Click Here for Update 88
: You know that moment in the Ni no Kuni 2 LP where you start realizing that the plot makes no sense whatsoever? We’re about to reach that moment.
: Most of this update is going to be a pointless plot recap that no one has a reason to give a shit about. You can pretty much skim this one until you see the black-and-white diagrams pop up.
: “…Hey, are you all right? Don’t fall asleep until we reach our destination. …Are you listening?”
: I like to think that Joker is sitting there and thinking “My god. This is one of those things where Sae is actually Makoto from the future, sent back in time to ruin everything. I have to warn Yusuke!”
: “Anyway, we need to talk about how to get out of this situation.”
: This cutscene also breaks the timeline. While it seems like this is the second half of the cutscene that happens on 11/18, it’s pretty clearly not.
: “Futaba’s monitoring of Akechi’s phone has confirmed it… he did indeed have an ulterior motive.”
: “It’s on a completely different level than just that.”
: “Not only was he trying to frame us, but he was the true culprit behind the mental shutdowns… his offer to assist us was simply a ploy to frame the Phantom Thieves… and kill Akira.”
: Game… I fucking get it. We just saw that in a lengthy cutscene.
: “If we go into Sis’s Palace as he suggests, we’ll likely be met by a large ambush of police forces.”
: Or a large ambush of canine-themed tattoos.
: “To think he would be this far gone… I know now what it means to feel a chill down my spine. Furthermore, he wishes to bring a police squad from reality into the Palace…”
: “If the eight of us can enter at once, it’s not inconceivable to think a larger group is possible. He may even be able to bring in vehicles or other pieces of special equipment.”
: Okay, but then the range on the app thing is completely inconsistent.
: “So this really was just a setup to shift the blame onto us…”
: “He made us go after Okumura, then once we triggered the change of heart, he killed him…”
: How many times is this that they’ve tried to change the reason why the party went after Okumura? First it was because they were “too obsessed with popularity”, then because they were led into a trap by the shadowy conspiracy.
: The reason they went in originally is because they were looking for Morgana. That’s why. Morgana is the one who made them commit to it.
: “The whole time he was workin’ with Makoto’s sister, he was really just some homicidal maniac! C’mon, we gotta take the bastard down! Isn’t that recording we got enough proof to do it!?”
: “No, Akechi is merely a tool. His orders come from elsewhere… the grand mastermind behind it all. An unimaginable fiend capable of arranging the murder of a suspect inside of a police station…”
: “Unless we find out who that is, we will continue being targeted even if we defeat Akechi…”
: “But… what means do we have of learning his identity?”
: “We’ll have to make Akechi say it… though once we do, that mastermind will likely eliminate us.”
: “I think that will be the case eventually regardless of whether or not we learn his identity. The only reason it hasn’t happened yet is because we’re an easy target to blame for his crimes.”
: “If he realizes that’s no longer possible and abandons that plan, he may opt to kill us immediately.”
: But… that doesn’t make sense. I mentioned this before, but why would the shadowy conspiracy even need you alive in the first place? In fact, isn’t it incredibly inconvenient for them that you’re even alive?
: I mean, they can blame crimes on you if you’re dead just as easily as they can if you’re alive - in fact, it’s more convenient for them if you’re dead because that way you can’t spread the “We don’t kill people” narrative that goes directly against their “The Phantom Thieves are serial killers” narrative.
: “Dammit… so we don’t got a choice but to go with that bastard’s suggestion…”
: “But if we go into the Palace like we’re told, Akira will get arrested and then Akechi will kill him…”
: “Palace… the Palace…”
: Now I remember why I like Futaba. Just shuts Makoto the fuck up.
: “Wh-what’s this all of a sudden!?”
: “There’s a way… a way to get past Akechi AND get the mastermind to lay off of us, all while learning his identity.”
: “Really!?”
: “You gotta be kidding me!”
: Well, now that whole cutscene where they’re reacting to Joker’s ‘suicide’ doesn’t make any goddamn sense. They do try to explain it, which we’ll see in the next cutscene. The explanation is “We did it because we thought someone might be watching us.”
: And here it is. The big ass pull. Apparently, the party can just create clones of people in the Metaverse, even though this has never at any point come up before and it has never been previously established that they can do this.
