VN Talk: even if Tempest - Part 1: Overview

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

Platform: Switch
Release: 2022

I was originally skeptical about playing even if Tempest because writer/director Ayane Ushio is the same person who wrote and directed Norn9: Var Commons, which struggled with its overly ambitious narrative, so I didn't pick it up until it was on sale. Now that I've finished it, I have to say it may well be one of my favorite visual novels of all time, with the caveat that I can still see signs of what were likely aborted plot threads.

Thankfully most of those are easy to overlook due to the strong central narrative, so I'll save the bulk of them for another post. For now, I'll just leave it at this: The story definitely changed during production, and the signs are there if you look, with the biggest indication being the fact that the title screen prominently depicts a monster holding Anatasia that never appears during the game itself. This is the title screen which you will see every time you start up the game, and a heck of a thing to leave in if it was never supposed to play a role.

But despite whatever changes may have been made, even if Tempest is an excellent dark fantasy of revenge, sacrifice, and discovering the truth no matter the cost. Though Anatasia's ability to rewind time by dying is occasionally played for a dark laugh, the deaths of others are never taken lightly, even if she theoretically can revive them if she rewinds far enough. In fact one of the burdens she carries is making sure that any sacrifices made can be corrected by the time she finally pulls free of the meat grinder she's trapped inside.

Normally for an otome visual novel there is a common route and then the story branches into different love interest routes that are more or less a different reality if the protagonist had made different choices.

That is not the case with even if Tempest. Since Anatasia's Fatal Rewind ability means she can rewind time, she gets to experience multiple timelines over the course of the game. And not to put too fine a point on it, the fact she rewinds at the end of each route save the last means that things did not work out well. Each love interest takes a key role in a different timeline, but Anastasia carries the memories of all these loops so every timeline is canon to her personal experience.

It's completely bonkers.

As a result of the more linear narrative, playing through the different love interests happens mostly in order (with the exception of Crius and Tyril being interchangeable to start) as Anastasia gets closer and closer to the truth of what is happening. I normally use a walkthrough after my first playthrough to speed through the game. However I found that undesirable for even if Tempest, mostly due to the trials which are similar to Ace Attorney and Danganronpa (which I go into detail more here), but also because I was really glad that I didn't look at a walkthrough until I got to the end of my first playthrough and started my second, since it would have made a narrative choice less of a surprise. Because of that, I chose to play the rest of the game blind.

I usually don't bother with spoiler warnings for games over a year old since anyone searching for information this long after release likely knows spoilers are everywhere, but just in case, you may want to stop reading now if you're concerned about spoilers.

Like I did for Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly I'm going to cover the game's main story in this overview and rather than a route post in subsequent weeks for each love interest, I'm going to do a character post to discuss their personal story. This is largely because three of the four routes don't necessarily have endings, they're either ambiguous or bad, which causes Anastasia to loop back in time for the next one. There is only one story, and it runs through all four routes. The happy endings all branch off that final route.

At the beginning of the game Anastasia is largely helpless, an abused daughter of a marquess who lives locked away in an attic until a royal request for her hand in marriage forces her family to let her leave lest there be a scandal. This reacquaints her with her childhood friend Prince Lucien, who somehow convinced his older brother (and presumed heir to the throne) Prince Conrad to marry her. At first Conrad is all sympathy and affection for the emotionally starved Anastasia, but when she tries to repay him by investigating the illegal siphoning of royal funds it costs her the life of her loyal maid and confidante, Maya, and she discovers Conrad is the culprit.

Conrad offers to keep her as his fianceé as long as she behaves, but Anastasia decides she'd rather kill herself than submit to oppression again, starting the first of many death-induced timeloops, with the real kicker coming in the next loop which ends with Conrad pinning his crimes on her and having her burned at the stake as a witch. This breaks the dam holding back Anastasia's rage and sets her off on her quest fueled by piss and vinegar to make them all pay.

I loved it.

