AI: Somnium Files - nirvanA Intiative - Rune's Playthrough

[Rune Lai]

It's time for another spoiler filled game thread! Spoilers for the first game included.

I did this for the first game. Why not for the second? And I have a lot to dump, so first off, this game's title is a mouthful (AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative) so let's get some definitions down. So when I talk about the series I'll use AI, the first game will be Somnium Files, and the second game Nirvana Initiative, which I probably won't stylize unless I feel like it.

I knew before the game launched that we were going to have a dual protagonist scenario, but I didn't realize that it was (mostly) going to be Ryuki in the past and Mizuki in the future, though that ends up making a lot of sense. Mizuki is only twelve in the past (since it takes place less than a year after Somnium Files), which limits her ability to investigate, and as I quickly learned, whatever happened six years ago changed Ryuki. The guy's gone from an eager young newbie to an alcoholic wreck in the present; in particular, one who doesn't want to remember the investigation from six years ago. And that in itself makes for a nice mystery.

We actually start in Ryuki's POV where he seems to be having a dream about being on a game show. Boss is with him (not her real name, but everyone calls her Boss), but all the other contestants and the host are just featureless blue character models. After he's convinced to answer a legit game show question, he's then asked if he knows the true events regarding the New Cyclops Killings, and is told the question is actually directed to the [you] on the other side of the screen (in a creepy voice, before going back to the upbeat one).

I said yes, but surprisingly the game doesn't take your honesty at face value and asks you who got shot in the leg on the last day of Somnium Files and I was like "I don't remember!!!" I remembered Date being injured and kinda being weak at the end, but couldn't remember if it was due to a shot in the leg. So I answered incorrectly and the host chided me, asking if I really completed the first game. (I did, but it was two years ago. Gimme a break!)

Since I knew this controlled the spoiler filter I looked up the answer online, because I wanted my dang spoilers. And the answer is Mizuki, which I remembered after I read it.

Surprisingly, the game says you could have gotten lucky and then asks you for the name of the true culprit, and that I remembered easily. It was Saito. Then it let me proceed.

And for the record, I nearly freaked out (did I do something wrong?) when I got to the first present day segment with Mizuki and saw Boss talking about Date and they used his old appearance, the one where he's in Saito's body. But when you get the first segment in the past where you meet Date, he explains that he's wearing a special custom-made mask because that's what everyone remembers him looking like. (Despite the fact everybody at the end of the game commented on Date's "new" old appearance after he got his original body back.)

This might be a budget saving move, since 3D models are often distorted in ways hidden to the end user when a camera angle might otherwise look unflattering, and the old Date-in-Saito's-body is likely already fully rigged for that kind of work, but it feels more like this was done to avoid spoilers for the first game, since the reveal that he was not in his own body was a late game surprise.

But what I thought the spoiler filter was going to do was remove the Date-in-Saito's body model used in the trailers and replace it with his Hayato model since it exists and must have some level of rigging.

I brought this up in a forum and someone commented that it might have been done to save the cost in voice acting rather than the character model, and that makes unfortunate sense to me. VO is pretty expensive and takes up a lot of file space. Depending on how many lines he ends up having, recording both could be a pricey prospect. Though there's a part of me that says, even if he's wearing a mask, he should still be speaking in his Falco/Hayato voice!

Anyway, back to the game!

The funky quiz show dream ends with Ryuki being asked by the game host if precognition is real, and the host's voice gets really sloooooow, and creepy, and ends with the blue featureless quiz show host splitting in half down the middle and falling apart. The other quiz show contestants follow suit, and, disturbingly enough, so does Boss.

Then we're in the present! We see grown up Mizuki with her trusty pipe, being a badass ABIS agent at only 18 and dodging a bullet from an unknown assailant, who runs away. She's come to this soccer stadium due to a mysterious text message, and in the middle of the stadium is the left half of a man's body. It's a guy called Jin, whose right half had been the first discovered in the unsolved Half Body Serial Killings. But here's the kicker. When the police come out and start doing forensics work, it's determined that this half of his body died only six hours ago, and shows no signs of having been frozen.

What's more is that the body seems to have been cut in half at the molecular level and not through any known tools like a blade or water pressure jet. Aiba also believes Jin was still alive when it happened (though my guess is that anything that split him so precisely was probably pretty quick so he might not have suffered). Additionally, all his blood seems to have been drained before the body was brought here, so wherever this half died, it wasn't here at the stadium. The grass around the body is completely undisturbed as if the body had been lowered from on high.

We get a little rundown of life during the past six years. There was some sort of incident that happened six years ago during the Half Body case that caused Mizuki to lose her left eye and Date to mysteriously disappear. I'm pretty sure he's not dead, but if he's not, he better have a good excuse for not coming back to Mizuki! After all they went through the first game I want them to be a lovingly dysfunctional father/daughter pair and six years is a long damn time! The girl's grown into an adult now!

Since finding Jin means that the Half Body case is seeing activity again, Mizuki goes to find Ryuki, since he was the psyncer in charge of the case at the time (I hesitate to say detective in charge, though he is one, because we meet another detective with a name and face, but he's not part of ABIS). However, Ryuki has clearly seen better days. She finds him drinking away at Brahman, a restaurant run by a big guy called Gen, who currently isn't around. Since he's drunk off his ass, she hauls him over to Pewter who runs the psync machine and asks to do a psync.

Though Nirvana Initiative is supposed to be newcomer friendly, it doesn't really go into how psyncing fits into the rest of law enforcement, and honestly after playing further in the game it feels like psyncing is a little too easy, as if it's just another part of the business. Pewter puts up a little bit of a fuss over whether Boss approved this psync or another, but dragging someone in feels a lot easier in this game. It might make sense for Mizuki, since she's six years' distant from the first game and attitudes towards pyncing could have changed, but Ryuki's part of the game takes place (I think) about a half a year after Somnium Files.

So Mizuki hooks up with Ryuki through the machine and is given the usual six minute time limit spiel. The game doesn't go into what happens if the six minutes is exceeded, which is likely superfluous for this game, and the six minutes is a nice game mechanic limitation in the somnium part of the game.

And speaking of somnium, slipping into Ryuki's was a lot of slipping on an old glove, so to speak. Mizuki makes a funny comment about Aiba looking like a shrimp in the somnium, which is a nice callback to Date calling her a shrimp in the very first somnium of the first game. Supposedly you can dress up her in various DLC and unlockable outfits, but seeing as my choices at this point were jokey t-shirts and a giant hot dog costume, I wasn't really feeling it. Maybe if I go about 100% percenting collectibles later, but for my first playthrough I want to be serious. (Not like my friend who played the entirety of Final Fantasy XV with Noctis in the mariachi costume.)

Ryuki's somnium is a lava-filled cavern, which is a rather odd choice. Most somniums take place in surroundings familiar to the psyncee, and related to whatever scenario the pyncer is looking for. The fact this is a cavern could mean that at some point Ryuki will explore one in relation to the Half Body Killings.

In any case, two things of note happen here. The first is that Aiba and Mizuki come under attack by a reverse sync, in which the other person attempts to switch the roles between psyncer and psyncee. Since Ryuki is drunk, this is probably being done unconsciously, and for a moment we find ourselves briefly playing his AI companion Tama, who is a similar AI-ball in his left eye like Aiba is in Mizuki's (since the event of six years ago conveniently left a space for her).

This is clearly the first branching point as the disoriented Tama needs to answer who the HB killer is, which at this point in the story I don't know. Since she can't answer, Aiba is able to push her out. (I admit I'm a little unhappy the main story branching isn't going to be like the previous game, since I enjoyed the back and forth bounce between the two very different storylines, but maybe it's better this way so we don't have information crossing realities.)

The other item of note is that we learn that Ryuki blames himself for whatever happened six years ago and he's unwilling to forgive himself for it. But oddly, that's all we really get before the somnium ends and we don't have a clear answer to what we're looking for, when normally we'd get some sort of visual representing what we were looking for (and subject to misinterpretation).

Post-somnium, we wake up as a drowsy Ryuki in an interrogation room with Mizuki wanting to know what happened six years ago. Sad thing for him is that there's no alcohol around him anymore so we begin our flashback as he's presumably telling the story to Mizuki.

And that's about where Ryuki Chapter 1 begins. Continued in next post because this is getting long.

[Rune Lai]

Ryuki is a little... interesting as a protagonist. At first I wasn't sure I'd like him since he looks a bit like a teenager, which is not too bad when he's 23 (during his segment of the game), but a bit weird after the six year time skip. But looks aside, his personality is off-kilter. In the real world segments, he plays straight man to Tama's wise guy, but in somniums and occasionally in the real world, Ryuki busts out some really odd lines of dialogue where his sense of humor just doesn't line up with the situation. It's fine in somniums, where dream logic rules and it's fine giving Tama dumb instructions, but he actually has to apologize to Boss once when his inner kid spits out something off-color in the middle of work.

Aside from that, he's just not right in the head, and I'm not saying that to be mean. It's established extremely early on in his first chapter that something is very wrong with him.

His half of the story begins with him at what appears to be a charity quiz show. There's a host (not a blue virtual man this time), Boss, and four other contestants (also not blue). Surprisingly the other contestants are all returning characters with Mizuki and Iris as one pair, Moma (the nice gangster and A-set fan) and one of his flunkies as another, and of course Ryuki is paired off with Boss.

Then in the middle of the live stream, the lights go out (but importantly the cameras are still rolling). When the cameras come back up again, there's the right half of a man's body (Jin's) lying in the middle of the stage. There is a sign impaled through the torso with the words "Fray to Free" and a QR code on it. (Cue world's worst placement of a QR code.)

You can do some minimal investigation with Ryuki, but "Fray to Free" doesn't really mean anything at this point, and everyone else present knows just about as much as Ryuki does (except Moma's flunky seems to have run off). So that left the QR code, and ugh I hate that QR code.

Given how Ryuki reacts, he probably hates it too. You see, it links to this disturbing surreal video in a CMYK color scheme with odd camera angles, close-ups of realistic-looking mannequins staring at each other or falling apart. There was some other stuff too, but I noped out after a few seconds of those visuals. I think it was also the eerie music. The whole thing just uncanny valley-ed me away (which I think is a shame since I was so looking forward to the game!).

As for Ryuki, he gets that look where his pupils are constricted and then the whole stage area goes digital with everyone turning into blue virtual people. When Ryuki tries speaking, his dialogue is nothing but gibberish.

Then he snaps out of it and he's apparently the only one who's had that reaction, though other people find the video scary/creepy when they see it. (And a lot of people outside the stage saw the QR code due to the livestream.)

Though Ryuki is a novice with ABIS, apparently he's worked really hard to get here, so he's really happy when Boss puts him on the case.

We also learn a few things about Ryuki. He apparently had a younger brother who died, and his parents are dead too, but he's not a poor orphan. He's a rich one. When you travel about town in Ryuki's chapters, you ride around in his car, which happens to be a freaking limo. The man does not drive himself (like Date). He's not swilling champagne in the backseat, but he could.

Since there are so few clues as to how the half body ended up planted in the middle of a darkened stage with people around, Ryuki begins investigating by speaking with the few people who were there. Of course Iris brings up wacko ideas like Jin was teleporting and the portal closed on him, splitting him in half, and while AI does push the limits of hard science fiction, now that this hypothesis has been suggested, it can be safely discarded.

We also meet two of Iris's classmates Amame and Kizuna. Amame works at the Sunfish Pocket Maid Cafe as a mermaid (I guess Mizuki would own the place now that Renju's gone) and Kizuna is in a club with Iris. She claims to not be as good as Iris, but her dancing is enough to inspire new character Lien to ask her to marry him just because he saw her dance in Ota's diner (which Ota appears to run by himself now since his mom has dementia). This is just a shade creepy since Kizuna is still in high school and Lien is a young man in his 20s, but Kizuna doesn't need anyone to stand up for her. She's pretty good at shooting down Lien on her own. I don't know entirely how he's going to fit into the story yet, but he's one of the rare Japanese American characters in anime.

The two biggest things we learn are 1) that Chinpei (?), Moma's flunky was the director of the live stream (he went clean as a condition for marrying his pregnant girlfriend) and 2) that the QR video is similar to one that went viral six months earlier called Bats480 (might have the number wrong). Supposedly anyone who solved the Bats video went missing, except for one boy who just so happens to be Mizuki's classmate. (I was able to watch the Bats video, but it was still disturbing.)

