VN Talk: Steam Prison - Part 5: Ines

I had certain expectations for Ines's route, given that he's presented both as a decent man and as a member of HOUNDS, its vice-commander no less, and I wasn't disappointed. Ines is someone who would like to take the more humane option, but given a direct order from Sachsen, he will bare his fangs like any other member of his unit and kill on command.

Of all the love interests, he's the most like Cyrus, down to the fact he wants to return to the Heights to discover the truth and right an injustice. But he's learned to keep his head down and toe the line, because if he screws up, he'll never be able to go back and accomplish his mission. It's no wonder that when Cyrus shows up and tries righting wrongs (that get her constantly thrown into the HOUNDS' holding cells) that Ines is the one who tries to teach her how to compromise her sense of justice in order to survive.

On his route, Ines ends up hiring her as a personal tutor. Given his family's background as farmers, he's not well versed in politics and the nobility, but that's Cyrus's family in spades. He thinks that knowledge will help him in pursuit of the truth once he returns to the Heights (and it turns out he's not wrong that the nobility have something to do with it).

This in turn gives Cyrus a job so she doesn't need to worry about feeding herself (as much). She still can't cook worth beans though, and this is the only route where she lives in the Depths on her own so she has to cook if she wants to live on more than bread and water. Fortunately Ines can cook and is willing to teach her a bit. (And in the alternate ending with Adage, it's fun to see her entering that relationship knowing how to cook ahead of time.)

The relationship growth between Cyrus and Ines feels very natural. Though it's harder to tell whether Ines is romantically attracted to her, it's clear that he does care about her. Like Cyrus, Ines has never had much reason to think about romance, given that it's outlawed outside of marriage in the Heights. As on other routes, Cyrus needs a bit of a push to consider romance, and in comes in the form of Adage asking her if she's Ines's girlfriend. He only brings it up once, with an unsolicited comment that it's likely to end badly given that she's a criminal and Ines is a member of HOUNDS.

That status disparity does come up on at least one occasion, when two meet in the streets and head to her place for lessons. Ines specifically tells her they can't walk together because of how it looks, but another time they go grocery shopping together without comment, so it's inconsistent.

Overall though, Ines's route hit all the major points that I wanted in this game, and it's the only route to do so! We get an extended look at life in the sanctuary district, we get a natural feeling romance, we go back to the Heights, and the murder of Cyrus's parents is resolved.

The big status changing moment in Ines's route is when he gets word from Sachsen that he's been given approval to return to the Heights. It's an incredibly rare event for a member of HOUNDS to be reinstated as a police officer, and when Cyrus finds out, she wants to know if there's a way she can go with him so she can find her parents' murderer and clear her name.

It turns out there is, but the story doesn't lay it out all that cleanly. In a nutshell, Ines can take one other member of HOUNDS with him, if he wants to. This is because police officers in the Heights normally work in pairs, so this would spare the need for finding him another partner. But Cyrus is obviously not a member of HOUNDS.

It initially looks like they're going to smuggle her up simply by having her cut her hair so she looks more like a man and then putting her in a HOUNDS outfit, which had me crying foul, because there's no way the Heights would just accept a random person in a HOUNDS outfit, and until they actually get up there that looks the plan.

When they do get there Ines handles it by introducing her as a deceased member of HOUNDS who Sachsen never bothered filing a casualty report for, which looks better and shows Ines put more thought into this. In the short term that probably could work, this isn't a era of photo IDs, but Cyrus expects to do a solo murder investigation and has zero clues to start with. They expect she'll have limited time to work before being found out. While the possibility of her being recognized is brought up, surprisingly not being recognized by the people who know the man serving as her cover identity never comes up.

The possibility of things going horribly wrong for Cyrus is ridiculously high (and they do!), and Ines acknowledges that if she's found out before she clears her name, he'll be punished as well for bringing her up in the first place (but when it happens he's not!). Considering that Ines has sacrificed so much, including his own sense of morality, to return to the Heights, it doesn't make much sense that he would risk it all on the chance that Cyrus could find justice. At least, not without mitigating risk wherever possible, which he does not.

Of course he takes her up so we can have our story, but it's so slapdash that the two of them get caught by Sachsen before they even go up the elevator. While I appreciate any occasion Cyrus gets to beat down Sachsen, it just makes Ines look like an idiot. He knows Sachsen isn't stupid and the man's specialty is logistics and inventory. Of course Sachsen would notice that equipment was stolen for Cyrus's disguise.

