RPG Talk: The Caligula Effect: Overdose

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

Platform: PS4 (also on Switch and Windows)
Release: 2019

I was interested in the original The Caligula Effect from the day I first heard about it, when it was still a Japan-only title that might never be localized. I liked the idea of characters trying to escape a virtual world that they originally arrived at in order to avoid the pain and trauma in their real lives. And the game had a pedigree, having been written by one of the original Persona writers, from before Persona 3.

However, Caligula Effect was plagued with gameplay and loading issues so I ultimately decided to pass on it.

Then The Caligula Effect: Overdose was announced with additional content, a new game engine to go with the new consoles it would be releasing on, and perhaps the best form of advertising; an anime series. I ended up reviewing the anime at Diabolical Plots and while it was flawed, I really liked the core of it. So when Overdose released, I bought it.

Though the loading issues are gone, The Caligula Effect: Overdose is still a flawed game with a flawed story that I think otherwise had so much potential.

What I liked about the game is that it pulls from a wide range of reasons that a person in pain might withdraw from the world. Every playable character suffers from a personal trauma. Some of the traumas are definitely in the vein of "Yes, that's a problem!" and it's easy to see why someone suffering from bereavement or body dysmorphia could find solace in another reality. But even the more "mundane" issues can still mean a lot to the right person, and I'll get to specifics after I lay out how the story is arranged.

Much like the Persona series, Caligula has your band of high schoolers with issues who come together for a purpose. Only they're not actually high schoolers. The only people in the virtual world of Mobius who are "real" appear as high school kids, but could be any range of ages in the real world.

All of them have realized that Mobius is fake and decided that they want to go back to reality. As with Persona 4 and on, the cast delves into one dungeon after another that focuses on individual characters and gradually more people join the party as we run into more dungeons.

The problem with Caligula Effect and particularly with Overdose is that there are too many damn characters! Our heroes are part of the Go-Home Club, and for every one of them, there is a Musician on the antagonist side, who is fighting to preserve Mobius. Each dungeon beyond the first focuses on a duo, one member of the Go-Home Club and one Musician, who are thematically linked in some fashion. For instance, Mifue has body dysmorphia that makes her starve herself, and she shares a focus dungeon with Sweet-P, who likes to eat but hates being fat.

This gives us a cast of twenty humans plus two virtual idols, μ and Aria, who are the ones responsible for creating Mobius in the first place. With few exceptions, when the plot demands it, there is no time in the main game to do more than touch on the problems these characters are facing, leaving their personal stories for the optional Character Scenarios.

Persona does this as well, but it's much better integrated because Caligula does not have an in-game calendar. Instead, new scenarios are unlocked by dungeon progression, and because there are only so many dungeons in the game (even with the four new characters original to Overdose) this usually means you'll end up doing scenarios back to back.

You also can only do scenarios after having done their dungeon (with the exception of Shogo and Thorn, being the final duo), so with late game characters, this creates an unfortunate logjam where you'll end up doing six or more scenarios in a row because the game is ending and you literally could not start sooner, but the scenarios themselves treat the story as happening over several days, which is frankly baffling.

And this is too bad, because with room to breathe, these characters really could have been something. This cast is broken and it is absolutely no surprise when their secrets come out why they could have been seduced into leading a virtual life where they don't have the problems they have in the real one; whether it is a lack of self worth, grief, or fear. No problem, whether society would consider it big or small, is beneath μ's desire to help.

Suzuna's trauma is referred to as "lunchmate syndrome" where she ate lunch by herself in the bathroom because she didn't want to be seen as having no friends to eat with. It sounds like a nothing problem, high school angst that she'll eventually get over. But it was traumatic for her and that's enough reason for μ to want to give her a better life in Mobius.

And Sweet-P's trauma, if handled with more time and sensitivity could have been amazing (cw: transphobia).

Unsurprisingly, Sweet-P would like a world where she looks like her ideal self, which is physically a far cry from her real world body (not just in terms of gender), and because of that she's one of the Musicians, the game's antagonists. Her character scenarios focus on her dissatisfaction with her real world life, being in middle age and considering gender reassignment surgery, and what it's like being assigned male but liking stereotypically feminine things (especially as an older person with a masculine appearance). In more capable hands her story really could have been good!

So it's terrible that the Go-Home Club, despite being the heroes, frequently says things like "she's actually a man" and outs her status to other characters who otherwise wouldn't know. Worse, the game pulls stupid crap like having everyone pause before the gendered doors in the sauna dungeon so one of the characters can wonder which door she used. Though only the group's meathead thinks Sweet-P would have gone into the men's sauna, showing that most of the characters are aware she thinks of herself as female, they clearly don't agree with her assessment of herself from their behavior elsewhere.

And then the game does things like walk back whether Sweet-P is actually transgender and maybe she's really just a middle-aged man who likes cute things, which could be fine if not for the fact it feels more like the writer got cold feet. I mean, that earlier scene in the sauna where Sweet-P is approached by Ayana felt like serious transgender fear of being attacked for not having the right body type and not the fear of a man being caught in the wrong bath.

My one consolation is that if the player wants to do her character scenarios, they have to be supportive, as expressing disgust or hate towards her gender results in the player being locked out of her stories. So even if the rest of the party behaves poorly, the player is encouraged not to.

