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!