Game Feedback and Impressions [Spoilery]

Wraith_Magus · 05-28-2012, 12:19 PM

Sorry, but I'm going to make this one of those tl;dr rambling walls of text I'm kind of infamous for in some remote corners of the Internet, and I'm probably not going to organize this too well.

I think I should lead off by saying that when I finally decided I was curious enough to purchase the game, I made the mistake of doing so at about 7 PM. By the time I was done with my first full playthrough of the game (Hyun-ae route), I looked up for the OHMYGODIT'SFOURAM?! (At least it was a Saturday night on a three-day weekend.)

Therefore, I'd have to say that making a story that sucks you in was a goal well-achieved, at least as far as I was concerned.

----

On the AI, I have the most focus of critique on the way the game is presented.

I kind of get the sense, though, that this is really only Hyun-ae's story. *Mute's there, and she has personality, but she just doesn't seem to be tied to the plot in any major way. She's just the alternative to *Hyun-ae.

I realize that, in a manner of speaking, you're supposed to be picking "who's right" in this, but there doesn't seem to be a clear opposite or choice against *Mute - she's just sort of the consolation prize if you choose against *Hyun-ae. There's a vague sense that the game was supposed to be you picking between the two extremes of Hyun-ae's liberated world and Mute's repressed world, but it just doesn't come off that way in the game.

I made two play-throughs of the game per ending, one as a male, and one as the unmarried "not an old woman" girl. I like the fact that there is a slight difference in the way *Mute reacts to you as either end (and being a girl certainly makes the "harem ending" a little bit funnier when she denies wanting to become a "wife" to another girl), such as where Mute simply assumes you're an idiot during the meltdown if you say you're a girl, and stays respectful if you say you're a man, or where she just rolls your eyes if you react approvingly of the girls' love letters versus freaking out. ("What, you think I'm not good enoug-- I mean, you better not!")

Still, she doesn't really seem to differ nearly enough between the extreme ends of player types or strictly enforce the views of the strict society to really identify herself with either end. She just seems like an alien to the society she is supposed to represent, herself. I like that it's not quite so black-and-white that she isn't purely a formal submissive matron, and has those colorful clothes and brash personality, but taken too far, and she just doesn't seem to represent any facet of the society she's supposed to represent.

I also don't see why there isn't a better divide between the notion that the player can like or sympathize with a character, and a love-at-first-sight relationship. It feels like it was a romance just because it's a VN, and VNs are supposed to have romance.

I remember a complaint about how all movies have to have a romance in them by making the allegory that if you came across an alien culture, and found that in all their books, plays, movies, or other forms of media, they could have any range of plots from mysteries to period pieces to comedies to sober political commentary, but each and every one of them had to feature a square dance competition between the major characters, because it was cultural custom to expect that of every single form of media, and every form of media put one in without fail, and as an outside observer, you'd think that insane. However, we do this with romance - whoever the main lead character is automatically gets a romantic interest, without fail.

Ultimately, I think the ending I'd honestly prefer would be a "harem" ending that wasn't a harem, but a "we're friends, now" ending. I like *Hyun-ae as a character the best (in the sense that I can empathize with her the most, and see her as the most human and relatable of any character in the story by far, and have an affinity for her general type of personality, as well as I just think a girl in glasses and a leather jacket and pants is pretty darn smexy), but I can't in any way justify leaving *Mute behind. (Even if I copy her to core2 and presumably leave her for a salvage team to recover, or deliver her code in a way that it could be decompiled by the historical society, there is no in-game feedback or mention of that. In fact, it's a little jarring that you can just silently kill off the deuteragonist of the story without a single acknowledgement of her "death", and in a game that relies entirely upon the player recognizing the humanity of its AIs, its astounding heartlessness to not even notice *Mute's death. Even in the *Mute path case where you copy *Hyun-Ae, no real recognition of her survival (or her death if you choose that) is given.) Some sort of character speech on Hyun-ae's part regarding *Mute would have gone a long way. *Mute or *Hyun-ae reacting to the other's demise if you simply deleted the other one offhand to save the one you choose and yourself, or tried to copy them in would have been telling character points. (Even if *Hyun-ae doesn't like *Mute, and even if she were angry enough that wouldn't care to see her go, the idea of how easily she could be deleted, herself, on the whim of the player certainly shouldn't sit well with her.)

Which is really the problem on both character's sides - they just don't talk enough, altogether. The number of logs you go through are alright, they could have been a bit longer, but I really feel that the interaction between you and the AIs needed more heft. Some people complained in the other threads and in a couple of the reviews I read about how much the romance seems a little tacked-on. I can certainly believe, given her circumstances, that *Hyun-ae really wouldn't care if you were man or woman, she'd latch on in white-knuckled desperation to the first random person who'd have her and save her from that sinking ship, however, that really doesn't seem to be the impression I get from her playing the game. It's just a really fast romance, she doesn't let the wild, desperate emotion show through, except on the topic of her crime, and the people she committed it against. A hint of barely contained desperation for other people or validation in the rest of her speech would have gone a long way in characterizing her and making her motivations a bit more understood.

