Racism in Valkyria Chronicles

I happened to start Valkyria Chronicles at about the same time the Black Lives Matter protests over the death of George Floyd began, which tinged my playthrough to the point that I had to break my discussion of how the game handles racism into its post.

While I enjoyed the game, this was the one aspect of worldbuilding that I had the most difficulty with. The game doesn't map the Darcsen ethnic group directly to being Jewish (in fact they're portrayed as the Europan continent's indigenous people), but the comparison is hard to avoid given that we're in a WW2-inspired setting and the Darcsen of captured territories have been funneled into concentration camps as forced labor.

However, the Darcsen aren't discriminated against for religious differences, so much as they supposedly incited a calamity in ancient history, causing many people to die, and as a result they lost their nation and have become a people without a homeland. Nobody really knows exactly what went down back then (being close to two thousand years ago), but in the present day the Darcsens are a persecuted minority in all the places they live and the legend serves as a means to justify it.

The problem is that the game is not terribly good about showing racism and characters overcoming racism aside from broad strokes. Part of this is because we play as Welkin, who is not Darcsen and he's such a nice guy that of course he sticks up for his adopted Darcsen sister Isara, and forces the rest of his squad to work with her and like it. The other part is that I don't think the writers really understood how racism works, resulting in an inconsistent application throughout the story.

We see that Largo and especially Rosie initially aren't too keen on working with a Darcsen squadmate, but Rosie's racism is a bit hit or miss. She's just short of openly hostile at the start of Chapter 3 and still pretty cranky towards Isara at the start of Chapter 8. But at the end of 8 she's oddly considerate and goes to downright pleasant (for being Rosie) during the optional beach chapter that chronologically takes place between 9 and 10. Then she goes back to being hostile in Chapter 10.

This makes it hard to buy into her change at the end of Chapter 10 when she discovers that enemy forces have herded Darcsen prisoners (including children) into a warehouse and then set fire to it. The way she reacts with anger and horror makes it seem as though she'd never seen a Darcsen child before (which I find unbelievable), and this event is the trigger to get her to be less racist as she joins in helping the laborers look for survivors.

Valkyria Chronicles goes out of its way to include racism against Darcsen. It's even present as a character trait in recruitable squad members. So having a prominent character in the squad serve as a racist mouthpiece is necessary for what the game wants to accomplish. That said, I can see why the writing would want to eventually rehabilitate Rosie so we're not left with a major character being a racist the entire game through. This probably would have been okay, except that the game isn't really good about showing racism anywhere outside of Rosie's transformation.

Largo's only skeptical about Isara for about a chapter before he treats her like anyone else. Alicia seemed to be confused at first whether Isara was Darcsen at all and didn't change her treatment of her once she knew better (or offer backhanded compliments like "You're much nicer than I expected a Darcsen would be"). And the other engineers in the R&D workshop who aren't part of the squad treat Isara as just another person.

The game only brings up Isara's race (or the race of other Darcsens) when it wants to make it a point, and then forgets when it wants to focus on something else. For instance, Darcsen characters all have black hair, and so does Welkin's superior, Captain Eleanor Varrot. From the slander "dark-hair" we can infer that only Darcsen have dark hair, so is Varrot Darcsen? It turns out she's not, because Darcsen do not have family names, but the player can only learn this by reading supplemental codexes. However, Varrot is never accidentally discriminated against or slandered in a case of mistaken ethnicity, when there is no way to visually tell her apart from a Darcsen character.

And it is easily confirmed that aside from their dark hair, it's impossible to tell a Darcsen from the rest of the Caucasian appearing population. We know this because Princess Cordelia is secretly Darcsen and no one can tell because of the headdress that hides her hair. Both the majority population and the Darcsen one possess the same range of skin tones.

Isara is also clearly allowed to wander where she wants without being worried about her personal safety and she gets to go to all the squad events. Imagine if she couldn't go to the R&R on the beach because she was Darcsen and it would "look bad" to have her on royal property. I get the game probably wouldn't want Welkin constantly sticking up for her and making a substantial portion of the speaking cast racist, but the result is that the racism really feels like it comes from one character on our side and of course the really mean people on the other.

This is likely because the game is the result of Japanese developers who live in a highly homogeneous country where racism isn't something a significant portion of the population will ever experience. And considering that, it's surprising they made the attempt to the extent that it's codified in the game mechanics where some characters literally don't work as well because they're racist against the Darcsens in their squad. It's not game breaking bad due to how character traits don't always flair up, but I still left all the racists cooling their heels back at headquarters.

Probably one of the worst things in how the game handles racism is how Isara dies. As a writer I like the complete suddenness with which it happens. This is a game set during a war with firearms, so my gut reaction to Isara getting sniped by an enemy soldier when the squad thought they were safe was great. It would be realistic for the squad to have a casualty among the main characters, and in broad strokes I don't mind that it was Isara in particular who was killed.

However, what I do mind is how they handled the impact of her death and how it serves as a vehicle for Rosie's redemption. Despite being the team's token racist, I actually like Rosie, because she's complicated and she's also an unapologetically tough woman who we don't see a lot of in JRPGs. Both she and Isara deserve better than what they got.

After Chapter 10, Rosie begins to soften a bit towards Isara, but has trouble showing it because she's stubborn and not good at apologizing. So initially she refuses Isara's gift of a good luck charm and brushes it off as something she doesn't need from a "dark-hair." Meanwhile Isara works really hard on a plan to protect the squad on their next mission so it doesn't turn into a suicide run, and succeeds. After the mission, Rosie thanks Isara and reveals that she actually kept the good luck charm.

The two agree to become friends and when Rosie asks Isara what gift she would like in return, Isara wants to hear Rosie sing. So of course that's when the bullet catches Isara. When Rosie finally does sing for her, it's at Isara's grave.

Presumably because they had a chance to reconcile that means that Rosie's racism is gone, because Rosie now has a precious Darcsen friend who died and she needs to carry on for. But that reduces Isara to being the magical minority friend who makes a white person better for dying. And the thing is Rosie should still be a bit racist. Learning to be better, sure, but if it's really ingrained she should still slip up without meaning too, and in more ways than just dropping a slur.

