VN Talk: Piofiore: Fated Memories - Part 3: Yang

After Nicola, I was a little ambivalent about which route to play next. I didn't outright dislike any of the characters, but neither were any of them jumping out at me as a person whose story I just had to see. I still had a bit of an inclination towards Dante, but I had just played through Nicola who was a Falzone so I wasn't sure I wanted to play a second route back to back from the perspective of the same crime family. Since I had completed a route though, Yang and Orlok had unlocked, so I decided to spin the wheel and role-play through the prologue again to see who I'd end up with.

With the newer, more expanded prologue, I kept all the same answers as last time, and winged it on the newer choices. As you can guess from the title and header of this post, I got Yang. Which meant that it was time to gird my loins and see if this mess was going to be as bad as I feared, because it was Yang's route that made me question whether I wanted to play this game.

Firstly, I can see why Yang is a divisive character among the fanbase. He's a charismatic but amoral man who is very much like a cat who plays with its food, and in this case, this food is Liliana. He makes it quite clear that her life is forfeit if she bores him, and though she is rightly terrified, she does her best to keep her wits about her because his goodwill demands that she does. Or at least she does in the beginning and occasionally in the middle. Other times she has bouts of making nice person appeals under the assumption he knows what compassion is, only to realize for the umpteenth time that he doesn't have any.

If you want to romance an unrepentant villain who doesn't become a better person through the power of love, then Yang isn't a bad pick. He's ruthless and cunning, competent but mercurial, and his habit of doing what he wants when the mood strikes him tends to work in his favor, except that I found it a little less believable when it comes to his treatment of Liliana, since I can't believe that being relatively nice to her is something he wouldn't find boring after a while.

VN Talk: Piofiore: Fated Memories - Part 2: Nicola

As previously discussed, Piofiore: Fated Memories has a short prologue with only a few seemingly noncommittal decisions (only two of which can be made on first playthrough), so I wasn't entirely sure what set me on Nicola's route. I actually was hoping for Dante since Nicola's character design suggests someone disinclined to take things seriously, and he's a flirt, which is a character type that rarely works with me. Nicola didn't disappoint though.

Both Nicola and Dante are part of the leadership of the Falzone family, with Dante being the boss and his cousin Nicola being the underboss, and when Liliana nearly gets kidnapped by the Lao-Shu, they take her into protective custody. She doesn't know why, and Nicola's route doesn't go into the real reason, but she's fairly cooperative about it, understanding that whatever the reason, the Falzone are looking out for her, and the head nun of her church is agreeable to this plan of action.

Nicola's route is a nice pop culture showcase of how a mafia man can be a vicious killer, but also be the same guy who goes to church on Sundays and sets up soup kitchens for the poor. The goons who hang out at the family's residence with Liliana are all friendly to her, and in return she often cooks for them as a way to show her appreciation for handling her safety. Nicola ends up being her primary point of contact, though he's not particularly warm about it. That's not to say he isn't friendly, he certainly flirts with her, but you get the feeling it's an arm's length sort of congeniality. Lili herself takes his kindness at face value, but Nicola never masks the kind of person he is or the line of work he does. In fact it often feels like he's trying to warn her not to get emotionally invested in him.

VN Talk: Piofiore: Fated Memories - Part 1: Overview

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

Platform: Switch
Release: 2020

Piofiore: Fated Memories came out the same year as Cafe Enchante, and while I pre-ordered one of them, the other I did not, despite my love for anime-tinged mafia stories. And the reason for that is largely down to one route that I had read about from an import reviewer.

If you've read enough of my otome VN Talks, you know that I really don't like controlling love interests, particularly when it comes down to dubious consent or attempted sexual assault. I knew one route in this game would contain actual assault, and I wasn't sure I was ready for that.

But as time passed and I absorbed more through osmosis from being around the general otome community, I realized that I probably knew enough that I could go in with a full suit of mental armor and if it really got uncomfortable, I would mash the autoplay button and just come back after the scene was over. So I picked up Piofiore during a sale and added it to my backlog, because I still really wanted a mafia game.

Detective Di: The Silk Rose Murders and Piofiore VN Talk Delay

I'll talk about Piofiore: Fated Memories first since the intention was that I start my seven part VN Talk series (overview, 5 love interests, and finale) today, but after spending far too much time combing through screenshots on my Switch I realized I wasn't going to finish trimming my library down to a manageable level in time for posting.

When I first started blogging about games, there wasn't a lot of screen capture support, particularly for the portable units I favored, so it wasn't until I got my Vita that I could begin transferring things. At first it was just key scenes I thought I might use in my blog, but then I started taking screen caps of dialogue to use as plot references, screen caps of characters' last names or minor character names that might be hard to find online.

It started becoming relatively common for me to take a couple hundred screenshots per route (of which at most 5-6 will be added to the blog) and for some reason that I'm sure I'll understand once I get far enough through the gallery, I ended up taking several hundred (rough estimate of 700-800) of Piofiore's Finale route. I suspect most of that is plot material. Since the Finale isn't going up until seven weeks out, it might seem strange to postpone the first installment of the series while I clear out the entire library, but the thing is, when I have so many it becomes incredibly hard to figure out which are the best to use and I want the overview to be a look at the game as a whole. Which in a way is the opposite problem I had when I first started with Vita games, where it was more common for me to not have an appropriate screenshot at all.

Out of the 2300 screenshots, I started with, I only managed to get down to 2000 in the time I expected to do my blog editing. And it wasn't particularly hard to do either. I have a lot of stuff I don't need to save. One problem particular to Piofiore is that some of the details I screenshotted for reference turned out to be lies or misdirection so I ended up deleting what are the equivalent of my notes for plot points that don't actually matter. I'm about halfway through my third route, and as mentioned, the finale seems to be hogging the lion's share. By the time I'm done I expect they'll still be in the hundreds, but better than two thousand. Fingers crossed for next week.