TRANSMIT the PLACEBO - Let's Play The Silver Case

[Timrod]

Summary

: Danwa is kind of the End of Evangelion of The Silver Case. Weirdly, everything in this update is canon - it gets confirmed in FSR and double confirmed in The 25th Ward.

: We start in a cafe, with Kusabi off to our left. I recommend you go get yourself a cup of coffee, or some water or something. This update will last just about long enough for you to finish it.

: “How you been doing? Things going OK? Huh? Sounds like I’m interrogating you. Sorry, some habits are hard to break.”

: “Well… it’s nothing special. It’s just, you know, I wanted to see how you’re doing… ah, don’t worry about it. The coffee here is really good.”

: “Hey! Lady!! Bring over some more chocolate sausages!”

: I looked it up. Chocolate sausages are in fact a real thing. They’re Italian, and are basically chocolate with bits of tea biscuit mixed in. Also nuts and dried fruit, if you’re into that.

: “The chocolate they serve here is imported from Berdet. They’re famous for it. Totally different from the crap you can just get anywhere. Yeah, this is my shit.”

: Berdet is not a real place. Yes, I bothered to look it up. I wonder if it’s in the same Not-Europe as Spy X Family or the 1970s Lupin III anime.

: “Anyway, with Sumio in jail… ah, that’s unfortunate… but you seem well on your way. Doing really well on these assignments… but I guess it’s about time, right? For the truth to be known.”

: You have to love how Suda ends Lifecut with a dipshit spinning in a chair, and then drops the actual plot in what’s basically a bonus chapter. He does this shit all the time - see that one scene in No More Heroes where Jeanne’s entire backstory is in a scene that is fast-forwarded through and has to be recorded and manually slowed down to be intelligible.

: “Like your sister being abducted by aliens, or that old guy smoking over there turning out to be your father. It’s nothing nearly as dramatic, so just don’t expect too much of it.”

: If I ever recorded this stuff in advance, I would absolutely have had Salty Vanilla do a picture of Big Dick looking over his shoulder and seeing an older chinchilla pretending to smoke.

: I like to think Big Dick’s dad is a chinchilla Columbo.

: “This is the truth regarding the ‘Silver Case’. Kamui Uehara killed some old folks. That’s the ‘Silver Case’. But, that’s not even the truth. At least, it’s not accurate.”

: Remember that thing about “Ocular silverization” from Lifecut and how I said it was important? Yep, Suda is going to wait until now to explain that.

: “Kamui’s eyes were gone… silver eyes. Kamui Uehara was no hitman. He was your average civilian, except for one thing. His eyes were silver. And do you know why?”

: “It’s ridiculous, right? I don’t believe it either. Who would make up some dumb shit like that? Am I right? I mean, that’s what you’d think, right? But that’s what the ‘Silver Case’ was. We were tricked.”

: “This Kamui, who do you think he was? The guy with the silver eyes. …I watched those old men fight over Kamui’s eyes right before my own. A bunch of old men brawling. It was hilarious.”

: “They went for weak spots, shoving their fingers into each other’s nostrils and asses. Ah, sorry… we shouldn’t talk about this over food. So then, there was only one left. Of the old guys.”

: If you’ve never played Dungeons & Dragons, there’s a very infamous artifact in that game called the Eye of Vecna. The silver eye is probably based on that.

: “It was gruesome. I feel sick even just talking about it now… but I couldn’t believe it. In an instant, he was young again. That old man caught on to me. I had my 229, and…”

: “Oh! I gave that 229 to Sumio. Well, anyway… after that, I aimed at his forehead. And he just laughed. I laughed, too. And I shot twice… game over, man! That silver was magnificent, gleaming in the light.”

: “If he’d been a woman, I’d have felt bad. Those silver eyes… a certain man owns them now. Hey, Timrod. Who do you see in front of you?”

: “Psyche. It’s not me. I had no idea at the time, about eternal youth and immortality… if I had, I would’ve made sure to kill that fucker. I’ll never forget that face. I feel like shit whenever I see him.”

: And now we know why the Kamui and Ayame projects existed. The whole point was to re-create Kamui to figure out how to make a silver eye - so that they could then mass-produce them.

: “The current mayor of the 24 Wards, our despot. He’s Chizuru’s grandfather. His real name is Uminosuke Hachisuka. That whole ‘father’ bit is a lie. That creep regained his youth from the silver eyes.”