The fact Rosie is suddenly not racist is really hammered home when her optional chapter is unlocked and she pushes for the squad to go out and stop imperials from rounding up Darcsens for slave labor. Not only does it suddenly boil her blood, but she's very kind to the Darcsen kid she meets up later and explains that she started hating Darcsens because of an attack on her village when she was a kid during the last war, and she blamed the presence of the local Darcsens for the attack happening in the first place. This pins the source of Rosie's racism to a particular event rather than a systemic societal problem and makes it easier for her to realize she was wrong.

After this point, Rosie's racism or former racism is never brought up again. And it's not for lack of other Darcsen characters for her to interact with. Zaka's part of the squad from Chapter 11 onward, but she has no conversations between him about growing or wanting to do more, even though meeting him and his fellow prisoners in the concentration camp was the start of her awakening.

And heck, just before the penultimate battle Princess Cordelia appears publicly in front of Welkin's squad as a Darcsen for the very first time and nobody says a thing about her dark hair. I realize they have other things to worry about at the moment (like an enemy tank the size of an aircraft carrier), but the fact that the head of state is secretly part of a persecuted minority surprisingly goes unacknowledged by everyone who wasn't present at the moment she revealed it.

At points I wondered if the half-baked Darcsen racism could actually be lifted from the game entirely without hurting it (rendering its inclusion pointless), and I can think of one reason not to. According to generally accepted history, the Valkyrur came from the north and fought with the native Darcsen population. Supposedly the Valkyrur stopped the Darcsen menace and eventually disappeared, perhaps by interbreeding with the local population to such a degree that they could no longer be distinguished as a separate group.

However, over the course of the game, we learn that the Valkyrur were not actually benevolent and pretty much beat the snot out of the Darcsens to get a hold of their geographical resources. Being the winning side, they got to rewrite history and blamed all the atrocities they committed on the Darcsens.

That the legendary Valkyrur were actually a race of conquerors was a nice twist and dovetails with the fact that the first Valkyria revealed in the game is a powerful general on the other side.

While the game could have written the Valkyrur to be remembered as conquerors, I did enjoy the added complexity to the worldbuilding. I just wish that if the game writing was going to include racism that the writers had done a better job of it so it actually meant something.

RPG Talk: Valkyria Chronicles

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

Platform: PS3 (also on PS4, Switch, and Windows)
Release: 2008

Valkyria Chronicles won my second Reader's Pick poll for my Ko-Fi supporters, and it's a game I've been meaning to play for years.

Taking place in a pseudo-WWII setting, Valkyria Chronicles follows the story of Lieutenant Welkin Gunther and his squad's exploits during the Second Europan War as they defend their small nation of Gallia against the invading East Europan Imperial Alliance (hereafter called the Empire).

Though the bulk of the war is actually between the Empire and the Federation, the two superpowers on the Europan continent, Gallia is closer to being Switzerland, being politically neutral and opposed to forming alliances with other countries. Similar to Switzerland, Gallia also requires all citizens to receive military training as part of their education, so when Welkin is conscripted, it's not surprising that he's quickly given a command (being university educated) and thrown on the battlefield. He probably needed a refresher, but not the full boot camp.

Unsurprisingly, the Second Europan War is over resources, specifically the MacGuffin known as ragnite. It fuels everything from tanks to medicine. The Empire wants more and invaded the Federation; and later, to get at even more ragnite, it invaded Gallia. This means that Valkyria Chronicles is centered around just one smaller front in a larger war. In fact, the game itself is presented as a book by the narrator Irene Koller called On the Gallian Front. We really don't know much about what's happening in the larger war, whether things are going well or poorly for either side. But we know how Gallia is faring, and for our characters, who are the ones with boots on the ground, that's all they care about.

Welkin is perhaps an unusual protagonist for a war story. He's introduced as an easy going nature lover and a bit of a doodler. Though he's the son of an important general from the First Europan War, he's not interested in following in his father's footsteps. As a recent university graduate, he wants to become a teacher. The only reason he ends up in armed conflict, even after the Empire drives out the people of his hometown, is because he's conscripted.

It takes a lot for Welkin to get upset. In fact, the only scene in the game where he really gets angry is when he confronts Faldio, his best friend and fellow officer, over whether Faldio intentionally shot Alicia, Welkin's sergeant. Even the death of his sister, Isara, doesn't get as much of a reaction out of him (though narratively I think that's because Isara's death was to focus on Rosie's transformation, which I'll get to in a separate post because addressing the game's handling of the Darcsen is going to take up too much space here).

By making someone like Welkin the protagonist, Valkyria Chronicles is able to insert more humanity into a game about modern warfare. Even though yes, our hero and his squad are killing a lot of people as part of their operations, Welkin never loses sight of what needs to come after; the peace and the rebuilding. He's not out to get anybody.

One of the best scenes that captures a glimpse of humanity in the middle of a warzone is when Welkin and Alicia are separated from their squad and take shelter in an abandoned cabin while evading enemies. A mortally wounded imperial soldier stumbles into their cabin, and instead of finishing him off, they choose to comfort the dying man. When he passes away, they bury him.

That's when they're found by General Gregor and his men, who are looking for their missing soldier. On seeing Welkin and Alicia's treatment of their fallen comrade, Gregor is appreciative of the kindness they gave him and leaves them be rather than taking them prisoner.

And the thing is, prior to this Gregor is presented as the most severe personality out of the three enemy generals. After this, the next time we see him, he's presiding over a concentration camp that is close to working the enslaved Darcsen laborers to death. He dies when we free that camp, but the fact he acknowledged a human kindness with a mercy of his own made him a more complex character that he otherwise looks and I was actually disappointed when he died. His capacity for both empathy and racism made him a surprisingly realistic character and I would have liked the game to run with him longer.

In general though, the imperial generals are fairly interesting characters. I wish I could say the same for Maximilian though. He's one of the princes of the empire, but because his mother is of lower birth he's not the heir, which probably explains why he's off invading a small country like Gallia instead of hitting the Federation.

I wanted to like Maximilian, because the guy wants better than he got (due to his low birth), and he's not afraid of doing his own dirty work. Welkin first faces him just before the halfway point in the game and Maximilian is on the front lines in his own tank. (Granted, it's a super tank, but he's definitely not a pampered snot afraid to risk his own neck.)

