: Okay, that last update is over. Thank god for that. Moving on..
: “She pretended it had to do with not knowing what would happen after we broadcast the record, but I knew something else was wrong.”
: “I think it’s obvious. You want us to listen to music and Alex’s spoiled ass has the best sound system out of the six of us.”
: “That’s actually correct. Back in my reality, I had written an album - this album. But, I guess you already knew that. Anyway, just listen. I hope you enjoy what I made.”
: The song that starts playing here isn’t bad, since none of the music in this game was done by the Allansons (as far as I know) but it kind of makes no sense. The lyrics are entirely in Japanese and it’s supposed to be Vella singing it so.. yeah.
: This is like that one time at work when the system was down for the entire day and I almost fell asleep listening to Rush.
: There are fifteen Vellas here, and most of them have nothing important to say, but I’m going to transcribe it anyway.
: “I don’t think I should have played this… everyone is going to hate my song!”
: “The guy who I wrote this for.. I wonder what he’s up to?”
: “I hope this isn’t as bad as I think it is..”
: “Can you hear my heart? It’s caling.”
: “This is what music from my reality sounds like. Pretty different from yours, huh?”
: Honestly, the song sounds like generic mid-2000s techno with Japanese lyrics over it.
: “Do you think I’ll ever feel the way I felt when I wrote this song? I don’t ever want to feel that way.”
: “I don’t think I ever loved that guy.”
: “Which of me is your favorite? I think you’re my favorite you.”
: Haha, Final Fantasy 13 joke.. so funny.
: “Just don’t be awkward about it. Don’t tell me that it’s beautiful like me. Please, just appreciate my art.”
: “My appearance doesn’t matter.. only what I make. You know?”
: Oh, that’s good to know. This game has slowly warped me into an amorphous blob that knows only hatred.
: “Like, I appreciate you for who you are. Yes, you’re kinda a brat… but Alex, you’re really not that bad. I bet there is a reason why you are the way you are.”
: If I had to guess, it’s because he’s written by the Allansons, though I’d probably make him a colossal douchebag just off appearance alone.
: “Just like there is a reason I am the way I am. We spend so much time of our journey learning about all of our friends… why don’t we ever ask about you?”
: Because Alex is a boring manchild whose entire personality and character motivation is a gaping void in the sorry excuse for a plot this game has?
: “Who are you? Where did YOU come from? How did you get to be the way you are…? I think that’s what this song is about. Sorry I lied.”
: I like how Chondra is taking her headphones off as if to say she was never listening in the first place.
: “Yeah, really nice.”
: “Better than I could do.”
: My life! It’s now or never! I ain’t gonna live forever! I just want to live while I’m alive!
: Oh boy, is this one of those judgment circles? Shun her! Shun her from society, for her taste in music sucks!
: “The music had shown us a side of Vella that we had never expected to see - a sort of vulnerable side.”
: “I felt compelled to chase after her, to tell her the music was beautiful, and that she was incredible, but my feet didn’t move.”
: “I remained as still and silent as everyone else. My body motionless, I surveyed everyone’s eyes, willing my brain to bind with theirs and GET what they had been thinking.”
: “Had they all hated it? What had triggered such a lack of enthusiasm?”
: “Let her know it was great.”
: “If this is Vella’s album, why was a guy singing on it?”
: I have no idea what the fuck he’s talking about. If you go back to the last update and watch the video, the voice singing is pretty clearly female.
: “I almost cried.”
: “I hope she’s okay.”
: When we get outside, the town is suddenly Halloween for no reason. There’s no explanation given - unless we had a timeskip from April to October without anyone mentioning it.
: Either that or Alex’s house is in Silent Hill again.
: We could go right to the arcade, but… if we go near Michael’s house, there’s a sidequest we can do only at night.
: I assumed I could just LP Toss my way through the fight, and I was sorely mistaken. The cone enemies go down in one hit, but the stop sign is a miniboss.
: By the way, I found out the hard way that the stop sign men have a fucking annoying gimmick. If they hit you, even if you successfully defend, the character that gets hit is stunned and loses a turn. I almost died on this fight.
: Oh boy, we’re doing this shit, aren’t we.
: “But I want you to promise not to judge me.”
: “I won’t judge you.”
: “I have come to understand certain things, things I know to be true, things that I know others wouldn’t understand unless they had experienced them.”
: You mean like how science has proven that all Skittles actually taste the same, and it’s just our brains expecting the flavors to be different that makes them seemingly have different flavors?
: “The link between our bodies and physical space is strong, but it is nothing compared to the link between our minds and physical space. Our bodies exist as a visual representation of our minds. They are nothing more.”
: Bull fucking horseshit, if this was true I’d have both laser eyes and chainsaw hands.
: “Every mind has the capability of transcending physical form. Many do, even if they do not realize it.”
: Basically what they’re doing here is setting up the whole “transcending your physical form” thing as a euphemism for suicide.