: “He killed his own son, and has been using his son’s identity. That fuckstick is pure evil. Oh, and get this…”

: Yep. Chizuru and Tokio are related. From a logical standpoint, this explains why they were used as masspros - because they were related to Hachisuka and could theoretically support a silver eye.

: “Using your own grandchildren like toys. Well, let’s take our time and get rid of them. It’ll be a new age soon. Aren’t we lucky? To be born in this age so that we can witness such a wonderful moment. It’s fuckin’ awesome.”

: “And so, I have a favor to ask. It’s important. It’ll affect you from here on out. It’s a very delicate problem.”

: God dammit Suda.

: You’re not missing anything. Kusabi just told us the entire plot of the game in a casual 10-minute conversation and revealed that the mayor of Tokyo is an immortal monster who sacrificed his son and his granddaughter in an attempt to manufacture magic immortality eyeballs.

: Oh, and Kusabi lost money at the horse track again. I like to think that he watched his horse lose, shook his fist at the sky, went “I bet Kamui did this!” and then realized that no, Kamui could not have done that because Kamui was some guy who got owned by a group of old people twenty years earlier.

: There is one thing I don’t get though, and that’s why the mayor would have let Kusabi live. I mean, Kusabi is ostensibly the only person who knows what the mayor actually is. Then again, I would not doubt that he’s tried before and Kusabi went Lifecut on the assassins.

: Anyway, several minutes of credits later…

: “Kusabi, we’ve got a problem!”

: “Huh? What is it? And what’re you doing here?”

: “We need you on the scene ASAP.”

: “What? What the hell is it?”

: Kusabi stands up. “I knew it! Kamui rigged the goddamn horse race! Big Dick, get over here, I need you to use your Kamui powers to fix the next horse race, and also lend me 50,000 yen.”

: “Kamui? Kamui’s right here, fuckhead. So what the fuck are you doing here?”

: “Sorry for not contacting you earlier.”

: “This isn’t the time for apologies! Mayor Hachisuka has been…”

: Yep, Hachisuka’s dead. It’s never explicitly stated who or what killed him - my theory on that is that the Ayame conciousness either killed him directly or possessed Tokio and made him do it.

: Or, there’s the alternate theory put forth by Salty Vanilla…

: I mean, we know Hachisuka had two silver eyes, and the game only ever accounts for one of them, so…

: “Come quickly!”

: “Come quickly, please!”

: “Wait a sec… then, who is Kamui?”

: No one is Kamui! Well… kinda. You’ll see.

: “You’ll understand once you get there!”

: “Thanks!”

: We’ll see Kusabi again in The 25th Ward. Unfortunately, he’s not the main character in that one.

: Who knows? And with that, we’ve reached the spot where the PS1 version ends. There are two more stories left, both of which are remake-exclusive. One of them is Yami. I will not be covering the other one in this LP.

: The last story is called “Whiteout Prologue”. It is a preview of one of the final chapters of The 25th Ward (which is, of course, called Whiteout), and ends on a cliffhanger.

: I’m not really sure I want to commit to doing the entirety of The 25th Ward, given that it’s a shitload of text. I’ll give it a try, but I think to avoid burnout I might not do it as my only project.

[Timrod]

: Now that we’ve done the entire Transmitter arc, it’s time to talk about Flower, Sun and Rain. Unfortunately, FSR was never properly translated and that sucks, because you need it to understand Yami.

: Let me explain what I mean by that. The whole point of FSR is that you’re initially supposed to suspect that it’s Suda shitposting again and that it is not, in fact, a sequel to The Silver Case.

: I’m going to borrow some screenshots from the only complete LP of the game on Youtube to explain more.

: Flower Sun and Rain is a game about a man named Sumio Mondo, who describes himself as a “professional searcher”. He drives an early-2000s Toyota Celica he calls “Giggs”.

: The game came with a manual styled after a travel guide to Lospass Island, where FSR is set. This later turns into one of the most concrete links to The Silver Case - one of the characters will mention Sayaka Baian and Sumio corrects her as to what page of the manual the entry about her is on.

: Sumio carries a silver briefcase named Catherine. This is very important. I’m not even kidding. This is also the first major translation fuckup.