That said, the game handles the emotional part of their return to the Heights reasonably well, down to the fact Cyrus is uncomfortable with her attraction to Ines. Once reinstated he'll obviously be assigned a new fiancee (having been exiled before his marriage could go through) and if Cyrus is successful she'll be in the same boat.

Once in the Heights, both Ines and Cyrus start their respective investigations and I like that his route dives into the corruption that Cyrus was previously too blind to see. I was disappointed though that her former fiance from the start of the game turned out to be her parents' murderer, acting on his father's orders. While I didn't expect him to be a great person, it would have been nice if the reason he and Cyrus wouldn't have made a good couple was just that they weren't compatible rather than him being a murderous stooge for his dad. (And why did he do it himself rather than have the corrupted part of the police do it?)

Ines's hunt for justice largely ends on a good note though. He learns about the corruption in the police, why he was allowed to be reinstated, and why his former partner was killed. And it ends in a big battle with him and Cyrus fighting back to back.

The aftermath is a bit rushed, but all the bad guys get their comeuppence in this route, even Glissade, who is revealed off-camera as the mastermind behind the human trafficking that Ines's partner was killed over. (He was incapacited early in Ines's route, so he never got the chance to do anything to Cyrus.) Saint Yune asks Ines if he would be willing to become the new commander of HOUNDS since Sachsen killed himself after losing his duel with Cyrus and Ines agrees. He'd wanted to reform the HOUNDS anyway, and planned to push for it once he returned to the Heights, so this paves the way for the happy ending when he asks Cyrus to come with him and join HOUNDS.

I was wondering how they would end up together if they both returned to the Heights, and the answer is that they don't stay. On the way down Cyrus comes out and says she loves him, and Ines admits the feeling is mutual. Since the laws of the Heights no longer apply, they're free to love each other in the Depths. (And as a note: Like Eltcreed, Ines has a normal ending. In this one he and Cyrus stay in the Heights, being reinstated as police officers and partners. She's a bit sad because she knows she can never love him, but is happy that she can continue to be with him.)

There are two other things I want to touch on regarding Ines's route that aren't about him.

The first is that we get the backstory regarding the HOUNDS' previous commander Theia (who was noted as killed in the Depths on Eltcreed's route) and Sachsen. Sachsen is an incredible bastard just about every time he shows up, but Ines's route lets us see him before he became commander. While he was never a bleeding heart, Sachsen clearly respected Theia a great deal, possibly loved her, and her death broke him. Since she asked him to take care of the HOUNDS with her final words, he took command by force and turned the organization into its current authoritorian existence in the name of protecting it.

I liked Theia's reasoning for smoking that she tells Sachsen. Being a part of HOUNDS, she doesn't have much control over her life, but even though smoking is unhealthy and shortening her life, she chooses to do it because it is one of the few things she can do that she can control. And it's telling that Sachsen is not a smoker before her death, but by the time we meet him in present day, he's become one. Sachsen needs control, which is why when he loses to Cyrus on Ines's route or Eltcreed's, his first instinct is that it's all over and he should kill himself.

The second thing is how Fin is handled. Though Cyrus is in the sanctuary district, she surprisingly doesn't see Fin the entire route until the very end (barring a bad end), even when realistically he should be present, which feels like a misstep. While adding Fin earlier would likely bloat the story with additional complications, it still feels like an oversight. She clearly hasn't forgotten him as she tells Ines that one of the reasons she wants to go back to the Heights is that if she clears her name then Fin can be reinstated too, as he'll no longer be guilty by association.

But when she returns with Ines as part of the HOUNDS, she finally sees Fin again and tells him that it'll be great to work with him as part of HOUNDS, so what happened to reinstating him? I mean, Fin might want to stay down in the Depths with her anyway, given how he feels, but she's in a relationship with Ines, and I don't know how he would take that. He doesn't completely freak out on Adage's route, but goes completely crazy on Eltcreed's, and Ines's route just ignores that.

I will say though, that it was funny as heck seeing Fin break out sobbing at seeing Cyrus again. It was completely in character with how he was in the Heights, so she doesn't find it unusual, but the other HOUNDS present comment on how Fin is acting so weird because he's normally (to them) as scary as hell, since they know him as the dude who cuts people down without batting an eye.

