Release: 2022
I didn't think that 2019's AI: The Somnium Files needed a sequel, but I wasn't opposed to one either, so when AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative was announced my biggest concern was that they changed protagonists, introducing Date's daughter Mizuki as the new lead (and later announcing newcomer Ryuki as co-protogonist). After all, it was the charm of Date and Aiba's working relationship that really made the game for me, and seeing Aiba with Mizuki left the question of: What happened to Date?
AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative, which I'm going to abbreviate to AINI for sanity's sake, is still a relatively recent release, so this is your spoiler warning that I'll be covering everything up to the ending of both this game and the first one as well. Spoilers will appear after the break.
There's a lot to unpack, so I'll only cover three aspects of the game or I'll be spending far too much word count because this game is dense. So these parts are the cast of characters, the narrative twist, and the ending.
We'll start with the characters.
The game makes it abundantly clear at the start of the game that it takes place in two different time periods involving a single case. Since this is a sequel, we have a lot of returning characters; in fact, almost everybody who survived the previous game.
We start in the present with Mizuki, who is a part of the police force's ABIS division that uses psyncing to solve crimes (basically scouring a person's subconscious for clues through their dreams). She's now eighteen and coping with the loss of her adopted father, Kaname Date, the protagonist of the first game. No body was ever found.
As part of her job, Mizuki discovers the left half of a man's corpse, so pristine it seems he died only a few hours ago, But the problem is that the right half of the man's body was discovered six years ago as the first victim of the Half-Body serial killings. The body shows no sign of being frozen and the DNA between the two halves is a match. The man did not have a twin. So what is going on?
Both Mizuki and Ryuki are accompanied by AI companions called AI-Balls that reside in their left eye sockets, mostly to allow for gameplay mechanics to remain the same no matter who is the current protagonist, but there are definitely a few moments that feel forced since Date was the original "I have a robot in my eye socket" protagonist. While Ryuki voluntarily had his eye removed for the implant, Mizuki did not, conveniently losing just her eye in the grand finale of Ryuki's route.
The game largely does well by its newer characters. It took me a while to get used to Ryuki since he's rather quirky and as the story plays out it becomes abundantly clear that he suffers from some kind of mental illness, exhibiting symptoms of cognitive dysfunction, There's definitely an element of survivor's guilt, but he often gets confused about when in time he is (which becomes important when we get to the twist) and he suffers from hallucinations. Add in the alcoholism post-timeskip and we have a man primed to be a wreck.
His personal backstory doesn't get the deep dive that Date had in the first game, and I think we could have used more of it, but for the most part, I like Ryuki. I thought he made a lot of bad decisions throughout the game, but I could understand where he was coming from, and I never felt bored or upset with him.
The other new characters similarly filled their roles appropriately, with most of them being interesting and fleshed out enough to cover their part of the story (except unfortunately the villain). There was no dead weight.
The same cannot be said for the returning cast. Mizuki and Aiba's dynamic is a lot different from Date and Aiba's since there's less of the "arguing but we actually care deeply about each other" and it feels more like a couple of sisters wheedling each other into doing things, but because they're often on a similar wavelength they aren't quite as entertaining.
Iris and Ota, who were important in the first game, are pretty much non-entities this time around. I can kind of justify Iris seeing as she's Mizuki's friend, but Ota didn't need to be there, and both he and Iris have stand alone scenes where nothing really happens because they aren't relevant to the plot at all this time around. I would have preferred if they were handled more like Hitomi, who showed up as a minor character as a nod to the fact she exists and has a strained relationship with Date, but nothing more than that because she's not part of the story.
The effort to include so many people from the previous game feels strange because AINI otherwise goes to a ridiculous length to make itself as newcomer friendly as possible. Not only is there no mention of the details of the previous game, but it hides Date's true appearance, with only a minor explanation for how this is done, assuming the player is able to answer two very specific questions about the first game to prove they finished it (specific enough that I failed to answer one of them even though I had).
The thing is, the big twist of the first game is that psyncing will allow the psyncer and the subject of the psync to switch minds and memories if the psync lasts beyond six minutes, and we learn that Date had actually switched bodies six years ago. By the end of the first game, Date is back in his original body, meaning that he no longer looks the way he does in the advertised artwork.
Except now he does again. If you answer the questions correctly, you'll learn that Date is wearing a mask in AINI so he looks like Saito again, since this is the face people know him best as.
Ideally, if the creative team really wanted to both hide spoilers and accommodate players in the know, it would have been nice if Date's Hayato Yagyu model was swapped in for all his scenes if a player passed the spoiler questions. Yes, they would have to record all his dialogue twice since his original body has a different voice, but he's not in that many scenes since he's a side character this time around and used rather sparingly at that. And it's better than assuming Date is masking his voice and wearing a mask every waking hour of his day.
Now on to the next part. The narrative twist. I hated it.
This game is written by Kotaro Uchikoshi, with help from a couple others, but it's mostly his work, and he's known for twists. Usually they're good, but every now and then he trips and his misdirection is either too good or the groundwork for the twist is laid too thin, so when the twist comes out it feels like you were slugged by a tuna. Not only did you not expect it, but you had no reason to expect it.