I'd have rather have had *Hyun-ae, especially after revealing her previous mortality, more constantly interrupting the player to try to just get some small talk in, (What's your favorite food? Mine's ____ do they have that where you live? What about ____? ) in between being worried that maybe she's pushing too hard. (Oh no! Look at me, I'm a mess!)

As I said earlier, I tried playing through with multiple different responses to the AIs about who I was. I actually think it would be, just for sheer irony, most amusing to have the main character have been a shy 16-year-old girl, herself, preferably with some sort of paralysis below the hip or deforming scars or birth defects that made her the sort of person who was antisocial enough to be a tech specialist (personality that prefers computers to people) that actively seeks lonely salvage jobs. (Surprise, Hyun-ae, your knight in shining armor is actually now your "little sister" who was looking for someone to lean on as much as you were.) However, you just don't get enough options to really explore the range of feedback you could get from the characters.

The cosplay events, in particular, could have done with more dialogue. I kept changing between them, expecting more lines to pop up eventually. I figured that if I kept her in a maid outfit, she'd say lines differently than if she was in the dapper detective outfits. I wanted to see her react more boldly in masculine clothes. I wanted to have some sort of timer or something where she'd complain about how long you've left her in a maid's outfit, and if you were making fun of her by trying to put her in a costume that portrays her in a submissive role. It's kind of disappointing that you never get her to berate you for those things. She also doesn't say why she favors cosplaying, or how it really makes her feel, or her emotional needs she fulfills by doing it. One of the reviews I read dinged the game for the seeming inconsistency of her being the "liberated" girl who played pretty princess dress-up on the player's command, but it would have made more sense if she made clear she was doing it to express herself, rather than to please others. (In fact, a better mechanic for the whole thing would have been to have her change clothes somewhat constantly on her own whim, while maybe asking the player which one of the two she's split between the player would prefer.)

---

On the gameworld revealed through the logs, most of the problem I have, again, stems from the *Mute side of the game. *Hyun-ae does a pretty good job of catalogueing the things important to who she was and why she did what she did. *Mute goes on about how important Sang-Jung was to her, but you get to see almost nothing about him. She tells you he was important to the Smiths, and did so much, but that's all tell, and no show. In fact, there's only one (and a half, I guess) log with him actually showing his personality off.

I guess it plays to "Mute the gossip" a bit, that she talks about how great a friend Oh So-Jin was, but then only keeps the parts about scandal, but it would be nice if she could have shown some sort of hints of the actual relationships she had with these people she says she had. Instead, it just helps reinforce the notion that Mute's path is hollow that she never seems to have done anything the whole game but snoop, and even her friends never have any evidence of talking with her.

When I was asked by Hyun-ae if I felt sympathy for her "mother", I did say I could - maybe I'm a hopeless sap, but I could sympathize with almost every character that wrote more than a couple logs, even Yeong Seok to a degree. However, so much of the cast and the world remained faceless. You don't even get a clue of what the Captain and Emeror was like but for one log of the queen, and even she had only the vaguest slice of her personality revealed.

I suppose it is part of being a mystery, and if some of the logs were damaged or corrupt or mostly deleted, it would have made some sense, as well. However, much of the world of that ship still seemed a mystery to me, even after playing all the way through the game. Nobody even gives much clue of how they turned ship cargo holds or personal rooms into having women's quarters, and what sort of architectural styles there were.

The way that "farming" worked in the ship is unexplained as well. It almost sounds like they had actual plain rice paddies and trees just growing in dirt rather than a more automatically managed hydroponics system you would expect on a ship. How people managed to live a medieval life in a high tech spaceship where everything relied upon the technology they didn't understand continuing to function really could have enjoyed more exploration as a simple sci-fi thought experiment.

---

For the emergency midway through the game, I'd like to just put out one final little nitpick.

The whole venting thing makes no sense.

First, how, exactly, do these bulkheads take power? Bulkheads don't need power to keep the atmosphere inside the ship unless they're some sort of forcefield-based system like Star Wars (which seems a little too advanced and power-hungry for the setting and context). The way that bulkheads work in this game is like saying that if you lose your remote to the garage door opener, you can just unplug the power, because your garage door will open on its own by unplugging it, and plugging it back in will make your garage door shut.

Likewise with the life support systems - the fans that circulate the air don't need to be on to have air to vent from the system. The fans and purification system are kind of incidental to the whole whether or not air is in the ship thing.

It would have made more sense to have had to have put power back to the emergency airlock mechanisms by temporarily turning something else off, and then having a command to open all the airlocks and prevent all atmosphere containment systems from turning on in a managed way (so that the air vents from the reactor area, you close the doors, open the doors to a sealed area, let air come in from there, let some convection go on, open the venting doors again, etc.) than to just make everything work via the on/off switch.