Characters aside, Caligula suffers a lot from the same new enemy, new dungeon scenario that Persona 5 does. The Go-Home Club needs to get to μ to force her to let them go home, and μ is working with the Musicians to keep Mobius running, so each dungeon is basically "Hey, we're chasing down another Musician!" culminating in a fight with said Musician, and after a few dungeons the formula starts to get stale. That Overdose actually adds another two dungeons does not help.

What Overdose does add that kind of works is allowing the player to join the Musicians as a covert operative, unlocking the Musician character scenarios, so the characters are not as flat as they were in the original game, and allowing the player character to unlock another ending.

This addition is not all that clean, and in fact results in even more dungeon running as you now revisit dungeons with Musician party members and fight the Go-Home Club, but if you're going to play anyway, it's worth it for the character scenarios. It's not for the added plot.

Ostensibly Thorn is trying to convince the player as the Go-Home Club president to side with the Musicians by seeing the story from their side, but ultimately she ends up brainwashing most of the Musicians to force them to continue fighting for Mobius, and she doesn't do this with the player protagonist. Obviously this is because removing player control would be bad, but this could have been handled with an ultimatum where the player stays or leaves when faced with the brainwashing, so at least Thorn would know that an unbrainwashed player agreed with her. It doesn't seem right that she would have let the player do as they please as a loose cannon.

Thorn as the lead villain is all right. Her ultimate goal is completely insane, destroying the world because her deceased friend no longer exists in it, but that's fine given that this is the game for characters with issues. What I disliked about her was actually added in the Overdose route.

The whole reason the Musicians are fighting the Go-Home club instead of kicking out the people who want to go home anyway, is that denying Mobius's reality as authentic actually causes Mobius to become unstable. The Musicians are trying to preserve the status quo, and for many of them, going back to the real world would be unbearable. Even for someone as unpleasant as Mirei, staying in Mobius means spending time with a loved one who is dying and otherwise confined to a bed. For Kuchinashi, it means living with the family she lost to an arson fire.

But in the Musician route, Thorn oddly threatens the Musicians with sending them back home to keep them in line, which completely contradicts why the Go-Home Club is a problem to begin with. There's no reason to keep this a secret as sending them home would solve everyone's problems and be a win-win for all around. Even if Thorn was keeping this secret on purpose to keep Shogo around for torment, the other Musicians should have said something.

Sadly, this feels par for the course for this game. It's got a lot of interesting ideas, fits and starts of something cool, but it just can't pull it together into the exceptional experience it could have been. I liked the bits I found, and seriously, if the character traumas had been given the proper room to breathe this could have been a highly memorable cast, but this is a case of where the parts are better than the whole.

VN Talk: My Vow to My Liege - Part 5: Wu Zixu

This is the last installment of my My Vow to My Liege VN Talk series. As mentioned before, beware of spoilers since I will cover plot points up until the end of his route.

If there is any character that the title My Vow to My Liege applies to, it's Wu Zixu. Though all the love interests are loyal (or not) to Fuchai, Wu Zixu's vow is front and center from the common route on. He clearly states that his goal in life is to see his king and country prosper. Though he and Fuchai disagree a lot, particularly on the common route, it feels like constructive disagreement. He's there to point out the things she can't or won't see, and there's no doubt that he will never abandon her, no matter what decisions she makes. Zixu dies on half the routes, protecting her kingdom in her absence after getting her to safety.

It was really hard not to like the guy after that, and I was glad I saved his route for last as it let me end the game on a high note. Not only is his route the most unique out of the four (the march to Qi doesn't happen at all), but it's replaced with palace intrigue and more nods to history than any other route, including Goujian's. He even quotes the classic poem Young Reeds Before Flowering (蒹葭) that is used as the lyrics for the ending credits song.

My only disappointment was that his bad ending didn't include his historical line to Fuchai that his eyes be posthumously hung on the gates of Gusu so he could watch the capital's capture. I guess that wouldn't have made for a tragically romantic ending, and I did like his actual bad ending, which flips an earlier question Fuchai had about what the king would be without her prime minister, making it clear that neither of them are anything without the other.

I suppose that was a dismal note to start things off with, so let's get to the meat of his route.

Getting Zixu's route involves pissing off Goujian (by being willing to kill him as a scapegoat), which I was all for, and results in a much more contentious king of Yue for the rest of the story. I found I liked it when Fuchai stops backing him up so much. And the thing is, even though Zixu's warnings about Goujian seem overly much during the common route, he's absolutely right about him.

Once the naval battle happens, Fuchai returns to the capital after hearing about a possible coup, only to find out that Wu Zixu is being dunked on by the rest of the palace ministers, led by Bo Pi (who historically was bribed by Goujian). Because Gusu's granaries were damaged on his watch, Zixu temporarily exiles himself from court.

This eventually leads to Zixu being framed for treason once mind-controlled Chenfeng "confesses" to setting the city on fire on Zixu's orders. And Goujian, who is providing much needed food aid to Ng, lets Fuchai know that he was shot during the naval battle by Ng forces (which we know from Goujian's route was done on Zixu's orders).