: The question is, if they could do this the whole time, why the fuck didn’t they? Why would you even need Haru to get through that door in Okumura’s dungeon if you could just make a Haru clone? I mean, the reason is obvious - because otherwise you’d have to explain how Akechi didn’t notice - but still.
: When I first played this, I thought this was merely godawful writing and a bad localization… but now that I’ve played YIIK and Ni no Kuni 2, I think I understand what happened here.
: I think what happened is that like Ni no Kuni 2, the writers had multiple drafts of this scene. With release date creeping up on them, they cobbled together what they had and hoped it made sense.
: I’ll talk a little more about this theory in what may turn out to be the next update. That’s how long this day is.
: “Yeah, that’s it!”
: “It seems that’s our only option. Listen close, everyone. I have a plan for how we carry this operation out…”
: “Waiting upstairs. Go tell them to come on down. I’m gonna fetch him.”
: The messaging here is all over the place. First you have (as we’ll soon see) their reaction of “We had to fake a reaction to Joker’s death because they might be watching”, and then you have “There’s no way they’d be watching Leblanc, we can all head there tomorrow as a group and no one will suspect anything.”
: I mean, that’s par for the course for this game’s plot, but still.
: “Makoto told me everything. Futaba-chan… I’m sorry that I caused you so much trouble this past summer…”
: “Eh, it’s ancient history now.”
: “But man, that goddamn detective!”
: “How’ve you been?”
: “You must be fine if you’re joking around like that.”
: “It truly is a relief to see your face.”
: “I bet that moron Akechi don’t even know we tricked him yet!”
: “Still, how’d you pull this off? Isn’t this guy considered dead?”
: “You weren’t told anything? I heard my sister brought him here though…”
: “Yeah. She came over in a taxi, dumped him off, and told me to keep him safe. It was right after they announced he had ‘died,’ too. Almost gave me a heart attack.”
: “I didn’t have time to explain…”
: “Hey, shouldn’t we tell Boss what really happened?”
: “We wanted to make our enemy believe the leader of the Phantom Thieves was dead.”
: “What?”
: “What we did was make that enemy kill his fake in the Metaverse.”
: “Enemy? Fake? What’re you talking about?”
: “The true culprit behind all these incidents set us up. Our true goal here was to determine their identity.”
: “True culprit? I see… so you guys were going up against someone else.”
: “It was Goro Akechi. You knew beforehand that he was the traitor, didn’t you?”
: Good to see Sae is clueless even after she gets out of the interrogation room. They just told you that!
: “Akechi himself gave us the chance to strike back. He made one fatal mistake.”
: The fatal mistake was being in a game written by Hashino. If Satomi Tadashi had written this, the game would have been over by now.
: “Couldn’t you have just said from the beginning that Akechi was the real culprit?”
: “That wasn’t something we could simply bring up. We couldn’t have you suspect Akechi. Besides, neither you nor the other investigators would have believed something like that, would you?”
: “…True. Akechi was credited with the arrest of the Phantom Thieves. Not even I would think he was the culprit… in other words, you left him alone on purpose… that was a bold move.”
: You know your plot is well-written when you have to have two characters who stand in for the audience and ask a bunch of questions to pave over the plot holes.
: Here’s what gets me, though. There’s two kinds of questions when you’re engaging with a story. The first is usually answered by “Because then there wouldn’t be a plot.” - this is your “Why didn’t Frodo just use the eagles to go right to Mount Doom and drop the ring in the volcano?”.
: Most of the questions here are that first type.
: “God, I can’t keep up with any of this stuff… uhhh, so what was this mistake Akechi made? What did he do?”
: “He slipped up in regards to Morgana’s voice.”
: “You mean our cat?”
: “Yes. Morgana can talk.”
: “…Sorry, was that supposed to be a joke?”
: “Oh! Our apologies. That’s completely true.”
: “You surprised?”
: “Does that mean… he said something just now as well?”
: “But you don’t understand him, do you? That’s how it was for all of us at first too.”
: “When you’re in the Metaverse, Mona talks like a normal person. Once you hear that and your brain realizes he can actually talk, you start to understand him in reality. …It’s a change in cognition! Most likely!”
: “Thanks to Akechi’s lame acting, we figured out something was up.”
