Summary
: Just as a heads up, this update will have Kusabi use a slur. I don’t know why they didn’t take it out for the re-release, since you already have a pretty good idea of what Kusabi’s character is.
: It’ll also contain an account of sexual assault. Both of these things will be at the end of the update, when the green security robot footage starts up.
: “The Special Forces Unit was destroyed… what happened?”
: “Tetsu, come on…”
: “What?”
: “He isn’t right…”
: “Huh? Hey, you listening?”
: “He’s in a state of psychosis. I don’t think he can speak.”
: I can speak, I just don’t because I’m still taking in the concept of LPing a game where the writing doesn’t suck.
: “Looks like it.”
: “What do we do?”
: “I guess we got no choice…”
: “Should we head out?”
: “The fuck are you talking about? Turn on the recorder.”
: “You’re right… hm? It won’t work, the battery’s dead.”
: “Well that’s useless. Whatever, write all this down.”
: “OK…”
: “Well? You even forget this guy’s face?”
: “Sumio… quit fucking around with the recorder like a little kid.”
: “Fuck off, old man. I know.”
: This is what, three times now that Kusabi has threatened to kill someone?
: “Fine, whatever, just ask the questions…”
: “I know… eight hours ago, the guy you guys were chasing. Kamui escaped to the woods near the isolation ward. Then, there was a chase. Special Forces was destroyed.”
: “Sakamoto and Inomata were killed in the line of duty… Natsume is still out cold in the ICU…”
: “Tetsu…”
: “Hm? So one more push, huh?”
: “Don’t.”
: “Why not?”
: “He’s extremely delicate. Any more and…”
: “Delicate?”
: It’s so nice to have a game that was made in 1999 where the characters have cell phones, as opposed to a game written in 2016 that has to explain dial-up.
: “Where’s Kusabi?”
: “He’s here.”
: “It’s an emergency. Get to the scene right away.”
: “Where to?”
: “Sending it over now. See you at the scene…”
: “Wait… she fucking hung up. What should we do?”
: “We go, obviously.”
: “No, I mean…”
: “What?”
: “Timrod…”
: “Hm… what do we do about this?”
: “He’s the sole witness.”
: “So we bring him.”
: “But without Dr. Tachibana’s permission…”
: “Fuck that guy.”
: “This isn’t something personal!”
: “Fuck off.”
: I really wish Suda had done an action game with Kusabi as the protagonist, because I could see there being a button in cutscenes where Kusabi tells whoever’s talking to fuck off.
: This would apply doubly to plot-important cutscenes, because Kusabi has no time for plot.
: “Seriously?”
: “Come on, we’re going! Huh? What’s up with this chinchilla, anyway…?”
: “Chinchilla? That’s kind of a shitty nickname after all.”
: I hope you’re ready for my absolute favorite bit of dialog in this game so far. If this game had been localized before No More Heroes came out, it probably would’ve eclipsed the “Mr. Sir Henry Motherfucker” scene in that.
: “In that case… maybe, like… ‘Private Dick Chinchilla’— no, that’s not it. He’s sort of a big guy… ‘Big Private Dick Chinchilla’ —?”
: "Nope, that sucks… I got it! Just shorten it to ‘Big Dick’ ! "
: “That’s a cool-sounding nickname. That’s it, then - Big Dick! What do you think, Sumio?”
: I think part of what makes me appreciate Kusabi so much as a character is having played Disco Elysium. This is basically what working with Harry Du Bois would be like.
: “That’s awesome!”
: Sumio being immediately in on it fucking kills me.
: “Let’s go, Big Dick!”
: I didn’t capture it right, but the time is 7:35 PM… which either means it’s a really long way to the sewer from the hospital or Kusabi and Sumio were in the hospital for almost ten hours.
: “Just past this sewer.”
: “Are the Unit 1 guys here?”
: “Yeah. Hachisuka and Morikawa should be…”
: “Let’s hurry.”
: “Hurry up, Big Dick.”
: The game automatically moves you to this point, and from here, shit can get a little confusing.
: You can’t immediately move north - all you can do is turn around. The trick is that each direction has different characters you can contact, and you need to contact all three.
: The game will be giving us bios of each character soon, but this is Morikawa. He’s part of the other half of the 24th Precinct Heinous Crimes Unit, and is Hachisuka’s partner.
: “We’re not sitting around on our asses like Unit 1.”
: “Who’s this guy?”
: “The witness. We brought him from the hospital.”
: “I heard Natsume’s guys all went down…”
: “Yeah, this guy’s the only one left.”