---

I guess, if you look back at it, my main complaint was that I was hooked on the game, and ran out of game before I ran out of interest in the game. I wanted to have more rocks to look under for more little worms of backstory or character depth squiggling around hidden underneath.

Wraith_Magus · 05-28-2012, 02:44 PM

Oh, and I forgot the most important critique of all -

Someone made it in another thread ("Pigeonholed"), but the point is still a valid one, and should be mentioned again.

The most critical decision you make in the game is the one about which of the two heroines you are going to spend the rest of the game with. It's decided, however, by a completely incidental mechanic that is very easy for a first-time player to not understand. (The way you prove you like *Mute more is by not listening to her and sticking around with her for a while instead of asking *Hyun-ae directly.)

In order to better make the nature of the decision apparent to the player, it would have been better to display it as a conflict between the two AIs somehow, where the player has to intervene to cut one out of the loop purposefully.

Having the AIs print out text to the text prompt as you are sitting there, and having them argue over how the player should proceed, especially if it has to culminate in you cutting one off, would have made the decision you were making both much more clear, and much more dramatic and meaningful to the story as a whole.

Flixerine · 05-28-2012, 11:28 PM

Good feedback, a lot of interesting ideas and mostly I agree with them, especially the part about it being too short

except the venting thingy, you could easily come up with any idea for why the bulkheads used power, maybe polarized armor to keep them together or whatever, it was just a plot device, of course you can always put more detail into things, but that really didn't bother me at all.

Sorry for the short reply, don't feel like writing more atm

Oh how much I would love to see a sequel in the same universe :/ ...dream on flix, dream on

PS my playthrough was similar, didn't get much sleep that day

...actually skipped sleeping at all afterwards...

Wraith_Magus · 05-29-2012, 01:49 AM

This is even more of an addition as-I-just-thought-of-it, so sorry for even further messing up the organization of the thoughts...

Part of what makes *Mute seem so distant from all the action, aside from the fact that she seems to want you to think of characters like Oh So-Jin or Smith Sang-Jung are great people, but never really showed you much evidence of why, and gave you plenty of letters to say why not (but felt a need to show letters to excuse Oh So-Jin's behavior, which didn't really shed any better light on him, anyway, even though she thought he was scum), is that she never really seems to embody the side of the argument "for" the society, or any serious opposition to Hyun-ae.

The whole of the contest between the two, ultimately, comes down to *Mute wanting to ask a few questions of *Hyun-ae, and never getting a chance to shuffle responses back and forth. In my first playthrough, I had almost immediately gotten *Mute's questions, and then got the static as I putzed around and got her into the "so do you trust me?" question for showing her her own questions twice in a row. (And when the static appeared and the music changed, I thought at first it meant *Mute was actually an evil AI and was corrupting the system and showing her true colors or something for being questioned...) I had been put into the choice without having any real information about *Mute, yet, or having any idea what she was like, but already was accidentally choosing her side of the story.

What I'd have really preferred to have seen is, either in that part where you have to choose between the two of them, there being a clear distinction where you are choosing between Hyun-ae the accused murderer and liberated girl vs. the defender of "tradition" so that you know what you are choosing.

Alternately, though, something I may have preferred to have seen more is, since *Mute seems so utterly badly suited to her role as a stand-in for that sort of tradition, is at some point unlocking messages from much closer to "year one", which talk about somehow rebooting or reformatting *Mute for playing the more traditional role, and how she was originally a sharp-dressing tomboy, herself, which would have been unacceptable in the new great society of "Male superiority". Seeing her react to it would have made her character much more meaningful.

It would also have possibly let the "harem" end idea have worked from the other side - allowing *Hyun-ae to feel some connection to *Mute she never seemed to have before.

mysterycycle · 05-31-2012, 10:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Flixerine

Oh how much I would love to see a sequel in the same universe :/ ...dream on flix, dream on

I hear that. After finishing the first time (Pale Bride Finds Love), I was sorely tempted to write some fanfiction about what happened immediately afterward, and speculating about everything from what laws existed regarding AIs to what sort of physical bodies (shells, if you will) could be obtained to house AIs. Aside from the romance story, there's the whole question of what the protagonist did to ensure *Hyun-ae didn't get prosecuted for her actions. Surely there's no statute of limitations for a being that is effectively immortal...

Flixerine · 06-01-2012, 03:58 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mysterycycle

I hear that. After finishing the first time (Pale Bride Finds Love), I was sorely tempted to write some fanfiction about what happened immediately afterward, and speculating about everything from what laws existed regarding AIs to what sort of physical bodies (shells, if you will) could be obtained to house AIs. Aside from the romance story, there's the whole question of what the protagonist did to ensure *Hyun-ae didn't get prosecuted for her actions. Surely there's no statute of limitations for a being that is effectively immortal...