: They repeat the Obvious Slip here, so I’ll just cut it.
: “Mona was the only one who was talkin’ about a pancake… that meant Akechi’d already been in the Metaverse by then!”
: “And since he was lying to us about that, we assumed he had a hidden motive behind contacting us.”
: “It seemed odd upon further thought. His reaction to my pancake comment was an honest one, after all.”
: “He did approach us when we found ourselves in the worst trouble yet.”
: “That’s why we asked Futaba-chan to wiretap his phone.”
: “Even that ace detective could never have imagined a program being installed so quickly. Futaba’s quirky nature proved to be a great help.”
: “That was just an act! After a few days of listening, this confirmed his betrayal.”
: They play the phone call between Akechi and Shido here, so I’ll skip that too.
: “Is this for real?”
: “I knew he was acting strangely, but to think he was this far gone…”
: If you’re wondering what the point of this entire exchange is, the answer is I don’t know. Maybe they did this expecting people would clear the casino and then drop the game for months?
: “He’s no ace detective… Akechi is the perpetrator behind the mental shutdown crimes.”
: Remember when I said the game is going to beat you over the head with the fact that Akechi is the killer?
: “On top of that, there’s someone else commanding Akechi… someone with great authority… so great that they can order an assassination in a police station. That’s why we had to make a move before they did.”
: You just said that! You said it almost word for word in that last cutscene! Fuck!
: “I see…”
: “We baited Akechi into Sis’s Palace, making him dispose of our leader’s fake but think he killed him.”
: “Could you elaborate on that in more detail? What exactly happened in my cognitive world?”
: You don’t fucking need to say “in more detail” after “elaborate”! That’s what the fucking word “elaborate” means! Fuck! This is Allanson dialog!
: “We’re sorry for using you without your permission. Your Palace had all the conditions we needed…”
: “What conditions?”
: “First, we required a place inside the cognitive world that was the same as in reality.”
: “That place’s based on the real world, after all. Anywhere that’s not warped looks just like normal.”
: “That’s why nobody but the person who uses the Nav even realizes they’re in the Metaverse.”
: “Back with Kamoshida, we came in from the station without even noticin’…”
: “And it was absolutely the best decision we could’ve made.”
: Putting in a plot recap after a plot recap… and then following it with another plot recap?
: “Makoto is normally so calm as well… but once her mind is set, she gets oddly impulsive…”
: “I did have a bit of a rivalry forming with Akechi… but I just couldn’t contain myself anymore once you became a target, Sis. The reason I joined the Phantom Thieves was to heal your heart, after all.”
: What rivalry? You basically rolled over and let Akechi take over on the casino, and then rolled over and let Futaba handle the stupid fake death plot!
: “My own achievements were all that mattered to me… I was desperate. I wasn’t myself at all. I’m sorry I couldn’t see that.”
: No shit! That’s why your entire dungeon arc existed! It was literally written on the goddamn walls!
: “We heard from Mako-chan that you were going to do the interrogation, Niijima-san.”
: “And regarding its location… I take it you used the data from my laptop?”
: “I’m sorry.”
: “Go on.”
: Okay, you can start paying attention again now. It’s time for them to justify the big ass pull.
: “First, our clothes didn’t change when we were down in the interrogation room.”
: “Once we heard that from Makoto, we secretly went to check it out without Akechi knowing.”
: “There was also one more thing we absolutely needed to make this work…”
: “Since he had yet to be caught though, there obviously wouldn’t be anyone in that room.”
: This line sounds irrelevant, but I think what happened is that in one of the earlier drafts of the plot, Sae had a clone of Joker and a clone of Akechi somewhere in her palace - and they used that instead of asspulling the ability to make clones.
: “They looked no different than actual people.”
: Wait, what police officers? There were no cops in Sae’s palace - unless you mean the security guards, who are dressed differently from the cops who come in with Akechi.
: Anyway, this probably made more sense in the original plot draft where they probably did have cops in the casino and the party presumably took one of those to act as the guard that Akechi kills.
: The thing is though, if you go with the given explanation of “we can create clones”, this part makes no sense. What would have stopped them from making a clone cop if the clones in the dungeon were like the ATM people in Kaneshiro’s palace?