Shoma, the classmate, is an introverted 12-year-old who's not inclined to talk to anyone until Ryuki gets him to open up (a little) to show off the robot that he built. He admits he solved the Bats video, but says he was just interested in solving it and not going to the location that was revealed as the answer.

He gives the location to Ryuki though and this takes him to an institute with an obviously creepy/shady director named Chikara. I forget exactly on what premise, but Ryuki manages to pull him in for a good ol' psyncing.

Chikara's somnium is weird, populated with models and statues of halves of people's bodies, just like the Half Body murder. You'd think he was involved, right? And lest you suspect that this installment of AI is less perverted than the last one, Ryuki tells Tama to activate the various statues in Chikara's somnium and since there's no switch or "on" button she ends up waving her hand around the crotch area and yeah... that works. So she ends up doing it throughout the somnium to turn on all the statues. >.>

Chikara's somnium has no branching, unlike the first game, where it branches at most somniums, which is a bit sad since I liked being able to solve them multiple ways and see what I got, and this gives us a clue about Naixatloz (I believe--I'm actually not entirely sure what we found at the end of the somnium anymore).

We also get to do a new game mode where Tama (and presumably Aiba once we get back to Mizuki) presents a virtual simulation of what the room looked like when the body was found, and we get to walk through how the half body of Jin managed to end up on the quiz show stage with no one noticing. It was pretty neat (and kinda gross), involving placing the body amid the stage lighting and waiting for rigor mortis to end to it would fall down. Since the livesteam was going to last for six hours it didn't need to fall down at a specific time as long as it did at some point during the stream. This mode was a very detective-y addition. I like it.

Once you get the process figured out you do a pretty funny recreation of how it happened with Tama playing movie director and Ryuki being bullied into playing a role on stage. It reminds me of the comic book recaps done at the end of each Danganronpa trial, except shorter and played out in 3D.

Knowing that someone must have needed access to the area above the stage, Ryuki heads to the Sunfish Pocket where Chinpei the show director is hanging out, and the guy draws a gun on him. I may have failed this quicktime event just because I'd forgotten this game occasionally has them. But after successfully dodging a bullet Ryuki is able to nab him and we get his story.

Chinpei let a guy with the awful name of "Tearer" access to the stage in exchange for a boatload of cash, which Chinpei agreed to in order to help support his pregnant girlfriend. The rules were that the Tearer would be given a specified number of hours to go inside, and no one else would be allowed in during that time (since the Tearer was obviously rigging the body, which would later explode into flames, camouflaging the method it arrived).

Conveniently, Chinpei then receives a text from Tearer for his payment, telling him to go to the local high school. Ryuki runs over there, but what he finds isn't Tearer or a boatload of money, but the right half of Chikara's body, somehow plastered to the blackboard. Tama later says that his guts have been removed allowing the formation of a pocket so he could have been vacuumed sealed to the blackboard, but she's also laughing like she's telling a joke so I'm not sure she was serious. >.>

But that clears the first chapter of Ryuki's half the story! I don't think my next posts will be this long, but I find doing this helpful in remembering things for my own sake.

[Rune Lai]

I ended up being busy for much of this past month and a half, which has been pretty terrible for keeping up with games, let alone doing write-ups about them.

But I have some notes and this will hopefully help me refresh my memory before I get back to the game itself.

Chapter 2 of Ryuki's route focuses on Naixatloz, the secret society he just somehow waltzes in to meet. I'm not 100% positive (and I'm absolutely not going to wiki while I'm only partially through the game), but I believe that Naixatloz was the name of the secret society that Iris was going on about in the first game that just about everybody other than Ota (her diehard fan) was pretty sure didn't actually exist, and that included people with underground connections.

But here we are with Naix, which really is a thing, and Ryuki is shown into a pretty swanky office which is probably in some high rise, and Tokiko introduces herself as the president of the Japanese branch of the group, which is otherwise based in New York. For a branch head of a secret society, she's pretty upfront about things.

Anyway, the reason Ryuki is here is because Naix made the Bats video, which Tokiko describes as a puzzle for prospective members. Those who are able to solve it will be given the opportunity to join their group. However, she insists Naix is not behind the recent QR code video, even though they look very similar.

The murdered Chikara used to be a member of Naix, but Tokiko says they parted ways because Naix is purely a scientific group and not an occult one, which was the side of things Chikara was more interested in.

Naix's shtick is that they believe the world we exist in is fake, a simulation, and that if one looks hard enough, it will be possible to detect the seams that hold this fake reality together and pull them apart. When you experience something that isn't quite right, when reality just doesn't work the way it should, you've found a seam. Essentially a bug in the system. Like maybe Ryuki's reaction to the QR code video...? (I don't think Nirvana Intiative is going that route, because again, its zaniness tends to have some kind of grounding first.)

Though Ryuki has no real way to prove that Tokiko is involved with Chikara's death or the QR code video other than she's a shady lady, he somehow manages to haul her in for a somnium scan in probably the most abrupt transition from talking to someone and jumping into their brain that the series has done. (It didn't even bother with a legal pretense for it!)

Tokiko's somnium is... interesting. It's a little creepy, as expected of the leader of a fringe belief, but the main take-aways are that she knows Gen, the owner of the Brahma restaurant, and Shoma, Mizuki's classmate, and her somnium also gives us the title drop. Gen appears after Ryuki finds a misshapen skull among many others, and he's beaten down by a crowd of faceless figures. Shoma is found floating in a fetal position and bizarrely becomes so large he doesn't even fit in the main room of the dream sequence.

But it's at the very end in a very tightly timed sequence (I thought I had a lot of time left to explore the somnium, but after all the swimming I had to do it ended up only getting to the target with single digits seconds to spare), Ryuki and Tama discover a book that mentions the Nirvana Initiative, but not what it is.

That's all they get. They're out of time.

So we've got the game's title drop, but they let Tokiko go rather than scan her brain for more information. I guess since there wasn't anything tying her to either of the previous murders there wasn't any reason to keep her. It's not a crime to be a creepy, or even crazy, lady who suggests that even should she die she will come back from the dead (and not in an occult way). And she oddly takes this whole having her brain scanned in stride, even suggesting that Ryuki come visit her at 10pm that evening.

Ryuki uses the rest of his day to gather information, which includes hitting up Shoma, who tells him about the Nirvana Trial, which is probably related to the Nirvana Initiative. Of course it's another video, but Ryuki decides not to watch it right away since he has other things he needs to get to.

Eventually he ends up in the park in the afternoon where he meets Lien, who is still interested in marrying Kizuna, despite only knowing her a few days. Lien doesn't really drop anything of substance that I recall. The important thing is that after parting ways with Lien, Ryuki finally feels he has the downtime to watch the video, and...

It's bad. Not for me (I watched the whole thing without looking away this time), but Ryuki has another freak out and by the time he comes to, Tama informs him that he's been standing there, staring into space, for six hours. It's now nighttime, and if he doesn't hustle he's going to be late meeting Tokiko.

...Who turns out to be dead in a locked room murder. Yes, we only find her right half lying on her desk in the same manner as Jin and Chikara. All her blood has been drained so she was obviously killed elsewhere and her half brought in and laid on the desk after the fact. (Carrying that must have been so gross.)

Her bodyguard (who amusingly used to work for last game's So Sejima before he had to retire out of the public eye) insists no one was allowed inside between when she returned and Ryuki's arrival, and there is only one door. Also, just because it's always nice to dismiss the protagonist as a potential culprit in these things, Tama confirms that Tokiko's time of death occurred while Ryuki was BSODed out in the park (unless she's lying, but we have no reason to distrust her)..

While investigating her body, Tama also notes that at some time in her life Tokiko must have given birth, but there is no record of a child in her family registry. Since we know Shoma's dad (amusingly, he's the game show host from the real lfie segment) and a bit of his story, it's fair to rule him out as Tokiko's child, but Gen, with his mask and supposed deformity beneath it, is a good candidate for being a hidden child.

So one of the new things in Nirvana Initiative is this virtual replication of the crime scene that Tama can do. This allows Ryuki to basically run around and investigate as if he was actually at a particular location, or as a location was originally represented. It's not a bad game mechanic, but it's kind of silly that Ryuki has to use the simulation to discover a hidden door in Tokiko's office, when Tama had to have known the door existed when laying down the parameters for the simulation in the first place.

In any case, the secret door is found and our intrepid duo take the not so creepy elevator down to wherever it might go.

Which ended up being a long way down and opening into a massive chamber with a high ceiling and a not so subtle raised area that looks like an altar. Ryuki notes that Tokiko insisted that Naix was based on facts, not the occult, so it's strange that there are occult trappings right under her building with a direct line to her office.

While looking around, Ryuki spots someone sneaking around and demands to know why they look like "that." And "that" turns out to be one of those blue virtual figures, but we're not in a dream. Ryuki is quite awake! And Tama is confused by his words. Though there's no time to talk, I suspect that only Ryuki is seeing a blue person and Tama is seeing who's actually there.

Unfortunately we don't find out more because Ryuki pursues the guy and massively screws up, causing a lot of damage and failing to capture the blue figure, and from the look of things his fall should have sent him into the hospital, but oddly we don't really see much of the fallout. Perhaps a case of the world not coming together right? Seams? Or is this just confused writing?

For this mess, Boss almost demotes him back to being a regular police officer, which Ryuki finds devastating for reasons that seem to be tied to his dead brother, but she offers him a week to solve the case if he doesn't want the demotion.

[Rune Lai]

My notes are a little sparse this chapter, probably because I intended to go back to what is the first branching somnium in Ryuki's half of the story! (Yes, it's taken this long to get to this part.) And at this point it's been about two months since I last played, but dammit, I want to write up my summary before I go back and play again.

So this is the very short and slightly muddled version of this section of the game leading up to the Shoma ending.

Ryuki picks up the trail by going back to Shoma and his comedian dad Andes Komeji while also doing some side investigation stuff, which takes him to Kizuna (Iris's classmate) and her dad, because it turns out her dad was doing a lot of the funding of Chikara's research (scientist guy who was killed early on). Research that Andes Komeji was also tied up in.

Kizuna's dad looks every bit a Daddy knows best rich man, especially when Lien shows up to court Kizuna again, but instead of coming down on Kizuna like I thought he would, he trusts Kizuna to handle herself, and she does. Lien is shot down again with Daddy's approval.

But then after her dad leaves, Kizuna elaborates a little more with Lien, explaining that they really can't know each other well enough to get married after like two weeks (I think?) so rather than shoot him down completely, she suggests an alternative. They take the glass slipper he was trying to use in lieu of an engagement ring and bury it under a tree with the idea that they will revisit this marriage idea in six years and see how they feel.

In six years. That's exactly the story's timeline period between Ryuki's past and Mizuki's present. I'm pretty sure their relationship is doomed. Something is going to be or get messed up.

Anyway, we end up grabbing Shoma's dad because he's shows up with a gun at Chikara's lab like a crazy person so what do we do with him? We throw him in the psync machine, leading to our branching somnium.

Now, in this somnium we learn that Komeji's career as a comedian kinda sucks, which isn't a surprise. We see him earlier in the game telling jokes to a near empty crowd. He's just not popular. But we also see in the somnium that he's been having monetary issues. Some of it's due to his good nature. He wants to help out a "friend" but then ends up getting too deep and before you know it, he's borrowing from loan sharks who threaten to kidnap Shoma if he doesn't pay up.

At the branch, in a moment of crisis, you can either pressure Komeji to find Shoma, or to get the money. Wanting him to be a better dad, I pressured him to find Shoma, which leads to Komeji ardently protecting his son in his dream.

Outside of the somnium, we learn that Shoma has been kidnapped for real, but Komeji is insistent that the culprit is the Tearer, which makes no sense to me. What connection does Shoma have to our murderer? But we charge in to the rescue.

I don't remember how Ryuki and company find where Shoma is being transported, but they get there, there's a lot of fighting, Komeji being a good dad, and a new mysterious girl in a mask shows up to help. Date shows up too, making it a pretty rousing scene. Shoma is saved and everyone gets away, but not without Ryuki getting critically wounded in the arm.

They take refuge in Date's apartment where our mysterious newcomer refuses to take off her mask because it's supposed to be keeping her alive. Date also tells Ryuki he should get himself to a hospital or he might lose his arm.