VN Talk: Steam Prison - Part 4: Adage

If I'd played with a walkthrough from the start I would have done Adage's route first; not because of what I saw of him in the common route (he's the only love interest who isn't in it!), but because I liked his character design. That said, I didn't know what kind of character he would be, and even after finishing his route I find him difficult to sum up in a few words, which is good! It means we don't get many love interests like him in an otome.

For a game about Cyrus being sent to a penal colony, Adage is surprisingly the only love interest who is actually a criminal. He's a blunt and contradictory man, simultaneously selfish and selfless, and for a doctor, he has a terrible bedside manner. Adage initially comes off as someone who doesn't waste words, but he's actually quite talkative when he wants to be. And though you might call him dour from his frequently clipped and emotionless manner of speaking, he has a sense of humor and often smiles.

Adage's spoken language is also ridiculously coarse, considering his profession. He swears more than the rest of the cast and he's possibly the first love interest in an otome that I've seen drop an f-bomb to describe what he wants to do with the protagonist. Given that it's Cyrus though, I'm not sure she understands what he means by that.

All that makes him an interesting and very human character to watch. He also has a great dynamic with Cyrus, who is much more outspoken on his route than the others. Whenever he finds a shortcoming in her, he doesn't mince words, but Cyrus doesn't sit there and take it either, and she pushes him over his own shortcomings as much as he does her. And one thing I like is that even though he frequently brings up that she doesn't have a feminine way of speaking, he also acknowledges that he likes that about her and doesn't want her to change.

His route is largely his story rather than Cyrus's, though we do get a surprise reveal near the end that I'll talk about later. Adage is perhaps unusual in that he committed a crime intentionally to be sent to the Depths, since he's looking for his estranged father. This makes him a little more sympathetic since he wasn't committing crimes for profit, and the victim was a patient who wanted to die anyway, but he acknowledges that his patient died in a cruel manner because he wanted to make sure the murder was heinous enough that he would not be granted leniency.

Like Eltcreed, his route is initially a lot of Cyrus settling into her new life with him. Adage hires her out of guilt for not saving the lives of the mother and son who'd taken her in, and this gives the impression that his hang up is about not being a better doctor, rather than living in the shadow of his father (who it turns out is also a doctor). But there isn't as strong a feeling of routine as in Eltcreed's route so I found I didn't mind the lack of a plot early on. Each day felt different and there was enough mystery around Adage himself (since he doesn't volunteer why he's in the Depths right away) that there's a reason to keep playing and see what happens next.

As in previous routes, something has to happen to spark Cyrus's feelings, and in this case it's Adage not wanting to deal with people around town second guessing his relationship with her. (He calls it "making fun of" but in practice it sounds like what he really doesn't want is gossip.) So he "fixes" this by introducing Cyrus as his wife while making it clear to her that it's just for appearances and they aren't really married.

But Cyrus doesn't really understand what exactly a married couple does, so in order to correctly pretend her role she needs Adage to explain it to her. This kicks off a number of hilarious conversations that illustrate just how sheltered Cyrus's life has been, and how much of a rapscallion Adage was despite the fact they both grew up in the Heights. Though I've seen Cyrus get some flak from other players for not realizing how babies are made, considering that sex ed is still optional in some places in our world, I didn't find it that hard a stretch, and there's something entertaining about Adage dryly discussing how that's accomplished through intercourse.

Given the focus on marriage in his route (even if it's a fake one) it's surprising Cyrus doesn't ask if he's had a real one. Adage was twenty-four when he was sent to the Depths, and we know Fin at twenty-two was getting a rare postponement due to having a low income; an option Adage would not have had as a doctor. He ought to have been married by the time he was sent to the Depths whether he wanted to be or not. It was probably glossed over just to make him a somewhat older love interest with more life experience, but it's also another instance of the worldbuilding not quite hanging together.

Though the seeds of Adage's route finale are laid down fairly regularly, it's hard to see how they all come together, until they do. Glissade Roselite is the doctor for the HOUNDS and he takes an interest in Cyrus, showing up multiple times on Adage's route. Though it's been about twelve years since his father disappeared from the Heights, Adage is also positive that Glissade is his father, but Glissade never acts as though he recognizes him.

What happens is a surprising exploration of what happens when there is a mandatory population plan with arranged marriages. Cyrus got on the lucky end with parents who ended up loving each other and were happy to have her. Adage's father did his civic duty and emotionally tapped out, being uninterested in both his wife and his son.