: “The very nature of physical reality is VERY unphysical. Humans have evolved to ignore the complexities and realities of the universe by using physical form to protect themselves from the harshness of existence.”
: This sounds like something they stole out of a freshman philosophy textbook, but I checked and it doesn’t appear to have been - or if it has, it’s from a physical book.
: “To cope, we developed corporeal form. The use of physical form is not unlike leaving the light off at all times, obstructing the undesirables in the room. Do you understand what I am saying so far?”
: That you’re trying really hard to be deep by spouting pseudo-intellectual bullshit? Yeah.
: “More or less. Please continue.”
: “When I entered your reality, I was a much different person than I am now. My reality was much worse than this one. I was a girl who was entirely lost. From a young age, people thrust their expectations on me. They believed I was destined for artistic greatness.”
: So.. what you’re saying is that you’re Doogie Howser, only without the part where Neil Patrick Harris had a career after that show?
: “I was, for all intents and purposes, a disappointment. Picture for a moment being a young girl who can’t do wrong.”
: “Everything I created, everything I said impressed those around me. I was the perfect child artist, but that’s all I ever was. When I became an adult, my body grew, but my artistry remained childlike.”
: “I considered quitting piano, considered removing myself from art altogether, but something pulled me back. Somewhere along the course of my life, I had developed an artist’s mentality.”
: “I knew I wasn’t a good adult artist, but I was still compelled to create. And with each new thing I tried, I disappointed those around me.”
: Honestly, I’m starting to wonder if this isn’t just one of the Allansons’ life stories re-packaged.
: “At 3:02 AM, I walked into a music club in the city. He was on stage, playing to a small but enthusiastic audience. Each note he played on his guitar seemed to tell me something that I had always known, but had never really understood.”
: You know what would’ve been cool? If they had a segment where you play as Vella experiencing this instead of just.. telling us about it. Also, who the fuck remembers exact times like that?
: After he finished, I knew that I had to speak with him. It wasn’t before long that we became both romantically and artistically involved."
: That “wasn’t before long” bit isn’t my mistake.
: “It was as if knowing him had somehow broken the seal around my mind that was preventing me from creating something worthwhile. The lack of refinement to his playing freed me from the confines of rhythmic and artistic regularity.”
: “Never before had I given myself to someone so literally and spiritually before. Together, we wrote ‘A Distant Voice’ and I knew that I still had the hopes of being, not only a good artist, but an interesting human being.”
: Honestly, I was pretty much falling asleep when I got to this part, and now I’m falling asleep again transcribing it.
: “At 3:02 PM, his daughter had come home and found us together. He hadn’t yet told his children about me. I was a much younger woman. He followed her out and into a coffee shop. I waited for them to return, hating myself more and more for entering his life and making it difficult.”
: “I waited there until 3:02 AM, completely beside myself. And the strange thing is, he never returned. He never came back to his own apartment. I stayed there for a few days, knowing he’d have to come back eventually. And he simply never did.”
: “I called his friends, I called his manager, and they all said they hadn’t seen him. Just like that, he slipped through the cracks of my reality, and never returned.”
: Seriously, what the fuck is it with that date?
: “A minute into the first concert I had put on since his disappearance. I had refused to do our music live or release ‘A Distant Voice’ until I had seen him again. Finally, legal pressure forced me to schedule a release for May 22nd, 1999, with a year-long tour to promote it.”
: Okay, we fucking get it! The guy was a dick!
: “This girl was not his daughter, though she was probably his daughter’s age. I left the stage and receded into myself. The man who placed his arms around that young woman was not the same man who placed his arms around me so many times. It couldn’t have been.”
: “The man I knew would not have put on such a display of affection knowing it could hurt someone so much.”
: “When the separation happened, it was almost immediate. It was so sudden that the painful moments leading up to it felt trivial. I was just my mind and I had left my physical body behind.”
: “I floated until I found a reality that seemed different from mine - hoping to find a reality that contained the HIM I knew, hoping that he had fallen into this reality and we could be together again.”
: Okay, so basically you killed yourself because you figured life was like the ending to Looper. Got it.
: “Was his voice the one we heard on the record?”
: “No. No, it wasn’t. I don’t know whose voice we heard. I was so nervous sharing that music with you guys, I almost didn’t realize it wasn’t me singing! haha..”
: So wait.. let me get this straight here. You put out a record under your name on which you didn’t even perform? I mean, plagiarism is what I’d expect from this game, but still.
: “Well, everyone loved it. It was amazing.”
: “Really? I can never tell what people think when I show them my songs.”
: I was going to put this to a vote, but then I realized.. nah. We’re playing as a giant douchebag who may or may not be influenced by his voiceactor. Let’s pick the option we all know he’d pick.
: “Yeah, no, it’s cool. Let’s just.. let’s go back inside and.. whatever. Just not that whatever.”
: Why do I have a strange feeling that this guy she was going on about is Alex’s isekai counterpart?