AINI suffers from both these faults. We're given a flowchart of the game that clearly lays out the story over several days starting with February 10th in the present, and then branching to February 11th on Ryuki's route and February 11th on Mizuki's. Because we know Ryuki's route starts in the past and Mizuki's in the present, we assume that as the events unfold six years apart, that Ryuki's route is entirely in the past and Mizuki's entirely in the present. After all, we play all of Ryuki's route first and it makes for a coherent story, and that's mostly true for Mizuki's as well.
This is something that I could see being really cool, and actually something I wanted when I first started the game, but it needs to play fair. It's not that there are zero clues that something is not right, but there is overwhelming evidence against it. The game wants the player on first playthrough to assume everything is linear until they are almost done with Mizuki's route.
For instance, the game begins with two halves of a man, Jin Furue, who according to forensic evidence only died hours ago despite the halves being discovered six years apart. The right half of the corpse was found in the past in the prologue, so when Ryuki finds the right half of additional victims in chapters 1, 2, and 3 of his route, the assumption is that when the left halves appear in chapters 2, 3, and 4 of Mizuki's route that they are in a similar state as Jin. Somehow they were preserved by a mysterious method that allowed them to appear intact six years later.
But once the timeline is rearranged, we see that the three later victims all had their halves discovered within a day of each other (and the initial victim turns out to not be the same person, but two different people, one of which had donated organs to the other, which screwed up the DNA sampling).
I disliked this trick because it means that while there was definitely a killer on the loose, this mysterious preservation method was a side piece since it only concerned one corpse and for the characters themselves was largely a non-issue. Only the player would focus on discovering the preservation method.
This other Mizuki, later nicknamed Bibi, which I'll use here to avoid confusion, is a hidden third protagonist who isn't revealed until we're in the last 90% of the story. Our Mizuki turns out to have been born in a lab as a genetic experiment, explaining her super strength, and Bibi was her somewhat less healthy genetic predecessor, being prone to collapsing due to a heart condition. Thus, they are both called Mizuki and look identical.
However, when they're together you can see there's a bit of a difference in personality between them. It's just harder to detect in isolation when playing as Bibi. There are a couple things that happen in the Bibi chapters that suggest that at least Mizuki Chapter 4 is not in the present day (references to a particular character being alive a few days ago) and that Bibi is a different person (an odd comment about not knowing what it's like to lose parents when Mizuki lost both of hers in the first game), but those details come so late that they get lost in the face of the overwhelming misdirection that we are playing everything in a linear order.
Ryuki's mental illness doesn't help either, as he ends up getting past and present confused. So when he chases a boy to the number 2 carriage on the ferris wheel at the end of his Chapter 3, it's not surprising that he freaks out at the start of Chapter 4 when carriage 2 comes down and it's empty. Of course it's empty, because it's been six years and the boy has long since left the cabin. Ryuki hasn't been standing in place the whole six years, but over the course of reinvestigating the Half-Body case he ended up back in the same location, conveniently at exactly six years apart so the change was undetectable to the player and that's when Ryuki conveniently happened to have one of his episodes where he's temporally confused.
And this leads me to the ending.
Our lead villain, Tearer, is actually dead at the start of the game. He's the left half of "Jin Furue" that was discovered in the prologue and was the unwilling organ donor to the original first victim. We feel like we're chasing him throughout the game only to find out that half our investigation has been done after his death and the only thing left behind has been recordings and the plan set in motion years ago, now carried out by his faceless minions.
Tearer is part of an ideological cult that believes the world is a simulation, and that by causing the program to bug out, they will achieve Moksha, or enlightenment, allowing them to escape the simulation. He plans on accomplishing that by launching a missile that will explode over Japan, raining down a virus that causes people to have hallucinations and behave erratically. Such a large number of people walking into walls, crashing cars, etc. would likely be unexpected by the simulation's designer, so the program would crash, freeing everyone.
But since Tearer is dead, the climax of the game is a large battle in a soccer field that is serving as the makeshift launchpad of the missile and it's our large cast of random characters (most of whom are definitely not police officers) fighting a bunch of faceless mooks.
As a result it feels a lot less personal than the first game, which featured a villain who had a vendetta against Date. Instead AINI becomes more of a race to save the world from crazy cultists, and while our three new protagonists have backstories revealed by the plot, particularly Mizuki and Bibi, this showdown isn't really about absolving them of any personal baggage. This is just them doing their job and it happens that somewhere along the line the stakes jumped from tracking down a killer to saving the world.
I don't like dumping on a sequel to a game I really loved, but really this is only a sampling of the ranting I'd been doing in private before collecting my thoughts into this much smaller blog post. The first AI: The Somnium Files was a game where I went back and grabbed all the collectibles and I was so sad there was no more game left when everything was done. It's a feeling that I don't get often. But AINI was a mess and though I did go back for the secret ending, just because I love story, I've skipped all the collectables.
In the end I suppose it was okay, but I wanted more than okay.
No comments:
Post a Comment