VN Talk: Psychedelica of the Ashen Hawk

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

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

Psychedelica of the Ashen Hawk is the second game in the Psychedelica duology, and it's a much different animal than its predecessor, Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly. It changes the setting from a Gothic mansion to what appears to be a fantasy European town and introduces us to a new heroine, Jed, who is a much livelier protagonist than Beniyuri. All the horror and suspense elements are gone, in favor of following Jed's day to day life in a town ruled by two feuding families.

I spent a good portion of the story wondering how the two games were connected, because the opening movie pulls scenes from Black Butterfly, but the connection is more for thematic reasons. Yes, it becomes clear they are a part of the same multiverse, possibly the same world if you assume that Jed's town is in the Europe of our world at a different point in time, but the only thing that really connects the two games (other than reincarnation shenanigans) is the fact they both take place in psychedelica; the intermediary world between life and death.

Playing this game is likely a vastly different experience depending on whether one has played Black Butterfly. Though Ashen Hawk is largely a stand alone experience, with only the Heroine Ending's epilogue likely to raise eyebrows for newcomers, Psychedelica vets will likely be looking for the meaning of the title, already knowing what psychedelica is, and being familiar with the previous cast.

Given that, I thought the game was pretty ballsy for rolling out a character called Ashen Hawk as the very first face a player meets outside of Jed herself, as it pretty much screams that it's his psychedelica. And it sort of is? I'll get to that later.

Seeing reincarnated versions of Black Butterfly's Kagiha and Hikage was also a nice surprise. The game is coy about their identities, since there's no reason to directly spell out who they were previously, but they have the same VAs and similar (but not exact) character designs. I loved how when I first met Lawrence I just knew he was Kagiha even though the voice was a little older (Lawrence isn't a teenager) and the hair style was different. Hikage took me longer to figure out since Elric's a kid with an uncorrupted personality so his vocal performance is substantially different.

Ashen Hawk's jump in genres made it a much different story to get into; as in, I wasn't sure what it was. The prologue makes it clear that Jed would be considered a witch for having a right eye that turns red when her emotions are heightened, but the early chapters also show that her day to day life is fairly safe. She crossdresses as a man (and has been living as male all her life) to reduce her chances of being suspected of witchery. She doesn't really lament it. It's just her life. (And if you understand the Japanese audio, she uses the very masculine pronoun ore to refer to herself, just to make sure there's no gender ambiguity in her speech.)

The biggest issue at the outset of the game is the ongoing rivalry between the Wolf and Hawk clans. Logistically I don't know how it works. (Initially I thought the Hawks collected taxes and the Wolves provided security, but the Hawks also have soldiers?) The town essentially has two masters who have been feuding for generations, with some citizens being sympathetic to one side or the other, or trying to stay out of the conflict altogether. Being the adopted son of the Lady of the Wolves, Jed is viewed as being on the Wolves' side, though she wants peace between them both.

I thought the arc of the main story would be getting the two families to stop fighting just as the annual masquerade begins, so I was a little surprised that happens by the third chapter. And it turns out this wouldn't be the first time that what I thought would be the end of the story wasn't actually the end of the story. This wasn't a problem with chapter 3, since I knew it wasn't the end, but with later chapters this felt more like a pacing issue because they could have legitimately ended the game at those points and it would have been fine.

Pacing is probably the biggest issue I had with Ashen Hawk. While the genre jump from modern Japan to low fantasy pseudo-Europe doesn't mean that the pacing needed to be different, the tonal jump from suspense to slice of life removed a lot of my drive to see what happens next. It doesn't help that the game packs the vast majority of its side episodes in Chapter 2. While they are mostly optional, and you can jump back and visit missed episodes at any time via the story flowchart, my first impulse was to play them all at once because they're there and I don't want to play them out of order with the main plot.

This results in somewhere from a third to half the game's run time taking place in the very low stakes Chapter 2. While a part of me understands why the designers shoved all the fluffy encounters so early on (because the story really takes off after the masquerade and Jed is less free to move around), it can make the game seem slower than it has to be. Jed spends much of Chapter 2 looking for the Kaleido-Via and the additional side episodes (many of which revolve around her ongoing search) make it a constant reminder that she's making no progress. Story-wise, spending one chapter out of ten on search isn't a big deal, but from a game time perspective, due the sheer number of side episodes, it felt like she was doing it for ages.

Adding insult to injury, after all that searching, she's just handed the Kaleido-Via early in Chapter 3 rather than discovering it for herself.

Fortunately the ball gets rolling after the masquerade when it becomes clear that peace is not happening in this town as easily as Jed hoped and the Wolves are driven underground. This middle part of the story does a pretty good job of painting Olgar, the Hawk Lord, as a monster driven mad by the cursed ring he wears, but I like that he ends up being a more complicated character, especially once it's revealed that he's Jed's birth father. I thought the rally to overthrow Olgar was going to be the climax of the story, but again, it kept moving past that point to give us his backstory and circle back to Jed being a witch.

