VN Talk: even if Tempest - Part 3: Tyril

I probably should be glad I'm writing this two years after release instead of immediately after, because I'm sorry Tyril fans, he just didn't work for me. When I first got the game I thought he might, because his relationship with Anastasia has so much potential.

Tyril is an inquisitor whose job it is to ferret out witches and mete justice upon them. He's an uncompromising individual and known as the best in his organization. Since Anastasia's knowledge of future events due to her Fatal Rewind ability can make her seem like a witch, conflict between her and Tyril should be ripe with tension. If he found out, would he believe her? Or would he follow his duty and treat her as a witch?

While that fear is there from Anastasia's side of things, Tyril is entangled in an entirely different mess that ultimately did neither his route nor the main plot any favors. In fact many of the items I'm going to discuss in my later "dropped plot" thread originate in Tyril's route, and the result was that his route is very busy with details that end up going nowhere. And ultimately I had to question his competency as an inquisitor at all.

You would think that Tyril being an inquisitor and Anatasia possibly being a witch (the game flip-flops) would be more than enough drama for his route, but no. He also has to be Prince Conrad's personal assassin, and the descendant of the Ishik clan of lorekeepers once in service of the royal family, and it's out of a misguided sense of repentance he's serving Conrad so he can restore his clan's honor. And he also runs around looking like a ninja while being a masked vigilante, which is hilarious once you realize this world has no ninjas and he cottoned on to the idea after hearing stories from Zenn. (Why? Doesn't he have enough to do? Does the man ever sleep?)

Tyril, as a personality, is fine. He's ruthless, a strict disciplinarian, but has bad manners and loosens up when drunk. Not even friendship will stop him from carrying out his duty when Crius falls under suspicion, but if he can fulfill his duty while offering a friend a hand he doesn't mind taking it. (Hence he'll torture Crius, but will stop early under the pretense that Crius is being sexually gratified by it so it's useless as a confession technique.) He's probably not the greatest person to have as a friend, but certainly useful. Offer him a swig of his favorite bad alcohol (so bad nobody brews it anymore) and he'll move heaven and earth to find the item you're looking for. If he wasn't terrible at life decisions and no doubt the man who killed Maya in the prologue timeline, I would probably consider him adorkable.

But his personal baggage between the backstory about his clan, the hidden story of being Conrad's assassin, and the obvious story as an inquisitor is a lot, and as a result I don't feel like any one part of it got any justice. Him being the vigilante Ninja is just so squeezed in there it's easy to forget and probably could have been dropped without any detriment to the plot or his character.

When we learn about the mysterious Ishik clan we hear they were wiped out for betraying the king (probably a trumped up accusation) and that's why they were all hunted down and killed twenty years ago, with the exception of one survivor; a girl who was spared by one of the knights.

When Anastasia approaches Tyril to have him hunt down the girl (presumably now a woman) in exchange for the alcohol he likes, he refuses despite the offer. Then we find out that he's actually an Ishik himself and that he was at the massacre where his clan was killed, but he survived by hiding in a den full of snakes.

The implication is that Tyril was the survivor who was spared by the knight, and that's why he refused to find "her" since that would reveal his own identity, but the gender doesn't match, nor does Anastasia say anything like "I thought the survivor was a girl" until the very end of his route, like the writer almost forgot when it had been bothering me ever since the reveal.

Also the fact that Tyril chooses to serve Conrad makes no sense. It did in the prologue timeline where Conrad was the son favored to inherit the throne, but in all of the post-prologue timelines, Lucien is of equal or better standing. Conrad even tells Anastasia in Tyril's route that he has to fight dirty to overcome the inherent advantage Lucien has by being the one who physically resembles their father the most. If Lucien rises to the throne, then any goodwill Tyril earns in Conrad's service would mean nothing since he could not affect any change, so if Tyril's primary aim is to redeem the Ishik by becoming a stooge for the royal family, then why Conrad and not Lucien?

It's possible Tyril did not know what an awful person Conrad truly is when they first met, but even if Conrad had been an absolute saint, that wouldn't change the fact that Tyril would be entrusting his clan's restoration to the king choosing the "right" prince as his heir. This could have been fixed with some exposition, like Tyril intended to approach the princes collectively, and Conrad ensnared him first, but without knowing more it seems like Tyril made a gamble and ended up with a loser, which doesn't lend any confidence to his decision making.

