VN Talk: Piofiore: Fated Memories - Part 6: Gilbert

Throughout the game I was wondering why Gilbert was the final love interest, especially since Dante's route felt like it explains so much of the church storyline and Gilbert doesn't seem involved in that at all.

That said, starting his route was a lot of fun because the game knows the player has a certain baseline of information to work with, including the back stories of all the love interests aside from Gilbert, so even if Liliana is bewildered about a three way battle erupting in the church when Yang comes to kidnap her, it's laughingly business as usual to the player. The only thing that was a little weird is that after fighting breaks out between the Lao-Shu and Falzone, Orlok is the one to rescue Liliana from Yang and send her running out into the night clad in nothing but her nightgown while he tries to hold everyone else back.

So while everybody who is aware that she's a valuable person is fighting, who does she bump into but Gilbert Redford, who is out for a late night walk. And I was (probably unintentionally) amused that after offering her shelter and security, Gilbert declared that the safest place in Burlone is next to him. Considering that he is the one love interest who has been killed by every other love interest on at least one other route through the game, I probably would have felt safer with anyone else (barring Yang).

VN Talk: Piofiore: Fated Memories - Part 5: Orlok

Orlok's route is unlocked at the same time as Yang's, by the completion of Nicola or Dante's route, which at first felt like an unusual step, but once I discovered he and Liliana spend almost half the route with the Lao-Shu I could see some kind of logic behind it.

Nicola and Dante are both part of the Falzone, and their routes serve as an introduction to the status quo of the city and how the various characters and factions fit together. Yang and Orlok are a showcase of the Lao-Shu side of the story and why the tension in Burlone has come to a boiling point at this particular moment in time.

But just as the opening routes and the first set of unlocked routes can be grouped together by mafia family, you can group Nicola and Yang's routes as being completely secular and unrelated to the greater story, while Dante and Orlok's can't help but be tangled up by all the church intrigue. Thus, while I don't think it makes much of a difference whether Yang's route is played second, third, or fourth (with Gilbert being a mandatory fifth due to route-lock order), playing Orlok before Dante would be an incredibly different experience.

I don't think it would necessarily be a bad one, but the player would be working with a different set of assumptions for most of the route and I'd be curious how that changes the experience.

VN Talk: Piofiore: Fated Memories - Part 4: Dante

It felt a bit odd playing Dante's route in the middle, because he's the poster boy (usually sharing the spot with Gilbert), but given that I got Nicola first and wasn't sure about doing back to back Falzone routes, this is how things played out. He was a conscious choice rather than a roleplaying one though, since the prologue doesn't introduce new choices with a second route completion and because I knew some spoilers I had a preference to play his route before Orlok's.

Dante is the dedicated boss of the Falzone family, and as such is intrinsically tied to Liliana's own story, and it's in Dante's route that we find out why. In fact his story is so tied to why everyone's fighting over her that some players are surprised he's one of the two routes available at the story of the game, as playing Nicola's route is a fairly straightforward mob story and Dante's shoots off into Da Vinci Code territory.

Though it starts in a similar fashion to other routes, with Liliana falling under Dante's protection and being hustled away to the Falzone manor, and then there's some sitting around at home while lots of mafia dealings are happening, there's a distinct change when the term "Key Maiden" comes up.

VN Talk: Piofiore: Fated Memories - Part 3: Yang

After Nicola, I was a little ambivalent about which route to play next. I didn't outright dislike any of the characters, but neither were any of them jumping out at me as a person whose story I just had to see. I still had a bit of an inclination towards Dante, but I had just played through Nicola who was a Falzone so I wasn't sure I wanted to play a second route back to back from the perspective of the same crime family. Since I had completed a route though, Yang and Orlok had unlocked, so I decided to spin the wheel and role-play through the prologue again to see who I'd end up with.

With the newer, more expanded prologue, I kept all the same answers as last time, and winged it on the newer choices. As you can guess from the title and header of this post, I got Yang. Which meant that it was time to gird my loins and see if this mess was going to be as bad as I feared, because it was Yang's route that made me question whether I wanted to play this game.

Firstly, I can see why Yang is a divisive character among the fanbase. He's a charismatic but amoral man who is very much like a cat who plays with its food, and in this case, this food is Liliana. He makes it quite clear that her life is forfeit if she bores him, and though she is rightly terrified, she does her best to keep her wits about her because his goodwill demands that she does. Or at least she does in the beginning and occasionally in the middle. Other times she has bouts of making nice person appeals under the assumption he knows what compassion is, only to realize for the umpteenth time that he doesn't have any.

