firemtn

firemtn

@firemtn

lowercase F, abbreviated mountain

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@firemtn

umineko ep1 thoughts

okay so i finished episode 1 this week lets dump some thoughts. it's long. sorry. (obviously umineko ep1 spoilers) -

  • I have joked that every time I encounter umineko in some way that i always see a new character i have never heard of before so it was Really funny to start the game and immediately get confronted with Nanjo, who I absolutely have never seen before in my life!!
  • I dont know if that means I should consider Nanjo completely unsuspicious or highly suspicious tbh (Gohda, Kumasawa, Rudolph, and Hideyoshi were also new to me)
  • Out of all of Kinzo's children, Rudolph I think makes me most uncomfortable. Rosa's treatment of Maria is horrible, and the swing from her seeming the most normal to That is quite shocking, and Krauss is your standard terrible man, but the way Rudolph interacts with Battler sets me on edge in any given moment they share the screen (I suppose it's a relief he died in the first wave). It is so shitty and so wrapped up in fucked up masculine gender garbage that I found it kind of uniquely unsettling. I completely understand why Battler would leave home once his mom passed, I wouldn't want to be in the same room as this guy for a second, let alone have him as my dad.
  • The way Eva's whole deal seems to just be utilizing misogyny against other women to put herself on top of the food chain is also pretty fucky too! Hey this game seems to kind of be preoccupied with gender a little huh
  • Battler himself is fascinating in that department because of the weird duality between his comedy sexual harrassment bit and also him going on about how fucked up and misogynistic the family structure and society in general are. His behavior feels like this utterly bizarre learned performance of like, boyishness that functions completely differently (it is sexual harrassment) from what he actually wants out of it (funny slapstick to make everyone laugh). It feels like something he saw happen to Rudolph when he was young and thought that it was funny and has never thought about it further until Shannon didn't react by hitting him. He's such a weird little dude and I look forward to studying him.
  • There is some real Battler/Kanon bait in here and I dont know if thats going to be followed up on or what but I believed in it a little more than Jessica/Kanon (in ep1, anyways)
  • (yes as i'm writing this i've played a little slice of ep2 so I see where Jessica/Kanon is now but still)
  • I'm thinking a lot about the way the narration switches between third person and first person. It sometimes changes in the same scene, even just between paragraphs, and sometimes even when the person who was narrating is still in the same scene. It has to be for a reason and I've been wondering if one of these narration styles is meant to be purely unreliable. I'd assume if that's the case then the third person narration seems he least reliable since (almost? not sure?) everything purely fantastical happens in third person. But I kind of don't really know if I think that all yet.
  • The Delsney Land bit really killed me. I was kind of surprised to learn the game takes place in the mid 80s because it could have taken place, At Basically Any Time, based on what i knew about it, but the importance of the economic situation clarified it. Krauss going on about how Japan's economic situation will literally only keep improving was very on the nose in a funny way. The whole Family Conference arguing over money was quite engaging! These people suck!
  • it is Very Funny that Kinzo spends all his time saying his family sucks ass and then is like "also battler is a dumbass for leaving the family"
  • It's cute how nice all the cousins are with Maria when things are still normal and they're just hanging out. In general, its relieving that the kids are... better to each other (not, perfectly, but, better) than the adults are to each other, overall.
  • Gohda absolutely 100% used Maria's rose as the decorative rose petals for lunch, right? That seems like the clear answer as to where it went to me. Fuck that guy.
  • re: "Who was the Beatrice Maria met" -- While reading through, I went through a number of theories as to who gave Maria the umbrella and the envelope, from starting with "Maybe an umbrella somehow was suddenly at her feet and she attributed that to Beatrice?", to "maybe Shannon or Kanon disguised themselves as Beatrice?" (Kanon in particular is easily placeable as having been where Maria was at the time and could just have lied about the whole thing), to "fuck idk Beatrice is real I guess!!" as more info got revealed and more people died.
  • The bit with Kyrie and Battler talking about and laying out the mystery is another really good and engaging bit. It's interesting how Battler initially begins on the side of "there could be a 19th person" here when talking to her but then swings very hard into not accepting convenient explanations like there being other people on the island or magic after the murders begin. I've been wondering if the reason Battler insists so strongly about there being rational explanations for everything is because of Kyrie's death affecting him so strongly and that being the last conversation they had...
  • I REALLY want to know why Rudolph thought (knew?) he was going to die!!! what the hell!!!
  • The George and Shannon romance scene is SO cringe ough I hated it!! I could not get the question of "is she just going along with this because she's the maid and he's related to her employers??" out of my head the whole time, which I know isn't the intent (since I have read some of ep2 now) but it still just comes off suspect! George is like really likable as the knowledgeable mediator of the cousins but god I hate seeing him flirt, it suuucks
  • Why the fuck was Nanjo in The Darkness
  • I really feel for Natsuhi. She is trying so hard to be this perfect Wife Of The Rich Family Patriarch that it alienates everyone who could sympathize with her and she will never be good enough for any of Kinzo's children. Her little win when Kinzo compliments her feels so good and it is So sad when she has to defer to Eva being Technically Correct about not disturbing the crime scene
  • ...I feel bad taking this away from her, but I do genuinely wonder if Kinzo actually only gave her that respect because she dodged the Devil's Roulette
  • The later release CG of Natsuhi pointing the gun at Eva turning back into the Ryukishi art of her was really funny. I loved it. the CG art is nice and all but it really does not feel like how the characters "Should" look to me like the Ryukishi art does (Battler in particular looks so wrong!)
