Summary
: I’m not sure what kind of car this is - it looks kinda similar to the Jaguar I always see parked outside one of the offices near where I work.
: On another note, the patch for Baldur’s Gate 3 is now out. I am waiting for a month or so before I begin the LP in order for all the mods to be fixed.
: “That’s awesome…”
: “Drive.”
: I preferred what Hotline Miami did with that movie, but okay.
: “OK!”
: “Just try pressing some, you’ll figure it out.”
: “Kuro-san, that’s not how cars work…”
: “How about this one? Try pressing it…”
: “No!”
: The dialog flashes “Checking data…” for a minute or so, and it was long enough for me to think “I bet if Suda ever remade this as a 3D game, he’d probably put that one sequence with the GPS from Heavy Rain here except you’d be trying to cause as much damage as possible.”
: “Ah.. the navigator turned itself on.”
: “Makes it easier to navigate. I’ll keep my eye on the map.”
: “OK, we’re taking off now.”
: This shot looks like a character select screen for a survival-horror game. Once you’ve cleared Shiroyabu and Kuroyanagi’s scenarios, Uehara stops being shadowed and is the final scenario.
: “If it’s unimportant then don’t bother.”
: “I’ve already started, so can’t I finish?”
: “Nope.”
: “But it’s kinda awkward driving around like this all suddenly… Uehara’s all quiet and creepy, too.. and you’re really temperamental.”
: “Then leave me the fuck alone.”
: “I can’t, I feel weird. I’m kinda sensitive like that, you know what I mean?”
: “Not at all.”
: “This really dampens the start. I wanna hurry up and get out…”
: “So, what is it?”
: “You don’t mind if I talk?”
: “What the fuck do you want to talk about?”
: “Where is this car headed, anyway?”
: “Isn’t it obvious?”
: The text here is really hard to read even when you’re zoomed in, so I’ll type it out: the top part is “12:30pm” and the bottom simply says “Coastal House”.
: “This place is quiet. It’s totally different from the 25th Ward. Where are we…?”
: “Damn, we’ve come pretty far.”
: “We’re in the Kanto suburbs, where they plan to construct the 26th Ward. It’s a redevelopment area. I believe construction is scheduled to finish in, what, 20 years…?”
: It’s been at least 20 years since this game originally released and we still do not have The 26th Ward.
: I know that Kanto is an actual region of Japan but the thought of Kamui Uehara in a bulldozer paving over where all the Pokemon live in Generation 1 makes me laugh.
: “For 20 years, this whole area is being put to sleep. This place has had time stolen by urban planning. It’s like time has stopped here.”
: “What was Kamijo doing here?”
: “We’ll know once we go inside.”
: “I’m a detective. These are my colleagues. Are you ‘Machiko’?”
: “Yes. So you know me, I see.”
: “Yes…”
: “Huh? I can’t tell where this is going. What’s going on?”
: “The name ‘Machiko’ is code. It’s a type of job known as a ‘contract lodger’. ‘Machiko’ is code for that.”
: “You mean like a ‘contract marriage’?”
: “No. Nothing remains on one’s record. People who can’t get married sign a contract and live together here.”
: “But they can’t actually ‘live’ together. They just go home sometimes. The contract lodger just waits at home. that’s why they’re called ‘Machiko’.”
: “Oh, because ‘machibito’ means ‘someone who waits’, right? What the hell is up with that? What the hell do they get out of that relationship?!”
: All of this is really just a fancy way of saying “Kamijo had a mistress he was putting up in a second home.”
: “Just shut the fuck up!”
: “It isn’t anything sad. It may seem pitiful from the outside, but in waiting for him, we are connected.”
: “Connected to what?”
: Her maker, clearly. They’re connected, chain reaction, they live in the eternal (unintelligible).
: I wish I could do VLPs because that song was in a rhythm game on the 360 called Child of Eden that I don’t think has been VLPed yet.
: “Don’t make me say it…”
: “Huh?”
: “Machiko, Kamijo isn’t coming back. He…”
: “I know. I’m aware that he died…”
: “Why are you waiting, then? There’s no more ‘connection’.”
: “Yes, there was. Our connection continued up to the point when you came here.”
: “Did Kamijo predict that some detectives would show up?”
: “Yes. And that the incident would finally come into shape..”
: " ‘Incident’?!"
: I think Shiroyabu’s brain broke.
: “Machiko, please tell us who or what Kamijo really was. What was he?”
: He’s the postmaster general, if you will.
: “Diver…”
: “What’s a ‘diver’?”
: We already know what a diver is because we did Underground Theater, but remember that Matchmaker didn’t exist in the original release of this game.
