Monday, September 25, 2023

VN Talk: Piofiore: Fated Memories - Part 7: Finale

As you finish every best ending in the game, an old timey film plays with a countdown starting at 5 and counting down as each ending is achieved, with 0 heralding the finale. I was expecting a brand new route, but instead it branches off of Gilbert's with a few new scenes being added to the parts in common between them, which feels a bit weird, but I suppose makes sense given that the finale serves as an explanation for what was going on in Gilbert's route as well as a deeper dive into the backstory between the Key Maidens and the Falzone family.

If the player makes the right choices in the prologue and Gilbert's route (which are generally easy to spot because they are new), fake editions of a national newspaper show up announcing sordid crimes by the various mafia families that causes them to fall out of favor with the common people, and this comes to a head shortly after Gilbert and Liliana find out about the casino being in on the counterfeiting. Liliana's safety is Gilbert's priority, and since staying with any of the mafia now is decidedly not safe, she goes back to the church. Since this happens before she falls in love with Gilbert, the Finale branch proceeds with Liliana unattached to anyone.

If Gilbert's route felt like a golden route with everybody being at their action-packed best, the Finale is more like a fan disk, with lots of lower stakes and moments of warmth. Once Gilbert is no longer the primary male character in Liliana's life, Orlok takes up being her bodyguard (since he's unaffiliated with the mafia) and she gets scenes with all of the guys to varying degrees to reflect her lack of attachment. If not for the fact they are in a race against time to foil the casino direttore's plans and discover his identity, I would say that the route is quite fluffy, with most of the guys being kind to her.

That said, I think fans of Dante and Orlok will get more out of Finale than Yang fans, with Gilbert and Nicola landing somewhere in the middle. Dante gets a lot of focus because his position as the Falzone heir makes it impossible to avoid. (In fact this is the only route where he learns the Key Maiden is fated to be with the Falzone heir of her generation, and from his reaction you'd think someone told him he suddenly had a wife.) Orlok gets to be a blushy bodyguard without any of the angst from his own route, and he's really quite adorable when he's not constantly afraid that he or Lili is about to be killed. Yang, on the other hand, is very muted because the mafia factions are united so the most he can do is the occasional snide remark. He gets a couple scenes with Lili, but they aren't his best material with the menace dialed down.
The main core of the Finale route is finding out who the dirretore really is (since the identity of Sebastiano Gallier is likely fake), and why he wants revenge against the mafia of Burlone. This is where the counterfeiting plot and the Key Maiden story intersect.

With the new dialogue options we learn that several years ago a French girl named Chloe and her younger brother Riton came to live with the Falzone family, and that Chloe died while in mafia custody. She was a Key Maiden and Liliana's immediate predecessor. Apparently it was because of Chloe's fate that Liliana was raised in the church unaware of her position. Though Dante says at varying points in the game that he would have liked Liliana to remain ignorant of her fate, he was too young to have made the decision to raise Liliana separately. That would have been done by his father, Silvio.

The Finale route really deals with the tragedy that surrounded the previous Key Maiden when things weren't kept separate, and the Key Maiden knew everything the Falzone heir did. Both Chloe and Silvio were aware of the bound by fate astrology selection of each new maiden. Chloe took this to mean that she and Silvio were meant to be together, and fell in love with him. However, Silvio did not assign any romantic meaning to it and went on to marry the woman he considered the love of his life (Dante's mother).

Chloe did not take it well, even pushing Dante's mother down the stairs, and then died under suspicious circumstances a few days later. Rumors spread of her getting shot or poisoned because she had become an inconvenience for the Falzone, but Marco, who is old enough to have been the detective who handled the case back when it first happened, tells Liliana that despite his suspicions he could find no signs of foul play.