  • I gotta be honest my thought right now about Eva's receipt trick is that I think she's fucking lying and she just put it on the ground when they went in and found out Kinzo was missing. Maybe I'm remembering wrong and someone else confirmed it was there but it feels so easy to lie about. Nobody in this game is ever considering that people are lying!
  • Okay so from the moment six people went missing it was obvious the murders would be in the pattern of the Beatrice Epitaph, but... I have to say, for as impossible as everything that happened is, it also seems incredibly sloppy. It's not clear when Kinzo actually died, and the fact that he, Eva, and Hideyoshi all got staked in the head implies to me whoever was doing it wasn't even sure which one would be considered the fourth twilight. Also leaving a note that says "Praise my name" is an INCREDIBLY shit way to fulfill the third twilight. I'd even say Eva and Hideyoshi's deaths don't fulfill the second twilight at all because they weren't torn apart from each other emotionally (they were literally about to fuck!!) or physically torn to pieces (as the kids suggest when trying to solve the epitaph the day before) -- you could maybe argue they were torn apart from the group, but I dont think that really matches the epitaph. Also like... if its a ritual... i dont think you can really speedrun it like that... idk... feels kind of not really fulfilling the epitaph correctly to me... Basically uh, i question the killings' effectiveness as a ritual and wonder what is being obscured by that.
  • Also, assuming "praise my name" in the epitaph implies Beatrice (the other option is Kinzo which makes no sense), that means that the hometown with the sweetfish river wouldn't be Kinzo's either, so we're off base there. That said uh, Beatrice's hometown would be... in Europe, wouldn't it? So the epitaph would be unsolvable by anyone on Rokkenjima either way -- I'm very curious if there is a river on Rokkenjima, because that does feel like the only way anyone on the island could have a chance to solve the riddle. (Not that I'm even sure that's the way to do it!)
  • Jumping ahead, I also wonder about the four treasures -- if we are to take the requests listed at the end scroll for the resurrection of love that was lost as leading into the tea party, that means that "resurrection of all the dead souls" was totally skipped over -- only the cousins, Shannon, and Kanon were seemingly brought back (though I mean, it also says they're in purgatory so idk. I'm not sure how seriously I should take the Tea Party, but it does seem to be actively leading into the rest of the story) unless i guess a potential time loop in future episodes counts as "resurrection of the dead souls"??
  • Kanon's sudden Xtreme moment was really cool, but I'm also not really sure what he was trying to do -- my thought when the scene happened was that he was trying to create a death that threw the epitaph pattern out of whack, (maybe im totally out of it but it genuinely didnt seem to me like he thought he was going to kill Beatrice herself, just do something that would stop her in some way) but I'm not really sure at this point...
  • I was quite surprised to hear Genji say Beatrice was a real, flesh and blood human who had passed away. it feels even stranger because nothing else in the story so far seems to support this. I don't know what to make of it yet.
  • The scene after Natsuhi sends away half the group is really heartwrenching. I did know "Without love, it cannot be seen" before playing this game (though I only know the line itself, not its particular relevance), and the whole bit made me think of it. Without love for each other the family couldn't see the possibility of the 19th person...
  • the rest of the episode is quite fast paced to an extent that i don't know what i think at all about what happened. While I'd say Eva and Hideyoshi's deaths are probably the least explainable, it's pretty much all hard to imagine from here. Reality feels totally broken down. And of course we don't even see what happens to the cousins...
  • the end scroll was awesome, i really liked that. In general the presentation has been really cool.
  • curious about the letter from Maria mentioned at the end, since "seeking the truth" of what happened doesn't really sound like her at all?
  • at this point i feel like it's pretty implausible for magic to not have been involved and then the tea party is just everyone going "yep no way any of this could have happened without magic it was a fantasy story all along haha ha" and i immediately kneejerked into being like "OKAY there HAS to be another explanation then" ... am i Battler?? I don't want to be Battler, that guy's an idiot!
  • i was soooo hype to see Beatrice finally. They really made you wait!! My previous post with her appearing reads like i wrote it as a joke after the fact and i did but that was essentially my thought process in the moment too lol
  • i fuckin loved Jessica cheering Battler on as she horrifically re-died. I have barely mentioned her at all but Jessica is great. Love that girl
  • when i started realizing episode 1 was An Entire Game Itself and not just "the first chapter" i was immediately wondering how the further episodes would continue- i briefly entertained the idea that Battler would escape the island alone somehow and then return a year later or something to figure out what really happened, but that started seeming unlikely as we approached Everyone Dying. I'm imagining from the tea parties and Beatrice being described as having the power to kill someone as many times as she wishes we're looking at a time loop scenario or something?
  • i almost cheered to finally see bernkastel too, lol, she's one of those characters I've seen so much of in fanart and whatever, i was really wondering when she'd appear. Interesting she speaks to the player directly, looking forward to Whatever she's going to do in the main storyline to "assist"
  • so i guess at this point we have at least three different conceptions of what "Beatrice" is. 1. A real, dead woman who kinzo loved and started researching magic to resurrect, 2. A theoretical 19th person on Rokkenjima that is behind the killings, and 3. A witch who is a manifestation of "the rules" of the game. I don't know that i have enough info to take any kind of stab at what the rules are but a wild thought came to me while writing this that maybe the reason vs magic theme is in some way an actual "mechanic" of the story -- if something happens that the characters can't find an explanation to, that gives more power to "magic"/Beatrice to do even more implausible things? Like how the events of the killings seem to escalate in implausibility until Beatrice fully manifests??? That's probably nothing.

