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.

Piofiore follows a young woman named Liliana Adornato, who grew up as the ward of the church in the fictional Italian city of Burlone. It is 1925, the Kingdom of Italy is not very strong and doesn't exercise much power over this coastal town which had formerly been part of the Papal States and over the years has become the domain of the Falzone mafia family; at least until it splintered in two due to an internal revolt, and then lost even more territory to an intruding gang from China.

So by the time the story starts, Burlone is largely divided between the Falzone, the oldest, most traditional mafia family, and in control of the largest district of the city; the Visconti, the splinter group which is less concerned about bloodlines and does not require members to be Italian; and the Lao-Shu, an offshoot of a Chinese triad that has set up shop in Italy.

There is one district of the city, Arca, that is considered neutral ground for all families, and that is where Liliana lives in the dormitory of the city's sole church. Because of this, even though she is aware of what the mafia is and often sees them attending service, she has little experience with the more sordid part of their lives. But for reasons unknown to her, she finds her life upended and dragged into the city's seedy underbelly.

The thing is, Liliana is not an ordinary orphan brought up by the church, though that's not surprising given that she's a protagonist who has a special birthmark she knows nothing about. She is a living MacGuffin for the various families and the church to fight over and most of the time she (and sometimes even her captors and guardians) has no idea why. Thus, no matter the route, everything starts because Liliana exists.

Because of her upbringing, and the fact she's a civilian, Liliana is put in a different space from most of the other characters and all her love interests. She can end up romancing any of the three faction heads, the underboss of the Falzone, or a church disciple who might as well be called the church assassin given how good he is at stabbing people, but she comes into their world a little naive about how things work.

She isn't completely stupid, but sometimes she seems to wear blinders in regards to what sort of person her love interest really is. This particularly comes up during interrogation/torture scenes on both Falzone routes.

And the thing is, other times Liliana is very smart! She can recognize the suspicious timing of an ambush, and put together clues behind a conspiracy. But that side of her is not consistently there, and when she does show her more proactive and intelligent side it's so effective because we know she's an ordinary person out of her element.

I know the gentle and kind protagonist is a staple in Japanese-produced otome, but there's a part of me that wishes Piofiore had gone a different route and allowed for a protagonist willing to wallow in the same muck her lover's in, because there's some tonal dissonance when Liliana's off baking pastries while everyone else is out mafia-ing.

And the thing is, if you play Liliana to the hilt as a kind forgiving young woman, it's a recipe for being dead. She might be a gentle person who wants to believe in the best of people, but the Liliana who avoids self-sacrifice is the one who survives.

Since Liliana is a non-combatant and most of the families respect that, she is often intentionally kept away from the bad things, at least until things escalate and whoever she's staying with can't completely stave off the storm. But in the early to middle parts of a route she's usually relatively safe and all the intrigue comes through the awkwardly interjected Meanwhile scenes so we can see the mafia actually doing mafia stuff while Liliana is not there.

I'm not sure why the developers thought it was necessary to cut out a special function for the Meanwhiles, because it breaks up the flow of the story in a very jarring way. It's not uncommon for visual novels to temporarily slide into another character's point of view before moving back to the protagonist's, but Piofiore will have a Meanwhile icon pop up on screen whenever a Meanwhile scene is available. And these always transition away from Liliana to someone else's point of view.

The reason I dislike them is because of how the scene cut is handled. It usually happens a couple sentences before the end of the current scene, then transitions to another location with another POV, and once the other POV wraps up, it transitions back to the very same line of text that was in the dialogue box when we last saw Lili's POV before moving on with the story. The result is that after the Meanwhile scene the player gets dumped back at the end of an almost complete scene that goes on for another text box or two, by which point the player may have forgotten the details of what Lili was doing before the Meanwhile. Most games would just put the Meanwhile between Scene 1 and Scene 2 and not run the story like: first 95% of Scene 1, Meanwhile, last 5% of Scene 1, Scene 2. The placement is weird.

It's even worse when there's a Meanwhile that involves a character who is physically in the same scene as Liliana, revealing that the "Meanwhile" is actually a flashback. It makes me wonder if the person writing that route did not know what "meanwhile" actually means (since English is often used for stylistic reasons in Japanese games) or the translator needed a better name for this game function since it started making me suspect when in time every Meanwhile scene was actually taking place.

Though Liliana is eventually able to achieve a happy ending with any of the five men, one of the interesting things about this game is that it has extremely detailed bad (not premature bad, but reaching the end of the game without enough of the right choices bad), good, and best endings. While anything other than the best ending is skippable in most games, Piofiore actually tucks information in these alternate endings which is a little irritating since sometimes a character you have not met the entire route will suddenly pop in and muse about something that wasn't really discussed, or you'll discover important character details you wouldn't otherwise know.

This dedication even extends to providing post-epilogue stories that take place after each of the bad endings, which usually don't do more except amp up the misery of how their lives got screwed up. These kinds of story bonuses typically only follow the best ending.