: That’s not at all what he’s fucking saying. There’s another LP that actually translates the PS2 version, and the real line is something like this: “Why Catherine, you ask? What else would I name her? Tetsugoro?”

: Anyway, the main plot of the game is that Sumio is sent to Lospass Island to stop a terrorist at an airport from bombing a plane - except that by the time he gets to his hotel, the plane explodes and Sumio winds up apparently trapped in a time loop.

: Like The Silver Case, FSR has two plot arcs - one with Sumio and a second with this person, who is Kusabi’s daughter, Toriko. She has a pet crocodile named Christina.

: On the second to last day, Sumio goes through a cave and winds up on a boat with Tokio, who reveals a number of things - namely that he was the writer for the travel guide that provides Sumio with the answers to every puzzle in the game.

: He also reveals that Kusabi is bisexual and was in love with Sumio, and that Sumio Mondo and the Sumio from The Silver Case are the same person. The translation is, once again, shit.

: Tokio then takes his sunglasses off, revealing that he has a silver eye - which he got from Hachisuka. This is part of why Yami exists, because Suda knew people had not played FSR.

: This is also where we find out why Lospass exists. Lospass was home to a tribe of people who raised hyenas that produced the silver eyes. The original Kamui (the one that got owned) was from here.

: There is an entire metaphor here for Japan-Ainu relations - “Kamui” is an Ainu word, and the way the Japanese treated the Ainu over the years was… not great. If you’d like to know more about that, I highly recommend reading Golden Kamuy - specifically the fan translation done by Everyday Heroes, which has a lot of really good historical notes. Those guys gave a fuck and it shows.

: Oh, right. The puzzles in FSR are all number entries. Sumio hacks into Tokio’s silver eye and the answer is the day Tokio killed his past: 12/30/1999. It’s in the guidebook, but this entire thing would have zero significance to anyone who hasn’t played The Silver Case - which was not available in English at this time.

: The final revelation from Tokio, just before the plane explodes, is that Morikawa’s notebook was blank. While it’s a very Suda thing to do, I don’t think he originally planned for that to be the case.

: Anyway, that’s all you really need to know from FSR in regards to The Silver Case and The 25th Ward - at least, as far as I’m aware. If anything else pops up, I’ll point it out.

: While we’re here, by the way, I’d like to clarify my earlier comments about Suda kinda shitting his pants in regard to Kamui. You know how the entire point of Kamui is that he’s a mystery, and that we don’t know which of the two versions of his story, if either, is true?

: Yeah uh, Suda kinda backpedalled on that. Kamui exists in both Travis Strikes Again and No More Heroes 3, where he is an immortal assassin with a silver eye. I do not like this.

: I had Salty Vanilla do a comic about it as well, to clear up any confusion.

: There’s also a piece I had Salty do about Big Dick rescuing his turtle friend in Flower, Sun and Rain.

: Anyway, now you’re ready for Yami, and the end of the remake.

[SpammyV]

It’s funny, I remember approximately a million billion years ago when people were speculating online about whether Travis Touchdown was supposed to be Travis The Ghost With The Shirts from Killer 7 and the arguments about whether the Garcian Smith lookalike from the sucker’s end of No More Heroes 1 was actually supposed to be Garcian. And the strongest evidence to the contrary before No More Heroes 2 was announced was the fact that if you ever looked up at the Santa Destroy skybox at the right time then there were passenger airliners.

And then decades later Suda just goes “I just think it’d be neat if all my little freaks and murderers knew each other and had to listen to Travis Touchdown ramble on about Ryosuke Takahashi vs. Yoshiyuki Tomino.”

[Timrod]

Summary

: We’re here. This is the final chapter of The Silver Case. I realized just now that I never clarified what Tokio’s chapter names mean. The ones in The Silver Case are simple words - they get much more complex in The 25th Ward. Most of these are words you’ve probably heard before if you’ve ever consumed any Japanese media, but I’ll put them up anyway.

• Yume (夢) means “Dream”.
• Hana (花) means “Flower”.
• Tsuki (月) means “Moon”.
• Ai (愛) means “Love”.
• Hikari (光) means “Light”.
• Yami (闇) means “Darkness”.

: There’s also a double meaning - all of those words are either names for women, or are very commonly used in women’s names.

: I will also warn you that there is a jump scare coming.

: This is Tokio’s new look for the entirety of Flower, Sun and Rain. He loses the sunglasses when we see him again in The 25th Ward.