But no, Ryuki needs to do one more somnium, this one on Shoma.

This one is fairly uplifting compared to most somniums. By exploring it, we can see Shoma's contentious relationship with his dad. Outwardly it seems that Shoma is embarrassed by his dad's comedy and that's what causes him to withdraw, but in actuality what he wants is the ability to laugh and be proud of his dad's career, and he's been hampered by that because his father is a public figure and made fun of by the other kids are school.

Also, Ryuki and Tama get to be really silly while exploring this one, and when Ryuki lets himself relax they make quite the comedy duo.

Thanks to Ryuki sorting his brain out, Shoma offers to talk to Ryuki privately, away from his dad, and lets him know that he met the Tearer while captured, verifying that yes, it really was the Tearer that kidnapped him (for some reason), and that the Tearer to him their name, which Shoma was confused by since he didn't know what good that would do him. The Tearer was otherwise masked though, so he didn't have any clues as to their identity.

And now that I type this, I realize I have forgotten the name so I'll likely need to replay that part, but with the name, I can now go to the other story branch from the beginning of the game when Tama is first asked who the Half Body Killer is, and that will likely take me to Mizuki's branch of the game.

The route than wraps up, which felt a little weird to me since the Tearer is obviously still out there and Ryuki needs to get himself to a hospital before he loses that arm, but instead it just ends at the amusement park where he and Shoma have their chat. Though Somnium Files also had endings that were clearly incomplete, they felt more "final" with a lot of details wrapping up or people dying. This, if not for the fact we'll obviously take the Tearer's name to the next story branch, feels like a new lead had been uncovered and we need to pursue it.

And this also (for me) brings up the question of why Ryuki would know the Tearer's name on the main story branch in the prologue part of the game. Does this ending continue into the Mizuki portion of the prologue, or will it be the other ending? Does this ending in fact exist in the "real" timeline? Or will I learn it on the other branch from Komeji's somnium as well?

I guess I'll find out, since I'm going to do that next.

[Rune Lai]

Okay, this is the meaty branch, and I'm glad I got the Shoma and Komeji happy ending first, because this ending is what looks to be the canon one.

What do I mean by that?

Well, we know something happened to Ryuki six years ago that messed him up, Mizuki lost an eye, and Date disappeared. That incident happens on the end of this route.

But first, let's rewind back to Komeji's somnium. This time, instead of pushing him to save Shoma, we remind him of his obligation to get money, which takes us down a different path, and we learn more about his illicit dealings. It's not just that Komeji ended up owing money to some shady people, but he also got in deep with yakuza as an illegal arms runner in order to come up with the money to pay off his debt. While doing this, he found something, we don't know what, that belongs to the Tearer and Komeji saw it as his ticket to freedom, presumably by blackmailing Tearer.

In the real world, Komeji is messaged by Tearer to come to the studio where the quiz show at the start of the game was done, presumably because Tearer wants their stuff back, and he's told to come alone. (Knowing that Komeji has something of Tearer's makes it understandable now why Shoma was kidnapped by Tearer in the other timeline.) Komeji is willing to act as bait and Ryuki follows him in, though of course it doesn't go well... for either of them really.

Ryuki gets knocked out and is roused by the Scooby gang of Iris, Kizuna, Amame, and Shoma who went looking for him and found him tied up. They free him as he wakes and of course Shoma makes the bad decision to open up the body bag looking wrap on a cart and as I was watching him I was saying "Don't do it, kid," but of course he does and when he opens it he finds the right half of his dad.

Shoma flips out and runs away and the girls are pretty freaked out. Ryuki ends up chasing after Shoma rather than remaining at the scene (which is a bit important).

Now the game does an interesting trick. While looking for Shoma, Ryuki goes to where Shoma is likely to be... namely the rooftop amusement park, and sure enough, he sees Shoma go on the Ferris wheel, specifically car number 2. He watches and waits, but when car number 2 comes down again no one's in it.

He doesn't understand how Shoma could have disappeared, but as this route progresses, it becomes more and more apparent that Ryuki has cognitive issues (and this is likely what's causing all the moments he's BSODing). What I think happened at this point is that Ryuki had a very small memory gap and Shoma left while Ryuki was effectively "stunned," but the window of time was so short that Ryuki himself was unable to perceive that he had missed anything. The only thing that throws a wrench in that hypothesis is that Tama should have noticed if Shoma left even if Ryuki didn't. (I suppose the alternate theory could be that Ryuki hallucinated Shoma getting on, but I don't think the conversation played out in a way that Tama could have misunderstood him and what he was waiting for. He even confirmed the car number with her.)

It's at this point that Ryuki decides to review the scene of the murder through Tama's virtual recreation. He knows that of the kids, Amame got there first and the others arrive later, and it looks like she started to untie him since one of her fake nails was torn off, but then for some reason she had knocked over a TV camera and a pitcher of water from a table as she ran to the opposite door from where she entered, and this door was locked.

While trying to figure out why she would do this, Ryuki and Tama conclude that she had probably encountered the Tearer and was trying to run away. This makes sense since Tearer hadn't a chance to finish laying out the body (Komeji was still in the bag). The Tearer brought the body after having done the halving, discovered Amame's presence, and then had to hide once too many people (the rest of the Scooby gang) arrived.

Shocked at this possibly, we do an infrared (or maybe it was an x-ray, I don't remember at this point) scan and we see that "Surprise!" there's someone hiding in the back among the mannequins!

Now, you'd think that Tama would have said something when she did the initial scan that allowed this virtual recreation to be made, even more than the time they discovered a secret passage in the Naix office. You can't even make the argument that her systems were knocked out, because she had the data to make the recreation! But I can understand why the writer wanted to have an "Omg, we were actually in the same room as the Tearer!" moment.

Also, a minor nitpick: when Ryuki is visualizing (in his head) what it looked like from Amame's perspective when she ran into the Tearer, we see the Tearer wearing a very distinct medieval robe outfit with a metal mask. Prior to this point, our opponent has been a faceless entity. I believe in Shoma's route we don't see the Tearer's appearance depicted even when Shoma is recounting the story of when he met the Tearer and the Tearer gave him their name. But in the Amame's presumed perspective, we get the Tearer's appearance for the first time, before the scan to discover the Tearer is hiding backstage, which was a bit weird since we shouldn't have known what they looked like yet.

Note: I've been using "they" for the Tearer because even though their voice is male, it's also distorted so we don't know their gender. In fact it sounds a lot like the Zero from Zero Time Dilemma. Probably not the same VA, but run through the same filter.

Anyway, after realizing that Amame ran into Tearer, they really want to talk with her, but when they finally find her, they discover the trauma has rendered her unable to speak, so into the psyc machine she goes. Oddly, Pewter and Boss are not present during this psyc and Ryuki says he'll retroactively ask for permission since he's not supposed to use this machine without them. There's no clear narrative reason that I can see for why this happens. Boss and/or Pewter are usually available and we haven't been given a reason for why they aren't this time. Tama has misgivings about doing this without them, especially given Ryuki's declining mental acuity, but he needs her to activate the system remotely in Pewter's absence, so he agrees to see a doctor afterward if she does this.

Amame's somnium is a bit creepy, but a level of creepy I can handle. It takes place in a corrupted version of the quiz show studio with Komeji being the champion and Tama the challenge. So you go through the somnium by playing game show games and answering "trivia" questions. The opening ones are kinda hard since you aren't given much to go on other than Amame really likes sound and music and you have to match her preferences to various items that might be only tangentially related, but later rounds are pretty much a gimme with a series of no wrong answer questions (so far as I could tell).

As you play with Amame as the prize, she appears to be menaced bit by bit until we finally get up to her, at which point she reveals three words, Nirvana, something, and genocide. I really don't remember the midle word off the top of my head, but it was clearly not as striking. Ryuki and Tama obviously want clarification on this, but they're out of time so they abort and drop out of her dreamscape.

That's when they get a call from Aiba, who has been off on a special assignment for all of the flashback thus far, which means that she's back in Date's skull. She lets them know that Kizuna has gone missing, and the pair quickly decide to go look for her, leading to a fifth chapter, making this Ryuki story branch longer than the last one.

[Rune Lai]

So everyone freaks out and goes looking for Kizuna, who is suspected of having been kidnapped due to having watched one of the viral videos (like people supposedly are). This search is done wide and you get to revisit tons of places that may be only tangentially related to Kizuna at all, which results in some weirdness, like Mama going into her creepy trance state again, or visiting Shoma who is oddly blase about the fact that his dad is like... dead, and Shoma seems to be living by himself now. (Why hasn't that kid been shuttled off to join his mom already?)

But there's some interesting stuff that comes of this. The first of which is that we get to see Hitomi again! She makes it clear that she hasn't seen Date in a long time, and from the way she talks I get the feeling that the fact Date acts like a horny pervert most of the time isn't really that he is a horny pervert (I mean he can be, but it's not the whole story) so much as he's basically distracting himself from the fact he hurt Hitomi and he's not sure he can ever go back to being with her again. Nothing has changed since the end of the last game and seeing her is a reminder that he failed her.

Also, Hitomi is currently looking after the odd girl with a mask and a health condition who we met in the other Ryuki timeline, though we don't learn her name and she doesn't really do anything on this route.

Aside from that, acting on Mama's tip, Ryuki checks out Tokiko's office again (more than once actually) and one of the detectives there shows him an interactive hologram of Tokiko that was left behind as a teaching tool for Naix members. It's mostly a lot of pseudoscience babble, with one of the teachings being how certain mystic parts of a person could remain connected even when split in half, but the second time he visits he's by himself and the police are gone. After he finishes plugging the hologram for info, the camera does a pretty cheap trick where we go into Ryuki's POV as he slowly turns around and... he sees Tokiko right behind him, alive and well. She tells Ryuki that things are as he suspects, that his friend has been taken by the Tearer. And then the camera cuts.

Next thing we see, Ryuki's riding in his limo and he's talking with Tama like nothing's happened. (Like hell it didn't!) So I'm pretty positive now that Ryuki is suffering from hallucinations and mental issues, and even though Tama is literally inside his skull because she resides in his eye socket, she can't actually view anything in his brain. Otherwise she would surely comment on the fact they just saw a dead lady. And Ryuki himself seems to want to downplay his symptoms to Tama.

In fact, one of the places we can visit among the many at the start of this route is the hospital, where the staff are prepping a place for Ryuki to stay for several days (since he agreed to go have himself checked out in exchange for Tama scanning Amame), but he just can't give up the case so he begs Tama to let him keep going a little longer.

While running around town, Date calls Ryuki to let him know that the Tearer seems to be at good ol' So Sejima's place, so Ryuki goes over there only to see So Sejima and an unconscious Iris. Nothing untoward seems to have happened (Sejima is her father after all, though Iris doesn't know it), but when she wakes up she can't remember what happened beyond the fact she went to see him because Hitomi told her that if she ever needed help, he would be able to give it.

I forgot how Ryuki gets the final clue to where Kizuna is being held, but it probably had something to do with the Iris somnium, which was a bit weird since it was was all about Iris streaming a new game called Kusemon Go, where you have to find collectable "monsters" to fight with (and Tearer showed up and it was implied they were actually in the somnium as well and not a memory, but then they were defeated at Kusemon Go and nothing further was made of it >.>). I mostly remember the somnium was weird in the "we're totally in a knock off game" way rather than creepy weird. All the "monsters" are people Iris knows and they have different strengths and weaknesses depending on who they're fighting (like Boss is really good against So Sejima since she could and did put pressure on him to get what she wanted IRL). I did like that if you explore really well you can actually discover Falco, who just appears as a shadowy figure called F, and he's pretty much the strongest "mon" you can have.

Interestingly, once we get the memory out of Iris's brain, it's a really weird, slightly disjointed conversation between Sejima and Tearer about an unnamed woman declining to raise a child and giving them up to the program run by Kizuna's dad. On first listen it sounds like they could be talking about Iris, who was raised by Hitomi instead of her biological mother, except that the story clearly doesn't match since Hitomi did not give Iris up and Manaka was killed so she didn't give up Iris either. I'm thinking this abandoned child might be our girl with the mask, since we do see her once in this timeline at the school run by Kizuna's dad.