But the game squashed my only other reason for liking him, and that has to do with Selvaria. Selvaria is the first powered-up Valkyria to appear in the game. She has the power to wipe out multiple enemy squads single-handedly and not even artillery shells can harm her. Her story is unfortunately common for villainous powered women, in which they use all their power to help a man who rescued them and showed them their worth earlier in their lives. But I thought I could tolerate it because Maximilian genuinely seemed to trust her.

Then, after Alicia awakens as a Valkyria and Selvaria loses, Maximilian suddenly decides he no longer has a use for her and has Selvaria sacrifice herself in a rear guard action. Granted, it was a really effective sacrifice, taking out almost the entire Gallian army, but why he would throw away any further use he could get out of her, especially once his enemies have a Valkyria of their own, doesn't make any strategic sense. While he neutered the Gallian military, in exchange, if things went wrong (and of course they did), he would no longer have Selvaria for backup.

Because Valkyria Chronicles follows Welkin throughout the war, it's perhaps not surprising that the story is less about him than the portion of his life he spends in it. The ending isn't Welkin freeing his hometown (that actually happens just after the halfway point). It's Welkin defeating Maximilian, who he does not have any personal grievance against aside from the fact he's the enemy commander.

The heart, the emotional highs in the build-up to the finale, are the principles on which Welkin decides they will win this war.

He first meets Alicia during a visit to his hometown, just before the invasion, and while they start off on the wrong foot, they quickly come together as a team, which is fortunate because when they're conscripted they're placed in the same squad. Though Alicia is not Welkin's only NCO, she's clearly the one he has the most affinity for.

Considering that she's his direct report, Welkin is generally pretty good about keeping any attraction buttoned down. While it's clear that they become close, given the number of scenes they have featuring just the two of them, none of their early to mid-game scenes are overly romantic, and it's possible to read Welkin as being simply too thick to realize that Alicia might actually like him. (This is a guy who compliments his sergeant's uniform because it reminds him of a rhinoceros beetle.) Neither of them flirt. They mostly just talk.

Though Faldio certainly seems to think Welkin loves Alicia, because he wrote as much in his notes, there's nothing to suggest more than a possible crush for most of the game, which I liked given that they're in the same unit and she's his direct report. It wasn't hard to see the potential, but they kept things professional.

Until they don't, but to be fair, it was a good moment, and if you're going to break decorum that was the time to do it, and this is where the emotional climax comes in.

Alicia, having awakened as a Valkyria, sees that the last ditch attempt to stop the land dreadnought from reaching the capital of Gallia has failed and realizes that there's still one thing left she can do. Like Selvaria did, she could sacrifice her life and essentially nuke the enemy into oblivion.

Alicia didn't appreciate the change in her life or the pressure of having become a Valkyria since it set her apart from the rest of the army and she realized other soldiers had begun worshiping her as their salvation. Blowing herself up would save the day and she wouldn't have to deal with the pain anymore.

Welkin is the one who talks her down and makes her realize that there are still people who look at her as one of their own, and he talks about after the war and wanting to spend the rest of his life with her. He gives her a future to look forward to and assures her that winning the war by using her power isn't the right thing to do. (And it doesn't hurt that he makes a temporary engagement ring for her using the flower she put in his uniform the other day.)

So when he and his squad face Maximilian they do so without Alicia turning into a Valkyria (thus preserving game mechanics) and without escalating things to the point that other powers in the war might consider finding Valkyrur of their own. Shortly thereafter, a ceasefire is called and the war ends between Gallia and the Empire.

Perhaps because the characters are a little older, I also appreciated the epilogue which runs over the fates of all the major characters after the war. Welkin and Alicia do return to their hometown where Welkin becomes a teacher like he wanted and Alicia now owns a bakery. Unusually, the epilogue is also far enough forward that the two of them now have a daughter who's old enough to "help" with the baking herself.

VN Talk: Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly - Part 7: Beniyuri

Beniyuri does not have her own route in Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly, but since I'm doing character arcs this time rather than game routes, I decided to devote one last week to talking about our protagonist. This also seems a good time to point out that this is the first otome I've played with a voiced protagonist, which surprisingly changes a lot of my impression of the character. Oddly, this likely explains an issue I had with the Code:Realize anime.

Most otome protagonists are unvoiced, so the player can self-insert. The protagonist tends to have a few character traits due to word choice in their unvoiced dialogue and/or habits mentioned in their first person narration; enough to know whether they're optimistic, bad at studying, or proud about their athletic skills. How a particular piece of dialogue or narrative is read can therefore be left largely up to the player.

This is where I'll digress into Code:Realize a bit. I read Cardia's dialogue as being pretty dynamic and lively after the other characters indicated that she was opening up, which made it hard to reconcile the Cardia in my head with the anime Cardia, who was voiced with a subdued personality for most of the series.

So now we have Beniyuri. Because she was voiced, it was very clear from the get-go how her lines should be read, since they were being performed. Unfortunately, that put a barrier between me and Beniyuri because I wanted to read her more favorably toward what I wanted in a protagonist than who she actually was.

It was interesting to see how much of a disconnect there was just through the voice even though the written words were the same.

This might have come down to casting choice, but I think it's also that hearing Beniyuri's distress verbally instead of just reading it made it more annoying to have yet another crying and helpless protagonist. It's not that she's crying and helpless all the time. I genuinely liked the finale where she realizes she has to kill Kagiha to stop Hikage and send everyone home, and I loved the scene where she dives into the Abyss to save Monshiro, but the scenes where she's feeling miserable and betrayed are long and extended and so emotionally charged it's draining just listening to her. (Heck there's an entire chapter of her feeling bad.)

That said, I had hopes for Beniyuri in the beginning. When she first sees Yamato and Karasuba she is the first one to summon a weapon to try and save them, and she does it based off her memory of what Monshiro did when he saved her and Hikage. In retrospect this was probably a narrative misdirection to avoid Hikage being too knowledgeable right at the start, but it was still great that she was the first to figure it out. Until suddenly she can't do it a second time and Yamato has to show her. I mean, sure, you get a nice picture of him helping her out, but it could have been the other way around too.