Oh in my dreams I simply left telling what she did aside and told a little modified story.... anyways even though I had similar ideas about the physical bodies I did not just mean the personal story between the characters, but more like in the same time other places more AIs maybe moral issues on earth and the like...maybe a colony story? idk

anyways, if you do write some fanfic ...tell me :3

Wraith_Magus · 06-01-2012, 08:54 AM

Well, the thing is, if they had technology from 1000 years ago to put any old dying person's consciousness into an AI...

One would think that the universe would have had access to that technology, and adjusted to it a long time ago...

Presumably, anyone entering old age and getting an infirm body could just go and be uploaded if there were no limitations on how AIs were treated. For extra bonus irony points, the protagonist could have been a centuries-old AI controlling a robot.

In fact, this gameworld runs on a sort of "Instant AI, just add water" type of ruleset where an AI has no unique quantum CPU, and can just be "decompiled" and copy-pasted willy-nilly. Why settle for a romance with one *Hyun-ae, when you can just CTRL-C and CTRL-V your way into making her triplets?

For all we know, organic humans could be nearly extinct by this point, and humanoid AIs reproduce through a "sexual reproduction" that involves a mixing of initial inputs building up a self-teaching AI code.

spongejordan123 · 06-29-2012, 12:50 PM

I still don't understand WHY the ship regressed the way that it did. That was my huge question the entire time.

Flixerine · 06-29-2012, 03:11 PM

Well, no one took care of it for a few hundred years ...duh ...the maintenance AI was out of order, the active AI sleeping, and due to the disabled lifesupport it most likely all froze... just my guess though

kschang · 06-29-2012, 11:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by spongejordan123

I still don't understand WHY the ship regressed the way that it did. That was my huge question the entire time.

Do you mean the culture?

In that case, I recommend reading a novella called "the shipwright" by Donald Kingsbury

http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/0...653598_toc.htm (look near the end)

WardDragon · 06-30-2012, 08:19 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wraith_Magus

Alternately, though, something I may have preferred to have seen more is, since *Mute seems so utterly badly suited to her role as a stand-in for that sort of tradition, is at some point unlocking messages from much closer to "year one", which talk about somehow rebooting or reformatting *Mute for playing the more traditional role, and how she was originally a sharp-dressing tomboy, herself, which would have been unacceptable in the new great society of "Male superiority". Seeing her react to it would have made her character much more meaningful.

I think that is more or less what happened. I'm sure the new society never would have chosen a female AI to run the ship in the first place, so she must have been there all along from back when the ship first set out and then the new society didn't have the technical knowledge to reprogram her or replace her with another AI. She did mention at one point that her older memories used to get deleted automatically so that she could only remember 300 years back (although I suppose that deletion process stopped when everybody died since she did seem to remember more than what was in the logs). Or more drastically, it's implied that all records got deleted at "Year Zero" so perhaps that included Mute's memories as well.

So either way Mute probably forgot who she was, just like Hyun-ae did after being indoctrinated for a year. The difference is that Hyun-ae's memories were still in there somewhere, and once she remembered she snapped and couldn't take the situation. But Mute's memories are totally gone so instead she accepted the situation.

Plus she probably had conflicting orders programmed into her, like to obey the captain but also to protect everyone (which probably wouldn't have conflicted in the original society, but do conflict with a corrupt captain that treats people like dirt). So even though she's been indoctrinated by the new society she still has a few bits and pieces of her old programming present which contribute to the sense that even though she's saying she likes the new society there's still something a bit off about her support of it (like her "crass" behavior, or when she says that she would have helped Hyun-ae if she knew the girl was in trouble).

I think Mute's unconvincing support of the new society is intentional. I don't think she actually supports it. I think she was just stuck living that way for so long and can't remember anything before it, so that's all she knows right now.

limegonk · 06-30-2012, 02:11 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wraith_Magus

The most critical decision you make in the game is the one about which of the two heroines you are going to spend the rest of the game with. It's decided, however, by a completely incidental mechanic that is very easy for a first-time player to not understand. (The way you prove you like *Mute more is by not listening to her and sticking around with her for a while instead of asking *Hyun-ae directly.)

In order to better make the nature of the decision apparent to the player, it would have been better to display it as a conflict between the two AIs somehow, where the player has to intervene to cut one out of the loop purposefully.

Having the AIs print out text to the text prompt as you are sitting there, and having them argue over how the player should proceed, especially if it has to culminate in you cutting one off, would have made the decision you were making both much more clear, and much more dramatic and meaningful to the story as a whole.

The whole point is that you don't get to choose. Things happen to people which they can't control, but they still have to deal with the consequences. *Hyun-ae never got to choose whether or not she would have her tongue cut off, after all. I felt horrified on my first play-through when I realised I'd have to effectively kill *Hyun-ae if *Mute and I were to survive - and I mean a good kind of horrified once you take a step back, in-character horrified.