Anyway, Ryuki eventually realizes that Kizuna is in the occult area beneath the Naix building, and he meets up with Date, Mizuki, Gen, and Lien to rescue her. There's a big fight with a bunch of Naix stooges who the Tearer is clearly in command of, and after they're beat up and the rescuers are looking for a way to free Kizuna, Tearer shows up in person. The Tearer explains that they aren't kidnapping people willy-nilly. Kizuna was kidnapped specifically to call them out. It seems like the Tearer has taken an interest in Ryuki and wants him to play their game.

They tell Ryuki to kill Date or they'll trigger the explosives around the altar that will likely kill Kizuna and everyone else around her. Ryuki draws his gun and you can choose to shoot or not, with Date naturally being of the opinion that Ryuki should shoot him, but even if you say you'll shoot (yes, I chose that option) Ryuki won't do it. (Mildly disappointed.)

Thus explosions commence and this is what Ryuki's somnium was at the start of the game. Stone temple looking area. Things on fire. Mizuki survives, but loses her eye. Gen carries her to safety while Lien carries the newly freed Kizuna. Ryuki remains a little longer to find Date, only to discover Date is partially trapped by rubble. He gives Aiba to Ryuki and tells him to leave with her shortly before a large portion of the ceiling comes down and we lose sight of him. We know from the prologue that Date's body was not found in the aftermath, so he more than likely survived, but for some reason has not returned. Smashed into paste without anything left to bury is unlikely.

So now I'm close to starting the Mizuki leg of the game, but there's an interesting decision I need to make. You see, we (specifically Tama and Ryuki) need to know the Tearer's name to progress into Mizuki's route, which is why Ryuki's half of the game is played first. But the Tearer actually gives two names. In Shoma's ending we're told it's Dahlia by Shoma, but when Tearer and Ryuki meet in person in the ending that clearly leads into the prologue, Tearer tells Ryuki without fanfare that their name is "Boat." Which got the what-the-hell reaction from Ryuki as would be expected given the abrupt lack of context.

Things like this happened all the time in Virtue's Last Reward, which was one of the *erm* rewarding things about playing the game. You would see something in one ending that would serve literally no purpose until you came across a need for it in an entirely different story branch. I think in one of the timelines the main character was even killed after being given the information knowing that he would carry it over to another timeline.

The fact Tearer gives their name, or the semblance of a name, before the end of Ryuki's route in either possible ending feels like they're trying to ensure something that will only happen if Ryuki knows a particular name, and this isn't a cheap way to enforce play order since if that were the case the Tearer would give the same name in both endings.

I've heard from someone who already finished the game that they really hated Mizuki's route due to going off the rails, so I guess I'll find out soon whether or not I'm okay with it. I hope it's not a VLR rehash, though I suspect not.

Side note: We haven't found out what Aiba's special mission was yet.

[Rune Lai]

I went back to the very first somnium of the game, set shortly after Mizuki discovers the left half of the first victim, Jin, after the Half Body case going dormant for six years. She psyncs with Ryuki to try figuring out what happened six years ago and at this point he's drunk off his ass. Once again the reverse psync happens shortly after they begin, and Tama finds herself inside of Mizuki's mind. She's confused and a voice (now identifiable as Tearer) demands to know who the villain's identity is.

There's space for a first name and a last name, which is where "Dahlia" and "Boat" come into play, drawing on names revealed in both endings, which means the player can't actually unlock Mizuki's route until after getting them both. And the fact Ryuki knows a name that Mizuki doesn't (Dahlia) does not go unnoticed to her considering she was there when Tearer revealed the name "Boat."

If you answer correctly, Ryuki freaks out and starts spewing gibberish and Tama does too, though it's only one line and she doesn't look insane, implying that she's trying to talk to him but he simply isn't hearing her. It may be worth noting that Ryuki has never BSODed in the middle of a somnium before and this is arguably when Tama is most plugged into his mental state.

By being able to provide the name, this splits us off into a timeline where Ryuki was unsuccessful in forgetting what happened six years ago (so I guess the flashback in the other timeline isn't really Ryuki telling the story to Mizuki like I'd supposed). Aiba once again manages to deflect the reverse sync and we move to the next part of the somnium, the one that is quite clearly the underground Naix cathedral and this time Mizuki recognizes it as such due to the big ass Naix symbol clearly hanging overhead.

Ryuki moans over and over again about Dahlia Boat, spawning creepy pixelated versions of himself that Aiba needs to avoid to prevent them from draining her remaining psync time due to destablizing the link, and they can be fended off by dosing them with a bit of reality, which oddly includes what appears to be a broken AI-ball from which we can summon a representation of Tama. I don't remember her being damaged during the Naix collapse event, but maybe something happened afterward. She seemed really startled during the reverse psync and Ryuki has clearly been out of commission for a while so it would not be surprising if Tama had been deactivated or put in sleep mode, and the version we summon acts more like a hologram than anything else since she doesn't interact with Aiba.

This somnium has a couple unique gimmicks and I can see how the designers were trying to make more varied somniums this game, but I really didn't like them. The pixelated Ryukis introduce a different sort of pressure on the player because there is actually a danger that has to be physically avoided that has never been done before. Failing to do so costs the player precious time, which we know from past experiences can be in short supply. And the second thing is that as Ryuki continues to freak out, the screen both mirrors and flips upside down with accompanying change in controls. The latter would just be annoying and possibly an interesting touch if not for the fact the game has you trying to dodge creepy Ryukis at the same time!

I really did not need Pewter yelling at me that I was running out of time while dealing with that. I was just hoping that I'd manage to get to the end of the somnium before running out of time and being forced to redo everything. Fortunately that didn't happen. I don't know how much time I had left since I was too panicked to check, but I'd like to think that this somnium was fairly generous given the new mechanics, mirrored controls, and the difficulty. Though there are difficulty settings for the game now, you can't change them mid-somnium and starting over sucks.

After all of that, we finally get to the real Ryuki, who is the thing at the end of his somnium, which seems to be restoring him to sanity. But once we get back outside again, he's still pretty useless. Mizuki tries to get him to explain the reverse pync, but he's unresponsive and Aiba says he might not remember and might not have been consciously trying it. Pressing him results in him freaking out rather than just being a barely responsive drunk, so they stop out of concern of breaking his sanity. Frustrated, Mizuki gives up and decides to go back to the stadium where Jin's body was found and look for clues.

At this point I'd like to note that given all of Naix's talk about seams in the world, that Ryuki knows something from another timeline (one that more than likely didn't happen) could be one of those seams, and I suspect the player is supposed to take it that way. But again, I don't think the seam thing and Ryuki's weird mental state is supposed to be a gateway into revealing that reality is just a simulation.

In fact, his mental state seems more a degradation of whatever condition he was supposed to get himself checked out for than what happened six years ago. Sure, losing his mentor and nearly getting killed in an underground explosion was a traumatic event that may have pushed him over the edge, but he was already close to that cliff to begin with. I'm not sure what information Mizuki was hoping to get out of him given that he doesn't seem to actually know anything that shouldn't already be on file... barring Dahlia Boat, which Mizuki could not have been looking for in the first place. Granted, she could have just been grasping at straws and that is what happened, but it would have been nice if she her expectations had been subverted somehow. Instead she hears this weird name and never says "I was hoping he knew more about X."

Also, another thing of note is that the sniper who shot at Mizuki at the start of the game is the girl with a mask and the health problems in Ryuki's route.

Last and probably least, but Ryuki has apparently been put on leave following his mental breakdown and the pausing of the Half Body murders (I'm supposing they paused since we don't hear about any killing in between Komeji and finding the second half of Jin). But it's been six years! I don't know at what point he was placed on leave, but it feels like at some point he should have been let go. I know that wouldn't work for the story since he needs to be kept around, but he could still be dragged back in on account of having been the previous psyncer on the job rather than still technically being on staff and just not doing anything. (I'm not too worried about him not getting paid since his route establishes that he's independently wealthy.)

[Rune Lai]

I'm back, and this time I hope to power through to the end because it's the last month of the year and I expected I'd be finishing this game in July!

Back at the stadium, Mizuki does one of the VR segments like in Ryuki's route, where Aiba makes a digital recreation of everything at the scene for Mizuki to look around in, complete with x-ray and thermals, and after mucking around she finds a screw, a small oil spill, and a single tire track obscured by the halfway line on the playing field where the body was found. She concludes that it was a robot that placed the body there, and we do a recreation if the crime as if it were a movie, just like Ryuki and Tama would do (since there's a Danganronpa-ish set of movie frames that need to be filled out and obviously they need to use the mechanics/UI again), but unlike Ryuki who had to be bullied into performing, Mizuki jumps into her role as Tearer pretty eagerly and hams it up.

We see how she struggles to pilot the robot, and almost messes up, thus spilling the oil and losing the screw, but gets the body down and the robot comes back, thus solving the mystery of how the body got there without any footprints being left behind.

But the robot model used in the sim is of Shoma's one-wheeled robot, which Mizuki notes is odd, so we set off running all over town looking for Shoma. Given that we're only shown his twelve-year-old self when talking about him, I suspect that Shoma's teenage appearance is being held back as a surprise. Aiba says they shouldn't rule out Shoma as being Tearer, but considering that we saw Tearer as a full sized adult both in person and in a virtual x-ray scan (when something silly like being on stilts should have shown up) I think we can rule him out. Also, Shoma was with the rest of the Scooby Gang when his dad was getting cut up, so he has an alibi.

Running around town lets us get caught up with everyone else after six years though. Kizuna and Lien are surprisingly still together, but it's clear that it's a painful relationship. After wink psyncing with them (a quick surface level scan that doesn't require people going in a machine) it's possible to see that they're both clearly in love with each other, but Kizuna feels that Lien is only with her out of guilt over not fully saving her six years ago, and Lien is unable to get through to her, so she keeps pushing him away and he keeps trying to stay. Considering that he was initially attracted to her because of her dancing and she's now in a wheelchair (the explosion and ceiling collapse damaged her spine, leaving her a paraplegic), it's not hard to see why she would doubt his interest in her now that she can no longer be the person he originally wanted. Lien's character model is the same, since he was already an adult, but Kizuna's has changed since she's now twenty-four.

Going around town, we see the same thing with Amame and Gen. Amame is older, but Gen, well, he has a bag over his head, but he's unchanged. Not even an outfit change. Gen seems to be waffling over his reason for not being in his own restaurant the night Mizuki came to pick up Ryuki, and he ends up giving her two different reasons, which leads me to question what he was really doing that night.

Next I met up with Ota and Iris. Oddly Ota does get a new model, with slightly longer hair. He's thirty now, and still infatuated with Iris, who is now twenty-four. Clearly the guy is unwilling to make a play for the woman of his dreams (now that the age difference is less squicky) and is happy to just bask in her presence as her #1 fan. Iris of course gets a new model and talks about how she's still working hard on being an idol and staying competitive, because at twenty-four she's probably a battle-scarred veteran by Japanese standards.

Eventually Mizuki decides to head for the Horidori Institute where Chikari used to work at, and punches out a guard to get inside... where she's assaulted by several scientists with illegal weapons. After a series of surprisingly easy quick time events, Mizuki finds herself surrounded, and then saved, by the masked woman who had previously shot at her.

The two escape and while they don't exchange names, they do talk a bit. The woman doesn't mention any medical condition this time, but does mention again that her mask is glued to her face and forcing it off would rip off her skin. (I'm pretty sure that even with a medical condition that would be bad as skin needs to breathe.)

I think it's at this point that Mizuki learns that Tokiko and Chikara had a child. I'd learned this at some point on Ryuki's route as well, though I forget from who, and it was pretty clear to me that child must be Gen since Gen shows up in Tokiko's somnium and it would be strange for him to be there if he did not have some significance to her. However, Mizuki is also told that the child is already dead, so... maybe not? (Note: Gen's age is not given so there's probably a reason for that.)

In any case, Tokiko wanted to keep the child, but Chikara (who was already married with a child) didn't want her to, so he convinced her to give it up in exchange for power within Naix. We're told that she was in tears over doing it (which I just can't picture given the stern and collected lady I remember) and thus she rose within the organization until she became its president. And clearly no love was lost between them because she didn't seem to care that Chikara died.

Mizuki ends up seeing Kizuna again and hears that Shoma has actually been out camping, and Aiba does a quick search of surveillance footage in the area he says he is, and confirms that yes, he's actually there, so he's (once again) cleared of being Tearer (unless the real Tearer is just a mastermind and never actually shows in person).