Instead, he fell in love with a child of his own creation that he cobbled together like Frankenstein out of the bodies of discarded infants that did not fit with society's desired traits. Because she was created out of his own free will, he cherished her for years until she died and he embarked on a mad scheme to repair her. (And getting repair parts is much easier from the bodies of criminals than upstanding citizens.)

The twin spokes of the finale revolve around the revelation that Glissade arranged for Cyrus to be framed as a criminal--not the specifics of getting her parents killed, but getting her sent to the Depths so he could drain her rare blood type to bring back Priscilla--and Adage coming to terms with the fact the father he wanted to reunite with cares nothing for him.

Normally I like it when a love interest's personal story and the protagonist's intertwine, but Glissade's reveal as the mastermind behind Cyrus being sent to the Depths honestly felt like it came out of nowhere. It's telegraphed early enough that the fact he wants her for reconstructing Priscilla is not a surprise, but him having the pull (because laws were definitely trampled) to get her sent to the Depths was a surprise and not properly set up. And the reveal isn't something Cyrus gets to discover for herself so much as something he just drops into conversation while villain monologuing.

The resolution to Glissade's mad scheme is similarly underwhelming. Adage sets fire to the currently inert Priscilla and Glissade dies trying to save her, which was all right, even though we know the HOUNDS aren't going to let that go unpunished. But because there needs to be a happy ending Adage can't actually be executed. The game avoids that by having Ines suggest to Sachsen that they make Adage Glissade's replacement, since getting a doctor for the HOUNDS is rough when people don't normally volunteer to go down to the Depths.

This was not a bad idea, but Ines suggests it moments before Adage's scheduled public execution in front of a large crowd. With a boss as volatile as Saschen it makes no sense to suggest that he could do things better in front of people he loves to impress his authority over.

I know why it's done publicly, it's so Cyrus can be present to see it, but it doesn't make much narrative sense.

Still, I felt that Adage ended up having one of the better routes, because it at least addressed a lot of questions about Cyrus's framing and even whether the HOUNDS' medication is really necessary. For that reason it feels the most complete out of the routes unlocked at the start and I'd recommend it first.

Unfortunately since Glissade was the only one who knew the truth about what really happened to Cyrus, his death prevents her from getting the proof she needs to return to the Heights, so she remains in the Depths as Adage's assistant. Not that he's nothing if not devoted to her. Adage's life has been a cesspool of neglect, so once he develops an attachment to Cyrus, nothing's going to break it.

This is also the first route to really touch on the Heights population plan, but like other parts of the worldbuilding, if you look at it too hard it tends to fall apart. For instance, knowing that children are planned, and that the Heights is constantly losing people due to natural death and exiling their criminals and HOUNDS, families of two to three children should be fairly standard. But Cyrus is an only child and so is Adage. While it's possible their parents could have had reproductive issues preventing additional children, it would not have been a voluntary choice and I would have liked to see that commented on.

VN Talk: Steam Prison - Part 3: Ulrik

Ulrik's the prickly sort, who won't/can't admit that he actually cares about anyone. His backstory supports his negative worldview, but that doesn't make him an easy person to get along with. If not for Eltcreed constantly prodding Ulrik with potentially uncomfortable banter he'd likely remain a glum, unlikeable person. But Eltcreed's jokes and intentional misinterpretations take the edge off Ulrik's acerbic personality and humanize him. This makes him more entertaining to be around, especially since it takes so long for him to warm up to Cyrus, even in his own route.

Unlike Eltcreed, the stakes in Ulrik's route come up fairly early through his acquaintance, Vice. Vice leads Rafale, an insurgent group that wants to topple the Heights (literally) no matter what it takes and many of the members revere Ulrik for his family heritage. Though most people are unaware of it, the Ferries were responsible for much of the tech that allowed the rebuilding and improvement of people's lives in the Depths following the flood that caused the creation of the Heights in the first place, but the Ferries chose to remain in the shadows while allowing the Valentines to take credit for their work.

Ulrik doesn't particularly care for Rafale, but he and Vice go back years to less pleasant times and he figures they can't realistically do anything to hurt the Heights, so what's the harm?

It doesn't take a genius to see that his dual allegiance to Eltcreed and Rafale are going to conflict, and that Cyrus is going to end up stuck in the middle of it as a noble from the Heights.