: “Some sort of superhuman?”
: “He’s Big Dick.”
: “Nice to meet you, Big Dick!”
: My new theory is that the player character is actually a sentient chinchilla, which I posed to Salty Vanilla. Here’s an early artist’s rendition of what the player character looks like.
: “Of course. So, who’s our guy?”
: “You didn’t hear? It’s Kamui…”
: “Kamui? You mean ‘Silver’ Kamui?”
: “So you remember, huh?”
: I didn’t find out until when I started working on this update, but there’s a timeline of events leading up to the start of the game on the game’s website.
: Some of it is spoilers, which is why I won’t post it here, but according to the timeline, the Silver Case happened in March of 1979 - almost exactly 20 years before the game starts.
: “I mean… how could I forget?”
: “What about this one?”
: “It’s really messed up… it’s like…”
: “It’s been awhile since we’ve had a nasty one like this.”
: “So it was him…”
: “Him? Kamui did this…?”
: “Yeah. No fuckin’ question, this was Kamui.”
: “But how?”
: “With that weird harpoon gun… he got four people with it.”
: “And he gouged out the different parts… get her down now!!”
: I remember in Disco Elysium when you had to either shoot the body down or become a racist.
: “Fuckin’ Christ…”
: Sumio and Hachisuka are over to the left.
: “Take a look. We’re just getting started…”
: “Seems like not much time has passed…”
: “Can you just keep quiet for me? Who’s this…?”
: “A special survivor. We brought him just in case. His name is Timrod.”
: “OK… Hi, Timrod. My name is Hachisuka.”
: “He’s in a state of shock. He can’t speak.”
: “Well then… good thing you brought him along then, huh?”
: I like to imagine that this is a conversation Hachisuka has every time Kusabi shows up to a crime scene.
: “It was Tetsu.”
: “Kusabi…”
: Finally, if we turn to the right from the initial view of the sewer waterfall, we can talk to two generic cops.
: “I don’t really know either, but apparently he’s some top secret serial killer.”
: “But I’ve never actually heard of him…”
: “It was all just rumors before. Nobody thought he was actually a real person.”
: “Why is this all not publicized?”
: “This world is full of the unknown.”
: “I thought it was all just made-up stories…”
: “There’s lots of stuff that little guys like you and I simply never know… crime is just like the darkness. It isn’t meant to be seen.”
: I mean, given that literal crime demons apparently exist in this universe, that’s probably a good thing.
: “That makes sense.”
: The entire time this dialog is going on, there’s camera noises and flashes going off in the Film Window.
: “Twelve hours…”
: “It was Kamui. The timeframe fits…”
: “Five hours between the woods and this. That would be enough time.”
: “Got an ID?”
: “Not yet…”
: “Let’s hurry and find where it happened.”
: “So he didn’t actually kill her here…?”
: “Nope… he did it somewhere else and then left her here, so it would stand out more…”
: “I’ll handle the ID.”
: “Do it… Sumio, take a look around.”
: “Roger that!”
: “Hachisuka! Where’s Hachisuka?”
: “She left.”
: “She left?!”
: “To attend the autopsy.”
: “Without even fucking saying anything…”
: “That sort of research is important, so…”
: “Whatever, fuck it. How about it, Big Dick? You remember anything?”
: Our movement is now unlocked, so we can go past the water.
: There’s a contact point right ahead of us. Let’s just see…
: And as soon as we take another step forward…
: “It’s a doll… right?”
: “What is this old thing doing here?”
: “No idea.”
: If you’re not familiar with Suda51, this is a hallmark of his writing - subverting the audience’s expectations by introducing a scene and then immediately discarding it.
: Ah, the tried-and-true policy tactic of not doing anything.
: You can tell a little bit about each character by what gun they use, so I’ll describe each one - just in case you’re not familiar.
: The SIG Pro is a polymer-frame handgun that was built to be a service weapon… but never really caught on anywhere except for France, where it’s the standard police sidearm.
: We’ve already seen most of Kusabi’s information, but they repeat it here anyway.
: The Colt Officer’s ACP is a short-barrel version of the M1911 developed for concealed carry and originally meant for military use. It’s not typically used by police due to a number of reliability issues.
: The SIG P229 is a concealed-carry variant of the SIG P226, and is a very common standard-issue sidearm among police and military units in the US.
: The P232 is a standard-issue gun for police officers in Japan, but is also used by a number of police departments in the US.
: “Kamui Uehara has escaped from the hospital isolation ward and has killed four people. He is currently still at large.”