: “After that, we just had to work our way into the Palace like usual while keepin’ Akechi in the dark.”
: “However, it was then that we were met with a terrifying, unexpected police ambush. As a result, even though we managed to grab the Treasure, we couldn’t get it out of the Metaverse…”
: “…Except that was all an act. We had prepared an empty briefcase beforehand and merely acted like we were taking the Treasure. This was because we knew the police would be coming for us.”
: I kind of forgot it existed, but while working on this update, I went and watched the Persona 5 anime to see how they handled this - because there’s no way in hell even the most patient of TV audiences is going to sit through all this. It’d be torture.
: The answer is… they don’t. At all. In the anime, they skip any explanation whatsoever and go right to Akechi killing Joker, then it cuts to the credits. That’s the final episode.
: I also watched the promotional OVA for Royal, and found this piece of sage advice from badly off-model Morgana about trying to analyze Persona 5’s plot:
: “We made sure before the operation that the police would be waiting to ambush us. And just as expected, he totally took the bait.”
: “Akira getting captured by the police went exactly how we planned it.”
: “And I had been interrogating him with no knowledge of this. But, how did you lure Akechi into this… cognitive world’s interrogation room?”
: “All I needed were the coordinates. Hehehehehe…”
: No, Hashino, this conversation started dragging like fifteen minutes ago. But yes, the game tries to patch over the rest of the plot holes in an entirely optional conversation. No, they don’t do any better job of it than they did here.
: “It must have been truly hilarious for our leader who sat idly in the real world’s interrogation room.”
: Here’s another reason that anime cutscene made no sense. Remember how you see the dead cop melt into black stuff and Joker looks up with the grin on his face? There’s no way Joker could even have known for sure the plan had worked!
: “So that’s why you gave me your phone… I only took it because of what you told me.”
: “It’s a shame I didn’t have the opportunity to see that for myself.”
: Wait, what? Why would you want to see… you know what, chalk this line up as non-canon.
: “All I could do was try to handle the messages that started coming to me on his phone. Huh… so in other words, I’ve been to the Metaverse, albeit for a brief moment.”
: “In our experience, there is little danger when someone enters their own Palace for so short a time.”
: “That’s the other reason we had him give it to you. We needed you to listen to Alibaba, deceive the guard, and ultimately aid in his escape. By having you head back to the interrogation room, we could return you to the real world as well.”
: “I mean, I had to think of some way to keep you from running into Akechi mid-assassination.”
: What Futaba will explain in the optional conversation is that she had a locator on both Joker’s phone and Akechi’s - which makes me wonder why they even needed to send Sae to the Metaverse at all.
: “…Astounding. I hadn’t the slightest idea that such a grand operation was taking place within me.”
: “I’m so glad Akira was able to persuade you during the interrogation. Even though we all knew Akechi’s plan, we were pretty worried about that part.”
: “True.”
: “Why’s that?”
: “Without Sis on our side, Futaba’s plan and subsequent breakout would never have been possible. That persuasion was easily our greatest gamble. We couldn’t consult Sis beforehand. It was absolutely the make-or-break moment of the entire plan.”
: “Still, I’m surprised you could convince me in such a short time. Were you confident you could do it?”
: “Understandable… either way, I can’t believe you went for such a risky idea…”
: “If we could just tell you the true culprit’s plan, I knew you’d realize the bigger picture… realize that Akira was telling the truth, and that there was a greater evil to pursue.”
: “As a result, we emerged victorious.”
: Basically, their plan was “Let’s hope Joker doesn’t get drugged too hard.” I think Makoto is the real villain here.
: “Then the reason you kept this a secret from me was so you could catch the true culprit, correct?”
: “Yes. Plus, you had lost control of yourself at the time…”
: “This is stunning. All I can really do is laugh.”
: “Huh?”
: “They had a coroner working to ensure Akira-kun’s death was reported as a suicide. That coroner didn’t take one look at the scene, and just passed along a falsified death certificate.”
: Okay, but like… surely Akechi told someone that there’s a dead body in the interrogation room. Were they planning on leaving it there?
: “…The bad guys have that much influence?”
: “Murder in a police station would be reckless otherwise. We also knew of a possible conspirator.”