Chloe's brother was then sent away out of concern he would be unhappy remaining in the Falzone manor in Burlone since it's the place his sister went mad. It's not hard for our cast to put things together and realize that the direttore is probably Riton, who I'm now going to call Henri, because that's the name he usually goes by in present day. According to Wiktionary, Riton is an outdated diminutive for Henri, and in-game it serves as a delaying tactic to allow Liliana to get to know Henri before discovering that he is also Riton.
Henri has a serious ax to grind over Chloe's death. From the flashbacks we get, he was never comfortable living in the Falzone manor and when Liliana meets him for the time it's in the newer prologue scenes. He's not in his masked dirretore outfit, but just a regular suit like anyone else about town. This allows them to have a single conversation at first, then two conversations just before Gilbert's route, and finally a much extended one once Finale is unlocked.

I don't think it's meant to be a secret to the player than Henri is both Riton and the dirretore (though figuring out how he came to have several names takes a while between Henri, Riton, and Sebastian), so we get to see how Henri both worries about Liliana and dislikes her voluntary association with the mafia.

Though everyone is supposedly prepping to confront the dirretore and handle Gilbert's trial like they do on Gilbert's route, it's mostly a whiff in the Finale version. The three mafia bosses actually accuse the dirretore of being the counterfeiting mastermind before they have proof, but without admitting anything he waves them off with the fact he is a government official (it's a government owned casino) so they can't do anything to him without bringing the wrath of the national government on them. It was a surprisingly anticlimactic scene since you have a bunch of guys used to killing and torturing people to get what they want, and then they just back down because the smug jerk says he's got powerful friends.

I mean, they aren't the police. If they find him a threat, any of them could likely arrange for the direttore to have an "accident" even if they have no proof of his involvement. They're the mafia!

But instead we go delving into all the Key Maiden stuff, and learning about Chloe while Gilbert has some drama about the fact the jury he had bought off has been replaced by anti-mafia jurors so going to trial and expecting anything fair (or biased in his favor) is no longer an option.

Eventually (after finding the money printing factory) everyone goes to the casino again for the real showdown. And this is where Dante being the focal point of the story is again apparent. Not only is the Key Maiden tied to him, but he is the embodiment of everything Henri hates, being the boss of the Falzone family just like his father Silvio was. When the mafia corner Henri, both Yang and Gilbert defer to Dante to decide what to do with him.
And that would be putting a bullet through his head, but apparently the game can't let anything be that simple, so just in time for Dante's shot to be thrown off, the casino erupts into flame, just like in Gilbert's ending. They leave a wounded Henri who seems happy to die in the flames while they figure out a way to escape, and Yang is surprisingly (for him) considerate in helping them find the safest route out.

The story ends with the casino burning down, Henri's body never being found, and everyone reconvening for a pleasant Christmas among friends (even Yang, who says he only came out of curiosity since he's not Christian). I was a little disappointed that it was opened ended whether or not he lived, because I felt Henri fully expected to die, and in fact, in his final conversation with Liliana (as Henri and not the masked direttore) he asks whether or not someone who has done what he has can be forgiven.

The player can choose her reply, and though she is very nice when saying she would be unable to forgive the person (phrasing it more like she doesn't know enough to have the right to decide), it's clear it's the answer Henri expects and goes to his doom.

However, the player can say she would forgive such a person.

Mind, by this point in time Liliana knows he is trying to ruin her mafia friends, he has probably killed the real Sebastian and his family in order to assume his identity, and he has killed at least ten other people who came close to discovering the truth about his identity. She knows his ultimate desire is revenge. And the player knows that on top of that he's not afraid of how many people may become collateral damage because he freaking blows up the casino at the end of Gilbert's route.

But she also knows that Henri has lost his entire family due to his sister becoming the Key Maiden (their parents were killed over it), so she can express an offer of forgiveness, which he does not expect, and taking this route leads to an alternate ending. It's not one that I particularly liked for the story it told, but it's worth playing to understand Henri, why he started talking to Liliana, and to learn what happened to him in the years in between living in the Falzone manor and returning to Burlone as the casino dirretore.
If Liliana is forgiving, she runs back into the fiery casino, refusing to let Henri die. He's reluctant, but opens a hidden escape route for them both to leave through since he doesn't want her to die (especially since she reminds him of his sister). Following their escape, the two flee to France since he can no longer stay in Burlone with the mafia out to get him, and the government would haul his ass over the counterfeiting business.

