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.

We know the Lau-Shu's kidnapping of Liliana is for Bishop Rosberg, since we get that info on multiple routes and the expanded prologue, and Yang's route reveals that he doesn't know exactly what her importance is other than it'll piss off the Falzone, which he certainly doesn't mind doing. But this plot thread is largely dropped later on aside from Liliana acknowledging every now and then that she's being kept for a purpose, and it's odd that Yang never gets around to asking the bishop to pay up since he got the girl. (At least we know from the bishop's perspective why he doesn't come and collect.) Instead Yang keeps Lili mostly tucked away in his room so his men don't mack on her (or worse) and keeps this up for over a month before he decides she's finally hot enough that he wants to bang her after sharing a bed all this time.

The game points out the only possible reason he hadn't forced the point sooner, and that's that he just wasn't interested. But for an uninterested person he bought her a sheer negligee, a cheongsam with thigh high slits, and a special order plush panda that was (no kidding) smuggled into the country along with his gang's usual shipment of drugs and firearms. (I have to wonder how that conversation went down with his fellow gang members.)

It felt rather odd that the game was going out of its way to show Yang is an amoral bastard (and don't get me wrong, he is), but was also careful to carve out a safe niche for Lili, assuming one follows the best storyline and doesn't end up at one of multiple bad endings where he most definitely gets bored of her and things do not end well for Lili at all. He is certainly pushy and probably doesn't love her so much as she amuses him enough to humor her, but for an amoral bastard you could do worse. Deep down, as shown by his good (not best) ending when a hesitation to kill Lili costs him his life, Yang does care about her on some level he might not fully understand.

I honestly thought given the content warnings and internet chatter that he would be one of the noncon/dubcon love interests, but I would say he's a low dubcon. Lili can say "no" the first time he insinuates she ought to be sleeping with him and by the time he brings it up a second time she's starting to fall in love with him (Stockholm syndrome says "hello") so it's less of an issue. She certainly wouldn't have slept with him if she was allowed to set her own timeline, but she understands that getting his way is part of who he is, so she puts up the same amount of resistance as you'd expect if he asked her to bake him a cake when she'd rather not but is willing to do so anyway.

Yang's route though, is a bit hit or miss. The Lao-Shu are always the odd gang out in Burlone, which is not surprising since they're the lone foreign mafia in a town full of Italians, but I wish that at the same time the Lao-Shu weren't also portrayed as the scummiest of the three crime organizations. It just feels a tad racist. They're so awful that while the Lao-Shu can be the bad guys on most other routes in a game where most of the cast already consists of criminals, Yang's route revolves around in-fighting in his gang that eventually sucks in the other crime families. The game actually can't find a powderkeg worse than the Lau-Shu itself (barring the Finale route stuff) to start the fireworks.

Lee, as the would-be new gang leader, is portrayed as an even worse person than Yang, but really the only reason he's worse is that he's less competent and he drugs his woman into being his (which is where the sexual assault comes in). He tries forcing himself on Lili too, but since Yang can frighten Lili into complying depending on player choice it's not really like either of them come out ahead in that department.

The rough part is that Yang's route doesn't seem to know what to do with itself. It has a great chapter 1 when Lili's caught and realizes that her survival depends on the whims of a merciless gang leader, but shortly thereafter she's left with twin teenagers as her guards. While they are ready to kill Liliana if she tries to escape, they have childlike, upbeat personalities; probably to prevent the route from being a misery gauntlet, but the result is that they're a tonal mismatch for the rest of the Lau-Shu and the game does itself no favors when it stacks the first half of the route with the twins taking Liliana on trips around the neighborhood or talking about Italian food.

I can't completely hate Lan and Fei, whose hardluck backstory serves as the closest thing to a pet the dog moment for Yang, but they feel like they wandered in from another game where teenagers with amazing fighting skills are no big deal. They're streetwise and much more aware of how to behave in dangerous territory than Lili is, but a lot of times they behave more like they're ten, being easy to please and completely unaware of any repercussions that may come of their actions. To be fair, the writing is conscious of this since other characters are surprised to learn the twins' age, but it doesn't make them feel less like they wandered into the wrong story.

When Yang isn't around, the twins are, and while they serve as a face to the Lao-Shu, they don't behave like the rest of the gang supposedly does (being too friendly to be sleazy to Lili) so they're hardly an average representation of the people she's hanging out with and aside from that, they're fairly stock characters. They're loyal to Yang because he saved their lives, they're good at killing people, and that's about it. So when Yang is the only person with any depth in his route and he's not around, it's pretty boring. And much of the first half is like this. He shows up, makes Lili uncomfortable for a bit, and then she hangs out with the kids.

These odd intermittent snapshots over the course of a month show Lili getting bizarrely comfortable with her new living arrangement even though she is sleeping in Yang's room every night. We know she only agreed to that because she didn't like Yang's alternative to have her sleep with his men, an arrangement even she isn't too thick to understand is not a good thing, and the opening to his route milks this uncomfortable arrangement for all its worth, until we time skip ahead and Liliana doesn't bother mentioning whether any previous discomforts are still on going, and considering how unbothered she is, it feels like they aren't.

So did Yang just keep his hands off her entirely after she declared she would sleep on the floor or was he still groping her on occasion? It felt really weird she wouldn't remark on it one way or another, and the lack of comment made it feel like if we didn't see it nothing happened.