Fuchai's ministers push for her to execute Zixu and she's furious that she seems to be the only one who trusts him. She demands to see the room in the palace where he's being held and her ministers are clearly afraid that allowing her a private conversation with him will convince her to spare him, but she's so upset that no one dares deny her.

What happens next is one of my favorite scenes. She wants to convince Zixu to become her husband (and even tries to undress before he stops her) because, she reasons, the father of the future king would be above reproach. But Zixu, being the guy that he is, tells her that she should execute him, even if the charges are false (mostly, he did give the order to kill Goujian). He tells her that she can't run a country without her ministers, and in aggregate she needs them. If his dying preserves the peace, so be it.

Fuchai does not take this very well. And to the player it looks like she angrily respects his wishes when she tosses a sword at him and tells him to stab himself, leaving her to fly solo for much of the remainder of his route. We even see his "corpse" hauled out after said stabbing.

While I was not surprised he would come back later in the story, since it was far too early to be either a good or bad ending, I wasn't sure how that would happen. And I definitely did not think that faking his death (by not quite stabbing himself lethally enough) would be the case.

Apparently "stab yourself to end things once and for all" is code for "fake your death and escape the city with a bunch of loyal followers" so Zixu can save the day when Goujian and the Kingdom of Qi try sacking Gusu. I am hoping something was just lost in translation (perhaps a reference to a historical event?) because I couldn't read into the exchange so Zixu's return came out of left field. I thought it would be more likely that the dream world (when Fuchai is trying to become master of the Ding of Virtue) would revive him somehow, since she's able to influence the past in it.

Still, Zixu's route ended up being my favorite of the bunch. I really liked how forward Fuchai was, from initially suggesting the marriage as an off the cuff method of getting Zixu back in court, to seriously trying to get him to marry her to save his life, to actually marrying him in the epilogue. Having all the palace intrigue didn't hurt either.

Fuchai remains king in Zixu's good ending and they have a daughter, who will inherit the throne since Fuchai has since made amendments to the law to allow a woman to become king. The implication is that Fuchai herself still presents as male at court though (likely to make sure that the law has teeth) and her marriage to Zixu is a secret.

I'm not surprised by that, since it's likely something he would have been in favor of, but I'm a wee bit disappointed that we find out he's stepped down as prime minister in his good ending, since it's not clear what he's doing with his time anymore. Their daughter is recognized as the legitimate heir, so she's probably being taken care of by palace nursemaids (if not Chenfeng, who is babysitting in this ending), so Zixu probably has lots of time on his hands now.

VN Talk: My Vow to My Liege - Part 4: Yiguang

I was probably the most ambivalent going into Yiguang's route because there isn't much to his story aside from being a mage. Though Wu Zixu distrusts both him and Goujian, Yiguang is in less precarious a position. The only black mark against him is that he faked his death five years ago when the rest of the Shi clan sacrificed itself instead of continuing his family's service to the king. Unlike Goujian, he never raised arms against the kingdom.

We meet Yiguang living as a simple village doctor, with the respect of the people around him, and given the flashbacks we have through Fuchai, there's no reason to doubt that he's anything other than the kind-hearted soul he appears to be. The question really is why he never came back after the sacrifice, and it turns out to be a very mundane but relatable reason. He was afraid that Fuchai would have changed over the years and she'd no longer be the childhood friend he remembered.

Considering that was the one element of the unknown going into his route, it was harder to get excited about it. Yiguang is continually himself, with few ups and downs, and we don't end up seeing any new sides of him.

What makes his route markedly different from the others though, is that we get to visit two places that he otherwise visits alone in other routes. So we get to be with him when retrieves the Azure Dragon Sword from the hidden palace of the Shi family and when he goes to Haojing to find the Body of the Ding of Virtue. Both trips make for a nice change of pace from the march to attack Qi, though they don't sync up with the rest of the story very well.

For instance, Yiguang and Fuchai leave the army after the naval battle to go to the hidden palace, with an agreement to meet up with everyone else at Han City afterward, but when they come back, they apparently don't meet up with the army after all and head back to the capital of Gusu where they find out that the army has been sent north to attack Qi by a fake Fuchai (actually the Dragon God, though apparently without needing her blood to maintain the disguise as he did on Chenfeng's route). This sends the two of them right back out of the city to catch up with the army so everyone can head south again.

Though this happens to some degree on most routes, since there's usually a march to Qi, and sometimes a GuSu visit between the naval battle and the march, it feels particularly needless given how quickly they turn around. Yiguang is already tied for the shortest route in the game despite being the poster boy since his route skips having a chapter in Linzi, the capital of Qi.

As a love interest, Yiguang does all right as the unwavering childhood friend, and I suspect the reason Chenfeng ends up mind controlled is to mark a clearer difference between the two. There's little romantic angst on Yiguang's route save that Fuchai is aware she is likely to die before achieving any kind of happy ending with him, and unlike Chenfeng, Yiguang is not shy about letting her know his feelings.

Despite that, I felt a little let down. His Jade Fish talisman saves Fuchai many times over, and it's something he gave her years ago even though (or perhaps because) it's intended only for his soulmate. But I just felt the romance wasn't earned. They've been apart for most of their teenage years, but there's very little sorting out their feelings and getting reacquainted before they suddenly exchange marriage vows before the final battle.