For some reason, possibly because Kizuna's dad funds the Horidori Institute, Mizuki ends up wink psyncing with Kizuna and realizes she knows something about Chikara, so she ends up asking to psync with her in the regular machine.

The psync shows Kizuna still wants something of a fairy tale life, but can't have it as it shows the playground of the school her dad runs with most of the activities being centered around fairy tale renditions of moments in Kizuna's life, like meeting and becoming friends with Mizuki. The end results in reuniting the separated glass slippers Lien had given her, but we don't really see how it all ties into Chikara.

In the end, Mizuki just has to talk to Kizuna for the answer, which would have been a lot easier than psyncing! It turns out Kizuna was asked to get some information for her father and found out that there was a girl at the orphanage he runs who had her genes completely rewritten by Chikara. The rewriting gave her immense speed and strength so she was kept away from other children and at age three she was adopted. That child is Mizuki.

So now we get an in-universe explanation for why Mizuki is ridiculously strong. While I can understand wanting to explain why she's like that, it doesn't really make much sense looking back at the previous game, because her parents were just so bad at it that it was pretty clear they were uninterested in having a child at all. Adopting a child when you don't even want one just doesn't make sense. (I mean, I suppose there could have been family pressure or something, but there was no indication of anything like that.) Also, by providing an in-universe explanation for what was often a gag (Mizuki randomly lifting up furniture) it implies there are in-universe explanations for other things... like Date getting powered up by looking at porn mags.

In other words, I didn't really feel like this answered some mystery that's been hanging over my head, but now that it has, I'm annoyed by all the other random bits of stupidity that ought to have an explanation but don't.

And that closes out chapter 1 of Mizuki's route, taking us to the next bit.

[Rune Lai]

Chapter 2 of Mizuki's route kicks off with the left half of Chikara suddenly showing up at the park. Clearly Tearer is aware of Mizuki's x-ray and thermal sensing abilities through Aiba because clues are left behind for her inside Chinkara's body and through thermal markings left on the backside of the monument Chikara's body is suctioned too.

These lead her to a message from Tearer saying that the world is a game and they want to challenge Mizuki. Tearer has left three half-red/half-blue balloons hidden throughout the city and suggests that Mizuki find them.

Considering that a city is really big, it's not realistic that the people Mizuki knows just happen to have stumbled across them (though Mama was doing a seance so depending on whether you think a spirit was actually speaking through her is debatable), but they do. Ryuki also shows up a couple times in this chapter, clearly still teetering on the edge of sanity, and ends up shooting at an amusement park employee off-camera and causing Boss a lot of problems. He still considers Tearer his case and wants to solve it, but at this point I think the guy needs to sit at home, relax with his hobby of choice, and take his meds.

Gen is one of the guys who ends up finding a balloon, but for some reason he hides it from Mizuki and it's only through x-ray-ing the contents of the trash can in his restaurant that she confirms he took it and popped it to see the clue inside.

We do learn that Gen's deformity, though present at birth, was not the way he had to be, but the result of genetic modification done to him as an embryo due to Chikara's pursuit of immortality. If he is Chikara and Tokiko's child, then that's pretty cruel of Chikara, though it might explain why he was still in contact with Gen after Gen was an adult and explained why he turned out the way he did.

Since Gen isn't cooperative, this chapter's psync was with Gen to get the clue out of him, but it largely ends up being a deep dive into his personal trauma of being rejected by most of society for looking like a freak. Amame, who has been his steadfast friend (and is possibly romantically attracted to him depending on how you want to interpret 大好き; the game chooses "love") is represented in the psync and manages to convince him that though she's his friend the reason she didn't choose his food in the food battle (yes, this somnium was an Iron Chef-style challenge) is because he doesn't love himself. Gen comes to realize that though much of society doesn't care for him, he does have those who do care about him regardless of how he looks and that is enough.

In gratitude, somnium Gen gives Aiba the clue she was looking for in an omelet. This allows Mizuki to solve the puzzle Tearer left behind in the real world and it directs her to the underground room in the Horadori Institute where Chikara worked.

This room had come up before, Lien tried breaking into it before the game began, but this is the first time either of the protagonists tried going there. There's some "interesting" quick time event guard dodging that comes up while searching for clues to the hidden room, but it was too easy and happened a little too often (four times for me) so it ended up being a little annoying having to stop and press a button every few seconds to make a guard go away. This might be less of an issue for people who don't want to read all the random text from looking at things.

Lien also tells Mizuki about a virus that causes hallucinations that was being worked on in the lab, and it would be interesting if this is the source of Ryuki's mindbreaks and possibly the entire "the world is a simulation" belief that the entirety of Naix possesses.

Anyway, Mizuki and Lien find the passage to the hidden room and it turns out to be a staircase leading up to a very rusted and creepy looking door in contrast to the very sterile and clean laboratory above. They hurry down before (or during) the guard shift change and enter a large empty room.

Mizuki thinks she hears something (notably we as the player do not), but Lien doesn't and Aiba tells her that she and Lien are the only two biological signatures she has and that there is nothing on the stairs outside. Interesting, and a bit creepy. Mizuki apologizes for scaring everyone and then starts her exploration, ending the chapter.

Now, I'm probably 60-70% of the way through the game, and I have no idea who Tearer is. There are still a few blank names in my character file, one of which is surely the mask girl, and a couple are probably some randos just to throw off the potential number of suspects, but I really don't have a lot of suspects.

I think we can safely rule out anyone at the Naix cathedral where Tearer physically showed up (Date, Ryuki, Mizuki, Gen, Lien, Kizuna), we likely can rule out the Scooby Gang at Komeji's body finding unless someone was lying about who was in sight of who (Shoma, Iris, Amame), we can rule out dead people (Komeji, Jin, Chikara, Tokiko), and we can rule out the AI-balls (Aiba and Tama) since they're literally only a few inches big at best in the real world.

This doesn't leave us with a lot of characters! There are Boss and Pewter, who are unlikely suspects as returning characters and lack any new character development beyond the revelation that Boss has a daughter. There's a monotone speaking detective that's shown up a few times, but not enough for me to remember his name. There's mask girl, who is mysterious enough to be Tearer but looks to be the wrong height, helped rescue Shoma from Tearer in one ending (though that could have been a misdirect), and wearing two masks on top of hiding a real identity seems a bit much. And I suppose there's Kizuna's dad, but he doesn't feel like much of a character so much as a prop.

The thing is, we don't know anything of Tearer's motivation right now other than they pick their victims for a reason, seeing the cutting in half as a sort of gift that shouldn't go out to just anyone. This possibly ties into a Naix belief that there are parts of a person's energy in both halves of the body or some other psycho-babble I don't quite remember. Given that Tearer appears to be part of Naix, it would not be surprising if all the victims have some sort of tie to the organization. We don't know about Jin, but Chikara and Tokiko were definitely part of it, and Komeji got tangled up in it when he somehow came across something that belonged to Tearer.

And if we go down ties to the organization, then really the only person I can think of that might fit that role would be Kizuna's father, who sponsored Chikara's research and took in Mizuki after the institute had experimented on her. We don't know whether or not he was a Naix member, but it's not entirely unreasonable that it is. It's just... he's only been in a single scene so far, with every other mention being off-camera, which makes it hard to get a feel for who he really is.

While Somnium Files hid Saito for a long time too, there were a lot of clues building up to how he could possibly be the killer before you confront him and realize he's been hiding in front of you the entire time. I'm just not getting any of that kind of build-up this time around.

[Rune Lai]

Okay, Chapter 3 of Mizuki's route is what I've been waiting for, and wow was there a lot of to unpack here. Mizuki and Lien explore the creepy underground room and amusingly Aiba still does the VR thing even though they are in the actual room with no need to recreate a prior state of the furnishings and she actually erases Lien from it as unimportant to the investigation. I just couldn't help picturing Lien desperately trying to get Mizuki's attention while she was stuck in VR land.

Anyway, Mizuki figures out there's a passage hidden by a metal plate at the far side of the room and that there's a powered foot pedal that will activate... something, so she steps on it and two identical weird circular machines rise up out of the floor, and on one of them lies the left half of Tokiko. We've now found the left half of the third victim. The other machine is empty though, and there is no sign of the left half of Komeji.

Obviously Lien does not take this well as he came to pick locks, not find bisected corpses.

But, we now know how the bisecting was done. The machines have an incredibly thin barbed nanothread wire running from end to end, too thin to be seen by the naked eye since it's microscopic (Mizuki can only see it through Aiba's assistance) so presumably if run back and forth like a traditional saw, or in some kind of loop like a chainsaw, it could finely cut through a person on the molecular level as described during all the body discoveries.

What we still don't know though is the preservation method, as Tokiko seems to have died only just a few hours ago.

Mizuki leaves Lien standing guard with the body while she investigates passage leading to another hidden room, and it turns out to be a good thing that Lien remains outside because the door does not have a knob or any way to open it from the inside. The hidden room was clearly a place where someone lived for a long time, obviously as a prisoner of some kind. There are posters, exercise gear, bedding, and computers.

On the computer we find the raw files used to create the QR video and the Nirvana Trial. There's also a diary which is basically a massive info dump written by Tearer over the years they've been stuck down here, and since Tearer wanted Mizuki to come here and find the machine and the diary, I can't help wondering the reason.

Anyway, Tearer seems to have a mother figure referred to as Mom and someone they disliked referred to as "him" (and this person turns out to have been Jin). Tearer didn't like the fact that Mom got along with Jin. Six years ago, Tearer got in a fight with Jin and really let him have it, knocking out a tooth and in a fit of rage deciding to bisect him with one of the machines that Jin helped teach Tearer how to use.

This was probably not something Tearer was supposed to do, but they decided to make the best of it and presented an idea, the Nirvana Initiative, to Mom. Mom approved and gave Tearer lots of money to carry out this plan, and that is when they chose the name Tearer.

It's clear from the writing style that Tearer is not that old and is rather immature (though I suppose they could be developmentally slow for their age), and this reframes our potential suspects from the characters who were adults pre-timeskip to the Scooby Gang. Somehow. (Jin was 29 at age of death, so Tearer has to be a fair bit younger in order to be upset over their mother's tolerance of this guy.)

The only character who I think is remotely possible is Amame due to the fact she was the only member of the Scooby Gang who supposedly ran into Tearer and she was out of sight of the others for a period of time while Ryuki was unconscious and Tearer was bringing in Komeji's body. However I'm doubtful that she was away from the others long enough to knock a man out, wheel a body out to a research lab, cut him in half, and then bring (half of) him back. That just seems a bit much. Also I don't quite remember if she was in the room when Tama presumably would have done the scan that allowed Ryuki to locate Tearer behind the stage.

Still, at this point she's the most likely suspect, especially since she seems to know something about the Nirvana Initiative and won't talk about it. Unfortunately this doesn't quite jive with her relationship with Gen and when Mizuki wink psyncs with her later in this chapter there's a suggestion that Amame is currently trapped in a situation where she has to obey and she hopes her deceased father will watch over her, which doesn't mesh with what we know of Tearer.

After Mizuki's investigation of the underground lab, there's a formal police one and Boss informs Mizuki that there were five not four DNA samples recovered from the underground room, meaning that there might have been a fifth victim there that we're unaware of.

Mizuki bounces all over town looking for more clues and she meets up with Kizuna and Lien, and manages to get them to reevaluate their feelings for each other by reading the time capsule letters they wrote to themselves six years ago before burying them with the glass slippers. Lien's letter is pretty straightforward, telling himself to look after Kizuna even if he gets shot down, but Kizuna's is more interesting since she didn't know what, if anything, she would feel for him in six years. She basically tells her future self to be honest about how she really feels and either tell him no, she's not interested or yes she is rather than mess with his heart. This leads Kizuna to apologize and explain how she really feels. Even though she's now in a wheelchair, they get those engagement slippers on and she wonders how she'll explain this to her dad, but is sure she'll come up with something.

We also see a weird wink psync of Lien after he makes an off-hand remark about today nearly being the worst day of his life. It seems like it should be either a humorous comment due to thinking Kizuna nearly dumped him, or an anxious one since he was staring at a bisected corpse at 1am, but when Mizuki looks it seems like he saw something he shouldn't. I couldn't help wondering if Tearer found him while he was standing guard for Mizuki in the basement but the conversation from the other party didn't seem overtly threatening and Mizuki focuses on the fact Lien seemed to have witnessed something shocking.