: I know this is boring as hell, but trust me, by the end of this update we are going to hit this game’s dark world mom moment. It was so bad that I actually had to stop recording, that’s how fucking stunned I was.
: I’m going to skip some textboxes here because I REALLY want to get to this particular scene. We get to spend the next few minutes walking back through the radio tower maze for a third time. No new enemies, no new treasure, just the same goddamn maze.
: “For myself, it was in days since Sammy had been missing. For Michael, it was days until school began and he lost his freedom.”
: For me, it’s days until I’m done playing this godawful game.
: “For Vella, time was measured in music - a careless and overwhelming existence where the aural world carried more weight than the physical world.”
: “For Claudio and Rory, it was days since their siblings vanished from their lives. For Chondra, I think it was days unti lshe could escape counting days since her little brother’s disappearance.”
: “But for all of us, time moved at the same rate - calculating days until we found a way to feel important.”
: For the record, I said no.
: Meet The Essentia 2000, a robot who is absolutely not, in any way, a complete ripoff of Aigis from Persona 3.
: We are immediately thrust into battle with her versus two Soul Survivors.
: Unlike everyone else, The Essentia 2000 does not have a "defend’ command. Instead, she can charge her health back up by wasting a turn. This command doesn’t work in this battle.
: Her skills also cost health, as she has no PP bar. Self Destruct kills her, while M. Launcher takes 50% of her HP.
: Her QTE is surprisingly hard to hit. I didn’t have infinite time energy on, but I probably should’ve because she does no damage unless her combo is maxed and doing that is pretty difficult. Also, isn’t this just that stupid pizza-cutter sword from Final Fantasy Tactics A2?
: She also has a machine gun in her chest, in case the fact that she’s literally Aigis isn’t hammered home hard enough.
: “I–”
: “HOLY SHIT!! DID YOU GUYS SEE THAT!?”
: “See what exactly? You guys put on the record and went into an epileptic fit.”
: “It would’ve been funny in any other context.”
: By that, Alex means the realdoll he ordered.
: “Woman made of plastic? What does that mean, Alex?”
: “She’s like, an android or something. But she’s, like, plastic.”
: “That’s happened to you before?!”
: “Yeah, like, once or twice. It’s been a recurring dream or.. something.”
: “But the Entities that were behind the camera… she destroyed them so easily and that wasn’t Banish she was using.”
: “If she could destroy the Entities that easily, I don’t think there is much danger she could be in.”
: “But we need to find her!!! That’s why the Entity who was living with me had us play the record right? To wake her up!?”
: “I agree. You’re right, but what’s actually going on here? What is she? I–”
: “You okay?”
: “Yeah, I am. But – forget it, never mind. I can’t really explain it yet - it’s just a feeling. Give me some time and maybe I’ll be able to put it into words.”
: Did ANYONE read this fucking script before release? Anyone at all?
: Anyway, here comes the dark world mom moment. This was so out there that I had to stop recording.
: “What’s up?”
: “I was wondering if we could go somewhere and talk for a bit? There’s been something on my mind and.. yeah.”
: So this comes absolutely out of fucking nowhere. I had no idea this was coming, and what I figured is that I’d put it up for a vote in the thread. Only.. there hadn’t been any save points between when I saved after the conversation with Vella on the swingset and now, and I really wanted to just find a save point - so I figured hey, what the hell, I’ll just pick the top one in case that’s what people pick, and if they go the other way I can always go back.
: Here’s my logic of picking this option. I assumed that Rory had a character sidequest or something that we could do to get bonus EXP. I was very wrong.
: “Well, I’ve just been real depressed lately. Thinking about my sister, my parents, just how much life is going to change from now on. My sister was a lot younger than me, but she really was my best friend.”
: “And now that she’s gone, I feel aimless. We had plans, things we wanted to do in the future, places we wanted to go, movies that we wanted to see, new games to play together.”
: “And now, none of that will happen. Sometimes I wish – You know what I mean, right?”
: Just wait for it. What you are about to see is the moment when this game hits rock fucking bottom.
: “Bad things happen. But life has to move on, right? You don’t have your sister anymore, but you have all of us - Michael, me, Vella, Chondra, Claudio. We can’t replace your sister, but we’re happy that you’re still here. If you had become a soul survivor, then we’d never have met you and that’s really depressing.”
: I mean, technically he DID become a soul survivor, but whatever.
: “I’m not the best with these sorts of things, but basically I’m saying, I’m happy we met you.”
: Are you ready.. for YIIK.. to attempt to implement a gay romance option? And are you ready for them to do it in the worst, most insulting way possible?
: Yep. We’ve just hit rock bottom. Oh wait, no we haven’t, I haven’t hit confirm on that yet.
: Sorry, NOW we’ve hit rock bottom. The following picture pretty much sums up exactly what I did when I saw this shit.
: That’s about all I could take of this game for right now. Next time, we’ll listen to a… 32-textbox monologue.. followed by what I can only assume is this game finding a drill so it can continue trying to go deeper.