I did like the climax of his route better than the others though, because the Dragon God is actually active around the ritual site where they prepare to kill him, and because Fuchai ends up doing it on her own without the ritual while Goujian is completely freaking out because she's discovered the Dragon God's hidden weakness. (She really hates Goujian for his betrayal on this route, which I'm all for.)

I'm less keen on the death fake-out though, because it's fairly obvious on Yiguang's route which are the good vs the bad choices, so the fact that it looks like Fuchai's dying in the good ending is pretty cheap. Much like in Chenfeng's ending she ends up faking her death, leaving the kingdom to her cousin, and this time leaves on a journey to see the world with Yiguang.

VN Talk: My Vow to My Liege - Part 3: Goujian

Even though Yiguang is the poster boy of My Vow to My Liege, I feel like the game may have been created with Goujian in mind as his route is the longest out of all of them.

I had a difficult time with Goujian's route, not because of the being on opposite sides thing (star-crossed lovers from feuding nations is all right with me), but because both he and Fuchai keep running hot and cold throughout the entire run. In the beginning of Goujian's route, when he's trying to figure out whether Fuchai actually trusts him, it was understandable, but as it wore on, I kept wanting them to make up their minds whether they loved or hated each other, and one or the other or both would keep bouncing between love, hate, and more rarely ambivalence (that wouldn't last).

I suppose, being a romance game, the answer is ultimately yes, even in the bad ending, but it's a long conflicting road with a fair bit of mood whiplash. The changing feelings are more understandable when prompted by something, but sometimes they aren't, so it's frustrating when they won't commit.

Like other routes, Goujian's story diverges following the naval battle with the Kingdom of Qi, during which Ng's supply ships were attacked. Given that the ships were traveling through a hidden route through the river tributaries that few knew about, there had to be a mole on the Ng side of the battle. If the player has gone through any other route first, it's pretty obvious that the mole is Goujian, but Fuchai at this point in time is still fully trusting of him. She and Goujian just swore a hundred years of friendship between their kingdoms and she released him to go back to his people.

Following the battle Goujian is prickly with her because it's obvious there was a mole, and he's the most glaring suspect. She says she trusts him, but he finds that difficult to believe given the circumstances, and when he pushes her to swear that she does not suspect him, she refuses on account of him acting so defensive.

What can be difficult to see, particularly in the early chapters of his route, is that Goujian has been getting mixed signals from Fuchai for a long time and his anger is nothing recent. We know they met before he realized that she was actually the king of Ng, which is why they use the affectionate nicknames Ahyu and Ahjiu, but we don't get the circumstances until his route when Fuchai enters the Spiritual Realm and lives out a mirror version of his circumstances, where Ng is defeated and Fuchai is the one enslaved.

This lets us see how Goujian came to care about the one person in Ng who was kind to him, while also feeling betrayed upon learning that his "friend" was also the king holding him prisoner and demanding his people pay tribute. While Goujian did not know who Fuchai was at first, it was impossible for Fuchai to not have known Goujian's identity, making the sincerity of her friendship suspect. Unfortunately for Goujian, he'd already started crushing on her by then, which made him extremely conflicted and understandably upset, leading him to forging an alliance with the Dragon God and his followers.

This revelation comes very late in his route though, leaving his behavior bewildering for most of it. He betrays Fuchai at the naval battle, but then he's mushy with her on the road to war with the Kingdom of Qi. A short while later he betrays her again at the conference with the Kingdom of Jin by ripping open her clothes to expose her chest and gender to the other kings, and then he's… sorry about it (or not, depending on choices made).

From Goujian's point of view I understand why he backstabbed Fuchai at the conference. He swore his revenge would not come without Fuchai suffering the ultimate humiliation, and his action, aside from being devastatingly personal, theoretically put the entire Kingdom of Ng on the backfoot. Being her lover at the time probably helped wedge the knife in, and I'm fine with that if Goujian's decided that his commitment is to his revenge, but being apologetic while exposing her didn't work for me. He can't have it both ways.

I'm less surprised that Fuchai's feelings bounce around after his second betrayal, but she seems surprisingly forgiving of it. Even in the bad ending when she's reconciled herself to the fact that they're enemies, it feels more like she's lamenting that their relationship can never be because they're the kings of two nations at war rather than because he placed his desire for revenge over her.

The good ending also felt a little… easy, considering what Goujian has done. Despite what happened at the conference, Ng having an openly female king turns out to be a non-issue and Fuchai gets to marry Goujian. I don't know exactly how that leaves things in his home nation of Yue, but Wu Zixu makes it clear that Goujian is marrying into Fuchai's family, and not the other way around. Goujian is a little put out, but that didn't bother me. If nothing else, I'm glad Fuchai didn't step down and/or run off with him.

But this made the conference chapter very irritating to me. Literally the only reason it exists is for that scene where Goujian humiliates Fuchai, because it doesn't appear on other routes, and has no bearing on the remaining story beats, not even the Goujian specific endings. It doesn't even bother to show the reactions of the other kings before putting Fuchai back on a boat for her capital, further cementing the fact everything about the conference was irrelevant except for Goujian.

I think if not for the conference scene, and if Fuchai had just been a little more suspicious of him, I would have liked Goujian's route better, but I just can't forgive him.

