Yeah that line seems very thrown in last minute to try and excuse some of the odd rooms we encountered.
I didn’t really get into it in this LP because I’ve talked about it previously when @GenghisKait and I covered other games, but I really dislike when video games have weird architectural choices when there’s little to no reason for it in the game. Things like the room where We have to cut off the dolls head to make the dual rooms match. Why was this room made this way? For what purpose?
It’s especially bad when it’s a setting like in Mad Father where it’s a residence where people are living and would be running into these puzzles regularly. Do you have to deassemble/reassemble a sliding block puzzle to flush the toilet?
I wonder what the plot of ‘Kind Father’ would be. Our dad secretes himself away in his workshop every night, and as the game progresses we learn that he’s actually Santa Claus?
I feel maybe it would help if there was, like, a journal entry somewhere talking more about the origin of the house. It could say something about how the basement used to be used as a vetting course for new members, with trials set up to purify the spirit or some such.
And your dad never removed the puzzles because, I dunno, the house is a historical landmark. Or he’s lazy.
Little Aya Claus wakes up one night to find that the all the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future have taken over the house and kidnapped her father. Can she make her way through the festive undead and survive this not-so-silent night with her life intact?
At the very least, they could have thrown in some handwave about how the curse is messing with the house because something something angry magic something.
Yeah, or maybe Dad appropriates the cults trials for his own experiments? Something akin to the human experiments that went on during WWII would fit in with the whole ‘Mad Doctor’ thing he’s got going on.
Well and it’s especially weird because they kind of do have magic messing with the house in addition to the cult thing. At least I assume that the cult members didn’t set up that room where we have to recreate our Dad’s memories. So it’s partially magic, partially cult members?
I mean I guess I can see where Aya was coming from with the whole “I’m gonna repeat my father’s mistakes” thing. It wasn’t any of the numerous vengeful ghosts that killed her father in the end, but rather many knives. As long as she keeps any of those out of Maria’s hands, she’ll probably be fine.
I feel like it, uh, kinda takes the wind out of the climactic mom confrontation when it goes:
[spoiler]Mom: "I must avenge the many innocents your father has-"
Aya: "You’re just jealous of dad’s hot girlfriend, aren’t you."
Mom: “lol, you got me.”
I mean, later we found out it was actually because she’s trying to foil your dad’s doll schemes, but in the moment it was really goofy.[/spoiler]
This sort of leads into my issue with the ending, which is that there’s way too many endings here. This entire final video is a series of endings, each one trying to one-up the last with another twist. It seriously puts Return of the King to shame. I just felt that the entire plot had been rendered meaningless by the time they were finished, and it got increasingly frustrating to watch. Not to disparage the LP, of course, which was a fun look at a game I’d definitely absolutely never play myself.
First Mom doesn’t want to spill the beans about Dad’s grand scheme,
but then they get out of the portal realm and she goes “Oh wait sorry changed my mind”. Dad seems to go crazy out of nowhere presumably just so we can have a dramatic chase sequence. We deal with Dad and then the lesson Aya learns from all this ‘I’m gonna do exactly what Dad did!’. Aya learns nothing, Maria learns nothing… to the point where at the very end of the game (Aya taking up her Dad’s practice) I wonder if the characters would be in the exact same situation had the events of the game not taken place
We’ll get to take a look at the other endings to the game next week plus a bonus scene that makes the ending even longer and more confused, believe it or not!
Thanks for your comments on the LP, everyone! It’s been interesting seeing what everyone thinks.
I have a soft spot for indie horror, so I have to admit to still enjoying the game even though it has massive, massive flaws. Specifically, as people have commented on, the ending is pretty unsatisfying. It’s weird to have Aya go through that entire ordeal and have her takeaway be “Mad science is really cool, let’s do that.”
I was wondering if you guys are going to be going for it’s quasi-sequel ‘Misao’?
I may be biased cause I played that one before Mad Father but I think he learned a bit about story pacing and scope in it, so it was always my preferred of their games
I might be wrong, but I think Misao came out before Mad Father! I’ve played it, either way! I enjoyed the game, but I found the narrative to be a little disjointed and uneven. Aki does a lot of things that make no sense to me, like cheerfully hide in a corpse. Also who dies from a phone ringing?? Still, it’s a fun little game that might be interesting to go over sometime.
Well I’ll be damned, you’re 100% right! Misao came out in 2011 and Mad Father 2012.
I guess I always just sort of assumed the opposite because of the seemingly cameos from Ogre/Mr Onigawara, Ms Library/Aya and Scientist with a chainsaw/Alfred but it seems that one was a prequel to the other instead of a sequel. My bad!
(edit: I suppose it also doesn’t help that Sen updates his games frequently, adding callbacks to mad father like Ms Library’s diary and the snowball plush and extra dialogue where she talks about her father in version 3.0 of the game, which came after Mad Father released, making placing a timeline a little harder to tell)
Interesting thing to note: You hear me refer to the young blond boy as “Dio” in this video. This name comes from fans of the game, who gave him the nickname based off his resemblance to a character from Jojo’s Bizarre Adventures.
Mad Father contains a gallery to look through, which contains all the character assets used in the cutscenes, along with a short sentence about the character. We didn’t check this out in the LP as the gallery doesn’t really tell us anything we don’t know/already find out in the game proper.
Presumably the gallery was added sometime after the original release of the game, after the fans had come up with a nickname for the ‘Blonde Youth’, as his gallery gives a nod to the nickname:
The 'Blonde' Youth
The nickname is usually how people refer to this character, though as it states it’s not his real name.
Genghis and I played the steam release, and looking at the Blond Youth’s gallery entry, references to his nickname have been taken out for some reason.
The 'Blond' Youth
So perhaps the creator doesn’t want the name ‘Dio’ associated with the character anymore? Also to note: ‘Blond’ has been changed to the masculine form in the new release, and ‘Coron’, the ghost girl who stole Mom’s perfume,has been changed to ‘Ines’.
And that’s it for this one! Thanks for checking it out everyone! We’ll be leaving this thread open for another week before officially closing it. Thanks for sticking with this one despite the technical issues and the text moving a bit too fast!
I am loathe to suggest games to LPers, but I would like to meekly imply that Shardlight might be a thing of potential interest somewhere in the future. I’ll probably follow along with whatever games you’re gonna show off, though!
So what was behind that door you explicitly didn’t enter right beside where you dropped the chandelier on the doll? You never explained why you didn’t open it.
[spoiler]Also you gotta love a bonus epilogue that both introduces loose ends and directly points out how nonsensical the good ending is considering Aya’s character arc.
“Pfft! Of course she’d never repeat her father’s mistakes! That would make most of the events of the game completely pointless!”[/spoiler]
I would’ve thought that collecting all the gems would’ve ended with an alternate ending where Aya doesn’t become evil. That would make the most sense considering obtaining a lot of the gems involves helping and sympathizing with your dad’s victims.
Please suggest away! I’ve learned of so many new and interesting games that way, and Shardlight looks like something right up my alley. I definitely want to take a look, even if only for my own sake.
Oh gosh, I didn’t really cover that very well, did I?? Going in that door causes a death, the door slams shut and you see blood come out from underneath. I meant to cover it in a “deaths” video, but I ended up not finding the deaths in the game to be varied enough to really cover and it slipped under the radar!