Initially, Beniyuri seems to be a generic not-to-competent otome game protagonist until you start getting to her flashbacks. Oddly, she was really spirited as a kid. She got upset, fought with her younger sister, and it's surprising to see the contrast between her as a child and her as a teenager. I'd like to say the change in personality is due to the accident, but it's more likely that the social standards for being a mouthy girl in elementary school are different from being a mouthy girl in high school since she's still pretty subdued in the alternate Happy Ending.

What saves her from being generic is her flaws; specifically her inability to let go. She looks happy on the outside, and tries to be upbeat and friendly with Yamato and Karasuba prior to the start of the game, but she's not, and she's hiding it both from her family and her friends.

In fact, one of the nice things about the expanded prologue that encompasses the Real World ending is that you get to see how Beniyuri is consciously trying to keep her distance from Karasuba. She's not blind to the fact he likes her, but she recognizes that she's not in a position to be in a relationship with him. All things said, she'd just like to keep their relationship at being friends.

And as the audience, we can see the disconnect between what she says about Karasuba and the kind of person he presently is, well before he calls her out on it. When the two of them meet Yamato for the first time again in years, she laughs and talks about how none of them have changed, when it's pretty obvious that Karasuba is no longer the soft-spoken little kid he used to be. That's just how she remembers him, and not reflective of his current personality, so it's easy to see why he ultimately blows up over that.

Beniyuri's hang-up over the course of the game is that she feels guilty over Kagiha's death, and this causes her to withdraw because she never wants to lose a friend again. This feeling of guilt is so strong that when Kagiha is taken hostage, her childhood friends refuse to tell her that the reason they're not rushing out to rescue him is because he's already dead. They know that if she knew, then all that guilt would come back again.

The first time I played through I actually didn't understand why she felt so guilty to the point it breaks her during the showdown with Hikage, because I missed that she was the one who suggested they look at the ruins in the first place. Instead I focused on the fact she's the one who suggests they brave the flooded path to escape the ruins. While it wasn't a good idea, they were in a bad situation with few alternatives, so I didn't like that she was beating herself up over making the best of a bad situation, and the choice to go back for a ribbon wasn't hers at all.

It was only on replaying the flashback that I realized Beniyuri is the first to suggest going to the manor, in which case I can understand her blaming everything that happened there on herself. I think that scene needed a little more pushback from other characters. Instead, everyone except for Kagiha agrees with her, making it so easy to forget that it was Beniyuri's idea at all. As a result, I thought she was being excessively hard on herself.

Unlike a lot of otome protagonists though, Beniyuri does grow, and it's not because a new boyfriend swept into her life and made it all better. The finale against Hikage, when she's the only one who can save all her friends, is still a standout moment. It's not merely the physical act of being the only one free enough to shoot, but the fact that by doing so, she's finally accepting that Kagiha is dead and will never return. She faces the truth that she was trying to suppress the entire time in the manor world.

Before passing on, completely this time, Kagiha lets her know that he doesn't regret giving his life for her and his last request is for her to live on. The Beniyuri we see in the best ending (and the Takuya and Aki endings) is finally at peace with the past and ready to let go.

I don't think Beniyuri will end up on any list I make for favorite otome protagonists, but she wouldn't be at the bottom either, because even if I have trouble relating to her, she's still her own character with her own personality rather than a bland self-insert.

VN Talk: Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly - Part 6: Monshiro

Continuing my examination of character arcs in Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly, I saved Monshiro for later because of his unique position as a "secret" route. He's not even featured by name in the opening credits. While everyone else (supposedly) arrives at roughly the same time, Monshiro is clearly an inhabitant of the manor world who has been around a while and knows how it works. In fact, he makes his entrance by shooting one of the monsters that's about to attack Beniyuri and Hikage before leaving without talking to them.

Since he wears a fox mask and has long white hair, Monshiro presents as otherworldly and, more importantly, as an outsider to their group. Of course, Monshiro is not actually an outsider at all, since he's Yamato's brother Kazuya.

I've already discussed the twist involving him and Hikage, but what I hadn't talked about was Monshiro's side of the story.

Unlike Kagiha, Monshiro didn't like working for Hikage because of the cruelty of his games and decided to withdraw. Over the years spent in the manor world he gradually began to forget everything about his past in the real world except for one thing: he had a ribbon he wanted to give back. Even though he no longer remembered Beniyuri, and apparently even lost his face because he was so far gone, he refused to pass on without giving the ribbon back.

Considering he risked his life to go back for the ribbon (and fell into a coma because of it) it's not surprising that his soul would have fixated on it while trapped in-between.

Monshiro's side of the story fills in a lot of gaps in the main plot. Nothing critical, but smaller things like how he came to know where Yamato was hiding (it turns out Yamato's sanctuary was Monshiro's up until monster-Yamato crashed it) as well as how he and Kagiha ended up staying as long as they did in the manor world without passing on or being turned into monsters.

He also is a nice contrast to Kagiha's desire to return to life. Monshiro actually believes he's dead, having no evidence to the contrary (which clears up his confusion about whether or not it's okay for him to go back in the main story). He's only waiting in purgatory to return the ribbon and has no clue that his body is still waiting for him or that he's physically in a coma.

Unlike Kagiha, Monshiro is very much in favor of following the proper order of things and would have departed already if not for the ribbon. He even confronts Kagiha late in the game over Kagiha's willingness to do whatever it takes, no matter how unsavory, in order to return to life; an attitude he finds irreconcilable with the Kagiha he once knew.

In fact, it's their confrontation that blows the cover off the mastermind, when the rest of the group finds Monshiro pointing his gun at Kagiha.

Monshiro gets his memory back at the same time Karasuba and Beniyuri do, when they look at the childhood photo of summer camp, but he chooses not to reveal himself even though he's aware that Hikage is masquerading as him, which is puzzling at first, until you realize that he's been largely alone for ten years. Revealing the truth would have broken the group's friendship dynamic, so even though Monshiro knew the game would eventually end, he didn't want to ruin it before its conclusion, since that would leave him alone again.

(Though as I'm writing this, I'm not sure that quite meshes, since he gives the ribbon back to Beniyuri the first night they actually talk, which means that he should be prepared to pass on. Or at least prepared to pass on after seeing his friends safely off.)