VN Talk: My Vow to My Liege - Part 2: Chenfeng

Chenfeng was my first route in My Vow to My Liege and he was initially a character design pick. Not too ostentatious, not too stern. He looks like a nice guy and one of the kinder characters in the cast. And when I saw how close he was with Fuchai in the opening that sealed the deal. As the king's bodyguard, attendant, and childhood friend, Chenfeng is in on her secret, and since she obviously can't have female servants helping her in and out of her royal clothes, he's the one who does it. There's no blushing, no sexual tension. When he's combing her hair you can see that this is just daily life for the two of them.

Out of the four love interests, Chenfeng is the least "special" with no magic powers or titles (former or present). He was a battlefield orphan who the king took in out of pity (possibly on a whim) and brought into the palace to be his daughter's playmate. While growing up he was constantly aware of his lower status and even though Fuchai called him her friend, he knew that other people might not necessarily see it that way.

Fuchai wasn't completely braindead about his concerns, and tried to raise his standing. Though it's only a background note and does not impact the story, she arranged for no less than Sun Tzu to mentor him. (Sun Tzu was one of the ministers of her father's kingdom in history, so this is not as large a stretch as it seems.) Chenfeng is commented on as being talented enough to be a general, though he refuses to take such a position.

Because, as is obvious to us if not to our protagonist, Chenfeng is in love with Fuchai and would rather spend his life at her side. As her bodyguard and commander of the Royal Guards he goes almost everywhere with her, at least until he's badly injured in the common route. Though the poor guy wants to do nothing but keep carrying out his duties, Fuchai keeps pushing him off to rest. That's not to say he doesn't continue to show up, because he does, and frequently, but it prevents him from being omni-present, which I think is a good thing. (With a side bonus of showing how much he wants to be with her because he keeps getting out of bed.)

I didn't initially like the start of his route because Chenfeng starts acting out of character, becoming brusque and possessive. Fuchai is taking greater and greater risks that are likely to get her killed, and Chenfeng, who is already doing his damnedest to keep her safe, feels like she doesn't respect how hard he's working for her. Worse, he knows that with mages and the Dragon God around, he can't fight that kind of power because no matter how good a swordsman he is, he's helpless against the supernatural.

His reasons are sympathetic, but his actions aren't. It might start with him becoming overly vengeful towards Fuchai's enemies, but he ends up imprisoning her in her room of the palace so she can't leave. He even suggests, quite forcefully, that she should give up being king so she can live as Tengyu again.

What saves this (from me punting his route as a surprise yandere ruining what I thought was a sweet love interest) is that it turns out Chenfeng is being corrupted by the Dragon God's magic from when he was injured and sent in to the human sacrificial array earlier in the story. His route gets even more dismal when it becomes clear just how little of his own self-control remains and how his devotion to Fuchai has been twisted.

Probably the best part, which will sound strange because I talked about his devotion being twisted, is that when Fuchai enters the Spiritual Realm to save him, she realizes that what she saw is a part of him. It's just it's not the only part. She comes across two dueling Chenfengs espousing conflicting views over how best to care for Fuchai (both of them make good and bad points), and when they demand she choose between them, the best choice is to acknowledge that both of them are a part of Chenfeng.

If Fuchai does everything right, Chenfeng is able to break free from the Dragon God's magic and will join her in the final battle to retake the capital of Gisu from the Dragon God. If she doesn't, Chenfeng remains controlled. She manages to kill the Dragon God in both the good and bad endings of Chenfeng''s route with rather surprising ease for a final confrontation (not even famous last words from the Dragon God himself), with the difference being that both Chenfeng and Fuchai die in the bad end, having inflicted mortal wounds on each other.

While I expected some sort of tragedy for his bad end, I hadn't expected it would run all the way up to the end of the storyline, or to hit me emotionally, but there was just something poetic about Fuchai turning into water to join the waters of the lake and for Chenfeng (after coming to his senses) to become the wind so he can continue to be beside her. (Bonus: "Wind" is one of the characters in Chenfeng's name.)

I particularly liked his good ending though, which sees Fuchai give up the throne (now that the Dragon God is gone and the Sacred Vow broken) to her cousin while pretending that she fell in battle against the Dragon God. This frees her to live a nondescript life with Chenfeng away from all her previous duties where she can be Tengyu again. And I have to admit I like the fact she ships her cousin with Princess Shaojiang. Maybe that marriage alliance between Ng and Qi can still happen.

VN Talk: My Vow to My Liege - Part 1: Overview

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

Platform: Windows
Release: 2020

I picked up My Vow to My Liege for a few reasons. One was that it's set in ancient China, which is unusual for an otome game, but also because it's by a Chinese developer (no chance of being exoticized by outsiders) and I heard that it has a good translation.

This title is less than a year old as of this writing, so be aware there will be spoilers as I get further into my discussion.

My Vow to My Liege is set during the Spring and Autumn period of Chinese history, probably during 492 BC given that Fuchai has been king for three years. Five years prior to the story, Fuchai's father tried breaking the Sacred Vow that bound their family and their kingdom to the deceitful Dragon God, but rather than killing it, they were only able to seal it away, at the cost of the entire Shi clan (the head priest and priestess's family) and all of King Helü's sons, including the real Fuchai.