There's no mystery behind her looping. After her second death she learns an extradimensional witch has given her the Fatal Rewind ability in exchange for helping him track down the Witch of Ruin in her world, the Ecumene. He suspects the Witch of Ruin was involved in the events preceding her death, so the investigation would be a win-win for both of them, but mostly she's out to expose the truth about Conrad and escape the clutches of her abusive stepmother (who is also the sister of the current king and thus Conrad's aunt).

The game properly begins after a deeper rewind of eight years to when Anastasia was still a child, during which she pretends to go to a convent with her maid Maya before she can be locked in the attic. Instead she joins a group of cadets training to join the Knights of Garuda, who have access to the royal castle (and thus Conrad), due being guardians of the goddess Norna's beloved garuda birds.

This makes the Anastasia of the majority of the game much different from the one we meet in the prologue, as she's now a driven woman who has grown to adulthood twice, and the second time with a single-minded intensity to protect the only person she still considers family (Maya) and to bring Conrad to justice, since she assumes without direct interference from her, Conrad's plans to siphon royal funds and use slave labor would still happen.

And to be fair, it's very easy for the player to get on board the Conrad hate train. Even if our current Conrad has yet to have (and may never have) Maya killed or abuse Anastasia's trust because of the time rewinds, he's quick to flaunt his superiority and willingness to play chessmaster to those he feels no need to humor, so the desire to see him pay stays alive every time we're forced to interact with the man.

But despite the fact Anastasia expects only her personal circumstances have changed after the ten year rewind, there are a few things "wrong" once she catches up to her previous present day. Prince Lucien, who was a spineless wimp pre-looping, has grown into a much stronger young man, nicknamed the "Frozen Prince." Zenn, who was previously the son of a viscount working in the castle, is now a rough and tumble detective who probably wouldn't be allowed anywhere near the castle. And her father is now inexplicably bedridden when he wasn't before.

Maddeningly for Anastasia, despite being able to reverse time, there are occasions when she has to let someone die for the short term so she can progress further in a particular timeline (and get more information about what's really going on) before doing a more complete rewind before the start of most present day events. For the first two routes this costs her both Maya and Lucien, with a particularly dark montage of Anastasia trying to loop a single day over and over again in a futile attempt to save Maya.

More maddening for the player are Lucien's deaths, since his limited contact with Anastasia prevents us from asking him why he changed and why he has complete and utter faith that Anastasia will persevere. The guy gives up his life twice so Anastasia's quest can continue.

Aside from changes Anastasia does not believe she could have influenced, the antics of the Witch of Ruin keep interfering with her quest for revenge. It's not that she begrudges trying to stop him, as the witch begins messing with her shortly after she qualifies to join the Knights of Garuda, and he is clearly up to no good, but the mystery of what he is doing and why become the driving force of the plot in the way a known quantity like Conrad does not.

After the witch makes his return known, the city prepares for the ensuing Carnival based on the rules laid out the last time he decided to play. At night, the Witch of Ruin forces every human in the capital to sleep with the exception of one who is turned into the witch's plaything, the Membrum. Membra supposedly get superhuman strength and their desires are twisted so that they kill in pursuit of them. Once they have done so, the magical sleep is lifted and the city's inhabitants can check on each other to see who survived. Red chains appear around the necks of five people, one of whom is the Membrum, and from there, a witch trial or Carnival is held. Three hundred jurors must vote for which of the five suspects is actually the Membrum, upon which that person will be executed. If they fail to vote correctly, the killings will continue every night until the people get it right.

The witch trials are fascinating since Anastasia gets to participate from the perspective of different roles in different timelines. She has been the innocent person marked as a dummy target by the witch. She got to play the role of an inquisitor administering the trial. And she gets to be the Membrum, which admittedly was a banger of a role, as by that point in the story she realizes that she will have to condemn innocent people to die if she's to win the Carnival and get to the truth behind the Witch of Ruin. And I'll say, getting Crius falsely executed as the Membrum without him understanding why was one of the most deliciously painful things the game had me do. (He was my favorite.)