Despite the fact Cyrus is still Eltcreed's bodyguard in this route, the story manages to let her step away from him often enough that Ulrik can take focus as the primary love interest in the route. Eltcreed plays an outsized role regardless, but it's not as bad as I thought it might be since he and Ulrik are close friends (not that Ulrik would ever admit it) and a lot of Ulrik's personal story is tied to Eltcreed. We finally get the backstory between the two men and as well as the tie between their families. I actually liked Eltcreed better on Ulrik's route because he wasn't hitting on Cyrus as much and I was entertained by his attempts to get Ulrik and Cyrus to hook up.

The big internal conflict on Ulrik's route is his relationship with his family's legacy and that drives the bulk of his behavior. According to Ulrik, the Ferries were supposed to have gone up to the Heights when the flood came, but were abandoned instead and left to survive on the ground below. Because of this, he's been taught since he was a child to hate the Heights.

For less clear reasons, the Ferries have intentionally chosen to live like paranoid paupers and stay out of the spotlight. His mother told him not to trust anyone because they'll inevitably betray him, and the lesson was hammered home when he found his deadbeat dad, who immediately turned around and sold him to the local tyrant. Supposedly this need for secrecy is due to the knowledge the Ferries possess, but Ulrik never learns what he's supposed to do with it or what he's saving it for, and neither does the player, making the family's drastic measures baffling.

Given Ulrik's surly personality, Cyrus has to wear him down into appreciating her and break through his forced hatred of the Heights (given the flashback to him as a child, his heart was never really in it). It takes a while to do so, and from a best ending perspective, the key to winning his heart is wearing him down with kindness. He even compares her to Eltcreed, who he privately admits has been incredibly kind to him, to the point Ulrik is extra acerbic with him because he just doesn't know how to handle it.

Since Cyrus is not terribly good with her feelings on this route either, she's helped along by a romance novel that Ulrik lends her (conveniently written in an old script so she can read it with less assistance) and I rather liked her progression in this route. She sorts through things at her own pace and while she's not entirely sure what to call her feelings by the end, she knows enough to say she cares about him.

But even though Ulrik has good chemistry with Cyrus and his story isn't as directionless as Eltcreed's, I couldn't help feeling a little disappointed in it because Ulrik doesn't really get to do much. He works essentially as Eltcreed's spymaster, which should be a pretty cool job, but we don't get to see him do anything involving his work, and even in his good ending, he doesn't get to save the day. Eltcreed does, and not only that, but Eltcreed even info-dumps on him afterwards because he knows a truth that Ulrik doesn't!

After Eltcreed's wide range of endings I was a little disappointed that Ulrik doesn't have a similar spread, and aside from his good ending, he or Cyrus dies in all of them; sometimes both of them. The biggest difference is whether Cyrus keeps or breaks her promise to him. If she keeps it, he doesn't activate the tower demolition device to destroy the Heights (though Vice does in the good ending--gotta have that drama). If she breaks it, he activates it himself, though it's not particularly clear why since he doesn't seem that keen on it, knowing that destroying the tower will bring the Heights literally crashing down on top of innocent people in the Depths.

Given that the tower demolition device is central to all his endings, it's a pity that the worldbuilding falters around his family history. It wouldn't make sense for the Heights to have intentionally cast out the family responsible for it because why would they want to make enemies out of the people who hold the keys to killing everyone on their little island in the sky?

Yes, there's civilization underneath the Heights today, but arguably in the years immediately after the flood, when the Ferries were most likely to be pissed, there may not have been enough civilization around to stop them if one of the family members was really intent on murdering the entirety of the Heights.

When Eltcreed infodumps in the good ending, he explains the Ferrie family story a little differently and says that a single ancestor of Ulrik's, the machine's designer, refused to go to the Heights in order to stay behind with his family and asked the Valentines to look after the Ferries so their hatred wouldn't get the better of them. Which sounds like the Heights may have allowed one Ferrie to go up, but he thought better of it and didn't, which still doesn't make sense from a Heights perspective since it places the keys to their potential destruction out of their hands.

It would have made more sense for the story if the Ferrie family as a whole had volunteered to stay in the Depths to guard the device, and that would explain why the family took such pains to stay in the shadows and let the Valentines take credit for all the work they originally did. If that had been the case, they would have been protecting the Heights against hostility, in which case their knowledge would be better kept hidden.