: “Thanks to Futaba-chan’s messages and the guard’s demeanor, I eventually came to understand… and since the higher-ups at the police knew nothing of this, they were thrown into disarray.”
: “As a result, Akira-kun’s suicide during imprisonment was reported on the news, just as Akechi planned.”
: “And with that confusion, he was able to escape with Niijima-san’s help.”
: That would have been the interesting part! Fuck! Why did they not just do that instead? Have a whole action scene with Joker and Sae escaping police headquarters.
: Shit, they could’ve done this whole thing where you’d be stealthing around and Joker doesn’t have his Persona powers, so no motion-blur jumping and crazy acrobatic shit. Have it so every so often, they have to duck into a side room to avoid a guard and then have plot happen there.
: But no, this is Hashino’s Atlus, and we all know their slogan: “If it would require effort, it can’t be helped.”
: “I made sure nobody would check the morgue for his body, and thanks to that, nobody knows he survived.”
: Cop 1: “Hey, did you hear about that body Akechi said was in the underground interrogation room? Did anyone go clean that up?”
: Cop 2: “Oh, that? I think Niijima took the body to the morgue.”
: Cop 1: “Well, we have no reason to go clean up the blood that’s no doubt all over the interrogation room from someone being shot execution-style at point blank range or dispose of the body, so that’s that then.”
: “Thinking back to the interrogation though… I can’t believe what they did to Akira. The callous use of violence and even drugs is utterly abnormal. If he had lost consciousness and hadn’t been able to tell Sis about the phone, he would’ve died…”
: At this point, I don’t think Hashino knew what he was doing anymore. He’s undermining his own plot by pointing out how dumb it is. Let me tell you what this reminds me of, because there’s a much better writer who was in a similar situation but didn’t shit his pants like Hashino did here.
: There was an interview I read a couple years ago with Jeremy Blaustein, the guy who localized the first Metal Gear Solid game. He realized pretty quickly that the idea of Snake (or really, anyone) agreeing to infilitrate a heavily-guarded nuclear facility without even being issued a gun was necessary for the core gameplay to work, but dumb from a plot perspective.
: That’s where the “Weapons and equipment OSP?” line came from. That wasn’t in Kojima’s script, it was something Jeremy Blaustein added because it sounded enough like actual military jargon that no one was going to question it. That decision worked out brilliantly. I never even really thought about that until he pointed it out.
: That line is also brilliant because it gives the fewest possible details about the situation and doesn’t invite the audience to think about it too much. Instead, you’ve got Hashino shitting his pants and putting in a 30-plus minute cutscene that overexplains everything and is practically screaming at the player to analyze it.
: You know what would have made a lot more sense here? If Makoto was a traitor and working with Akechi. That’s supported a lot better by whatever this shit is than the actual plot they’re trying to support with it.
: “Don’t. You shouldn’t have to remember such things…”
: Joker looks her in the eye. “I still remember the tramp stamp.”
: “It still freaked me out when I saw the suicide on the news though.”
: “We made sure to live normal lives while he was being interrogated to avoid drawing any suspicion. Even with that, I couldn’t help but worry for him in my heart…”
: It was one day! Not even one day, given that he was out on the night of the 20th!
: “Well, I knew right away that our plan worked out.”
: “I wanted to believe… but considering what we’re up against…”
: “Ryuji’s a bit on the dense and carefree side.”
: “Can it, cat!”
: “I had to be patient and avoid this place until things settled down. I finally feel relieved…”
: “We knew he was alive, but… it was difficult to not worry until we could confirm it in person.”
: “Now that I think about it, my interrogation was just a formality for the head commander. What a joke letting me interrogate someone who was meant to die. They just wanted to avoid backlash…”
: Backlash for what? The whole point was that no one would give a shit because they were pinning a bunch of murders on the Phantom Thieves.
: “Very well. From here forward, I will do my utmost to assist you. …You saved me, after all.”
: “That’s reassuring to hear.”
: “I’ll do whatever I can to help too. Just let me know. Let’s take a break for now though. This old brain is pooped.”
: “Are you sure?”
: “It’s not like this place is the liveliest joint in town. It won’t be a huge loss for me.”
: “Let us accept his offer. What a great man…”
: The game cuts to black, and you’d think that you’re finally done with this godawful fucking plot dump. But are you? Fuck no you’re not! We’re at the halfway mark… of this day. Oh, did I not mention? This plot dump goes on for another three days.