So what is the truth? What is she really chasing after?

Anastasia has two different goals most of the game, with the idea that chasing one will enable her to solve the other, but the Witch of Ruin and Conrad and her stepmother's cruelty to her are completely unrelated, which gives me the suspicion that Rune, the witch who gives her the Fatal Rewind in the prologue, was lying to her when he laid out the circumstances of their bargain. This would not have been that surprising since he knows who and what she really is.

In the third route, Anastasia learns that Ish, the Witch of Ruin, used to be a servant of the goddess Norna, and she is, in fact, Norna reborn as a human after a great deal of betrayal and trauma.

Humans didn't originally exist in the Ecumene, but Norna did, and opened portals to other worlds and offered refuge to the needy humans there. The settlers began to build a kingdom, and the king was going to marry Norna, at least until he suffered from a needy ego that could not stand the thought that Norna would continue to live eternal and he would be relegated to history as second fiddle beside the woman they considered a goddess.

So he tried to kill her and passed off another woman as his goddess wife, which is why the royal family of the present day claim a divine lineage. Norna survived the attack, and could no longer find solace among humans who viewed her powers as witchcraft (since the "goddess" was with the king). In despair she split her powers among her various servitor witches, including Rune and Ish, and then abandoned her body to be reborn as an ordinary human.

Ish felt betrayed that after all she went through she would want to be one of them, and holding the witch trials has been his way of baiting out Norna's reincarnation. He's not aware of anything that happens in an erased timeline, because the whole reality is rolled back including him inside it (but not Rune who is in an interdimensional space outside), but he does know whenever Norna's powers are used, which includes the Fatal Rewind.

So every time Anastasia has restarted the timeline, he becomes aware and he has known she is Norna since her farthest jump back of eight years ago. In fact it's because he shapeshifted to look like Maya that Anastasia realizes the reason Lucien turned out different is because of a letter "Maya" encouraged her to send him before running away to become a knight cadet.

Though I liked the fairy tale stories of Norna and the witch presented at the start of each chapter and how they ended up being distortions of the same person, I found I was less enamored with Anastasia being her reincarnation. And to be honest, I don't think Anastasia was really thrilled about it either.

There's a point in the finale of the game where she finds the body Norna had sealed away and they speak to each other (which to me implies they are very much not the same person). There doesn't seem to be any progression from the person Norna was to the person Anastasia is. They are just two people talking to each other. Norna understands she has made some regrettable decisions, and she is sorry for all the trouble Ish has caused. Then she's gone, though she spares taking Ish into oblivion with her at Anastasia's request.

Anastasia gives up her goddess power in the end and is a normal human when the credits roll. (In most endings. She keeps them in Zenn's.) After all that, she decides she doesn't care about revenge on Conrad anymore, and by then I didn't either.

That's not a patch against the game. Throughout it I was grumbling that I would be disappointed if Conrad was forgiven or allowed to go free. It's just, when you're dealing with the warping of reality, a corrupt prince is a smaller menace in a much larger picture. And by then we know that Zenn, Crius, and Tyril had dismantled the slavery ring before Anastasia even met them for the "first time" after her first big rewind. While I was a little annoyed she didn't get to participate, I know that waiting for her to grow up doesn't make any sense when the three older guys can free those people as soon as possible (which Zenn was able to do since he retains his memories every rewind).

While the game has some flaws, like the lack of any romantic tension in Lucien's route, and some logic gaps left by unfulfilled plot threads, by making the entire game one single story it raises the stakes more than any other otome I've played. It was very hard to put the game down and I settled for writing notes between routes rather than full blog posts as I normally do just because I didn't know how things were going to go. In retrospect that kind of bit me in the butt as it's taken me months to get this blog series properly written out as I had to reconstruct so much material out of my notes, but it was worth revisiting the game as I did.