I've really liked it so far. I have no real theories at the moment aside from vague feelings of like "well we're trusting Nanjo's word a lot about these deaths when he isnt even a coroner" and "we sure havent seen any of the deaths except kanon's happen on screen huh is that like, weird or anything". A lot of things feel really questionable! But basically any explanation other than "Beatrice did it with magic" feels like grasping at the moment. That's great. It probably should feel that way right now! I look forward to continuing the story.

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in reply to @firemtn's post:

senegart
@senegart

I kept swapping back and forth to the new art whenever I met a new character just to see it, and yeah the Ryukishi art is just the way to go imo.

Everything about the riddle so far feels suspicious, like... for one, I think even when talking about where Kinzo is from, the cousins are just guessing based on where the family lived at the time? I wonder if it's going to end up being less literal (i.e. is "the sweetfish river by my hometown" actually like a road or path rather than a literal river). In a more traditional game I'd even suspect it as the clues to some kinda puzzle lock (with like... a map??? idk). Kinzo seems like he'd do some Resident Evil shit like that.

I also felt it was extremely possible Eva was just lying about her funny receipt, because for one she's just nasty like that, and for two why the fuck did she do that then? She claims it was on a whim but like... that feels like a stretch. But then she seems weirdly sincere at the end of that scene telling Battler not to forget about the receipt...

Nanjo feels so unsuspicious that it's suspicious. Like the story very much paints him as "doddering old Dr chessman", and maybe that's the case but given his attachment to Kinzo I gotta assume there's more going on.

I initially thought the "trick" was going to be that none of the people actually died, and that was going to be how the miracle of "all dead souls returned" would manifest, and I still think that's possible but boy Kanon's death makes that a hard one (which feels like the point). Either everyone would have to be in on it, or else restrained in some way that they aren't suddenly showing up. Rudolph mentioning being killed feels like maybe his way of letting Battler know that some of this is staged?

also yeah everything about how Kinzo acts feels contradictory. he doesn't want them talking about the inheritance but he does want them solving the riddle to get the inheritance. he doesn't like it when people leave the family but does seem to want people to be "self-made" in a way they never could with the family's resources. I wonder if this is significant or just like... he's a weird old asshole.

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firemtn
@firemtn

The thing about the epitaph is that it feels like the intent of "solving the riddle" is that there is some kind of double meaning to it or that there's a hidden message within it or something but with the context and clues we have right now it feels like there's almost no other way to interpret it (though, when all the story's focus is on Everyone Dying that can be pretty distracting from looking for a different reading, lol) ... It did jump out to me that the kids going to the beach the day before could be interpreted as the "going to the shore" bit but I'm not sure anything else in the beginning matches at the moment, unless Maria herself is maybe "the key"...?

oh god yeah, Eva DID have that sincere bit emphasizing the receipt when she left. Geez, I dunno...

They have emphasized that Kinzo is like two different men in a way, though that's mostly about him switching between being the stern, hateful patriarch and him ranting and crying about Beatrice... I wonder if there's something more to it than just that, with how contradictory he can be though.

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