: “…That sounds familiar…”
: “No. Nothing in particular. More importantly, you’ve done well with regard to the prosecutors.”
: “The cause of death for the SIU director has been settled as a ‘stroke’.”
: “I had him work quite substantially on forging evidence. His loss should be mourned.”
: “It was thanks to his efforts that I could enter the phantom thief’s interrogation room.”
: Hashino, please. You’re having two of your villains talk to each other about shit they already know, and for what purpose? We already knew the SIU director was working for Shido!
: “The SIU is in disarray with his death. I’ll take my time choosing a successor after the elections…”
: Come to think of it, how would they explain away that death? The SIU director died either at the same time as (or slightly after) they announced Joker’s death. They can’t pin it on the Phantom Thieves at that point.
: I mean, I know how, and that’s because this is a Hashino plot. This is what happens when you can’t write and then invite people to think about your writing.
: “At any rate, I’m now praised as a hero, and I owe it all to the Phantom Thieves.”
: “All possible hindrances are now gone. There’s no doubt that this election is mine.”
: Naturally, 12/18 is the deadline for dealing with Shido.
: “Elections, huh? Eh, don’t matter to us. It’s not like we can vote in 'em anyway.”
: “Why don’t we resume our conversation?”
: “Well, the Phantom Thieves’re back together! We can finally take it to Akechi and the bastard backin’ him!”
: "Akechi accidentally let that slip after the murder. He said, ‘Shido-san.’ "
: “Shido… feels like I’ve heard that somewhere.”
: “He is unmistakably a man of power if he has such strong connections to the police.”
: You’re… not going to have Makoto chime in and tell us who Shido is, even though everyone already knows?
: “…Who?”
: “I believe he’s a politician… remember, Ryuji? You said his speech was too loud.”
: “For real!?”
: “It’s certainly possible that Shido is the mastermind…”
: “Huh?”
: “Do you have some kind of evidence?”
: “Nothing material. However, there are various conditions which align with that possibility. First, he would profit from damage done to the current administration by the psychotic breakdowns.”
: “On top of that, he’ll most likely become the next prime minister if he wins this upcoming election.”
: “No…”
: “Did he set us up with that election in mind?”
: “If he is behind all this, that would be in stark opposition to his honest public image.”
: That’s kind of a “duh” statement there, Sae.
: “So his current position and popularity is just him benefiting from the mental collapses…”
: Here’s a question I’d like to posit to you, the reader. By this point, we’re well over 15 minutes into this cutscene - not counting the ones from 11/19 or 11/20.
: What is it that we’ve learned from this cutscene (apart from that Hashino is a terrible writer and the writers for Royal could have cleaned this up but didn’t) that we didn’t already know by the end of the last update?
: I ask this because I genuinely do not know. As far as I can tell, the only thing we learned is the bit with the diagrams about the details of the plan to fake Joker’s death.
: “We’ll make him have a change of heart, no matter what it takes.”
: “Mom…”
: “Shido, huh?”
: “What is the matter?”
: “I had a feeling he was wrapped up in all this.”
: “From the moment Wakaba died… I had a hunch he was involved. But there wasn’t anything I could do, so I chose to protect Futaba and went into hiding.”
: “Oh yeah, that’s just how Shido is, makes his enemies disappear.”
: “Originally, I was looking into the mental shutdown cases. It was then that I accidentally stumbled upon government research regarding the psychotic breakdowns.”
: “So, I tracked down the whereabouts of that research data and met with the associated parties. Boss was one of those parties.”
: “I would never have imagined all of this was connected… the mental shutdowns, psychotic breakdowns, Shido, and even the Phantom Thieves’ actions…”
: “Way back when, Shido kept saying he was going to be prime minister one day. Nobody believed him though…”
: “What’s going to happen to this country if Shido becomes prime minister? What about the world?”
: “The issue is simpler than that. This is nothing more than yet another selfish adult trying to impose his will on the public.”
: Hashino, why is the party not over this already? The whole “adults bad” thing probably should be dead by now. This game has a lot of problems with messaging, in that I don’t think Hashino knew what message he was trying to convey.