I'm not sure that getting revenge by framing the mafia for counterfeiting money was really the best plan for Henri to avenge his sister, but then we don't really know what his next step would have been since attacking Gilbert was only his opening move. Considering that he left a trail of bodies in his wake and has his own set of henchmen willing to murder the Falzone underboss for him, it's rather surprising that he didn't do something that would result in a harsher punishment than getting put behind bars in Gilbert's ending.

And the fact that Liliana running away with him results in a romantic ending bothers me, which is a funny thing to say in a game where all of the love interests have killed people. I suppose it's because all of the mafia characters, even the Lao-Shu, understand that Burlone has to survive in order to support them. A farmer won't get any more eggs if they kill the chicken. So even though they can be murderous and violent, they never go completely wild and have a vested interest in some form of order.

Henri, on the other hand, has lost touch with everything beside his hatred, so he no longer cares who he disposes of as long as it moves him further down the path of revenge.

If not for the fact Liliana reminds him of Chloe (in spite of, or perhaps because of, being the current Key Maiden), he would likely have been willing to dispose of her as well, but when she rescues him from the fire he gives up on revenge and chooses to start a new life running an orphanage with her. He doesn't seem particularly happy, but finds life bearable, and I think that's about the best we can expect from him.

I mostly liked this route for the team-up, fluff scenes with Dante and Orlok (and to a lesser degree Nicola), and for the backstory of Henri, Chloe, and Silvio.
Silvio is a figure who looms large over other routes, as Dante's demanding father, but it's not until the Finale that we learn more of what he was like as a person and how he wanted to treat his own Key Maiden. He was trying to be kind by offering Chloe a home, and likely did not expect what was probably a teenage girl at the time to freak out over his engagement to Dante's mother.

And the story even clears up one of the things that bothered me the most about how the Key Maiden works. We know the seal can be broken by the Key Maiden losing her virginity to the Falzone heir/successor (both terms are used, probably depending on who did the translation for a given route), because that's what happens on Dante's route and losing her virginity to Yang and Gilbert on their routes results in Liliana no longer being the Key Maiden. But that's a raw deal for the Key Maiden. The relic is only supposed to be unsealed in case of emergency, so is the Key Maiden supposed to be a virgin for her entire life for that "In case of emergency, break glass" moment?

But even though the Key Maidens are fated to be with the Falzone heir, it seems like they only hold their Key Maiden status for a period of time, and it's suggested that with Dante's birth, Chloe's status as Key Maiden was ending if it hadn't ended already.

This is less bad, since it means that if a Key Maiden is not called upon, she will eventually be free to live her own life while she still has a lot of life ahead of her. But also raises the question of what would happen if the relic needed to be moved after Chloe stopped being the Key Maiden but before Liliana grew up. Also, if Chloe was losing her status as Key Maiden specifically because Dante would be the new heir, and Liliana would be born in another two years as the new Key Maiden, why are she and Silvio so far apart in age?

Ten years isn't a big deal between older couples, but Dante and Liliana are within two years of each other, which makes sense if the power transfer begins at the birth of the next heir. Silvio is old enough that he regards Chloe as a younger sister and if he had needed to move the relic, it could have been fairly squicky depending on how old Chloe was at the time. We're never given her actual age or how much older she was than Henri, but I suspect she was not yet an adult otherwise she probably would have told Silvio to his face that she wanted him to marry her and not Beatrice. Instead she does this underhanded back door thing to try getting rid of her competition. Her still being a teenager would also explain why Silvio still tried to do right by her and her brother when it became apparent the Key Maiden couldn't stay in the same house as him anymore.

But I get the feeling the writers didn't think that far. This is a game, after all, that says a new Key Maiden is chosen every ten years and that Nicola could have been chosen as the next Falzone boss; both worldbuilding tidbits that are completely obliterated by this route.

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