And I also found it silly that Ulrik's ancestor basically decided it wasn't worth telling his family the truth about how his device worked or maybe that they shouldn't hate on the Heights so much and left it all up to the Valentines.

(Note: Yune's route shows the actual conversation where Ulrik's ancestor Arcenclimb decides to stay behind, and it makes the whole Ferrie family hatred on Ulrik's route even stupider because Arcenclimb's wife and child also decided to stay behind. It was a family decision! None of them were denied a place in the Heights! They stayed because only Arcenclimb's nuclear family could go, but his wife's family, who would not have been Ferries, could not.)

Like Eltcreed's route, Ulrik's does not result in Cyrus discovering the truth behind her parents' murder. In fact, it drops out of the narrative entirely, but I found I didn't mind it as much as I did in Eltcreed's route. I suppose it's because her previous life in the Heights wasn't as in-your-face as on Eltcreed's route, where HOUNDS would show up, Fin would show up, and there was the potential for actual travel back to where she came from.

In Ulrik's route, going back to the Heights never moves past being a nebulous goal, and she quickly gains a lot more immediate issues to worry about (like Rafale being out to get her) that she doesn't have on Eltcreed's.

VN Talk: Steam Prison - Part 2: Eltcreed

I entered Steam Prison much like I do other otome. For my first playthrough I role play it out with the idea that I'll choose a love interest based on whoever strikes my fancy, which may or may not be who I thought it would be based on reviews or promotional material.

That did not happen quite as expected this time around because of how the game is structured, with routes being based around whether Cyrus goes to the sanctuary district (possible to avoid on later playthroughs once Yune and Fin are unlocked), and then what she does once she's there (further dividing player choice between Eltcreed and Ulrik on one route and Adage and Ines on another). Given Cyrus's determination to find work after arriving in the sanctuary district, I took the first opportunity given, which locked me into the bodyguard route and limited me to Eltcreed and Ulrik, neither of whom I initially liked.

But between the both of them, Eltcreed is the closest to being the poster boy, so I decided to do his route first.

Given his character design I expected him to be an arrogant bastard, and his first scene did little to dissuade me of that, but he ended up being more of a confident playboy instead. Normally I don't like those kinds of characters because their flirtiness feels so overbearing, and I definitely did not like that his first kiss is without Cyrus's consent, but after she gets curious about it I found I didn't mind as much because she is as dumb as a brick when it comes to romance. Anything other than being overbearingly flirty wouldn't even register as affection, as shown by the fact Fin was clearly devoted to her but she never thought there was anything romantic behind it. (Being raised in the Heights has nothing to do with it. Fin obviously fell in love and Heights people have been thrown into the Depths for falling in love with a non-approved partner.)

It helps that Eltcreed has a strong compassionate streak and wants to help the people of his district as much as possible. I was skeptical when I saw his character trait was Charity in the opening movie, but his life really does revolve around how best to look after the people of his district, and he does it by being the biggest voice in the room.

I suspect his desire to make people happy is why he keeps talking about giving love to people who ask, and why he sleeps with so many partners he can't keep their names straight when he wakes up. He's the most eligible bachelor around given his position as administrator of his district and the head of his family's bank. He's socially savvy, and he's physically attractive.

Which leads to one of the more annoying things on his route. While he doesn't have a fan club per se, his admirers essentially function as one and I dislike the digs Cyrus gets when attending social functions with him as anything other than an obvious bodyguard. It's not a major part of the story, but something I hadn't expected outside of a contemporary setting.

Eltcreed is the one who offers the job that spirits Cyrus out of the sanctuary district and into the Depths where the people who have naturally been born on the ground are. Being impressed with her sword skills, he hires her as a bodyguard, but being that the Depths are more technologically advanced, this is mostly for show as any serious combat will be done with guns. Eltcreed is a big Heights buff since his mother was born there and is completely in love with the idea of Cyrus being his pure and shining knight. This results in him putting her up on a pedestal, convincing himself not to bed her as quickly as he would other women, but notably doesn't stop him from being extremely forward with her.

I don't mind that Eltcreed finds her different from previous women he's been with, because obviously that's a factor when someone has dated a lot and found someone new who interests them, but I didn't like the focus on her purity. It's something Fin also does when he returns in Eltcreed's route.

While I don't think they mean her virginity specifically, by raising her up so high it feels like an impossible standard to reach (especially in Fin's case since he's in two bad endings on Eltcreed's route).