: The game DOES have a message… which we’ll see about five minutes before the end of the base game, because that’s how you should do that kind of thing (it’s absolutely not how you should do that kind of thing).
: “We gotta expose that rotten bastard!”
: “Yeah, we’ll do it like always!”
: “Then let’s check the Nav!”
: “Where would the location be?”
: “…What kind of things go through a politician’s head?”
: “I always think of dirty money and shady actions.”
: “What does he do? And where? We don’t got a clue about this guy’s life.”
: “His Palace must be somewhere that politicians frequent. Any ideas, Akira?”
: “How arrogant must he be to see himself as the ruler of the Diet Building?”
: “Our next target’s the big-shot politician Masayoshi Shido. We’re gonna do this, right?”
: “No need to waste time with him. We just gotta hit the head. Nobody against it?”
: “Of course.”
: “He will be a worthy opponent.”
: “Let’s win this, together!”
: “Time for revenge!”
: “Then it’s unanimous!”
: “All we gotta do now is figure out what he thinks that Diet Building place is.”
: “So, that’s the app that allowed me to enter the Metaverse.”
: “An old fart like me can’t wrap his head around all this stuff…”
: “We’ll have to deal with this before election day, December 18th. That means we need it done by the 17th.”
: “It’s best we hurry before they discover there’s no body in the morgue.”
: Given the competence level of the villains, I would not be surprised if one of them opens the morgue, fails to find a body inside, and then decides that Joker was “one of them Draculas” before going out to buy some garlic.
: “Should we start tomorrow then? We can meet at the Diet Building after school.”
: “That reminds me, what’re you gonna do about school? You can’t show up if you’re supposed to be dead.”
: “That’s what I told the school.”
: “Don’t let ‘em find out you’re alive then, all right? This whole thing’d be for nothin’!”
: I’m also just now realizing how incompetent this whole thing makes Akechi look.
: “What do you mean?”
: I’m going to cut some dialog here for my own sanity. Makoto recaps the entire thing about Shido being the real enemy. Again. Again.
: The writers for Royal could’ve fixed this. They just fucking didn’t, and that’s why Royal sucks.
: “We’ll be making use of the police statement that the leader of the Phantom Thieves committed suicide. Our leader who is presumed dead will come out of hiding to deliver a grand statement.”
: “He’ll say he has escaped prison, not committed suicide, and was in fact almost killed by a criminal.”
: “Everyone’s gonna flip.”
: “You guys thought through all this stuff too?”
: “We’re intellectuals, y’know!”
: You and Makoto have a single brain cell between you!
: “But the true battle has only just begun. We won the first round, but we must stay on our toes.”
: “Yeah, this ain’t the time to be celebratin’.”
: “These people tried to trap and kill us. There is no end to their inhuman, conniving nature. We will need to be prepared for whatever may come our way.”
: This is clearly it, right? It’s going to cut to black and then go to Joker alone in his room. There’s no way Hashino could possibly fuck this up any worse than he already-
: Do yourself a favor. Skip the rest of this update. It’s just going to be me screaming at how bad this fucking writing is. Next time… more plot dump, followed by even more plot dump.
: FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!
: “Back then, you earned the media’s attention as a young politician who could rise up against bureaucracy. Because of that, those who wanted to preemptively deal with problems tried to tie you up in scandal.”
: Shut the fuck up! Shut up! Fuck! No one gives a shit! This entire conversation doesn’t make any fucking sense! You’re telling each other shit you already know! Fuck!
: “To think I would fall for the ruse schemed by those decrepit fools in power. I recall that’s when you came to me. You promoted yourself, saying you had ‘special powers’. If it wasn’t for the research on cognition that I dabbled in, I would have thought you insane.”
: “I made those troublesome opponents psychotic, and erased any trace of that scandal.”
: If you put this exact dialog into YIIK and used YIIK’s character portraits, I would have no idea it wasn’t from YIIK.
: “Who’d think that tampering with a person’s heart could trigger a psychotic lapse or a mental shutdown. And when someone like that said he’d support me, I had suspected there’d be an ulterior motive.”
: “It’s because I sympathized with your aspiring ideology. I believed that your ideals needed to be achieved for the sake of the country’s future.”