I don't think I've encountered anything in a good/bad ending that was required to better understand the overall story, but they can flesh out the type of person a character is, fill in their backstory, and/or their motivations, making them more worthwhile than in most other games. They consist of an entire alternate final chapter (between the best and good endings) or alternate penultimate and final chapters (between best and bad endings) plus epilogue so there was a surprising amount of work put into these, considering that each playthrough is about eight chapters long, barring Dante's route and the Finale, which are nine.

And that brings me to Dante. Piofiore allows him to be played right at the beginning, but given that he has the longest route, that makes him the most prominent love interest. Though otome rarely make anyone a canon love interest, Dante's story is inexorably tied to Liliana's. No matter which route you go down, her importance to him is what kicks off the story, and you only learn the full extent of why in his own route (though you can get an abbreviated version in Orlok's if you play him first), which makes it odd that he's available right at the beginning.

On the flip side, playing his cousin Nicola first (as I did), tells you nothing of why she was targeted for kidnapping. And surprisingly, Nicola's reasoning behind his actions in his own route take on new meaning if you play Dante's route after Nicola's.

I suspect both Dante and Nicola are available at the start for purposes of scene setting, since they're the two Falzone options and beginning with the Falzone sets the tone for the rest of the game, with them being the most traditional of the mafia in town. Yang and half of Orlok's routes are spent with the Lao-Shu, who are important players in the city, but given their Chinese ethnicity are not what most players expect when picking up a mafia game set in Italy, so they are locked until one of the starter routes is completed, and Gilbert is the final love interest who interestingly enough has the least to do with the main story, but can only be played after everyone else.

This strange unlock sequence is likely because Piofiore does not have a long common route; just an extended prologue. Unlike most other games with short common routes, there's little indication as to what choices are directing a player to one route or another. The player can select a handful of dialogue options for Lili, with more being added as other routes are completed, and then the end of the prologue segues into the route she will be on.

Also unlike most other games, each run through the prologue after completing a route adds more scenes, to better flesh out everything that is happening in the lead-up to the attempted kidnapping of Liliana and also set up for the Finale, which is mostly a non-romantic route (though it can be one) that fleshes out the history behind the Key Maiden and the Falzone family. I'll leave the Key Maiden and all the ramifications around her for discussion in my posts about Dante's route and the Finale since that's far too much to unpack here, and likely why these are the two routes that required an extra chapter to tell. But I will say that the writers did not have all their ducks in a row since Dante's route and the Finale contradict each other as to how often the Key Maiden is chosen.

While most games use the end of the common route as a divergence point from which all other routes spring, Piofiore is a little different. Though some details carry over to multiple routes such as the kidnapping of young women and Nicola and Orlok always have a working relationship of some kind, there are things that just change for no real reason.

For instance, Bishop Rosberg's name comes up a lot and his deal with the Lao-Shu is a part of every major route except for Gilbert's (and thus by extension the Finale). For some reason, in Gilbert's route he decides not to go through with his plan and this decision happens independently of anything Liliana could possibly have done. So when you're trying to piece together an entire story across multiple routes sometimes the pieces just don't fit, and that's probably the biggest gripe I have with Piofiore. Maybe the Key Maiden selection frequency is one of them, but once you start going down that line of thinking you have to wonder what is true in one route and not the other.

As for how the game works as a mafia otome, which is the premise everyone is buying when they go in, I think it's pretty good. Though there are some odd mistakes here and there, for the most part it feels like the writer did their pop culture mafia research. And the localization is good, using terms like "soldier" to refer to the rank and file of a mafia family, and there's a lovely use of "Qualcosa bolle in pentola" woven in without translation in Nicola's route that I suspect was added in the English version.

Given that the love interests are part of different factions, the body count by the end of a given route can be quite high as none of these guys are above killing another person, and while they're usually portrayed as better people on their own route, seeing them on a different one makes it clear that they can be completely callous when Liliana has no personal meaning to them.

This callous treatment of the protagonist is where the consent issues come in. While it's possible to get the best ending on all routes without any non-consent, there is attempted assault along the way, and fade to black rape in multiple bad endings. Most of those are on premature bad endings, but if you're an artwork collector who is sensitive about this stuff you might want to mute Orlok's bad end and leave it on auto-play so you can get the ending CG without actually having to sit through what is probably the worst of the non-consent endings. I knew what would happen since I intentionally spoiled myself, but I found it tasteless and out of character once I was able to see it in context.

In the end, I was able to play through everything, but I very much appreciated having been prepared in advance. And though I don't think it was a flawless piece of work, I think I'll try to squeeze in the sequel Piofiore: Episodio 1926 at some point. Maybe next year, given I still have a lot of backlog I want to get to.

Next week, we're going to take a look at Nicola, who I'll say right now, had the best route in regards to what I wanted out of a mafia otome.