The game's Fuchai is actually Tengyu, Helü's daughter. Since a woman cannot rule, and the Sacred Seal binding the royal family to the Dragon God can only appear on the bodies of those of the bloodline, Tengyu took on the name of her youngest brother in order to become her father's heir. When he died, she became king, and only those closest to her are aware that she is a woman.

Naturally this introduces complications, as the Spring and Autumn period is a fractured time in Chinese history with multiple smaller kingdoms rather than a single empire. Fuchai wants to keep her kingdom safe while also researching ways to sever her kingdom's connection to the Dragon God, and one of the traditional ways is to form a political alliance through marriage.

It's not surprising that Fuchai wonders about the point of it all when she would never be able to produce a child with a wife, but she still proceeds with the marriage proposal because it's too important not to. As for how getting a blood-related heir would be conceived, her prime minister advises her at one point to pick a random guy, get pregnant, and he will handle disposing of her partner to keep it secret. She's not keen on the idea.

Fuchai is a complicated character. She wears her royal mask well and is capable of thinking like the man she pretends to be both in terms of romantic interest (she admits that if she really was a man, she would love to marry Princess Shaojiang) and as a king with too much to lose. There aren't too many otome heroines who will unhesitantly cut off an enemy's hand during an interrogation. No one prompts her to do it. She does it on her own without any dramatic build-up because she's out of time and needs answers from enemy agents who are willing to kill themselves, but might speak up to avoid being maimed. (She gets the info from the maimed prisoner's partner after making an example out of the first one.)

That isn't to say that Fuchai is all about being a ruthless king. She has moments of vulnerability, and she wants to live as a woman instead of being trapped by her filial and national obligations, but she's also capable with a sword and will go to hell and back for those she calls "friend."

This makes it unfortunate that part of her backstory deals with attempted rape (and attempted suicide following the attempted rape) because it really doesn't do anything to advance her character. She's already compelling without it and barring one romance route, her experience in the past has no impact on her present. It's just there like it's part of the atmosphere.

Since Fuchai is (sort of) a historical character, one of the more interesting things about the game are the other historical characters around her. This is an otome, so that means there are love interests. The game gives us four, three of whom are historical; Wu Zixu, her prime minister, Goujian, an enemy king currently held by her kingdom as a slave, and Shi Yiguang, historically one of Fuchai's concubines but in this case a male mage and childhood friend. Chenfeng, Fuchai's attendant/bodyguard/childhood playmate, rounds out the group as the fourth option.

Because of this history, savvy players are likely to have expectations on how things will go and who to trust, which can run counter to what Fuchai believes. Given that Goujian is historically famous for nursing his revenge (there's even a proverb about his dedication to doing do) it's quite likely that a Chinese player wouldn't be surprised that Goujian betrays Fuchai on most routes, even if Fuchai herself is. Goujian does a pretty good job of pretending to be cooperative, even saving Fuchai's life at one point, all in the name of obtaining the freedom he needs to do the real damage.

For an otome, My Vow to My Liege leans heavily into dense military action sequences, which is an unusual choice for the genre. Due to Fuchai's duties and the eventual escape of the Dragon God from his imprisonment, she and her love interest have to deal with finding sacred artifacts and threats from other nations. There are land battles, sea battles, operations in another kingdom, filling the middle to late parts of the game with a lot of warfare. And for those liking proactive heroines, Fuchai is in the thick of it, from participating in planning stages (where as king she is the final word) to charging in with her escort herself.

Fuchai also doesn't spend much time wondering about what love is or baffled about the feelings she's having. She acknowledges the affection she has for the men in her life fairly easily, but she does not know what her future will be or if she'll even have one, which is probably the most mood-dampening aspect of her romances. When the Dragon God's plans begin in earnest, the Sacred Seal on Fuchai's chest keeps acting up and it's clear that it's slowly killing her. One of the reasons she tells Wu Zixu that she cannot agree to his secret pregnancy plans is that she doesn't know if she's going to be around long enough with a rogue Dragon God running around.

Fortunately, on most routes the romance and the Dragon God plot move hand in hand, so confronting her feelings about her love is woven in a naturalistic fashion. Between events like Chenfeng being brainwashed by the Dragon God and Wu Zixu being framed by the Dragon God's followers, it makes it understandable why Fuchai would devote time to her affections even though she's simultaneously trying to take down a god.

And no matter what happens, Fuchai will always take down the Dragon God, even in her bad endings. I really appreciated the game's fidelity in sticking to her main quest since some otome will drop the heroine's story in favor of focusing on the love interest's goals in certain routes. Before anything else, it's Fuchai's mission, which only makes sense when she's the liege of the title.

I'd also like to talk about Shaojiang, who plays a major role in the story. She's introduced as Fuchai's fiancée for the arranged marriage, but she's a determinator herself and a powerful mage. When she gets kidnapped by the Dragon God's followers and trapped in the Human Sacrificial Array, she ends up fighting them from inside of it.

After her initial surprise at learning Fuchai's gender, she doesn't freak out or complain about wanting to break the marriage because her husband-to-be is actually a woman. It's just another fact and she doesn't treat Fuchai any differently for it. One ending even suggests she's still sweet on Fuchai and that's the reason she's refusing another marriage proposal. Though, she is a bit of a shipper herself and happily arranges for Fuchai to get some alone time with her chosen man, providing that Shaojiang approves of the match.