Yes, it serves as drama since the first Membrum trial wraps up about halfway through his route, which allows Tyril's service to Conrad and the Ishik be the focus of the second half, but it didn't feel thought through. It was gripping while it was happening, the game's narrative is exceedingly good at that, but I wasn't satisfied by the end.

Tyril is supposed to be clever, with his faults being in his personality and not his intelligence, but we're supposed to accept that he's been stupid with the most important part of his life.

Apparently Tyril can't accept it either which is why his route ends in his heavily implied suicide.

It would be a tremendous blow to realize he's been sacrificing his pride and his ethics in service of a royal family that wasn't even real, but it would have been a much crueler blow if it didn't look like his service was misguided to begin with.

Tyril, for all his bark, has little in the way of actual bite, and once it's clear how oppressed he is, the back and forth between him being a disciplinarian and him being a dork who can't handle positive feelings is largely done. The whole bit about the royal family not being real is certainly the nail in the coffin that kicked off the tragic ending (and Anastasia's own implied suicide so she could try again), but we don't really see how hard it hit him. Anastasia parts ways with him as if it's any other farewell, and it's only because she had a vision of the future that she runs back to find he's passed away.

I suspect that the very small Ninja subplot was to show that despite Tyril being locked into his position as inquisitor and assassin he is still trying to do good deeds to make up for the bad ones, but one reason I disliked it it because it shows that Tyril does not fully believe that people are witches just because they are accused. In the prologue he has no issue with burning Anastasia to death after she gets condemned and he's hailed as the best around, and there's no reason to think he isn't a supreme hunter of witches at that point in the story, but by the end we learn that witches are a very specific thing tied to the goddess Norna, which means that every single witch Tyril has hunted in his career has been an innocent person. If he's secretly trying to fight the system that's a large amount of collateral damage.

It's something that could have been worked around if there had been more focus on him actually being an inquisitor, but with his identity spread over so many buckets there just isn't the space.

And what possibly bothered me the most about his arc as a character is that there's little throughline when it comes to the final canon timeline. Did he actually develop as a character?

Tyril goes through a lot in his route, and even if I disagree with the in-world logic behind his choices, he's still put through the ringer badly enough that the truth results in his death. Yet when it comes to Lucien's route, where everything is more or less put right and the truth comes out to the most important players involved, he remains his usual dour self. It's not until the very end when he discovers Anastasia is Norna's reincarnation that he completely does a 180 and now he's the most reverential follower she could have (because she's the goddess, and thus definitely who he should be serving).

It's actually a bit awkward for Anastasia to start a relationship with him in the final timeline, because worshiping aside, he admits that he and the other Tyril Anastasia fell in love with are not the same man, but he's game to try. That's fine on the romantic front, but you'd think he'd be kicking himself in the ass over all the suffering he went through in service of Conrad and none of that comes into play. He does not attempt to kill himself, even though he learns an even darker truth than he does in his own route.

If thinking his clan was killed by a fake king whose son he still tried serving anyway was enough to make him suicidal, you'd think finding out his entire clan had been obliviously toiling away for over a thousand years for a fake royal family would send him over the edge as well. His entire heritage has been built on a lie.

I realize this is a romance game, so Tyril needs to have a happy ending. Sending him over the edge isn't desirable for the player base, but I can't see why one "good" ending where everything is resolved results in him deciding it's better for him to die and the other doesn't. And it's not like Anastasia intervenes in the happy ending to stop him from offing himself. It's just not an issue.

If Tyril's multiple roles had been dialed back I think it would have been easier to have him die in his own route while still living in another. Personally, if I had to pick one, I would have removed the Ishik clan, because ultimately the Rose of Tranquil Time ended up being a terrible can of worms I'm going to discuss in the dropped plot post and if the rose was removed then the Ishik could be cut as well.

What I missed the most is that Tyril is supposed to be the bane of witches as an inquisitor, and we never see him wrestle with how his job conflicts with who and what Anastasia seems to be. That entire possibility is just dropped, and it's because by the time he learns she's a "witch" (which is still debatable since right after that Ish "proves" she's not because she can't touch him) it's time to move on to the Tyril working as Conrad's assassin plot. I was ready for a great enemies to lovers plot and it wasn't there.