Monshiro behaves rather strangely, being overly cuddly with Beniyuri, though it's played off as not understanding personal boundaries more than intentional harassment (like Karasuba), and that not a bad take on it considering that he was likely six when he landed in a coma and has been starved for human contact for years. At one point he ends up sleeping in the same bed as Beniyuri and it's played completely chaste. Monshiro says he's cold and doesn't want to be alone.

Unlike the other living characters, Monshiro doesn't really have a character arc where he changes because of his time in the manor world. This partially because he didn't have to deal with years of regret following the accident where he nearly drowned, but also because he's the one character who tends to make good choices both in life and in-between.

While that's commendable in a cast where nearly everyone's keeping skeletons in the closet whether they know it or not, it also makes his personal story a little flat. It's well-executed, I felt for him at the appropriate times, but I think that's why his endings felt the weakest. Because he's never been wrong, he doesn't have a chance to grow.

His route is also unusual in that it doesn't follow the main storyline even though he's a living character. The branch to both his endings splits if Beniyuri chooses not to run to Kagiha's rescue at first opportunity. This allows Monshiro to attempt confronting Hikage alone, which works out poorly for him.

It's only lightly touched on elsewhere, but everyone is wearing accessories of some kind that absorb the black butterflies that emerge on killing a monster. What the game doesn't really bother with until this route is that the accessories have a limited capacity and when filled, the person succumbs and is pulled into the Abyss, which is basically the ultimate destination of those who've been turned into monsters. It's pretty much the bad place for a soul to go if they do not properly pass on.

Though Hikage pushes Monshiro to the brink, it's Kagiha who tips him over the edge, and it's not entirely clear whether Kagiha does it maliciously or not. Regardless of why Kagiha does it, a massive hole to the Abyss opens up in the floor of the manor's foyer, which does not go unnoticed by Beniyuri who decides she's going inside to save Monshiro no matter the cost. In what must be one of the most heartbreaking scenes for Kagiha, she gives him her hairclip with the final shard (the one everyone needs to go home) and tells him to use it to go back with the others before diving in. (She doesn't know Kagiha's dead at this point.)

Finding Monshiro is a surreal experience punctuated with flashbacks of his time in-between, and once she locates him in nothingness, Beniyuri has to nudge him into remembering her before they try to leave.

All of this is managed through her mother's ribbon, the one she used to bandage his leg as a child and the one he kept all his years in the manor world to return to her. It feels like a dropped plot thread, but at some point the ribbon had become a talisman to ward off harm. We see this in the main story when Beniyuri becomes corrupted after Kagiha takes the ribbon from her, but there's never any explanation for how the ribbon became able to do that.

Now, somehow, the ribbon is able to serve first as a divining rod to locate Monshiro, and then a wayfinder to point the way out. At the end, it's literally pulling them to safety and the breaking point for the Monshiro vs Kazuya endings is whether or not Beniyuri tries to bring Monshiro up with her even if it means the ribbon could break.

His route is pretty touching, but his endings are substantially less happy either way. In the Monshiro ending he sinks back down and Beniyuri is the only character who wakes up, meaning that Yamato and Karasuba never made it out even though she left her hairpin for them.

The Kazuya ending is a little better since Monshiro wakes up from his coma, but Yamato and Karasuba are still unconscious, and no matter how hopeful Beniyuri frames it, they're probably not coming back. It would have been nice if he had a happier Kazuya ending, given that he's one of the living characters, but I think that narratively it would have been rough since all the good Monshiro scenes are on his own route, since by necessity his identity has to be hidden most of the game.

He's a pretty charming character though, and doesn't come with any of the badass attitude you'd expect from his gunslinging introduction. Instead Monshiro is soft-spoken (in fact he usually sounds like he's having trouble staying awake) and not terribly good at interacting with people, though he often tries with entertaining results.

In the alternate Happy Ending where the original accident never happened, we get to see he's going to the same school as his brother and he's still quirky about getting too close to Beniyuri, though that ending points out how ridiculous it is (much like it does Kagiha's childhood marriage promise). In fact, the Happy Ending plays it off as Monshiro doing the innocent bit as an excuse to get physically close to her, only for Yamato and Karasuba to call him out on it.

It's nice getting a chance to see what he would have been like as a teenager without having been stuck in the manor world (especially since he's pretty worn down in the Best Ending) as he comes off as a relatively normal person, even with the lack of personal space shenanigans.

VN Talk: Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly - Part 5: Karasuba

Most otome games end up having a love interest I don't particularly care for, and Karasuba is Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly's. Though Hikage can be a sexist jerk, he's the kind of jerk I can deal with. Karasuba's actually twisted and I can't see myself ever replaying his route as I was pretty grossed out while reading it. If non-consent is your fantasy, you may not mind, but the fact that Beniyuri said "no" (while she's obviously in emotional distress) and he went ahead anyway is not something I'm down with.

Probably the only saving grace with Karasuba is that he's complicated. I don't think it makes up for him having a rotten personality, but we can understand how that rotten personality emerged.

Karasuba is a year younger than Beniyuri and was bullied as a kid since his family name is "Himeno" and "hime" is the word for "princess." Being a small, non-athletic kid, he was called "princess" as a put-down. (Even Yamato, in one of his less sympathetic moments, did it.) Beniyuri stood up for Karasuba and brought him into her group of friends, which earned her place as his childhood crush.

When the summer camp accident happened, Karasuba was safe, but freaked out over how helpless he was and how he couldn't do anything to save his friends, so when he grew up, he decided to change himself.

Teenage Karasuba projects an air of cocky confidence. However, he's also incredibly distrusting of people, believing that it makes things easier should they ever betray him. Both in the real world and in the manor world, he is incredibly unsubtle in the way he hits on Beniyuri. It's impossible for her not to realize he's flirting with her, and in the manor world it even crosses over into sexual harassment. (Thankfully the worst incidents are either in optional episodes or his manor ending so they're skippable.)

However, despite his lack of propriety, Karasuba does have one good thing going for him, and it's that he's really good at reading people. He's not always nice in the way he uses it, but when they find the summer camp photo that restores the memories for everyone except Beniyuri, Karasuba is the one who takes a moment to comfort Kagiha, recognizing that there's no easy way to bring up to Beniyuri that Kagiha died back then.

Because of this, Karasuba is also the one to reveal that Hikage is the master, because he knew that there was someone Monshiro liked as a kid, even though Hikage professed to have never liked anyone.