As with many otome, there is a common route, a fairly substantial one, that establishes the setting and the characters before branching, and the routes are long enough that I'll be breaking the game up into a series of posts like I do for most of the longer otome I play. So next week will start with Chenfeng!

VN Talk: Psychedelica of the Ashen Hawk

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

Platform: PS Vita (also on Steam)
Release: 2018

Psychedelica of the Ashen Hawk is the second game in the Psychedelica duology, and it's a much different animal than its predecessor, Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly. It changes the setting from a Gothic mansion to what appears to be a fantasy European town and introduces us to a new heroine, Jed, who is a much livelier protagonist than Beniyuri. All the horror and suspense elements are gone, in favor of following Jed's day to day life in a town ruled by two feuding families.

I spent a good portion of the story wondering how the two games were connected, because the opening movie pulls scenes from Black Butterfly, but the connection is more for thematic reasons. Yes, it becomes clear they are a part of the same multiverse, possibly the same world if you assume that Jed's town is in the Europe of our world at a different point in time, but the only thing that really connects the two games (other than reincarnation shenanigans) is the fact they both take place in psychedelica; the intermediary world between life and death.

Playing this game is likely a vastly different experience depending on whether one has played Black Butterfly. Though Ashen Hawk is largely a stand alone experience, with only the Heroine Ending's epilogue likely to raise eyebrows for newcomers, Psychedelica vets will likely be looking for the meaning of the title, already knowing what psychedelica is, and being familiar with the previous cast.

Given that, I thought the game was pretty ballsy for rolling out a character called Ashen Hawk as the very first face a player meets outside of Jed herself, as it pretty much screams that it's his psychedelica. And it sort of is? I'll get to that later.

Seeing reincarnated versions of Black Butterfly's Kagiha and Hikage was also a nice surprise. The game is coy about their identities, since there's no reason to directly spell out who they were previously, but they have the same VAs and similar (but not exact) character designs. I loved how when I first met Lawrence I just knew he was Kagiha even though the voice was a little older (Lawrence isn't a teenager) and the hair style was different. Hikage took me longer to figure out since Elric's a kid with an uncorrupted personality so his vocal performance is substantially different.

Ashen Hawk's jump in genres made it a much different story to get into; as in, I wasn't sure what it was. The prologue makes it clear that Jed would be considered a witch for having a right eye that turns red when her emotions are heightened, but the early chapters also show that her day to day life is fairly safe. She crossdresses as a man (and has been living as male all her life) to reduce her chances of being suspected of witchery. She doesn't really lament it. It's just her life. (And if you understand the Japanese audio, she uses the very masculine pronoun ore to refer to herself, just to make sure there's no gender ambiguity in her speech.)

The biggest issue at the outset of the game is the ongoing rivalry between the Wolf and Hawk clans. Logistically I don't know how it works. (Initially I thought the Hawks collected taxes and the Wolves provided security, but the Hawks also have soldiers?) The town essentially has two masters who have been feuding for generations, with some citizens being sympathetic to one side or the other, or trying to stay out of the conflict altogether. Being the adopted son of the Lady of the Wolves, Jed is viewed as being on the Wolves' side, though she wants peace between them both.

I thought the arc of the main story would be getting the two families to stop fighting just as the annual masquerade begins, so I was a little surprised that happens by the third chapter. And it turns out this wouldn't be the first time that what I thought would be the end of the story wasn't actually the end of the story. This wasn't a problem with chapter 3, since I knew it wasn't the end, but with later chapters this felt more like a pacing issue because they could have legitimately ended the game at those points and it would have been fine.

Pacing is probably the biggest issue I had with Ashen Hawk. While the genre jump from modern Japan to low fantasy pseudo-Europe doesn't mean that the pacing needed to be different, the tonal jump from suspense to slice of life removed a lot of my drive to see what happens next. It doesn't help that the game packs the vast majority of its side episodes in Chapter 2. While they are mostly optional, and you can jump back and visit missed episodes at any time via the story flowchart, my first impulse was to play them all at once because they're there and I don't want to play them out of order with the main plot.

This results in somewhere from a third to half the game's run time taking place in the very low stakes Chapter 2. While a part of me understands why the designers shoved all the fluffy encounters so early on (because the story really takes off after the masquerade and Jed is less free to move around), it can make the game seem slower than it has to be. Jed spends much of Chapter 2 looking for the Kaleido-Via and the additional side episodes (many of which revolve around her ongoing search) make it a constant reminder that she's making no progress. Story-wise, spending one chapter out of ten on search isn't a big deal, but from a game time perspective, due the sheer number of side episodes, it felt like she was doing it for ages.

Adding insult to injury, after all that searching, she's just handed the Kaleido-Via early in Chapter 3 rather than discovering it for herself.

Fortunately the ball gets rolling after the masquerade when it becomes clear that peace is not happening in this town as easily as Jed hoped and the Wolves are driven underground. This middle part of the story does a pretty good job of painting Olgar, the Hawk Lord, as a monster driven mad by the cursed ring he wears, but I like that he ends up being a more complicated character, especially once it's revealed that he's Jed's birth father. I thought the rally to overthrow Olgar was going to be the climax of the story, but again, it kept moving past that point to give us his backstory and circle back to Jed being a witch.