Fortunately, Eltcreed stops bringing it up later in his route as Cyrus begins sorting out her feelings and I like that she later initiates a kiss with him instead of always waiting. She never gets to the point where she can comfortably say she loves him aloud, but she's clearly adapting and has figured out what he means to her; so much so that even if she gets the opportunity to return to the Heights (which may or may not happen depending on player choice) she realizes that the Depths have become her home.

Unfortunately Fin proves incapable of moving forward, and his feelings for her have turned into an obsession due the torturous conditioning he went through with his new employment in the HOUNDS. While I disliked discovering Cyrus's sweet partner on the police force turned yandere, it actually became entertaining once I realized that Fin's insanity is the reason the route escalates into a climax at all (instead of being day to day Cyrus following Eltcreed around to various engagements while being flirted with).

First, after Fin discovers Cyrus is alive he kills a fellow HOUND to prevent his boss from learning where Cyrus disappeared to, and when the man's body is discovered the HOUNDS blame the people of the Depths. Then Fin attacks Eltcreed in a fit of jealousy, giving the people of the Depths reason to demand retribution against the HOUNDs.

Obviously neither side is interested in taking blame for something they did not do (it was all Fin!), but the Heights take issue with Eltcreed capturing a chunk of the HOUNDS and taking over the sanctuary district, so they issue an "invitation" for a representative of the Depths to come to the island to negotiate. Eltcreed agrees to go, since it's his district that's closest and he was the one who riled them up.

What Eltcreed knows, but does not tell Cyrus (at least not right away), is that he's certain the representative will be killed as an example to the Depths, but the other district admins feel that this is an opportunity for the Depths as well. If he dies taking out as many of the people of the Heights with him as possible (as a suicide bomber), then he'll become a martyr and inspire the Depths to go to war.

Given Steam Prison's predilection for branching, I shouldn't have been surprised that Eltcreed would have several different endings depending on Cyrus's affection level with him, but the degree of difference was really what startled me. Aside from bad endings (which tend to be brief and can happen at any time in a route), there are four different ways his story can end.

The good ending (the one with the most elaborate ending sequence) is the most different, since it's the only one where he doesn't go to the Heights. Basically, Cyrus sees through his death wish and as his bodyguard she decides the best way to protect his life is to ensure that he never goes, which, good for her! I like that she challenges him to a duel, and being the fighter she is, Eltcreed obviously loses and has to figure out another plan.

But my enthusiasm for this ending isn't particularly great because it ends up ignoring the demand from the Heights for the rest of the story. It chooses to focus on the fallout with the other districts, which withdraw their support in the form of trade while fomenting unrest. Though it's nice that Eltcreed ends up freeing the HOUNDS from imprisonment and forging an alliance with them and therefore the sanctuary district, I wanted to see the Heights issue addressed since the HOUNDS work for the Heights and I'm sure Sachsen would turn around and say no go to any trade the instant he got word.

My preference is what would probably be called the "normal" route. He and Cyrus go to the Heights and she refuses to leave his side even though he'll probably die. She reiterates the knightly promise she made to him when she first entered his service and it's a great callback. We also learn more about what makes Eltcreed tick, from the story of his family to why he likes knights so much.

Their impending deaths are spared by the deus ex machina appearance of Yune, who is the one person everyone in the Heights have to listen to, which disappointed me (I wanted to see how they'd get out of it), but Eltcreed's dialogue with Yune provides a potential win-win situation for both parties and wraps up the conflict between the two sides.

Eltcreed goes bomber on the remaining two endings based on affection. It's just whether Cyrus is with him or not.

While I enjoyed playing his route while I was in the middle of it, the more I think about it, the less I feel it holds up. The early parts were slow given that everything is just going day-by-day, and there wasn't much of a plot. While I know realistically Cyrus had no chance of returning to the Heights on her own, I was disappointed that investigating her parents' murder and clearing her name ended up being dropped from this route entirely.

This was especially egregious since Sachen shows up later in the route (in the incident that leads to the HOUNDS' imprisonment) and tells his men to capture her alive if possible so he can deliver her to "him." Who this person is, never comes up. He could have just called for her capture without saying anything more and it would have been fine because it was already established in the common route that Sachen likes tormenting her.

Because Ulrik is on the same bodyguard story branch as Eltcreed, his route will be next!