However, his insight into people is used less sympathetically in the real world. Karasuba is right when he confronts Beniyuri about the fact she still hasn't gotten over Kagiha. And he's completely correct in that she's so trapped in the past that she only sees him as the little kid he used to be rather than the person he is now. When he rips her for not knowing anything about his years in middle school because she never thought to ask, it's completely understandable. He doesn't like who he was, and he's gone to great lengths to change himself, but she refuses to acknowledge any of it.

What causes him to lose this sympathy is that he also refuses to let her move on at her own pace. Rather than cutting his losses and moving on himself, Karasuba is hellbent on dragging her (and to a lesser degree Yamato) into getting over the past.

From a plot perspective, Karasuba is a necessary instigator. He gets the ball rolling as he's the one who drags Beniyuri and Yamato out to the lake in their ill-fated attempt to say farewell to Kagiha (only for the bus to get in an accident and the three of them to end up in comas as well). And he's also the one who figures out that Monshiro is the real Kazuya. Major plot beats happen because of his involvement, and yet he's the character who's least interested in going back at all.

At one point in the story, depending on how much Beniyuri wants to remember the past, she has the opportunity to sit down with Karasuba and he asks her to forget along with him. On first playthrough she automatically realizes from the conversation that she does want to remember, sending her back on the main route, but after seeing enough of his optional episodes, it's possible for her to choose to forget.

This gives Karasuba essentially what he wants, though it's not clear how any of this happens. It's kind of like the Kagiha Ending, only we don't see a dream vs. reality dichotomy. Is this all a joint hallucination? But the two of them live day in day out in the group hideout, only there's no one else around and no explanation for how this dream world exists, since I think Hikage would want to keep his game going.

All we know is that Beniyuri seems to have forgotten how their situation had come about (convenient), but she also recognizes that there's a part of her that still isn't ready to move into a relationship with Karasuba even though he pushes for it. Specifically it's like there's a shard in her heart, which is a phrase used in the main path to refer to her memory of losing her friends. Despite the fact she even tells Karasuba "no" in regards to a kiss, he does it anyway, and quickly escalates from there.

This is the only ending that results in implied sex and it's not entirely clear how consensual it is. Aside from that, it's pretty nihilistic, with no future for either of them. They wouldn't be returning to life, but it doesn't look like they'll be passing on either.

His Aki Ending is better, mostly because I find real world Karasuba more tolerable. (He's definitely a guy who needs societal restraints.)

Like Yamato's Takuya ending, this follows the main path with Kagiha's sacrifice and the living characters returning to the waking world, and in this one, she agrees to ditch school with Karasuba, much to his surprise (since he thought she'd turn him down as always). While ditching, they sit down and have a proper talk about their feelings and their past, and Karasuba agrees to wait for her to catch up with him instead of forcing her forward, which would have been a way better move if he'd done it earlier.

Though I wanted to feel good about that ending, I couldn't really because then I'd flash back to all the incredibly awful things he did in the rest of the game and his id is just out of control.

VN Talk: Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly - Part 4: Yamato

Back when I thought Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly was a more conventional otome, where there would be a central branching point based off a series of choices I made, I decided that I was going to choose Yamato first. It wasn't because he immediately jumped out at me as a character, but because he didn't do anything to push me away from him (unlike Hikage's sexism and Karasuba's bizarre mix of cynicism and aggressive flirtation).

Though Yamato and Hikage are both brusque and prone to bouts of male ego (one clue that Hikage is not the polar opposite personality Yamato's brother is supposed to be), Yamato's more concerned about what he sees as his own personal integrity than putting other people down, and given his backstory, it's not surprising to see why. He wants to become the better person that he wasn't when he was a kid.

After having finished the game and all its endings, I'd also have to say that I'd be fine if my first playthrough had somehow taken me to Yamato's Takuya ending (Takuya being his name in the real world). It's not possible to unlock on first playthrough, but it feels like a very natural epilogue that isn't necessarily incompatible with the best ending.

Like Beniyuri, Yamato is also a person trapped in the past and unable to let go. And it's for this reason I'm much more sympathetic towards him than Karasuba. Everyone grieves at a different rate, and both he and Beniyuri are still suffering from the decisions they made the day Kagiha died and Monshiro fell into a coma. He and Beniyuri get each other, and we see this in the extended version of the prologue.

If the bus accident that sent the two of them and Karasuba into the manor world had never happened, I think Yamato and Beniyuri would have become close. (I can't say the same for Karasuba.)

Both of them had made regrettable decisions as children that changed who they became as teenagers. Yamato's was especially petty, but also completely in line with the behavior of a jealous six-year-old.

Like all of the boys in their group of childhood friends, he liked Beniyuri, but Yamato has never been a good communicator. As a kid he was brash and bullying, always wanting to do things his way and getting him to compromise would only happen after an argument. So even though he liked Beniyuri, whenever they spoke with each other it had the tendency to turn into a fight.

That was not the case with his twin brother, Monshiro. When they were at summer camp, Beniyuri used the ribbon her deceased mother had given her to bandage Monshiro's leg. Unhappy that she used something so important to her on his brother, Yamato loosened the ribbon later, on the pretense of fixing the bandage. He hoped Monshiro would lose it and she'd get mad at him, which is a jerk thing to do but at six completely believable.

What he hadn't counted on was the heavy rain when they were exploring the manor ruins. If the ribbon had remained securely tied everyone would have made it to safety, but because Monshiro realized the ribbon had fallen off, he went back to the ruins to get it. This caused the delay that separated Beniyuri, Kagiha, and Monshiro from the others and eventually resulted in Monshiro's coma and Kagiha's death.

We learn that as a kid Yamato loved soccer and wanted to eventually become a pro, and this is the memory that Beniyuri kept with her even after his family moved away in the wake of the accident. When they reunite as teenagers, she learns that Yamato is no longer playing. In fact, his life now revolves around his comatose brother. Since he's heard evidence that speaking to a comatose person helps maintain their awareness, he visits Monshiro everyday after school in hopes of someday coaxing him back to the waking world. This means he's not in any clubs at school and soccer is a long lost pastime.

In fact one of the touching moments in the alternate Happy Ending, where no one died or ended up in a coma, is seeing that Yamato is in fabulous athletic shape and still playing soccer.