Regarding some of your other criticisms, remember that you, the player, never really get to give any input on anything. You're just picking the most appropriate answer from choices given to you by *Mute/*Hyun-ae. For example, when you "killed" *Mute, why should anything be explicitly said on-screen? The only person with any control over the text on the screen is *Hyun-ae, who clearly doesn't give a damn about *Mute. What matters there is how you react to it. In my opinion, it's not necessary for the game to explicitly acknowledge your feelings; it's not like those feelings are illegitimate until they're confirmed. If anything that would constrain the emotional range players might feel at the character's death.

Similarly, you're right when you say that you don't get much feedback based on the kind of character you're playing - but the way the game is set up, that makes it easier to play any kind of character.

You yourself said:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wraith_Magus[/quote

Why settle for a romance with one *Hyun-ae, when you can just CTRL-C and CTRL-V your way into making her triplets?

For all we know, organic humans could be nearly extinct by this point, and humanoid AIs reproduce through a "sexual reproduction" that involves a mixing of initial inputs building up a self-teaching AI code.

Indeed we don't know, and if you'd like to play it that way, there's nothing in the game which outright states otherwise. I also did the trick of copying the inactive AI into the active AI's core without going for the harem ending. Does the technology exist to reconstruct the inactive AI in that scenario? Well, the game never says it doesn't, and I'm the protagonist here, so it does if I choose it to be so! When I got the harem ending, I didn't really want a harem, but I still wanted to get them both off that godforsaken hulk, and the harem was just how they interpreted it. Wait until we get the speech parser back up, and I'll explain myself to them properly...

.

@ WardDragon, iirc *Mute does specifically say at one point that her memories got wiped when the ship's culture got 'reset.'

WardDragon · 06-30-2012, 03:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by limegonk

@ WardDragon, iirc *Mute does specifically say at one point that her memories got wiped when the ship's culture got 'reset.'

Ah, thanks

I thought she said that but I couldn't remember the specific conversation.

And yeah, I agree with you about the harem ending as well. I wanted to save both of them just because I didn't want them to die, so I thought it was kind of weird for that to automatically mean harem

But you're right, anything can happen once they get onto the ship and can actually hear my character, so I imagine they'll have a lengthy conversation trying to explain what's going on :P

nights fire · 07-01-2012, 06:07 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Flixerine

Oh how much I would love to see a sequel in the same universe :/ ...dream on flix, dream on

According to wikipedia Analogue is actually a sequel to Loves older visual Novel Digital:A love story(abliet set hundreds of years in the future) so a sequel in the same universe is entirely possible even if it's unlikely to feature the same characters

Quote:

Originally Posted by spongejordan123

I still don't understand WHY the ship regressed the way that it did. That was my huge question the entire time.

I think it's deliberately not discussed, it would likely ruin *Mute as a representative of the regressed culture as the player would just point out that she hadn't always thought that way(especially if it turned out that the regression had been partially or fully deliberate).

Quote:

Originally Posted by WardDragon

And yeah, I agree with you about the harem ending as well. I wanted to save both of them just because I didn't want them to die, so I thought it was kind of weird for that to automatically mean harem

But you're right, anything can happen once they get onto the ship and can actually hear my character, so I imagine they'll have a lengthy conversation trying to explain what's going on :P

The Harem ending never actually requires you to acknowledge any kind of relationship with the girls so you can really take it how you want, that Routes ending is essentially a condensed version of both other routes endings

Spoiler:
accept, understand and trust Hyun-ae, get *Mute to like you more than she feels she has a duty to the ship

so their attitudes towards you are basically the same as at the end of each of their respective normal routes.

limegonk · 07-01-2012, 07:05 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by nights fire

According to wikipedia Analogue is actually a sequel to Loves older visual Novel Digital:A love story(abliet set hundreds of years in the future) so a sequel in the same universe is entirely possible even if it's unlikely to feature the same characters

Digital, Cell Phone Love Letter and Don't Take It Personally aren't really a narrative sequence or anything, but they're all connected via a certain recurring character. The only thing specifically tying Analogue into the same universe, as far as I can see, is the fact that

Spoiler:
AIs have stars before their names.