Elsewhere, Gen is kinda sulking over the whole psyncing thing (I assume, since he probably doesn't know exactly what was done to him) and we don't know why he took the balloon or hid the fact he did. Iris and Ota are a nothing burger of a scene save that it reintroduces us to one of Moma's yakuza who mistakes Mizuki for a fellow Naix and tells her the rehearsal is on the roof of Mitaten (where the amusement park is).

Shoma is... ugh... eighteen and both looking and sounding like a prepubescent twelve-year-old. I did the audio equivalent of a double take listening to the voice coming out of his old character model. The narration makes it explicit that Shoma has not changed in the past six years, and I can't help wondering if that's part of the plot or someone got lazy because freaking Ota who is window dressing this game got a timeskip model. He says someone must have stolen his robot because it's not like it would have driven away on its own, though that begs the question of how did Tearer know about it. Shoma says that the only people who know about the robot are people close to him and Ryuki (because Ryuki discovered it through Tama's x-ray).

Interestingly, though Shoma tells Ryuki that he didn't join Naix, he tells Mizuki he was part of Naix, but left, so he doesn't really know anything about the Nirvana Initiative. Considering how much of a focus he was in Tokiko's somnium, and now that we know he wasn't some kind of fish who got away, this makes me think that Shoma still has a larger role to play before the story is over.

Anyway, towards the end of the day as sunset is falling, Mizuki ends up at the Izume Shrine where a bunch of Naix goons (the masked ones from the end of Ryuki's route) are just hanging out in broad daylight (broad sunset?) like it's no big deal. Mizuki learns from a wink psync that they're planning on launching a rocket full of the TC-Perge virus and confronts them, leading to another quick time event sequence.

I don't know if it's just that it's been a while, but I couldn't quite figure out what I was supposed to do from the visual commands, and the thing is, every time you screw up, you get sent back to the beginning and after five tries I was really tired of that. I'm just trying to finish this game now, so I went into the settings and changed it to story mode and that was much nicer.

Joining Mizuki in the fight is our mysterious masked woman and the two of them make a nice duo. Unfortunately the woman has one of her illness conditions crop up so the goons take the opportunity to run and Mizuki chooses to stay and watch over her rather than give chase.

The two of them chat a bit at the Aoien orphanage that Kizuna's father runs, and the masked woman reveals that she grew up there. It seems she was adopted at nine and lived with that family until fifteen, until moving into what I assume to be her current family since she mentions being adopted again. She was one of Chikara's experiments, though she doesn't directly mention him by name.

(Side note: There was mention that a child disappeared from the orphanage at some point in the past, and I thought that might have been our masked woman, but since it's not I'm going to guess it's Tearer who may have taken up permanent residence in the underground lab at that point.)

The masked woman declines to share more about herself and what she's doing other than some vague suggestion that Mizuki should stay out of this for her own protection, but then she passes out due to her health condition and Aiba's like "This is a fantastic opportunity to psync with her!"

Mizuki thinks it's terrible to take advantage of her this way, but does it anyway. It's funny how she asks if it's okay that the woman is wearing her glued on face mask and Aiba says it's fine because there are eye holes, but no one made a comment about Gen who wears a bag over his head and that wasn't removed either. Conveniently for the story, but unintentional on her part, she does this while Boss and Pewter aren't around so they don't get to ask questions.

The woman's somnium is... distressing. There's an animation that plays during psyncing (while the scene loads) and it looked off to me, making me wonder if we were somehow entering a damaged brain. And when Aiba loads in, she finds herself restrained by a virtual Chikara who is treating her as his experimental subject. Normally a somnium does not interact with the AI until the scan is activated.

Again, there's a part of me that likes the different types of somniums in this game, but I also would like more straightforward "try wacky dream logic stuff." Which doesn't sound straightforward, because narratively it might make no sense, but as a player it wasn't that demanding beyond experimentation and using time buffs wisely. Once you knew the basic rules the game didn't try to layer on additional mechanics.

The woman's somnium has you play the role of her child self trying to evade a torturous "experimentation" session from Chikara, so there's a lot of time pressure to find hiding spots (where he can peekaboo jump scare you if you choose poorly) and I don't think time buffs really mean anything in this somnium because there weren't many choices to be made and most of the time if you made the wrong choice you were instantly dead and had to restart, so you couldn't really run out of time by making too many wrong choices. This may have been the first somnium that I used every last continue I had (with Tokiko it was just running out of time, so the issue was more how far back do I reset rather than dying constantly along the way).

In the somnium, Chikara threatens to torture another child in the woman's place, using a rabbit as a symbolic representative in the dream sequence, and I suspect that was Mizuki, who was only three and may not have remembered anything from that age. It would explain why the woman is looking after her, having been an older child in the same situation and in some ways her predecessor (being similarly strong and quick when not suffering from health issues).

The somnium branches depending on whether or not the player can enter the password to Chikara's computer in the dream sequence, which is apparently an eight letter word he said about his son (it was not "deformed" which was my guess assuming he's Gen's dad) so I'll probably get that at the end of the route I've now been routed on to.

Aiba helps the woman in the dream save her friend's life and the woman in the end reacts as the adult she is now rather than the child she was, and beats up Chikara. Previously in the somnium Aiba and Mizuki noted that it's weird that her dream is focused on Chikara when he's dead and beyond the reach of revenge, but after beating him up, the woman turns around to confront a newcomer and swears she won't let them finish the Nirvana Initiative, and from the virtual blue figure's voice, it's Tearer.

Of course, once we're all awake again it's late evening and the woman refuses to explain the circumstances under which she met Tearer. She only reveals that the Nirvana Initiative is a plan to bug out the entire world so they can all go to Moksha together (after skimming Wikipedia I'd guess we'd call that enlightenment if we're being less specific about the religion the terminology comes from). But given what we know of the TC-Perge virus it's pretty obvious how Naix intends to do this, and Mizuki connects that with the rehearsal on the department store rooftop. So she and the woman run over there...

...where they discover Ryuki, who is still not right in the head. He says he's come to watch the ferris wheel (and investigate), but isn't really useful for much of anything before the woman decks him for something that happened six years ago... which I'm not really sure about? I don't think he did anything on the canon timeline with her since the only scene she appeared in was napping with Hitomi.

In any case, the test rocket is launched before Mizuki and the woman can stop it, and Tearer announces over the loudspeaker that there was no virus in it. It was just a test. Thus ending the night.

[Rune Lai]

Making this its own post for readability.

Mizuki Chapter 3 was quite a chapter! So what does this leave us with?

Well, we still don't know:

• What is the point behind all these videos? The original Bats video seems to have been a Naix recruitment video, but the rest are considerably more nebulous in purpose.
• Why does the Tearer leave body halves to be discovered? The fact this was considered a good way to make use of (or make up for) Jin's death seems to indicate this is integral to the Niravana Intiative.
• Why did Tearer stop killing and put their plan on hold for six years?
• Why were Chikara and Tokiko killed? Tearer had beef with Jin and Komeji, but we don't see hints of discord with anyone else.
• Who is the fifth DNA sample from? If the fifth DNA is from another murder victim I don't know who's missing at the moment, though I suppose Kizuna's dad hasn't been hit yet and if he's not Naix he's at least giving them money.
• Is Ryuki's backstory about his brother and why he needs to be a detective so bad ever coming back into the story? I just feel unfulfilled when he shows up, because the only thing he does is show he's deranged and doesn't advance his own story or the main one. This is okay a couple times to get the message across, but the ferris wheel appearance was one too many.
• Why does Tearer want to play games with Mizyuki and Ryuki (as opposed to anyone else)?
• And most obviously, who is Tearer? Likely suspects remain scarce and I'm skeptical the revelation will come about as naturally as Saito's. At least in Somnium Files I thought that Date might have been Saito under a new name given his amnesia, so it was not hard to pivot from there. But if this is being done similarly to Saito, then that means Tearer is likely a character who has been introduced off-camera and has not actually been seen, which I think only leave Ryuki's unnamed brother as an option, which is still not ideal since Saito was still named, but Ryuki's brother hasn't been. Also, Ryuki's brother was raised with Ryuki so I don't think he could have been locked in a basement as Tearer.

Of the pre-timeskip children/teenagers, we should be able to eliminate Iris, Kizuna, and Shoma from being Tearer due to having parental figures who obviously kept them at home and meeting other people, which again really only leaves Amame and possibly the masked woman. The masked woman is fighting against Tearer who appears as a separate figure in her somnium. So again, we're left with Amame, whose primary defense seems to be that she probably would not have had the time to kill Komeji given that she was around other people for a certain segment of the story.

And then because it was really bugging me I decided to replay that segment when Ryuki wakes up after having been knocked out by Tearer at the TV studio (who did it by playing one of the creepy videos at him, which probably means they knew it would have that effect on him). When Ryuki wakes up, Amame is in the room, which means that she shouldn't be Tearer, who at this moment is supposed to be standing backstage, because presumably this is when Tama is making the scan for the later VR simulation. This also eliminates Iris, Kizuna, and Shoma, so... I got nothing on who this person is supposed to be.

[Rune Lai]

Chapter 4 of this branch of Mizuki's route opens with Komeji's left half being discovered on the stage of the amusement park where he was previously doing his routine. When questioning the detective, Mizuki learns that three days ago on Feb 11th the power was cut to the rooftop and four hours later the security guard encountered a drunk man who pushed him away when he tried to stop him from going to the roof. Then early morning of the current day (Feb 14th) the power was cut again and now we have Komeji's half.

Amusingly, since it's Feb 14th, Mizuki is able to hand out giri chocolate to a couple men and one boy. Giri chocolate is sometimes called obligation chocolate in translation because giving it is not a romantic gesture but something you're supposed to do to show appreciation on Valentine's Day (obviously the custom warped when it got to Japan).

The VR segment yields some interesting information in that there is a luminol reaction on the stage. Not where Komeji's body half is lying, but next to it, and there is a set of footprints and a set of wheels leading away from it. Due to the shape of the cleaned up bloodstain, it was once the left half of a body. Presumably our fifth victim. Our drunk visitor was supposed to have been wheeling something, so Mizuki and Aiba conclude that the nighttime visitor must have packed up the body in the suitcase and wheeled it away, making them someone other than Tearer. (Since it would not make sense for Tearer to cut the power only to return four hours later and remove a body.)

I immediately thought of Ryuki, who is now quite a drunk and bonkers enough that yes, I could see him showing up at 5am with a suitcase and wheeling off half a body.

Mizuki then decides she needs to see both Ryuki and Shoma to pump them for potential info, which sounds good, but this is where things get weird, and not in a scary way but a "Are you paying attention to the details of your own story?" way.

I hit up Ryuki first since Mizuki wants to know if he has any additional info from having psynced with him before and Ryuki is oddly much like his old self in this scene. He doesn't have any new info, but says he's going to see a new informant with info on the HB case, without revealing who his source is. He also talks about Komeji stealing something from Tearer three days ago (not six years and three days ago). Mizuki oddly doesn't correct him or say anything internally to herself or Aiba to refute him (if she's trying to be sensitive about his delusions).

Then I talked with Shoma and Mizuki asks if he remembers anything about his dad and a suitcase. Shoma says his dad had one, but three days ago he told Shoma he lost it or something. Now, I am pretty sure Komeji has been dead for six years. He died on Ryuki's route, so I don't think this is a part of the story you should be able to accidentally mess up without anyone on the dev/translation team catching on, but neither Mizuki nor Aiba (in case Mizuki is getting virus-ed) acknowledges the problem with Komeji supposedly being out and about three days ago when he died six years ago.

This may be just to mess with the player, but because of the lack of acknowledgement it also risks looking like the writer just got sloppy.

Regardless, I have a major issue with this at the moment because the duo conclude that three days ago Komeji was drunk with his suitcase, on his way to the rooftop amusement park to pick up part of his outfit that Shoma had given him but he forgot after performing. He then found the body, stuck it in his suitcase, and walked off with the idea of blackmailing Tearer in order to get the money needed to pay off his debts.

