Summary
: This is why I love Kusabi. I wish Suda hadn’t been on the whole “no sequels” thing around this time, because I would love a Kusabi game.
: “Clowns…?”
: “A pair of jerkoffs. Sounds like they’re totally full of shit.”
: “Is it them?”
: “Yeah, definitely.”
: “A male and female pair?”
: “Looking like a couple of fuckin’ weirdos. What do you call those people? Savant guards or whatever.”
: “You mean… ‘avant-garde’?”
: “I’ve seen people like that before… like these losers.”
: “Copycats… maybe they’re Kamui ripoffs?”
: “Kamui?”
: “Kamui, like with Ayame…”
: “Sounds like some sorta curse.”
: “They’re trying to do something with Kamui as the motif.”
: “They seem really interested in Kamui…”
: “It’s probably a feeling similar to jealousy. They’re jealous of Kamui.”
: “Jealousy…? So that means, like, they also feel hatred towards him, huh?”
: “The hatred that transcends love…”
: “That means…”
: “What is it?”
: “They’re saying they’re gonna change the world. These fuckin’ people…”
: “With different methodology from Kamui.”
: I think Kusabi just described the plot of Persona 5 in three sentences.
: “Their goals are the same as Kamui’s… but they want to show off the difference in scale.”
: “What the fuck is up with the end of the millennium, huh? Jesus Christ!”
: “The end of the millennium is next year.”
: “Next year…? Isn’t it this year?”
: “The new millennium starts in 2001.”
: “OK… I get it now.”
: “Get what…?”
: “Selling? Selling what?”
: “Don’t you get it, Sumio…?”
: “Not really…”
: “Me neither.”
: All we have to do in order to finish the game is get in the elevator and go to the fourth floor. There are, however, some references that will show up in Suda’s later games on the other floors.
: I should note that I’m not sure if these were in the PS1 version or not.
: Beef Head is the name of the video store in No More Heroes.
: On the opposite side is a reference to Suda’s previous game, Moonlight Syndrome.
: Bad Girl was a boss in No More Heroes that Suda apparently liked enough that there’s an entire plotline in Travis Strikes Again about Travis bringing her back from the dead.
: This is the room we need. Let’s just open the door.
: Big Dick spends the next several hours playing Sonic Adventure, before realizing that apart from being technologically impressive in 1999, Sonic Adventure is not a good game.
: I like to think Big Dick looks at her and goes “Wait, are you some kind of Dreamcast spirit? Can you make it stop beeping?”
: “Are you looking for someone? The missing girl, right? Great, that’s me. You heard from Naka, right? Naka is so cute. When Sayaka Baian died, he cried ‘wah~wah~’ like a little kid.”
: “It was really hard to cheer him up. Ah, don’t tell Naka I told you, OK? <3”
: “Oh yeah. The clowns on the Internet… ‘oldman’ and ‘Neutral’, wasn’t it? It looks like there are a lot of people who think that ‘Neutral’ is me. How rude. I’m waaaay younger than her.”
: “Did you think it was me, too, Mr. Man? Here? There’s nobody here. Everybody moved. It was really lively until yesterday. But I came late. They left me behind, hehe.”
: See, I figured the whole missing girl thing was another one of those dropped plot threads so I stopped thinking about it immediately after it happened.
: “I was really confused. But… if I end up not able to go, then I’ll just want to go so badly, you know? So I’ve been so bored.”
: “They were so nice. They talked to me about all sorts of things, and there were a lot of hard words, but they taught me really simply. Do you know how dimensions work?”
: No, that won’t happen until a little over sixteen years later.
: “There are numbers, right? There are all kinds of numbers, like even and odd numbers and stuff. And some of those numbers can’t be divided, right? Like 1 or 7 or 3 or whatever..”
: “But there’s a world where these numbers can be divided. I’m going to that world. They said it’s in a different dimension. There are computers there, right?”
: I got kinda confused here, because the dialog stops and you’re back in first person mode. I wound up going all through the building again until I figured out there’s a second, hidden contact point in here.
: “The program source code inside will lead us. It would take even the best microchip 500 years to work out the calculations, they said. But they also told me something..”
: “It won’t take 500 years for people to work it out… so they’re gonna go ahead and develop the world. Maybe, they’ll be considered invaders over there. But we have to be brave and move on to the future..”
: “I’m happy I was able to talk to someone one last time. It looks like they forgave us for being late. They’re pretty nice, for aliens. They said you’re supposed to be here, Mr. Man.”
: This is the second game I’ve LPed now where the plot has devolved to the point where people talk cryptically about aliens.
: “You’re needed here, so please take care of the place. It was fun… goodbye…”
: Welp, Big Dick’s hallucinating again. Time to finish this chapter.
: “It’s a male and female pair named Furuya and Nakama. Method Tank has been exposing themselves to the media for the past few days, and are garnering attention all over.”
: “Like a zoo using pandas to get visitors to come in.”
: “That’s fun, isn’t it?”
: “They are apparently planning to commit network-based crimes.”
: “Shouldn’t we be investigating?”
: “Leave them…”
: “That’s rare, boss.”
: “Nakategawa…”
: "Yes… in accordance with orders from Central, we are not to engage in any sort of investigation with regards to Method Tank. They say ‘contemplation is the best method of investigation’. "
: “Does that mean they have a defense plan?”
: “No.. without knowing their target, we can’t defend anything.”