05-28-2012, 12:19 PM	#1
Wraith_Magus Join Date: Jan 2011 Reputation: 48 Posts: 242	Game Feedback and Impressions [Spoilery] Sorry, but I'm going to make this one of those tl;dr rambling walls of text I'm kind of infamous for in some remote corners of the Internet, and I'm probably not going to organize this too well. I think I should lead off by saying that when I finally decided I was curious enough to purchase the game, I made the mistake of doing so at about 7 PM. By the time I was done with my first full playthrough of the game (Hyun-ae route), I looked up for the OHMYGODIT'SFOURAM?! (At least it was a Saturday night on a three-day weekend.) Therefore, I'd have to say that making a story that sucks you in was a goal well-achieved, at least as far as I was concerned. ---- On the AI, I have the most focus of critique on the way the game is presented. I kind of get the sense, though, that this is really only Hyun-ae's story. Mute's there, and she has personality, but she just doesn't seem to be tied to the plot in any major way. She's just the alternative to Hyun-ae. I realize that, in a manner of speaking, you're supposed to be picking "who's right" in this, but there doesn't seem to be a clear opposite or choice against Mute - she's just sort of the consolation prize if you choose against Hyun-ae. There's a vague sense that the game was supposed to be you picking between the two extremes of Hyun-ae's liberated world and Mute's repressed world, but it just doesn't come off that way in the game. I made two play-throughs of the game per ending, one as a male, and one as the unmarried "not an old woman" girl. I like the fact that there is a slight difference in the way Mute reacts to you as either end (and being a girl certainly makes the "harem ending" a little bit funnier when she denies wanting to become a "wife" to another girl), such as where Mute simply assumes you're an idiot during the meltdown if you say you're a girl, and stays respectful if you say you're a man, or where she just rolls your eyes if you react approvingly of the girls' love letters versus freaking out. ("What, you think I'm not good enoug-- I mean, you better not!") Still, she doesn't really seem to differ nearly enough between the extreme ends of player types or strictly enforce the views of the strict society to really identify herself with either end. She just seems like an alien to the society she is supposed to represent, herself. I like that it's not quite so black-and-white that she isn't purely a formal submissive matron, and has those colorful clothes and brash personality, but taken too far, and she just doesn't seem to represent any facet of the society she's supposed to represent. I also don't see why there isn't a better divide between the notion that the player can like or sympathize with a character, and a love-at-first-sight relationship. It feels like it was a romance just because it's a VN, and VNs are supposed to have romance. I remember a complaint about how all movies have to have a romance in them by making the allegory that if you came across an alien culture, and found that in all their books, plays, movies, or other forms of media, they could have any range of plots from mysteries to period pieces to comedies to sober political commentary, but each and every one of them had to feature a square dance competition between the major characters, because it was cultural custom to expect that of every single form of media, and every form of media put one in without fail, and as an outside observer, you'd think that insane. However, we do this with romance - whoever the main lead character is automatically gets a romantic interest, without fail. Ultimately, I think the ending I'd honestly prefer would be a "harem" ending that wasn't a harem, but a "we're friends, now" ending. I like Hyun-ae as a character the best (in the sense that I can empathize with her the most, and see her as the most human and relatable of any character in the story by far, and have an affinity for her general type of personality, as well as I just think a girl in glasses and a leather jacket and pants is pretty darn smexy), but I can't in any way justify leaving Mute behind. (Even if I copy her to core2 and presumably leave her for a salvage team to recover, or deliver her code in a way that it could be decompiled by the historical society, there is no in-game feedback or mention of that. In fact, it's a little jarring that you can just silently kill off the deuteragonist of the story without a single acknowledgement of her "death", and in a game that relies entirely upon the player recognizing the humanity of its AIs, its astounding heartlessness to not even notice Mute's death. Even in the Mute path case where you copy Hyun-Ae, no real recognition of her survival (or her death if you choose that) is given.) Some sort of character speech on Hyun-ae's part regarding Mute would have gone a long way. Mute or Hyun-ae reacting to the other's demise if you simply deleted the other one offhand to save the one you choose and yourself, or tried to copy them in would have been telling character points. (Even if Hyun-ae doesn't like Mute, and even if she were angry enough that wouldn't care to see her go, the idea of how easily she could be deleted, herself, on the whim of the player certainly shouldn't sit well with her.) Which is really the problem on both character's sides - they just don't talk enough, altogether. The number of logs you go through are alright, they could have been a bit longer, but I really feel that the interaction between you and the AIs needed more heft. Some people complained in the other threads and in a couple of the reviews I read about how much the romance seems a little tacked-on. I can certainly believe, given her circumstances, that Hyun-ae really wouldn't care if you were man or woman, she'd latch on in white-knuckled desperation to the first random person who'd have her and save her from that sinking ship, however, that really doesn't seem to be the impression I get from her playing the game. It's just a really fast romance, she doesn't let the wild, desperate emotion show through, except on the topic of her crime, and the people she committed it against. A hint of barely contained desperation for other people or validation in the rest of her speech would have gone a long way in characterizing her and making her motivations a bit more understood. I'd have rather have had Hyun-ae, especially