The game's one good twist is that it turns out the entire town is actually psychedelica. There were hints about it before; with the town being shrouded in fog, that they get no travelers and no one ever leaves, and the fact that a lot of characters are suspiciously missing memories of things they really ought to know. Everyone in town is actually dead, but has forgotten that they are, so they continue "living" as though their town is a real place. So the question is, whose psychedelica is it?

Olgar activated a partially complete Kaleido-Via (which apparently works a lot like the kaleidoscope in Black Butterfly) after his wife was murdered as a witch sixteen years ago, which marked the town's transformation in psychedelica. But oddly the dialogue says the psychedelica belongs to both him and Ashen Hawk, who turns out to have been a long time friend to Olgar's, at least until Olgar killed him in a fight after his wife's murder. I think this is because Ashen Hawk had one of the Kaleido-Via's four gems on his person when he died, and the other three were nowhere near it at all, but the game's not particularly clear.

Nor does learning about this event clear up why the game is called Psychedelica of the Ashen Hawk. Olgar is the only one of the two who had a wish to see someone who had died.

In fact, the master of this psychedelica is likely not either of them, though it requires unlocking additional content beyond the main story to find an obscure character; an actual hawk, called Ashen Hawk. Presumably the human Ashen Hawk took his name from the bird he'd known in his childhood. The original Ashen Hawk died and went on to be reborn.

This brings us to the person who gives the Kaleido-Via to Jed in Chapter 3 (and intervenes just often enough to keep it safe from the Hawks). Hugh is a shapeshifter sort of character to which rules do not apply, dipping in and out of the story as the mood strikes him. He is clearly magical in nature, with multiple identities (including being the person who gave Hikage the kaleidoscope in Black Butterfly), and Lawrence suspects him of being the master of this world. Hugh, it turns out, is Ashen Hawk, the bird.

He's also the only character who says this psychedelica was created by Olgar and Ashen Hawk, so if he was lying or exaggerating, no one would know. It stands to reason that if it's his psychedelica, which is supported by his inhuman ability to appear, disappear, and go wherever he wants, that he is the Ashen Hawk of the title, and not the human we meet at the start of the game.

But if that's the case, we don't know how the psychedelica was created, and don't know how it ends save what he tells us will happen. Unlike in Black Butterfly, the people of the town do not have bodies to return to since they've been dead for sixteen years, and the one ending where there's a move to end the psychedelica, kills our viewpoint characters before we see what happens.

Hugh is probably the most irritating part of the story because everything is fairly low fantasy aside from the Kaleido-Via and Hugh himself. But the Kaleido-Via is just an object, while Hugh saunters in and out of scenes whenever he feels like it, giving characters information they would otherwise have no way of obtaining due to his privileged position of knowing the truth about the world. The story would not play out the way it did without him, but because he's such a stage setter, it's difficult to see him as something other than a crutch for the narrative to move things along. He literally will pop out in front of characters just to explain things to them and then leave.

The last major talking point I want to cover is Jed herself. Despite my dislike for Hugh spoon-feeding the plot along, I like Jed as a protagonist, and she's very much allowed to protag once she has the necessary information. Though she's comfortable living as a man, she's curious enough to try living as woman, and goes through some pretty entertaining self doubts about being a woman crossdressing as a man crossdressing as a woman when she disguises herself as a woman in order to try gathering information from the Hawks who would otherwise not talk to the adopted son of a Wolf.

Jed isn't shabby in a fight, and also finds ways to broker peace between the Hawks and the Wolves whenever possible. I like that she wants to be in charge of her own destiny and, before things turn otherwise, that she was planning on leaving the town for a fresh start where she could find a place where she wouldn't have to hide who she is.

In the Heroine Ending, she's the one who comes up with the plan to free the town from psychedelica. Even if it's using Hugh's information, it's what she does with it that makes it such a powerful moment. She knows she has to die to free the Kaleido-Via gem trapped in her red eye, and she does in a way that gives the town what they want (the death of the witch) while protecting the lives and reputations of those she cares about. It probably wouldn't have been as powerful if she was simply executed, but she goes down in a swordfight, killed by the man who loves her and was in on the plan. (Side note: I really loved Lugus for that, for respecting what she wanted and how this was the only way to accomplish it.)

As with Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly, Ashen Hawk is technically an otome, but I found it even less of one than its predecessor. The chance to choose, or the illusion of choosing, various love interests along the main story is either non-existent or barely there, at least until character focused endings unlock after beating the main story. It's clear that Lavan is in love with Jed, but Lugus is fairly well positioned as the primary love interest and the story would feel like a complete experience even if none of the other characters had been options. The fact he's the one who's reborn with Jed in modern Japan in the Heroine Ending gives him a surprisingly canon feel for an otome.

The character-specific routes are all fairly short and unlike Black Butterfly, the love interests don't have their own character arcs where they end up in a different place than they were in the beginning, so I realized I didn't have much to say about them that I didn't already say here (aside from the fact I was really bothered that Lavan was crushing on his adopted sister for years). Normally I'd write a series of posts for an Otomate otome game, but because of how linearly Ashen Hawk played out and the lack of character arcs, I won't this time.