: “Well, my faith in you was precisely why I pulled the plug on that research. I only need you using that power. It’d be troublesome if someone else uncovered how it works.”
: “Any suspicions should be snubbed out. Even the smallest doubt must be severed at the root. After all, we had an active Public Prosecutor’s Office director on our side until recently.”
: Hashino, I think everyone understands at this point that Director Evil was working for Shido.
: “Astounding, isn’t it? To think the director himself often forged evidence to secure his promotion. He was quite surprised when you confronted him about it. He didn’t know who leaked that information.”
: “Well, I got that out of his Shadow, so technically speaking, he did it himself.”
: Why does it even matter? Seriously, he’s already dead, who gives a shit?
: When did this become Deus Ex?
: “I must agree.”
: “There’s no need to be ruined along with such incompetent fools. I will lead this country to its revival. Those who get in the way must be eliminated at times - that’s the correct way to use the Metaverse.”
: “Still, it would stand out if there were continuous deaths and scandals with your political rivals. Which is why I made them ‘suspects’.”
: WE ALREADY FUCKING KNOW! FUCK! SHUT UP! FUCK!
: “Prosecute the targets that I turned psychotic… and solve them as cases unrelated to you.”
: There’s another 30 textboxes of Hashino’s trash plot shitting itself, and going through it, I feel just like I did when I was doing the YIIK LP.
: “Thanks to your efforts, my clean image remains untarnished, and I’ve monopolized public opinion. Once I gained public sentiment, collaborators from all sectors began approaching me on their own.”
: And here’s Hashino’s lame excuse for why the principal was part of the shadowy cabal.
: “The police were no exception. With their management in my pocket, keeping them in check was easy.”
: “When the Phantom Thieves emerged, I thought things might become somewhat troublesome.”
: “And they were just brats once we looked into it - all we needed to do was lay the blame on them…”
: How many times has he fucking repeated this in this conversation alone? Two? Three? I cannot bring myself to give enough of a shit to count.
: “When you told me that, I knew then that you were the better man.”
: “Their popularity was a bit beyond my expectations, but flipping it made the negative press stronger. After that, all I had to do was openly berate them; I’ve been gaining more supporters since.”
: I like to think that this scene was the straw that broke the camel’s back that was Hashino’s employment at Atlus. This is the moment when Sega’s executives realized that this game worked despite Hashino, not because of him.
: The only pleasure I take from this scene is knowing that it’s likely that this is where Hashino realized how horribly incompetent and out of his league he was. The moment where he realized that he fucked up, and now it was too late to fix the problem.
: “The current administration is dead with ongoing scandals… never mind the fact that they’re my doing. Even the government parties have begun splitting up… and they’re dissolving just as planned.”
: “The time has finally come… just a little more, and I will take the seat of prime minister. However, inauguration isn’t my goal. That’s when everything truly begins.”
: At the very beginning of the LP, I mentioned a spot where I would have to spoil Eternal Punishment. This is that spot, but I’ll be as general as I possibly can.
: Shido is a direct fucking ripoff of a villain from Eternal Punishment who has a very similar MO and a character who is basically Akechi but written by someone competent (and also not a high schooler).
: “In other words, you’re creating a more powerful country that can compete with the world.”
: “The public resonates with my ideals and follows me. And for that, some ‘sacrifices’ can’t be avoided. That is my duty as the chosen one. Your assistance has been very influential in making my plans proceed smoothly.”
: You know what I would pay money to see? How Satomi Tadashi would’ve salvaged this plot.
: “When I become prime minister, I’ll grant you whatever wish you want.”
: “With this most recent case, my name has become known across the country, perhaps even the world. Surely my story will be passed down as a hero who won against monsters that could control people’s hearts.”
: This line is… probably a reference to Eternal Punishment. I wonder if Hashino put this here himself, or if one of the other writers did it after they caught on to what he was doing.
: I may get a bonus Yusu-Gay done based on it, because it involves Jun being a ninja and the concept of samurai Joker with a ninja Yusuke amuses me.
: “I believe I’ll lay low and devote myself to my studies.”
: Right after this is an ENTIRELY OPTIONAL scene with Futaba where Hashino tries to fill in some plot holes. We’ll do that in a separate update, because I am done with his bullshit for now.
: Next time - more plot dump. Three more days of plot dump.