after revealing her previous mortality, more constantly interrupting the player to try to just get some small talk in, (What's your favorite food? Mine's ____ do they have that where you live? What about ____? ) in between being worried that maybe she's pushing too hard. (Oh no! Look at me, I'm a mess!) As I said earlier, I tried playing through with multiple different responses to the AIs about who I was. I actually think it would be, just for sheer irony, most amusing to have the main character have been a shy 16-year-old girl, herself, preferably with some sort of paralysis below the hip or deforming scars or birth defects that made her the sort of person who was antisocial enough to be a tech specialist (personality that prefers computers to people) that actively seeks lonely salvage jobs. (Surprise, Hyun-ae, your knight in shining armor is actually now your "little sister" who was looking for someone to lean on as much as you were.) However, you just don't get enough options to really explore the range of feedback you could get from the characters. The cosplay events, in particular, could have done with more dialogue. I kept changing between them, expecting more lines to pop up eventually. I figured that if I kept her in a maid outfit, she'd say lines differently than if she was in the dapper detective outfits. I wanted to see her react more boldly in masculine clothes. I wanted to have some sort of timer or something where she'd complain about how long you've left her in a maid's outfit, and if you were making fun of her by trying to put her in a costume that portrays her in a submissive role. It's kind of disappointing that you never get her to berate you for those things. She also doesn't say why she favors cosplaying, or how it really makes her feel, or her emotional needs she fulfills by doing it. One of the reviews I read dinged the game for the seeming inconsistency of her being the "liberated" girl who played pretty princess dress-up on the player's command, but it would have made more sense if she made clear she was doing it to express herself, rather than to please others. (In fact, a better mechanic for the whole thing would have been to have her change clothes somewhat constantly on her own whim, while maybe asking the player which one of the two she's split between the player would prefer.) --- On the gameworld revealed through the logs, most of the problem I have, again, stems from the Mute side of the game. Hyun-ae does a pretty good job of catalogueing the things important to who she was and why she did what she did. Mute goes on about how important Sang-Jung was to her, but you get to see almost nothing about him. She tells you he was important to the Smiths, and did so much, but that's all tell, and no show. In fact, there's only one (and a half, I guess) log with him actually showing his personality off. I guess it plays to "Mute the gossip" a bit, that she talks about how great a friend Oh So-Jin was, but then only keeps the parts about scandal, but it would be nice if she could have shown some sort of hints of the actual relationships she had with these people she says she had. Instead, it just helps reinforce the notion that Mute's path is hollow that she never seems to have done anything the whole game but snoop, and even her friends never have any evidence of talking with her. When I was asked by Hyun-ae if I felt sympathy for her "mother", I did say I could - maybe I'm a hopeless sap, but I could sympathize with almost every character that wrote more than a couple logs, even Yeong Seok to a degree. However, so much of the cast and the world remained faceless. You don't even get a clue of what the Captain and Emeror was like but for one log of the queen, and even she had only the vaguest slice of her personality revealed. I suppose it is part of being a mystery, and if some of the logs were damaged or corrupt or mostly deleted, it would have made some sense, as well. However, much of the world of that ship still seemed a mystery to me, even after playing all the way through the game. Nobody even gives much clue of how they turned ship cargo holds or personal rooms into having women's quarters, and what sort of architectural styles there were. The way that "farming" worked in the ship is unexplained as well. It almost sounds like they had actual plain rice paddies and trees just growing in dirt rather than a more automatically managed hydroponics system you would expect on a ship. How people managed to live a medieval life in a high tech spaceship where everything relied upon the technology they didn't understand continuing to function really could have enjoyed more exploration as a simple sci-fi thought experiment. --- For the emergency midway through the game, I'd like to just put out one final little nitpick. The whole venting thing makes no sense. First, how, exactly, do these bulkheads take power? Bulkheads don't need power to keep the atmosphere inside the ship unless they're some sort of forcefield-based system like Star Wars (which seems a little too advanced and power-hungry for the setting and context). The way that bulkheads work in this game is like saying that if you lose your remote to the garage door opener, you can just unplug the power, because your garage door will open on its own by unplugging it, and plugging it back in will make your garage door shut. Likewise with the life support systems - the fans that circulate the air don't need to be on to have air to vent from the system. The fans and purification system are kind of incidental to the whole whether or not air is in the ship thing. It would have made more sense to have had to have put power back to the emergency airlock mechanisms by temporarily turning something else off, and then having a command to open all the airlocks and prevent all atmosphere containment systems from turning on in a managed way (so that the air vents from the reactor area, you close the doors, open the doors to a sealed area, let air come in from there, let some convection go on, open the venting doors again, etc.) than to just make everything work via the on/off switch. --- I guess, if you look back at it, my main complaint was that I was hooked on the game, and ran out of game before I ran out of interest in the game. I wanted to have more rocks to look under for more little worms of backstory or character depth squiggling around hidden underneath. Last edited by Wraith_Magus: 05-28-2012 at 12:41 PM.