The game's one good twist is that it turns out the entire town is actually psychedelica. There were hints about it before; with the town being shrouded in fog, that they get no travelers and no one ever leaves, and the fact that a lot of characters are suspiciously missing memories of things they really ought to know. Everyone in town is actually dead, but has forgotten that they are, so they continue "living" as though their town is a real place. So the question is, whose psychedelica is it?

Olgar activated a partially complete Kaleido-Via (which apparently works a lot like the kaleidoscope in Black Butterfly) after his wife was murdered as a witch sixteen years ago, which marked the town's transformation in psychedelica. But oddly the dialogue says the psychedelica belongs to both him and Ashen Hawk, who turns out to have been a long time friend to Olgar's, at least until Olgar killed him in a fight after his wife's murder. I think this is because Ashen Hawk had one of the Kaleido-Via's four gems on his person when he died, and the other three were nowhere near it at all, but the game's not particularly clear.

Nor does learning about this event clear up why the game is called Psychedelica of the Ashen Hawk. Olgar is the only one of the two who had a wish to see someone who had died.

In fact, the master of this psychedelica is likely not either of them, though it requires unlocking additional content beyond the main story to find an obscure character; an actual hawk, called Ashen Hawk. Presumably the human Ashen Hawk took his name from the bird he'd known in his childhood. The original Ashen Hawk died and went on to be reborn.

This brings us to the person who gives the Kaleido-Via to Jed in Chapter 3 (and intervenes just often enough to keep it safe from the Hawks). Hugh is a shapeshifter sort of character to which rules do not apply, dipping in and out of the story as the mood strikes him. He is clearly magical in nature, with multiple identities (including being the person who gave Hikage the kaleidoscope in Black Butterfly), and Lawrence suspects him of being the master of this world. Hugh, it turns out, is Ashen Hawk, the bird.

He's also the only character who says this psychedelica was created by Olgar and Ashen Hawk, so if he was lying or exaggerating, no one would know. It stands to reason that if it's his psychedelica, which is supported by his inhuman ability to appear, disappear, and go wherever he wants, that he is the Ashen Hawk of the title, and not the human we meet at the start of the game.

But if that's the case, we don't know how the psychedelica was created, and don't know how it ends save what he tells us will happen. Unlike in Black Butterfly, the people of the town do not have bodies to return to since they've been dead for sixteen years, and the one ending where there's a move to end the psychedelica, kills our viewpoint characters before we see what happens.

Hugh is probably the most irritating part of the story because everything is fairly low fantasy aside from the Kaleido-Via and Hugh himself. But the Kaleido-Via is just an object, while Hugh saunters in and out of scenes whenever he feels like it, giving characters information they would otherwise have no way of obtaining due to his privileged position of knowing the truth about the world. The story would not play out the way it did without him, but because he's such a stage setter, it's difficult to see him as something other than a crutch for the narrative to move things along. He literally will pop out in front of characters just to explain things to them and then leave.

The last major talking point I want to cover is Jed herself. Despite my dislike for Hugh spoon-feeding the plot along, I like Jed as a protagonist, and she's very much allowed to protag once she has the necessary information. Though she's comfortable living as a man, she's curious enough to try living as woman, and goes through some pretty entertaining self doubts about being a woman crossdressing as a man crossdressing as a woman when she disguises herself as a woman in order to try gathering information from the Hawks who would otherwise not talk to the adopted son of a Wolf.

Jed isn't shabby in a fight, and also finds ways to broker peace between the Hawks and the Wolves whenever possible. I like that she wants to be in charge of her own destiny and, before things turn otherwise, that she was planning on leaving the town for a fresh start where she could find a place where she wouldn't have to hide who she is.

In the Heroine Ending, she's the one who comes up with the plan to free the town from psychedelica. Even if it's using Hugh's information, it's what she does with it that makes it such a powerful moment. She knows she has to die to free the Kaleido-Via gem trapped in her red eye, and she does in a way that gives the town what they want (the death of the witch) while protecting the lives and reputations of those she cares about. It probably wouldn't have been as powerful if she was simply executed, but she goes down in a swordfight, killed by the man who loves her and was in on the plan. (Side note: I really loved Lugus for that, for respecting what she wanted and how this was the only way to accomplish it.)

As with Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly, Ashen Hawk is technically an otome, but I found it even less of one than its predecessor. The chance to choose, or the illusion of choosing, various love interests along the main story is either non-existent or barely there, at least until character focused endings unlock after beating the main story. It's clear that Lavan is in love with Jed, but Lugus is fairly well positioned as the primary love interest and the story would feel like a complete experience even if none of the other characters had been options. The fact he's the one who's reborn with Jed in modern Japan in the Heroine Ending gives him a surprisingly canon feel for an otome.

The character-specific routes are all fairly short and unlike Black Butterfly, the love interests don't have their own character arcs where they end up in a different place than they were in the beginning, so I realized I didn't have much to say about them that I didn't already say here (aside from the fact I was really bothered that Lavan was crushing on his adopted sister for years). Normally I'd write a series of posts for an Otomate otome game, but because of how linearly Ashen Hawk played out and the lack of character arcs, I won't this time.