If you want to romance an unrepentant villain who doesn't become a better person through the power of love, then Yang isn't a bad pick. He's ruthless and cunning, competent but mercurial, and his habit of doing what he wants when the mood strikes him tends to work in his favor, except that I found it a little less believable when it comes to his treatment of Liliana, since I can't believe that being relatively nice to her is something he wouldn't find boring after a while.

VN Talk: Piofiore: Fated Memories - Part 2: Nicola

As previously discussed, Piofiore: Fated Memories has a short prologue with only a few seemingly noncommittal decisions (only two of which can be made on first playthrough), so I wasn't entirely sure what set me on Nicola's route. I actually was hoping for Dante since Nicola's character design suggests someone disinclined to take things seriously, and he's a flirt, which is a character type that rarely works with me. Nicola didn't disappoint though.

Both Nicola and Dante are part of the leadership of the Falzone family, with Dante being the boss and his cousin Nicola being the underboss, and when Liliana nearly gets kidnapped by the Lao-Shu, they take her into protective custody. She doesn't know why, and Nicola's route doesn't go into the real reason, but she's fairly cooperative about it, understanding that whatever the reason, the Falzone are looking out for her, and the head nun of her church is agreeable to this plan of action.

Nicola's route is a nice pop culture showcase of how a mafia man can be a vicious killer, but also be the same guy who goes to church on Sundays and sets up soup kitchens for the poor. The goons who hang out at the family's residence with Liliana are all friendly to her, and in return she often cooks for them as a way to show her appreciation for handling her safety. Nicola ends up being her primary point of contact, though he's not particularly warm about it. That's not to say he isn't friendly, he certainly flirts with her, but you get the feeling it's an arm's length sort of congeniality. Lili herself takes his kindness at face value, but Nicola never masks the kind of person he is or the line of work he does. In fact it often feels like he's trying to warn her not to get emotionally invested in him.

VN Talk: Piofiore: Fated Memories - Part 1: Overview

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

Platform: Switch
Release: 2020

Piofiore: Fated Memories came out the same year as Cafe Enchante, and while I pre-ordered one of them, the other I did not, despite my love for anime-tinged mafia stories. And the reason for that is largely down to one route that I had read about from an import reviewer.

If you've read enough of my otome VN Talks, you know that I really don't like controlling love interests, particularly when it comes down to dubious consent or attempted sexual assault. I knew one route in this game would contain actual assault, and I wasn't sure I was ready for that.

But as time passed and I absorbed more through osmosis from being around the general otome community, I realized that I probably knew enough that I could go in with a full suit of mental armor and if it really got uncomfortable, I would mash the autoplay button and just come back after the scene was over. So I picked up Piofiore during a sale and added it to my backlog, because I still really wanted a mafia game.

Detective Di: The Silk Rose Murders and Piofiore VN Talk Delay

I'll talk about Piofiore: Fated Memories first since the intention was that I start my seven part VN Talk series (overview, 5 love interests, and finale) today, but after spending far too much time combing through screenshots on my Switch I realized I wasn't going to finish trimming my library down to a manageable level in time for posting.

When I first started blogging about games, there wasn't a lot of screen capture support, particularly for the portable units I favored, so it wasn't until I got my Vita that I could begin transferring things. At first it was just key scenes I thought I might use in my blog, but then I started taking screen caps of dialogue to use as plot references, screen caps of characters' last names or minor character names that might be hard to find online.

It started becoming relatively common for me to take a couple hundred screenshots per route (of which at most 5-6 will be added to the blog) and for some reason that I'm sure I'll understand once I get far enough through the gallery, I ended up taking several hundred (rough estimate of 700-800) of Piofiore's Finale route. I suspect most of that is plot material. Since the Finale isn't going up until seven weeks out, it might seem strange to postpone the first installment of the series while I clear out the entire library, but the thing is, when I have so many it becomes incredibly hard to figure out which are the best to use and I want the overview to be a look at the game as a whole. Which in a way is the opposite problem I had when I first started with Vita games, where it was more common for me to not have an appropriate screenshot at all.

Out of the 2300 screenshots, I started with, I only managed to get down to 2000 in the time I expected to do my blog editing. And it wasn't particularly hard to do either. I have a lot of stuff I don't need to save. One problem particular to Piofiore is that some of the details I screenshotted for reference turned out to be lies or misdirection so I ended up deleting what are the equivalent of my notes for plot points that don't actually matter. I'm about halfway through my third route, and as mentioned, the finale seems to be hogging the lion's share. By the time I'm done I expect they'll still be in the hundreds, but better than two thousand. Fingers crossed for next week.