The result is that Lili's narration tells us that time has advanced, but there's no sense of progression. A timeskip of a week feels the same as the timeskip of a month. Lili gets used to things and feels relatively secure if not actually content. It's like the days only passed because falling in love in a week would be silly, and that takes away a lot of the feeling of danger I felt early on. After being with the Lao-Shu for a month and baking pastries for Lan and Fei it didn't feel like Liliana had any reason to fear for her life anymore.

Thankfully the second half picks up with the infighting putting Liliana in actual danger and forcing her out of her usual routine. Lee (the would be replacement leader) is killed off earlier than I thought he would be, since I thought he was going to be the villain of Yang's route, but Yang's route, much like Yang himself, wants to do a lot more.

We have Dante showing up with the Falzone to try "rescuing" Liliana (since she likes Yang by then), but Yang takes advantage of Dante's reluctance to hurt Liliana and uses her as shield so he can get close enough to kill Dante, which is a move I just really like from him as a character. Nobody else would use their girl as a freaking body shield, even if it's logically sound.

And from there, there are subsequent efforts from Nicola to get revenge for Dante's death and Gilbert with assistance from the church (which threw their lot behind the Visconti after they thought Yang had "ruined" Liliana). It means there's there's a lot going on in the last couple chapters and there's a certain amount of fun in watching Yang murder half the other love interests in the game.

My only complaint really is that Nicola and Gilbert oddly focus on trying to kill (or at least wound) Liliana during various points in their fight with Yang, even though she wasn't participating in the fight aside from just being present. It wasn't like the time with Dante when Yang was using her as a shield. She was either behind or off to the side, so their decision to waste precious time to focus on her when a guy with two hook swords is trying to kill them is baffling.

And I was particularly disappointed with Nicola. When he abruptly fired a shot at the start of the "duel" I assumed he was just getting the jump on Yang, which I was ready to applaud, but he fired at Liliana instead and I was like: Why?

Though the part of me that prefers realism was a bit annoyed at the Yang versus Nicola fight, which was clearly the wonkiest since it was one-on-one and you can't write good fight choreography between a guy with two swords and another guy using a pistol, overall I liked the fact Yang used two shuang gou since it's a distinctly Chinese weapon that doesn't get a lot of visibility outside of martial arts films, and most of the time there are other distractions around so Yang using a melee weapon when all the Italians are using guns isn't quite so eye roll inducing.

So what did I think at the end? Was it worth waiting so long to play this game now that I've finished the route of the most monstrous guy in Piofiore?

Well, Yang's not my preferred type of love interest, and I don't like him as a person, but I think Yang is a good character. He's entertaining to watch (when you're not afraid of what he's going to do to Lili) and I really like that his bad endings show just how narrow a path Liliana has to tread to get the best ending with him. Even in the best ending, he is never outright nice to her, because Liliana continuing to live means that she is still entertaining him. Though, in a twisted romantic fashion, he admits he finds life without her boring, which is why he plans to never give her up.

What I do like though is that in the end it's a life that Liliana chooses, even though she can't agree with her lover's sense of morality. In fact, to get the best ending, player has to have Liliana acknowledge the kind of man that Yang is and be as smart as possible, which makes sense, because Yang makes it clear he doesn't want to talk to someone with an empty head and no thoughts of their own. The branching point between the bad ending and the good/best one is when Yang and Liliana are ambushed on a boat while making an exchange with smugglers.

When Yang saves her life, Liliana has the option to do a generic "thank you" or point out how strange it was that their attackers knew exactly when they were going to meet. Yang wants the more intelligent Liliana who will put up a fight because she has a mind of her own, but ultimately can't get away from him. If the player has Liliana surrender her virginity to him at any time prior to his second attempt to bed her the game is over. He's not interested in a doll, and no interest means a bad end for her.

One of the most interesting plot threads in Yang's route involves Liliana's friend Elena, who is the woman Lee keeps drugged as his toy. Liliana wants to rescue her, but knows that Yang won't do it out of the kindness of his heart, and it's nice seeing how Liliana talks him about her friend's situation without asking him to go out of his way to help her, thus giving Yang that space to ask questions about how she wants to handle her friend's return should she have the opportunity without having him to commit to anything.

The only thing that gets a little weird about that is when Lee kidnaps Liliana and Yang rescues her (because she's his woman), and they hightail it out of there without Lili once mentioning her friend and how they have to save her. She might acknowledge Yang isn't interested (though his mooks end up saving Elena off camera), but I found it odd that she didn't ask to be set down so she could find her friend on her own.

Circling back to the reason I skipped the game, I think my concerns were a little overblown--for me personally. I knew what happened on the bad endings before I played the game, so the content didn't surprise me, but much what they were was just a couple sentences of implication and a fade to black. The worst scene was Lee's attempted rape of Liliana, which still bothered me, but not any more or less than seeing similar scenes in other otome, but at least it wasn't a surprise this time.

I'm not entirely sure why Yang is a locked route since we don't really learn much about Liliana's personal story than we could have figured out from the prologue and Nicola's route, but I suppose being from the odd gang out, going the Lao-Shu route first wouldn't have been a good representation of what the designers wanted the game to present itself as, since this is, after all, a game set in Italy with primarily Italian mafia.