: So wait, Nakategawa can track down some random girl who disappears, but even though they know who Method Tank is, they can’t figure out what they want?
: “So what’re we supposed to do?”
: “I don’t know…”
: “Just leave them… those are our orders.”
: “I see…”
: “You’re OK with this?”
: “Not at all…”
: “Looks like it’s started…”
: "From terminal to terminal, everyone’s love will proliferate.
: “When you open the true eyes of your soul, the new world will be before you.”
: “Words and intentions are wiped away by the passage of time. I shall release the seeds of the new world. I promise you a new way of life. People are reborn on the internet.”
: It’s weird that the game is internally inconsistent with whether it capitalizes the I in internet or not.
: “Cover the whole of the land.. with a great digital wave!”
: “Shit! Is this some sort of nuclear detonator or something…?”
: “Nuclear?!”
: I’d like to expand on this just a little. Since the end of World War II, Japan has been a vehemently non-nuclear country: they’ve strictly adhered to what they call the “three non-nuclear principles”.
: Those principles are that they won’t produce nuclear weapons, they won’t have any themselves, and won’t allow other countries (read: the US) to host nukes in Japan.
: In fact, a couple of months after this LP started, Shinzo Abe made the suggestion of having Japan host American nukes specifically to deter China after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
: His idea was immediately shot down by the current Japanese government.
: “Really?”
: “There have been plenty of real-life examples…”
: “Boss, is this really OK? For us to just sit here ‘contemplating’?!”
: “So basically… their goals are the same as monkeys.”
: “Monkeys??”
: “That’s a bit insulting to monkeys… anyway, they’re similar to wild animals. A male and a female get some sort of dramatic shot in the arm. They have a goal, and their egos awaken.”
: “The impulses they can’t hold back are exploding. It’s the same sort of desire one has for sex. Two people who desire each other have sex over and over.”
: I think Nakategawa’s still not over being horny for idols.
: “But with that alone, there’s a sort of self-consciousness that is beyond one’s control. They now have a goal other than just sex. So now it’s the ‘et cetera’ of a man and a woman.”
: “If this hits zero…”
: “It’s almost here. There are gonna be some big fireworks.”
: “No choice but to see how this will play out…”
" …"
: If you know what the Dreamcast VMU’s beeping sounds like, I’d like you to imagine it here, because I did.
: Wait, isn’t this just the ending to Fight Club? I mean, sure it’s a power outage instead of an explosion, but still.
: In case you don’t remember this guy, his name is Munakata, and he’s a special agent with some branch of the government.
: He can also apparently make a coat appear like magic.
: “A power outage… it’s nothing to worry about.”
: “You hiding something…?”
: “Naive ambition has rotted and crumbled away in the hands of adults. You know the Internet? Those clowns genuinely tried to change the world.”
: You know, I never thought of the idea that Furuya and Nakama could just be giant ICP fans.
: “Believing that the net could be used for all communication everywhere… they distributed a super high-function next-generation OS throughout the entire world.”
: “And so I had to dish out punishment for the naughty children.”
: “No idea what you’re saying.. you sound like a goddamn foreigner. Maybe I’m just too old.”
: “You’re old.”
: “I feel fucking nauseous…”
: “You have to discard the illusion of ‘youth’.”
: “So.. what do you want?”
: “Anytime now…”
: “He’s gonna do it again?”
: “Probably.”
: “The fuck is it this time?”
: “Doesn’t that depend on you?”
: “Depend on me? Is every single motherfucker just r----- or what?”
: “It’s got nothing to do with me. I don’t care. I can’t deal with this shit.”
: “Well, please don’t get in Kamui’s way. We’re going to smoke out the remnants of the FSO. OK, I’m going home.”
: “Don’t get yourself killed.”
: “Oh not just yet…”
: “Well how optimistic…”
: “Ah, Tetsu… you should be careful of those around you. This is a big game, you know. Alright then…”
: “What a ripoff…”
: This part here is why I like all those segments between Kusabi and Sumio in Kamuidrome. There’s someone talking - but it’s not Kusabi and no one else is in the car.
: “You OK with this? Sumio…”
: Okay, so let me tell you what I think this is. I’ll start by saying Sumio isn’t dead - the game will confirm this in the epilogue. He’s alive and in prison, where he’s been since the end of Parade.
: We know from Flower Sun and Rain that Kusabi is bisexual and had a thing for Sumio, and I think Suda intended for Kusabi to be bisexual even in this game - it wasn’t something he came up with later.
: My theory is that this entire chapter, all those exchanges Kusabi had with Sumio, were him trying to get over the fact that Sumio chose Riru over him.
: I think some of the exchanges between them probably didn’t actually happen within the context of the plot, and are instead Kusabi talking to his own mental version of Sumio.
: I do think, by the way, that Sumio definitely did feel something for Kusabi, even though he was really using Kusabi as a way of getting back at Yukimura. That’s also something that Kusabi is clearly coping with.
: That would mean that one of the core plots of The Silver Case is in fact a gay romance, which is surprisingly forward-thinking for a game released in 1999.
: I want to remark that I showed this to Salty Vanilla as a reference for a piece that we’ll see in Lifecut, and his response was “He actually looks hot ngl”.
: I really, really want to do Lifecut next because it’s where like 80% of this game’s plot is, but we’ve still got Ai to do, so next time: Ai.