This blends Komeji stealing from Tearer six years up with the power out that happened three days ago, meaning either Komeji walked off with half a body six years after dying, or he walked off with half a body and there's a really good luminal reaction from something that happened six years ago on an outdoor stage that would have been subjected to the elements (not to mention being cluttered by other random stuff like someone scraping a knee).

That said, I like the conclusion that for some reason Tearer had to have a body positioned on the stage like this, which is why when Komeji stole it, they had to come back later and do it again. Komeji never gave anything back to Tearer, so it's possible the six year delay was because Tearer never got that half body back, though that doesn't explain why they'd go ahead with Komeji's. (And I still don't know what to make of the trespass three days ago if Komeji originally ran off with the half body six years ago.)

Anyway, after visiting both Ryuki and Shoma, Mizuki gets a call from Lien that Kizuna has been kidnapped... again. Mizuki follows Kizuna's cell phone gps to the abandoned factory used as the finale in Somnium Files where she beats up a bunch of goons only to get tasered by Ryuki, who is being forced to work for Tearer in exchange for keeping Tama intact. This is not an old arrangement. This just happened earlier this afternoon, since it turns out Tearer was the "source" Ryuki was going to meet, though it's unclear whether Ryuki knew that ahead of time. They then send Ryuki off to do more stuff.

Tearer wants to kill Mizuki to get her out of the way, but before they can, Date shows up and tranqs Tearer. Surprisingly there isn't any "Wtf how are you alive dialogue?" like I would have expected from Mizuki. Instead she's mad at Date because now that Tearer's unconscious she can't interrogate him to find Kizuna.

So she says they need to psync with Tearer. Date doesn't express any surprise that she wants to do this herself, but if he's been keeping secret watch for six years he probably knows she's an ABIS agent now. And since they're in the same factory as the previous game, you know what's still here? The old prototype psync machine!

The in-game appendix says ABIS now keeps it as a back-up system, which explains why Mizuki doesn't need to remove her left eye or or Tearer's mask for this to work. Why is the back-up stil in this factory? Aside from saving on art assets, the in-game reason is that Saito rigged it to blow if anyone tried moving it... which would not make me feel comfortable about using it... like... ever. As for why they don't remove Tearer's mask, it's because crazy pants rigged an explosive to the back of it that will go off if anyone tries to remove it.

So Mizuki goes into our indisposed villain's mind to see what's going on in there. I suppose it would have been too much to expect not going in Tearer's brain at some point given that we went inside Saito's twice and then got psynced by him in return for a whopping three somniums with the guy, but at least the first two were while we didn't know who's mind we were actually in.

I think I would have liked Tearer's somnium if it wasn't for the time pressure, because it's a series of small escape rooms. But escape rooms suck when you have a six minute time constraint and have to run around dodging slow-moving globes that want to drain your remaining time.

Like with Tokiko's somnium I had to restart at an earlier checkpoint when I was running out of time. Fortunately, the escape rooms all involve putting together a 3 number combination to escape, and they don't change, so once you've solved it, you can just input the number and leave. It's actually pretty funny hearing Mizuki tell Aiba to try this number and Aiba's like "Wow, that actually worked."

The last few puzzles were awful though, and I would have eventually gone to a FAQ if I was playing say Zero Escape and spent a half hour to an hour banging my head over them, but even when solving them correctly they were difficult enough that they have no business being in a timed somnium. I just kept my browser open and slowly scrolled down to read the answers as needed while also reading how the FAQ author figured them out. (I would not have gotten three of the last four.)

So we eventually figure out that Tearer's love for his mom is one-sided (and Tearer is definitely a "he" now, since we hear their unfiltered post-puberty voice) and that's no surprise if Mom is Tokiko. But here's where things get a bit weird. We see dream Tearer banging on a figurative door/wall/other barrier while on the other side are three figures. Two are quickly revealed to be Chikara and Tokiko, and the third is not revealed but presumed by Mizuki and Aiba to be Jin Furue, which I suppose is a reasonable conclusion given that Tearer seems to have killed Jin in a fit of jealous rage as the first victim, but then they also conclude that Jin is Chikara and Tokiko's son, which I felt was a jump since we don't feel the face.

This doesn't mesh with the final answer to this somnium's puzzles. When asked who deserves Mom's love, the correct answer is Jin, which is important when you consider this is from Tearer's POV, and he expressed jealousy over someone else getting his mother's affection.

So we leave the somnium knowing that Tearer has a massive Oedipus Complex and that they were also a test subject.

Back in the factory, Mizuki sees that Date has wandered off. Assuming that Tearer is still good and tranqed (Date said he should be out for 12 hours), she leaves to look for him. However, Aiba detects a biological signal behind them and... it's Tokiko, alive and in one piece, unlike the last time Mizuki saw her.

Mizuki doesn't seem to be off the deep end like Ryuki, and Aiba acknowledged that someone was there, so I would guess this really is Tokiko, somehow returned to the living as predicted. Though oddly Mizuki only asks why she's here rather than how she's alive, which is what I would figure most people would ask.

Tokiko confirms the intentions of the Nirvana Initiative and that Jin Furae is her son with Chikara, though she ignores Mizuki's question about Tearer's identity. (So where does Gen fit into things? What is his connection to Tokiko?) And really they don't get to talk much before Tearer shows up, explaining that after all that experimentation anesthesia doesn't really do anything to him anymore. (In my head I snarkily expressed surprise they even used any on him for him to get used to.) Tearer gets ready to kill Mizuki again, Date intervenes again (yes really), and shoots Tearer twice.

One of the bullets hits Tearer's mask and apparently the explosive doesn't really care if it's shaken around harshly just as long as the mask isn't properly undone, because half the mask's face grill breaks off to reveal the face underneath. Tearer is Jin Furue.

I don't get it either. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Aside from the whole being cut in half thing that kicked off this ordeal, and the assurance that Jin has no twin brother when we found the second half six years later, what does that even mean for his somnium? Were Mizuki and Aiba just weirdly reading into things without support like I felt they were? Were there four people in the somnium scene where Tearer was calling out for his mother's love or was Jin represented twice? But if the latter is true, Tokiko was supposed to have been pretty broken up over giving up her child, and I could understand that if it was for experimentation (!), but Tearer didn't have her love, which seems weird for a child she didn't want to give up.

I'm not bothered by the inconsistency of Jin being the first victim killed by Tearer in a fit of rage and Jin actually being Tearer because Tearer's diary just called the victim "him" and we assumed it was Jin because Jin was the first body to show up (setting aside the fact he seems to be alive and walking around at the moment). Because we know there was a fifth DNA sample in the killing room that mystery person is probably who Jin killed. I just don't know who that could have been because I believe Jin is the only character who was introduced post-mortem six years ago.

I'm also just a little puzzled how Jin was able to lead his lab rat life and also have the time to go to school and grow up as an outwardly well-adjusted person in society. I vaguely remember we met a nurse who looked after him when he was young and mentioned he was sickly, but seriously he had a lung removed as part of his torture (if his somnium is to be believed) and his outside doctors never noticed? He likely would have had breathing issues and even a cursory scan would have brought up the single lung, prompting further investigation.

Also, Jin was 29 when he "died" and left his diary at the site of his old living quarters. Because he killed the first victim just outside his imprisonment room, it implies he was still forced to live in it, even though he's this universe's Elon Musk and has presumably been jetting about as wealthy CEOs do. How can he just disappear and still be experimented on once he's a public figure?

In any case, Jin tells Mizuki she can't say anything about him being Tearer or Kizuna's going to die, and then both he and Tokiko run away. Mizuki collapses for some reason (after effect of the psync?) and Date catches her leading too... an inconclusive ending!

Yes, we need to go back to the story branch in the masked woman's somnium now that we know who Chikara's son is and what he called him, which is "Almighty." I'm guessing Chikara saw something in the boy and forced Tokiko to give him up "for science" and not because he was trying to avoid a scandal since he was already married and father to another kid.

We're surely hurtling towards the end now and I still have a lot of questions and very little room in which the story can answer all of them so here's fingers crossed that it can stick the landing and I don't have more than a couple more creepy somniums to go through.

[Rune Lai]

So it's back to the masked woman's somnium, which I have to start from the very beginning, but even though I know how to solve it, I decided I wasn't going to take chances and set the difficulty for the somnium all the way down to story mode (which I'd already done for the quick time events). There's a part of the gamer in me that dislikes this, because it does take away from some of the immersion, the adrenalin that comes from knowing failure is possible, but I didn't like this somnium and it's timed moments when Chikara can catch you, so I just didn't want to deal with it.

Now that I knew the code, I went all the way to the decision point and input "almighty" into the computer, which causes Chikara to disappear and a bunch of his test subjects to appear instead, though they're all black figures with no details. One of them is a child we can't interact with until we go around checking out all the other suffering children. We learn the masked woman is trying to make sure no other children suffer like she did and that she's been working to unearth Chikara's research. Among her findings is the discovery that Chikara has almost finished his immortality research, though as a side effect this particular test subject is stunted for his age and the woman notes that he hasn't changed at all in the past six years.

This child is, of course, Shoma.

And I'd have to say that if Shoma was a tortured guinea pig I don't know how he managed to go home and live a normal life. Granted he's very introverted, but he does have friends like Mizuki who he might be inclined to share things with, and while on Ryuki's route he expressed discomfort with his trips to Chikara's lab, it was nothing like "Omg they're breaking my bones and using nerve gas on me!" More like "They're doing dishonest stuff."

Mizuki talks with the masked woman afterward, who confirms that Shoma was successful enough that Chikara was pretty happy. Shoma does age, but at a crawl, which is functionally close enough that it was enough to Chikara, and apparently Chikara has found a way to induce that process in an adult, because what he was previously doing was experimenting on embryos which would be of no use to him personally. She doesn't specify whether Chikara used the adult result of the experiment on himself or someone else. I'm pretty sure the game previously established that Shoma did not start going to the Horadori institute until after he'd grown up a little, so trying things out on Shoma first (as a child and closer in age to the earlier test subjects) before doing it to an adult makes some kind of sense.

Since the conversation does not move to the Nirvana Initiative on this branch, Mizuki and the woman do not run over to the amusement park and see the rocket shoot off, though you can ask Shoma about seeing a rocket the next day.

Chapter 4 on this new route starts with Mizuki at Shoma's where she's able to give him chocolate (because it's Valentine's Day) and he gets a sense of deja vu since she'd given it to him in the hospital in the other timeline. He also brings up his older sister, who he had briefly mentioned before and it turns out she's Amame. He's actually surprised Mizuki didn't already know even though their last names are different due to their parents' divorce. To be fair, Amame and Shoma are barely in any scenes together (maybe just the one when the kids show up at the studio and find Komeji's body in the body bag?) so it's not surprising no "onee-san" came out of his mouth.

Shoma talks a little more about Tokiko this time, including that she had stashed some really important papers he was not to talk about in a safe in the underground cathedral. Though the way to the cathedral was thought to be lost in the collapse six years ago, Shoma knows an alternate way in and gives Mizuki the coordinates to get there, but when she arrives she sees a small structure with a massive pile of locks on the door. It's lined with heavy metal sheeting so they can't x-ray to see what's inside, but we do know a good lockpick, so the duo heads off to find Lien, which conveniently takes them almost all day, fast forwarding the time to sunset.

There we meet Kizuna and Lien in the park, where they're oddly uncomfortable with each other despite being lovey-dovey the day before after Kizuna accepted his marriage proposal. In fact, Kizuna under no uncertain terms breaks up with him, and a driver shows up a few minutes later with a big stack of money from Kizuna's dad. Clearly, negotiations with her father did not go well and now the guy is trying to pay off Lien under the assumption he's some kind of gold digger.

Lien is, of course, insulted, but we have a case to solve so Mizuki tries to enlist his services. He refuses though, saying he doesn't want to get involved in criminal stuff anymore, and wink psyncing with him reveals a little more about what we saw the day before. He broke into something for someone and was pretty shocked, but this time we get a little more and whatever Lien found is something he thought was related to the HB case. (Wanna bet it was half a corpse?)

Seeing this, Mizuki has Lien detained and psyncs with him instead of oh... asking him more directly about what he found. From a gameplay standpoint I get it, we need a somnium, and in fact I thought we were going to psync with him back in chapter 3 when we first got that dubious wink psync, but from a narrative standpoint it's lame. Lien could have a reason for not wanting to talk, but Mizuki doesn't even try and since somnium findings are not admissible in court, which even this game acknowledges, getting voluntary information from the person is still considered the better result.