In the main storyline, teenage Yamato is still not great at communicating, and he's still impulsive, but he's also much more compassionate.

Though he loses all his memories upon entering the manor world like the rest of the cast, the one thing that remains is that he has an incredible drive to get out and he doesn't know why. It's only later once he starts getting fragments of his memory back that he remembers it's because he's afraid his brother will fade away without him.

Interestingly the first time Beniyuri has a bad reaction to the idea of her memories returning is when Yamato reaches for her after telling her about his comatose brother, and it's likely because that moment is similar to one they had walking home together after visiting Monshiro and the two of them realized they were both dealing with losing their loved ones.

Yamato's place in the manor world is mostly removed from the group, which is narratively necessary since he would have blown Hikage's cover much earlier once people started getting memories back. In fact, Hikage only sends Beniyuri the childhood photo of Yamato and his brother right before Yamato is overwhelmed by despair and transformed into one of the manor's monsters, causing him to panic and run away.

This allows the player to start piecing together previous relationships without Yamato confronting Hikage, but the result is that Yamato spends about a third to half the game sitting in a greenhouse that he uses as his own hideout while staying away from the others. The game's not specific about exactly when he gets his memory back, so it's not clear if he tells Beniyuri not to tell the others about his survival because he's figured out Hikage is an imposter, or because he just doesn't want everyone to see him in his monstrous state, but if it's the former I would have liked him to have dropped a hint not to trust Hikage. I don't like the idea that Yamato would have left Beniyuri in danger knowing that there was something very wrong about the group's leader.

Yamato's manor ending is pretty bleak, with him beating himself up over losing his brother and Beniyuri choosing to share in that loss until they are both consumed with despair, but his Takuya ending is a much better showcase of his growth.

This one follows the main story path, but instead of going to the "best" ending where the group takes a memorial trip a year later to say farewell to Kagiha, we're treated to an earlier point in time after Beniyuri has woken from her own coma and is ready to go to school again. She meets Yamato, who has decided to fess up about what he did with the ribbon to his brother and the two of them visit Monshiro who is still in the hospital (not being strong enough to leave given his ten year coma).

Yamato and Monshiro are able to reconcile (and Monshiro admits he was being a bit of a jerk too because he knew showing off the ribbon would make Yamato mad) and on the way home Yamato and Beniyuri decide to begin dating. And I liked it, because the two of them have constantly been on the same page over their past and now, their readiness to move forward.

VN Talk: Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly - Part 3: Hikage

Continuing my character arc discussions for Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly, Hikage was the second of the characters whose character-specific ending I got.

His route is interesting in that it branches from the main story early on, and it has to in order for Beniyuri to get to know him while he's still a sympathetic character. Chronologically, it's the first alternate ending you can get.

Since he's such an effective villain and the main story makes no bones about how twisted he is, I was curious about how they would make him sympathetic. What they do is make it clear that even though Hikage is incredibly sadistic, there are still moments that reflect who he had been in life, giving him a chance to figuratively pet the dog and show a softer side.

Though I like the self-labeled best ending the most, because it wraps everything up, I think Hikage's is probably the most moving ending.

We don't get to know the mastermind in the main storyline, because his time with the group is a front to get his game going. He plays the pragmatic leader because he knows it's effective, but when it's time to drop the charade he becomes a completely different and arrogant personality, so we know him more by what he says and does than what motivates him in the first place.

He wants the kaleidoscope shards collected and gets a bunch of lost souls to work with him on it. Then he breaks them down until they're consumed with despair. He repeats this over and over again while waiting for the final shards to fall in his grasp and he clearly has no intention of helping anybody but himself. It makes him evil, but we don't really understand why he's like this in the first place. We don't even know if he's really human.

His storyline gives us that answer, as well as the story behind his rabbit-masked servant, Usagi.

Hikage's route plays the most like a traditional otome divergence in that it's a very long, fairly developed story branch, and it's only accessible after having completed the best ending, so when the player goes through it, they have the knowledge that he's the master of the manor, even though Beniyuri lacks it.

This gives us his first real pet the dog scene, when we see one of the masked children of the manor. She's scared of being left alone and latches on to Hikage thinking that he might be the older brother she's looking for, but then she realizes he's not. Hikage speaks gently to her and guides her to finding her way to her brother (who clearly has already passed on) and as a result she fades away peacefully to the afterlife.

The thing is, we know there are other souls trapped within the manor besides our main cast, but they're all children. They wear masks because they are so close to forgetting everything they were in life that they don't even have faces anymore, and they use the masks to hide that. Usagi makes it clear that the natural order of things is for souls to forget everything and depart for the afterlife.

This means that in most cases Hikage is allowing the process to proceed normally with children. He primarily incorporates teenagers and adults in his game, and by helping a little girl along after the player already knows he's the villain, we get to see another side of him. There's no advantage for him to be as helpful as he is in this situation as either Hikage the pragmatic leader or the manor's insane master, and it's the kindest we ever see him.

Aware that Hikage still needs to be revealed as the manor's master, the game also lays out a parallel story within the route itself to set him up as a sympathetic character. In one of Kagiha's childhood side episodes, we learn about a story where two white butterflies are separated by death and the living one goes on a journey to see the other again.

In Hikage's route, the title of that story is finally dropped and of course it's Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly. Beniyuri finds the book in the hideout and reads about the still living white butterfly who's looking for psychedelica, the place where the living can meet the dead. Over a long and arduous journey the white butterfly becomes black with dirt, but eventually it finds psychedelica. She's puzzled though when she discovers the end of the book has been torn out, so she doesn't know what the butterfly does once it actually gets there.

Hikage tells her the rest of the story and how it doesn't have a happy ending. Ashamed of how it looks, and fearing the other white butterfly would no longer accept it, the now-black butterfly turns away from psychedelica and dies alone in the desert. Beniyuri disagrees with the ending, thinking that the white butterfly wouldn't care what the other butterfly looked like, but Hikage says he understands how the black butterfly felt, which is important since his personal story parallels it.

(As a side note, the game does show where the last page of the book is. Hikage keeps it in his study! It's just you don't get that scene if you follow the chronology of his route.)