: “Kamui is assumed to have made his way into the city, where he is currently in hiding. Now, three things.”
: “First off, there’s something I’d like everyone to be consistent with. The official name of this case is the ‘Kamui Case’. It’s a good, simple name.”
: “Second, I’d like you all to watch this video. Hachisuka, start the tape.”
: The video very slowly moves down the hallway as this is going on.
: “Well how thorough. Fast-forward it.”
: Kusabi understands the Hashino-Allanson Rule of Explanations well.
: “I can’t. It’ll damage the tape head.”
: Of course the futuristic guard robot uses VHS tapes. This is 1999, and everyone thinks DVDs are the next LaserDisc.
: “Whatever, let it play.”
: “Yeah, so what?”
: “What about it?”
: “This is where the female victim worked. At the time of the murder, she was wearing her own clothes.”
: “Yes.”
: “So what does this mean?”
: “So there was someone she wanted to see so badly she was willing to break the rules…”
: “She is believed to have been meeting with Kamui in secret.”
: “The fuck is wrong with this broad…”
: “Lovesick, I’d assume. She works in a hospital, after all…”
: “And? What else?”
: “So Kamui…”
: “Killed her. We’ve gotten some comments. Apparently the victim, Yuriko Sonoda, and Kamui were involved physically…”
: “So they were fucking?”
: “And it seems it was strictly one-sided, from Sonoda. Kamui was mentally ‘impotent’, so…”
: God dammit, and I liked Kusabi.
: “To a woman, he may have been the ideal man. Like a doll with no emotions, who will never betray you. The perfect man, whom you can just set down by your side forever…”
: I get what the point of this scene is - it’s that you have a bunch of clueless middle-aged guys in a room discussing a woman - but still.
: “You think so? Wouldn’t that be boring? Also, assuming all women are like that is pretty sexist.”
: “But it’d be comfortable and easy, right?”
: “Well,it would be easy, but still…”
: “Let’s get back on track. Sonoda seduced Kamui and lured him here.”
: This sounds less like an investigation and more like Nakategawa pushing a narrative, but I guess that’s what happens when you work for a government hit squad.
: “Goddamn.”
: “So she seduced Kamui, and was killed…”
: “And then she was left here.”
: “Hold on… the lead is different, isn’t it?”
: “Yes. In Yuriko Sonoda’s case, the scene of the murder and the place her body was dumped were the same.”
: Wait, can you really call it ‘dumping the body’ if Kamui just left it there without moving it?
: “In Yuka Kawai’s case, it’s two separate places. After killing her in her home, he moved the body.”
: “That’s pretty complicated for Kamui.”
: “You got something, Tetsu?”
: “No, never mind…”
: “Here is the victim’s profile. The victim is Yuriko Sonoda. Twenty six years old; female. Worked as a counselor. After graduating from medical school, she started work at this hospital.”
: “Her most recent patient was Kamui. She had been counseling Kamui since about six months ago, recently they had been in some form of contact almost every day.”
: “The cause of death is his specialized harpoon gun. The body shows signs of perforation in four places. Inside her uterus we found traces of bodily fluid thought to be Kamui’s.”
: “We’re currently waiting for a positive ID. Estimated time of death is between 10pm and 11pm on March 27th. This matches the time the tracking satellite began tracking Kamui almost perfectly.”
: “Next up is the profile of the victim found in the sewer. Yuka Kawai, 25 years old. Worked at a digital media sales firm. She was in charge of the Kamui projects.”
: “Estimated time of death is between 3pm and 4pm on March 28th. We’re waiting on test results for further details.”
: “I’ll leave the details to Naka. Next!”
: “Alright, and finally: I’ll give a simple explanation of Kamui Uehara’s history. Please take in as much of this info as you can.”
: “He’s not your run-of-the-mill criminal. This man has been completely overtaken by an evil darkness. Go ahead and toss ‘common sense’ right out the window for this.”
: Hold on, did I just walk into the writer’s room for Kingdom Hearts?
: Well, that explains why Kusabi showed us the photo earlier.
: “OK, if I may continue, with regards to how we proceed…”
: “That’ll do! Unit 2 is the brawn, and you Unit 1 guys are the brains of the operation, right?”
: “That makes sense.”
: “That’s basically right. Investigation Unit 1 is analyzing the database to try to predict how the suspect will move and where he will appear. Investigation Unit 2 will collect the data not yet in the database and investigate the areas the tracking satellite can’t reach.”
: “Everyone else, await orders… that’s all for now. Let’s get to it.”
: Next time, we’ll finish Decoyman.