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05-28-2012, 02:44 PM	#2
Wraith_Magus Join Date: Jan 2011 Reputation: 48 Posts: 242	Oh, and I forgot the most important critique of all - Someone made it in another thread ("Pigeonholed"), but the point is still a valid one, and should be mentioned again. The most critical decision you make in the game is the one about which of the two heroines you are going to spend the rest of the game with. It's decided, however, by a completely incidental mechanic that is very easy for a first-time player to not understand. (The way you prove you like Mute more is by not listening to her and sticking around with her for a while instead of asking Hyun-ae directly.) In order to better make the nature of the decision apparent to the player, it would have been better to display it as a conflict between the two AIs somehow, where the player has to intervene to cut one out of the loop purposefully. Having the AIs print out text to the text prompt as you are sitting there, and having them argue over how the player should proceed, especially if it has to culminate in you cutting one off, would have made the decision you were making both much more clear, and much more dramatic and meaningful to the story as a whole.

05-28-2012, 11:28 PM	#3
Flixerine Join Date: May 2012 Reputation: 0 Posts: 4	Good feedback, a lot of interesting ideas and mostly I agree with them, especially the part about it being too short except the venting thingy, you could easily come up with any idea for why the bulkheads used power, maybe polarized armor to keep them together or whatever, it was just a plot device, of course you can always put more detail into things, but that really didn't bother me at all. Sorry for the short reply, don't feel like writing more atm Oh how much I would love to see a sequel in the same universe :/ ...dream on flix, dream on PS my playthrough was similar, didn't get much sleep that day ...actually skipped sleeping at all afterwards...

05-29-2012, 01:49 AM	#4
Wraith_Magus Join Date: Jan 2011 Reputation: 48 Posts: 242	This is even more of an addition as-I-just-thought-of-it, so sorry for even further messing up the organization of the thoughts... Part of what makes Mute seem so distant from all the action, aside from the fact that she seems to want you to think of characters like Oh So-Jin or Smith Sang-Jung are great people, but never really showed you much evidence of why, and gave you plenty of letters to say why not (but felt a need to show letters to excuse Oh So-Jin's behavior, which didn't really shed any better light on him, anyway, even though she thought he was scum), is that she never really seems to embody the side of the argument "for" the society, or any serious opposition to Hyun-ae. The whole of the contest between the two, ultimately, comes down to Mute wanting to ask a few questions of Hyun-ae, and never getting a chance to shuffle responses back and forth. In my first playthrough, I had almost immediately gotten Mute's questions, and then got the static as I putzed around and got her into the "so do you trust me?" question for showing her her own questions twice in a row. (And when the static appeared and the music changed, I thought at first it meant Mute was actually an evil AI and was corrupting the system and showing her true colors or something for being questioned...) I had been put into the choice without having any real information about Mute, yet, or having any idea what she was like, but already was accidentally choosing her side of the story. What I'd have really preferred to have seen is, either in that part where you have to choose between the two of them, there being a clear distinction where you are choosing between Hyun-ae the accused murderer and liberated girl vs. the defender of "tradition" so that you know what you are choosing. Alternately, though, something I may have preferred to have seen more is, since Mute seems so utterly badly suited to her role as a stand-in for that sort of tradition, is at some point unlocking messages from much closer to "year one", which talk about somehow rebooting or reformatting Mute for playing the more traditional role, and how she was originally a sharp-dressing tomboy, herself, which would have been unacceptable in the new great society of "Male superiority". Seeing her react to it would have made her character much more meaningful. It would also have possibly let the "harem" end idea have worked from the other side - allowing Hyun-ae to feel some connection to Mute she never seemed to have before.

06-01-2012, 08:54 AM	#7
Wraith_Magus Join Date: Jan 2011 Reputation: 48 Posts: 242	Well, the thing is, if they had technology from 1000 years ago to put any old dying person's consciousness into an AI... One would think that the universe would have had access to that technology, and adjusted to it a long time ago... Presumably, anyone entering old age and getting an infirm body could just go and be uploaded if there were no limitations on how AIs were treated. For extra bonus irony points, the protagonist could have been a centuries-old AI controlling a robot. In fact, this gameworld runs on a sort of "Instant AI, just add water" type of ruleset where an AI has no unique quantum CPU, and can just be "decompiled" and copy-pasted willy-nilly. Why settle for a romance with one *Hyun-ae, when you can just CTRL-C and CTRL-V your way into making her triplets? For all we know, organic humans could be nearly extinct by this point, and humanoid AIs reproduce through a "sexual reproduction" that involves a mixing of initial inputs building up a self-teaching AI code.

06-29-2012, 12:50 PM	#8
spongejordan123 Join Date: Aug 2006 Reputation: 2 Posts: 62	I still don't understand WHY the ship regressed the way that it did. That was my huge question the entire time.

06-29-2012, 03:11 PM	#9
Flixerine Join Date: May 2012 Reputation: 0 Posts: 4	Well, no one took care of it for a few hundred years ...duh ...the maintenance AI was out of order, the active AI sleeping, and due to the disabled lifesupport it most likely all froze... just my guess though