: “They’re part of the postal service.. divers oversee the deliverymen. They’ve also received special training.”
: “Huh? So, Kamijo was a hitman?”
: “He was in the past, but he had already retired. Within the company, he had attained legendary status as a claims processor.”
: “I’ve heard of that. Five years ago, there were a bunch of problems stemming from complaints that were stubbed out.. but recently I hadn’t heard anything about it.”
: “The company allocated some of the claims processing budget to form a syndicate. Those are the divers.”
: “They got rid of people in order to cover up inconvenient complaints.”
: “That’s right. Kamijo was troubled by it. Which is a given, I suppose. He was supposed to work for the postal service, but ended up learning to process people.”
: “By becoming a diver, he had his identity erased…”
: Maybe it was a good thing that Kamijo exploded his insides.
: “Kamijo received a huge amount of money in exchange for losing his identity. And then he bought you?”
: “I think he wanted someplace to which he could ‘go home’. He never asked about my identity, even once. He never even touched me; he said he just wanted to be together… he always said that and smiled.”
: “…”
: Shiroyabu is going “I wish Kamijo was still alive so I could shoot him.”
: “Kamijo was thinking about returning to you, even if he were to die. Only thinking about protecting you, he led this case far, far away. The Postal Federation was trying to kill Kamijo. Right?”
: “Yes. His very existence itself was incontrovertible evidence of what they were doing.”
: “They were trying to hide the existence of the divers from the world and make their postal service business work out, and Kamijo was too much of a threat.”
: “The Postal Federation has their eye on a much larger market, and are fostering divers. In order to prevent that information from leaking…”
: “They had to kill him… but, what is this larger market?”
: “I’ll tell you later. Machiko.. the last time Kamijo came, did he have plans to meet with anyone?”
: “You’re quite knowledgeable. He said he was going to meet with an old friend. The… ‘building adminstrator’?”
: Well, now we know why the hit squad was there.
: “The administrator?! Kuro-san! The high-rise apartments!”
: “Thanks for talking with us, Machiko.”
: “Not at all.. he told me to believe, so I spoke with you.”
: “What did he tell you to believe?”
: “That’s not exactly a compliment.”
: “Machiko, I have just one final question. Where are you from?”
: And that’s confirmation that Machiko is an Ayame.
: “I see…”
: More importantly, the game has now confirmed what I’ve pretty much known all along: Kuroyanagi is an Ayame.
: “So please don’t give up hope. I’ll take that gun off your hands for you…”
: “You, too…? Why?”
: “It’s OK.. your sorrow will absolutely go away. So life is worth living, even if Kamijo is no longer here. OK?”
: “OK.”
: “I don’t know if we’ll be able to solve this or not, but it’s clear that he was basically contracting us.”
: “So he was trying to bring his past crimes to light. Using the photos of the women he killed when he was a diver, he tried to lead us to the truth.”
: That last line is a bit confusing because as far as I understand it, Kamijo stopped being a hitman when he became a diver.
: “The postal service is killing people who file these boring-ass complaints.”
: Again, confusing because Underground Theater says the opposite: the deliverymen were killing people who had complaints filed against them, however minor.
: “Claims about absence notifications not arriving.. claims about postal workers knocking on doors… claims about employees not responding… claims about letters getting wet in the rain.. claims about employees’ delivery bikes being in the way..”
: “These are the reasons people like her were murdered. They’re murderers who take advantage of people living alone.”
: “Next up is the administrator. The missing administrator is going to set this case off.”
: “Was Kamijo trying to set the case off with his own death? I feel like that has to be it.”
: “Nope. It’s even more simple than that. He ran his mouth in order to keep Machiko from being sucked in to this shitstorm. In order to fool the Postal Federation.”
: “Was that really the reason?”
: “He’s a legendary diver. Geniuses think differently than regular people. Nobody could keep up with Kamijo. They’d just get fucked with.”
: “But he can’t protect Machiko if he’s dead, right?”
: “He’s already fucking with them.”
: “I… I don’t really understand what’s going on.”
: Wait, what? How the hell is he not a Kamui? We haven’t met a single character younger than Kusabi who turned out to not be a maspro.
: No wonder Kuroyanagi calls him “jabroni”, he’s not even enough of a man to dehumanize himself to become the embodiment of a hitman who may or may not have ever existed.
: “Don’t worry about that.. you’ll know someday. Until then, forget about it.”
: Not shown: Roughly four full text boxes of ellipses from Shiroyabu.
: “OK, it’s forgotten.”
: And that’s the end of Good Looking Guy. Next up is Tokio’s second chapter, titled Tigiri (契り), a word that can mean both “promise” and “destiny”.