: The date here is a reference. May 2nd, 2001 was the release date for the PS2 version of Flower, Sun and Rain.

: Remember how I said in that post that Flower, Sun and Rain is about Sumio investigating an airplane bombing? Guess what plane this is.

: “Alarm?”

: “Oh, my, uh… computer.”

: Tokio apparently kept his laptop. I mean, I guess there’s nothing in the rules for killing the past that says you can’t get another computer.

From “/”
To: Tokio Morishima
Subject:
Date: None

You know who I am, right? Did you think I was dead? I was indeed killed, but I continue to exist as a program on the Internet. I’m still kinda getting used to it, though.

I’m still taking time to grow and develop, so please keep that in mind, OK? I’m just here to say hi for now. My personality isn’t quite fully fleshed out yet, so I’m good at what I do. So I’m sure to come in handy somehow.

See you.

“/”

: Slash being an AI now is something that isn’t ever brought up in Flower, Sun and Rain and as far as I know is not brought up in The 25th Ward either.

From: Unknown Sender
To: Tokio Morishima
Subject: No Title
Date: None

If nobody on earth would ever die again, wouldn’t the world get pretty crazy? The planet would be lousy with humans, and people around the world would probably start killing each other, but nobody would die.

Even reduced to chunks of meat, they’d continue to live. Once that chunk of meat becomes garbage, the soul alone would remain and live on. What do you think? Can you picture it? It would be like a nightmare where the world is filled with zombies, but even worse.

But I’ve realized that that’s pretty much how it is inside your head. Seriously, poor you.

: The mail window keeps scrolling up as more of these blank emails get added.

: “What the hell kind of curse is this supposed to be?”

: “Oh, uh… I was just sleeping.”

: “No. And it’s ‘mister’, not ‘old man’. Anyway, my eye was just tearing up a bit.”

: “No, my eye is just kinda weird.”

: “Yeah, that’s what I said.”

: “See? It’s only this one eye that’s tearing up, right? I’ve got a problem with this eye. So don’t get too close. Sorry, but I’m not very good with kids. Who are you, anyway?”

: This is how we know when this takes place - near the end of FSR, as Sumio is using his briefcase on Tokio.

: “Lady Catherine… your seat’s somewhere over there, isn’t it?”

: “Huh?”

: “Hell if I know.”

: “Quit looking.”

: “Look too closely and you’ll get possessed.”

: “What?”

: “A curse is a curse. You’ll get cursed, too, if you get too close.”

: " ‘Guess’ what? What is this, some kinda quiz?"

: “What the hell are you talking about?”

: “What, was I saying that while I was asleep, too?”

: “Are you even real? Or are you… some sort of residual amalgamation of something inside my head…?”

: “It wasn’t a knife.”

: “I used a spoon.”

: Of course Sumio’s magic talking briefcase knows how to make puns.

: “It’s the curse of immortality. People die. As for why people die, it’s because they’re programmed to die. If you aren’t killed first, you’ll die by the program. Being immortal doesn’t mean that you’ve gained the superpower of immortality. It means that this fatal program has been forcefully suspended for a while.”

: “If that enforcement continues, weird stuff happens. It’s like continually punching a car’s gas pedal with the muffler all plugged up. It goes against the laws of nature. That’s probably why things like you turn up. That’s all part of the curse.”

: “Yeah… but you could also say that it sort of took me over, actually. The eye chose its new host. I don’t know why. There may not even be a reason.”

: I think this is why the Mayor kept talking about himself in the third person - Tokio wasn’t talking to the mayor, he was talking to the silver eye.

: “I guess so, yeah. But the past can’t be thrown out so easily. The past loops around again and again and catches up with you.”

: Honestly, I think this whole thing is a lot more interesting than a lot of Tokio’s story, and I hope if Suda does follow through with the remake of Flower, Sun and Rain that he adds a Placebo arc.

: “We’re almost there…”

: “What can you do?”

: This ending isn’t quite as happy for Tokio as you’d think.

: And we’re done. I really, really liked this game. Up next… actually, I’m still thinking about that. There’s a couple of options there. I could go right to The 25th Ward, and I might just do that.

: However, I recently read through a certain LP of Shadow Hearts and Shadow Hearts: Covenant and might do an LP of From the New World. In an emulator, because I value my sanity.