Since Hikage himself is not forthcoming about his true identity, his route handles this through getting to know Usagi. We've known that Usagi is different from the other masked children in that she's actively working on the master's behalf and that she still has a face even though she's wearing a mask. She comes and goes without fanfare to keep the hideout stocked with food or to deliver messages, and Beniyuri gets the idea that she can try plumbing Usagi for information by leaving notes for her in the food basket.

Initially their conversations are a bit silly, especially when Usagi learns that Beniyuri might be attracted to Hikage and tries to play matchmaker, but eventually Usagi decides to lay all the cards on the table in order to save her brother, who turns out to be the manor's master.

That's when Hikage's backstory comes into play.

Usagi was born to a wealthy merchant and his wife in what was probably Taisho era Japan, but was terribly sickly. Eventually, an older brother, Hikage, turned up at their manor, which caused a rift between her parents since Hikage was the child of a mistress and was presumably being brought into the household as an heir under the assumption that Usagi would die before adulthood. Because of this, her mother hated Hikage, but Hikage and Usagi got along well and became close.

Over time, their father's finances dried up, and along with it, the ability to pay for the medicine for Usagi's treatment. Hikage did everything he could to scrounge up the money for it, even debasing himself in front of relatives who hated him, but ultimately failed when the promised medication didn't arrive. Usagi died, and Hikage went insane with grief, killing the uncle who reneged on the promise of medication and then going full-on occult in search of a way to bring back the dead.

This led him to the kaleidoscope, which can breach the barrier between the living and the dead, and he activated it, creating the manor world that now exists in-between. Because he did this on the shore by his manor, the in-between is like a surreal version of the manor he actually lived in (and the ruins the main cast explored as children at summer camp). Hikage shot himself in the head, killing himself, and fell into the water, entering the manor world the same way the rest of the cast did.

This also means like everybody else, he forgot who he was on entry, and the reason everyone's weapon manifests as a handgun is because he shot himself with a revolver.

However, because his intention was to meet with Usagi, she was also pulled into the manor world even though she had properly passed on. This makes her different from everyone else and is why she retains her memories. She would like for her brother to also pass on, but because of his strong attachment to the resentment he had in life, he's unable to fully let go even though he has otherwise forgotten enough that he's become faceless. Usagi hides her face because she doesn't want him to remember her since it makes it harder to move on.

Hikage eventually goes full-blown psychotic mastermind on his own route, but only after we know all of this, and because of Usagi's side of the story, there's now incentive to try to save this guy. The attempt goes poorly, though, and I respect the fact that Hikage's ending is not happy.

When Usagi and Beniyuri try confronting him, he decides they're conspiring against him and shoots at Beniyuri, only to be stopped by Usagi who takes the bullet for her. When Beniyuri removes Usagi's mask at her request, Hikage sees his sister's face and his memory comes back to him, causing him to effectively lose her all over again as she returns to the afterlife.

We also learn that Hikage, like the black butterfly, actually turned away from psychedelica once he found it. Even though he activated the kaleidoscope, he realized that everything he'd done to get that far had changed him into a kind of person he didn't want his sister to see, so he broke the kaleidoscope (yes, he's the reason it's broken in the first place) before shooting himself. Only he didn't realize its power was still active when he died and fell in.

With his memories back, Hikage bids farewell to Beniyuri, knowing she and her friends now have all the shard pieces they need to reassemble the kaleidoscope and leave, and shoots himself again to pass on to the afterlife.

Beniyuri does try to get him to go back with her, but Hikage quite rightly points out that his body has long since rotted so he couldn't go back even if he wanted. (Presumably this is the case for Kagiha as well, but Hikage's ending doesn't bother addressing what happens to him.)

His ending does have a bit of a hope spot, having Beniyuri meet a pair of siblings at the lake in the real world when she comes to say good-bye to Hikage. They're heavily implied to be the reincarnated Hikage and Usagi, and the brother is even wearing a shirt with a black butterfly monogram.

I was surprised by the amount of sympathy Hikage got from me considering what an absolute dirtbag he is in the main route. Even when he's playing the role of party leader, he's sexist early on towards Beniyuri and prickly about what's "manly" behavior. Though he has what as a stand alone piece of art looks like the most passionate kiss in the game, when you actually get to the scene it's a forced kiss with the implication that he could easily go further whether Beniyuri wants him to or not, and this is while he's still playing the part of group leader.

When I first started the game, I thought that I would like Hikage based on his personality type, but he constantly kept shooting himself in the foot as if to remind me that I really should not like this guy. So while I was shocked he was the mastermind, I wasn't dismayed about it.

In a way it's too bad though, because Hikage has some funny scenes where he's fairly likeable. Since he's so uptight as group leader, there's a side episode where everyone realizes that despite being seemingly proficient at everything, Hikage has no idea how a smartphone works. Though Kagiha doesn't either (which is likely because they've both been dead prior to the invention of smartphones), it's a lot funnier with Hikage trying to figure out how to type on a screen that has no buttons, and the eagerness with which he explains his newfound knowledge to Kagiha is charming.

Though it's not a trick of the written narration, there is one visual element of the storytelling that gives an extremely subtle hint that Hikage is not the Kazuya he pretends to be most of the game, and that's the two moles under his left eye. He's introduced as the Two-Moled Man prior to picking a door name and it's a facial feature only Hikage has. Kazuya doesn't have moles in any of his flashback images and once we learn Monshiro is the real Kazuya it's pretty clear that he doesn't have any either.

One thing that I kind of wish had come up regarding Hikage's disguise is that no one asks him what happened in between Kazuya falling into a coma and now. While his disguise is not perfect in other ways (he doesn't behave like Kazuya and there's the facial feature he apparently cannot or chose not to change), it seems asking about the coma ought to have been on people's minds, especially since Hikage says he arrived in the manor the same time as Beniyuri, Karasuba, and Yamato. Hikage doesn't behave like a six-year-old who's been unconscious for the past ten years.

In fact, what gives him away to Karasuba in one of the side episodes is that Hikage ends up answering a question as himself rather than as Kazuya, in regards to whether there's a girl he likes. While it's a nice catch, it's not the first thing I would have asked in Karasuba's place and it seems like Hikage should have expected someone to ask about the coma as part of his disguise. It wouldn't have had to be anything elaborate, he could even say he's not sure, which is why it's weird that the game dances around addressing it at all.