His somnium was fun though, being more reliant on puzzle solving than trying to dodge things or deal with new mechanics. It's thematically designed around who Lien is, a dreamer and an expert lockpick, and takes place in Yoyogi Park which is a place he hangs out. Interestingly, he has a branching somnium, which I hadn't expected given that Ryuki's route only had one branch which means Mizuki's route has at least three endings on it.

You need to open a series of safes to progress through Lien's somnium and the branch is when you have to choose between the gold and the metal (?) safe. I don't remember the other one, but I chose gold to thematically fit with the lead > copper > silver progression of safes from earlier. That led to seeing his feelings about Kizuna and related insecurity about being unworthy of her, so I guess I won't be going off on the branch where I'll see what he was shocked by.

Mizuki is disappointed at finding like... nothing... in the somnium and basically interrogates Lien afterward, which she should have done before throwing him in in the first place. Just as she's getting frustrated about getting nowhere with him, the masked woman calls her, and since Aiba handles phone calls, this call takes place entirely in the neural interface so Lien hears none of it. The call basically reveals what we already suspected. Kizuna's father forced her to end the relationship, and he did it by threatening to have Lien arrested, possibly on false charges (we don't know if Lien was ever actually in prison for his previous crimes).

On Aiba's advice, Mizuki dangles this information as a carrot to get Lien to open the locked passage to the Naix cathedral for her, so he does. Once inside, they see the entire place has been rebuilt, and Mizuki x-rays the altar while looking for the safe. But what she finds inside is half of a corpse. Specifically, the right half of one, like all the halves from six years ago. Mizuki breaks open the altar only to realize she has no idea who this person is.

The first victim of the Tearer? Good possibility at this point.

And since that's where the chapter ends, I'll break here for now, even though the start of the next chapter picks up immediately where we left off.

[Rune Lai]

Chapter 5 of the M3 branch of Mizuki starts with Lien pretty much curled up in a corner, because lockpicking adventures with Mizuki tends to end up with him finding bisected corpses, and more than anything else, perhaps this is the reason he should give for not helping her out with lockpicking again.

This ended up being a really short branch since it actually has no somnium and only consists of two scenes. The first is in the underground cathedral and the second is sort of a weird happy ending with Lien and Kizuna.

Anyway, getting back to the corpse, it has synthetic skin and since we can't identify it, we get back to the main mission of finding the hidden safe, which Mizuki and Aiba do, and rather than messing with virtual recreations on how to physically take it out, Mizuki just takes her extend-o-pipe and smashes the wall open, to which Aiba makes a snarky comment about her being a nightmare for escape room operators, which I'm sure is a jab at the creator since he did the Zero Escape series.

Inside the safe are Tokiko's notes, and though some of it is rendered in her own words to us, it's a lot so Aiba scans most of it and in summary, we find out that at age 5 Jin developed tumors on the right side of his body. Though Tokiko had given him up to the Furue family, she still cared about him and Chikara came to her with a plan to save Jin. They would basically find someone with the same genotype as Jin (I don't think Kotaro Uchikoshi knows what this means, or something was lost in translation, because the old biology major in me wants a word about what's going on here) and then use that child for replacement parts.

That child was Uru, who was the kid who disappeared from the Aoien Orphanage at age six. Uru was kept alive and underground, and basically harvested for parts whenever Jin needed them. In short, Uru is Tearer, and thus the scene with the four figures in Tearer's somnium and the diary entry expressing jealousy over "him" makes sense. (Sort of.) The orphaned Uru considered Tokiko his mother figure, but was devastated by the attention laid on Jin.

At one point the tumors became so bad the whole right half of Jin's face had to be replaced, and thus the right half of Uru's face was taken away and replaced with a skin graft, making our most recent discovery likely to be Uru. Yes, this does not jive with Tearer being active again in the previous branch of the story I played, but in this timeline Mizuki and Aiba have not synced with Tearer so they are working with a different set of facts than the player is and prior to the psync, the assumption is that the first victim was Jin.

We get a photo of what Jin really looked like prior to getting the facial transplant, and he looks much different from the public photo we're familiar with. In fact, the public photo seems to be of Uru. Aiba says Jin never appeared in public and the photo was probably created by mirroring the right half of Jin's face, which is the half "donated" by Uru. The left half had a noticeable birthmark and likely was the reason for hiding it (aside from the fact the birthmark also looked like a % symbol and thus was holy to Chikara's splinter faction from Naix).

The story even manages to explain how the DNA test could have been fooled. Aiba suggests the right half of "Jin" found six years ago really was Jin (having the transplanted face) and the left half had to have been Uru (since it had his original face), but since the DNA used for the tests were from Jin's organs, which were originally taken from Uru, the tests matched because it was all Uru. I can buy this.

However, this still does not explain Tokiko and Uru being alive in the incomplete story branch. It had to have been Uru because the broken part of the mask was on the left side and because the mind we were in was obviously that of the person who had been imprisoned.

Also, why is the right half of Uru in the cathedral? Aiba timestamped the body's death to February 10th, the same time as the left half of Jin/Uru, the one that kicked off the start of the game in the stadium, but we already know the time of death can be manipulated in some yet to be determined manner so that doesn't mean that's when this person presumed to be Uru was actually killed.

Anyway, with no further answers, Mizuki gets Lien and Kizuna to reunite, they decide to elope, and some goons hired by her dad show up to stop them. The masked women rides up on the same bike Mizuki uses, brandishing the same extend-o-pipe Mizuki fights with, and offers to help. It's clearly not a coincidence that she's in the area and her mask breaks off in the ensuing fight, revealing that she looks just like Mizuki, but with a different hairstyle and her left eye is off-color, not with the golden sheen that Mizuki and Ryuki's have when their AI companions are active, but a pale blue instead.

Surprisingly, both Kizuna and Lien know her, with Lien calling her Quartz, though it's clearly a nickname. Mizuki has a lot of questions, but the game ends with her and Quartz holding off a second round of goons as Kizuna and Lien run away on Quartz's bike, so we never get the later conversation.

Much like Ryuk's Shoma ending, there isn't much of a feeling of resolution, but this branch is likely necessary for learning the existence of Uru and probably for the unmasking of Quartz.

[Rune Lai]

Okay, I'm taking a bit here to vent my spleen as my dad would say, because the more I think about it the more annoyed I get, it makes my head hurt. There's a lot of unpack here. The game's biggest twist is out, even though not all the answers are given. And the writer in me is offended.

The chapter starts with Mama, apparently while possessed since she snaps out of it at the end of the scene, speaking to someone called the Frayer, who at the moment is best thought of as the player since we are in first person POV and we can't see ourselves. Mama essentially guides the player to a few answers to make sure certain story-based assumptions are either correct or corrected for the story going forward. The easy ones are that Uru is Tearer, that Uru is responsible for the deaths of Jin, Chikara, and Komeji (note the omission of Tokiko), and that the killings were done for the Nirvana Initiative.

The one answer I would not have gotten without the answer being part of the multiple choice is that we witnessed the events of the story out of order.

When I first started the game I was hoping we would bounce back and forth between present and past, and was disappointed that we spent the entire time playing Ryuki's route in the past and then Mizuki's route, but that's not what actually happened. I did bounce back and forth between the present and the past. It's just the game didn't tell me that until now.

After speaking with possessed Mama she reveals that the even-numbered days following the discovery of Jin's second half in the present day Feb 10th were placed in the wrong position. So for the canon story branches, Chapters 2 and 4 with Ryuki were actually in the present, and Chapters 2 and 4 of Mizuki were in the past. We're then presented with a corrected timeline, which fixes some of the weirdness, like Komeji running off with the body three days ago in Mizuki Chapter 4, because it happened entirely in the past.

The corrected timeline also fixes why all the body halves are so well preserved. Barring the Jin-Uru combo (which was explained) all the body halves were found within a day of each other so there was no magic preservation method. We only assumed there was a mystery there because of the Jin-Uru combo and because there's no reason to question that we're being told the story out of order.

But what we don't know is who killed Uru and Tokiko, who've both died in the present day rather than six years ago once we see how the scenes are rearranged. Uru was Tearer and actually died at the start of the present day timeline, and Tokiko was killed after him.

The rearranged timeline and the scene immediately following it between Mizuki and the masked woman also reveals how the Mizuki segments in the past worked. Because Mizuki was actually a twelve-year-old in the past she was obviously not the eighteen-year-old ABIS agent doing the investigation segments. That was the masked woman, and she was Mizuki's predecessor at the Horadori Institute, as we kind of figured from her somnium and the Kizuna/Lien ending. She's Boss's adopted daughter, also called Mizuki (because the people at the Horadori Institute weren't creative). She was established as being blind in one eye, so the off-color eye is likely artificial and where Aiba was when she was on her special mission six years ago. Aiba lost her memories of the case in the cathedral collapse so she was never able to tell our Mizuki about it.

Kizuna knows Bibi (the nickname Mizuki gives to her predecessor) because she was her adopted older sister for six years before Boss eventually adopted her, and presumably Lien eventually met her through Kizuna. Though oddly no one ever told Mizuki that she looks like this other Mizuki they know. I mean, would it have cost much to drop in an off-handed line about it? Ryuki's dead brother gets some play. It wouldn't have been hard.

And speaking of his dead brother, he's not a candidate to be the person behind killing Tearer because my character file is completely filled out now and all characters are named, with Bibi being the last entry.

I can see why some people might have gotten pissed off with Mizuki's route going off the rails because so far as I can see right now, there is no justification for the out of order playthrough other than to mess with the player's head because the characters are never confused and it's not how the characters are experiencing the story (like it turns out Kizuna was only kidnapped once, and Bibi has thought Tearer was Jin Furue for six years but kept it secret so Kizuna wouldn't be hurt). This made everything needlessly complicated for the player and the mystery a lot simpler since the only really weird part is that "Jin's" second half shows up to restart the investigation into the half-body killings.

It's possible to play an out of order story where the timeline is played through in an arbitrary manner and it's fun to put things together. I really liked Zero Time Dilemma where you had three groups of people and you'd experience different timelines in a non-chronological order, but as you played more and more scenes the real order of events came together and you could figure out where and how the timelines branched. I had a good time. I was in on the mechanic.

This was not a good time. We actually had a hidden third protagonist and due to all adult characters, Shoma, and oddly Amame (who has multiple outfits) looking the same pre- and post-timeskip, it's hard to remember which scenes that I previously thought were in the present are actually in the past, and vice versa.

Like, what was Ryuki expecting to find by psyncing with Amame in the present after discovering Tearer was in the studio with them six years ago (and why didn't he do the VR six years ago)? Though, this at least explains why we see Tearer's physical appearance in this VR segment before we've supposedly been introduced to what he looks like, because with the rearranged timeline Ryuki already knows Tearer's appearance.

I also want to know what Tearer wanted Ryuki to do after giving Tama back, because immediately after that Ryuki Chapter 5 takes place and that's when Ryuki goes over to Sejima's to chase up a Tearer spotting and they're trying to save Kizuna. He's not behaving like someone who just shot a fellow ABIS agent.

There's a part of me that wants to replay certain parts of the game, and the game is really well set up for allowing you to revisit previous scenes, but another part of me just doesn't want to get into the weeds like that, because I feel like I shouldn't have to. I know some of this could be attributed to me taking long breaks, but I've been playing the Mizuki half of the story in a fairly short span of time, and that's when all the reveal stuff happens.

Also, isn't it just kind of bad writing if we can't tell the difference between two different people that just happen to look similar and have the same name? I mean, maybe on replay I could find some personality differences, but I don't think it's that great if I can't tell them apart aside from now understanding why Mizuki doesn't insult Date when they meet in the abandoned factory (aside from the fact he hasn't been missing for six years yet either).

Some of my notes here blur the beginnings and endings of chapter a bit here, because each chapter takes place on a particular day, but sometimes because of how I played and because somniums usually happened at night, I would lump the post-somnium evening dialogue into the next chapter, so now I'm really confused about the scene when Aiba comes back and notifies Ryuki about Kizuna's kidnapping. That had to have been in the past now that I think about it, but I believe that was after he scanned Amame and I don't think there was a chapter break in between. Ugh...

Anyway, home stretch now! I should be getting close to done!