PinkuBentoBox

Late last week I finished playing through the first episode of this. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and will be starting episode 2 ASAP. I realise that I’m extremely late to the party and pretty much everyone’s already talked this one to death probably, but I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts. Naturally this is going to have spoilers for episode 1 so if you don’t want to be spoiled then don’t read. Additionally I’d really appreciate it if people who have played subsequent episodes would please not make knowing comments or whatever, or spoil the coming installments.

Additionally I already know that I’m completely wrong about everything.

For those who have no idea what I’m talking about here, visit this site for more info including the english translation patch for the first three episodes.

First off, I want to take a quick second to be an ungrateful whiney asshole and complain about my free translation. I noticed a few grammatical errors which were a bit distracting because they were repeated more than once. The major one was referring to servants, esp. Genji, as being someone’s ‘aid’. ‘Aid’ is a verb (except in the case of a ‘visual aid’ or a ‘hearing aid’ or the like). The word that was being searched for is ‘aide’ but it doesn’t make sense in that context, so it should really just be ‘assistant’.

The one that really irritated me though was Battler’s constant references to ‘turning the chess board over’. I’m not sure if it’s a literal translation and the Japanese actually says exactly that or not. If it does I guess that there’s no escaping it. But the phrase doesn’t make sense as it’s given in the translation - if I turn a chess board over then I will dump all the pieces on the ground. The whole point with the chess analogy is that there are two ‘ends’ to the board, the black and the white. Battler’s phrase is referring to viewing the situation from the opponent’s end of the board. So rather than turning it over he is mentally turning the board around. Semantics, I know, but it doesn’t make sense otherwise.

Actually, the references to game theory seemed a bit out of left field. Battler’s suddenly talking about the holes in his chessboard mentality are not quite accurate either. He’s right in that the analysis assumes that both players always choose the optimal move, however the reason for that is that if one player makes a sub-optimal move, in the case of a zero-sum game this will result in the other player winning. Which is actually what happens when the remaining survivors decide to leave the study. However the fact that game theory has been mentioned several times in this episode leads me to believe that the author believes that using it will help figure things out. We should probably assume that ‘Beatrice’ will always choose optimal moves. There are some more fundamental questions we have to ask first, regarding the nature of the ‘game’. Is it a zero-sum game, for example? It appears to be on the surface, but I have my doubts, primarily because different characters stand to gain more or less. The other thing that’s interesting is that solving the riddle properly will require cooperation, but given that this is essentially a winner-takes-it-all game, cooperation is a sub-optimal strategy as you stand to gain nothing.

I, like Battler, am still unconvinced that Beatrice really exists. She certainly provides a workable explanation, but I’m not sure that there can’t be a plausible explanation for anything that happens. The major sticking point is the chained door, as there seems to be no workable explanation for that, at least not yet. The best I could come up with is that the killer was already in the room somehow. I just can’t accept that the whole thing is the work of a supernatural witch, as if it was then, among other things, there would be no need to kill people with physical objects. Additionally there are several situations where there is reason to believe somebody was physically present, such as Kanon’s death - why would the door to the courtyard be open otherwise? It gives the strong impression that there was a physical person present at that time. The golden butterflies phenomenon is more of a sticking point, however Higurashi had a similar phenomenon, maggots in the flesh. There’s no reason why this couldn’t be something similar. What I’m suggesting is that we should take a lesson from the author’s previous work and accept that we may not be able to rely upon the characters’ perceptions. It should also be pointed out that all the characters who died were in a heightened emotional state.

There are a lot of questions still completely unanswered about Beatrice. It’s clear that a woman named Beatrice may have once existed - Kinzo’s obsession with her suggests strongly that she was alive once. So at this point in the story, she appears to be dead, and Kinzo’s black magic ritual was intended to revive her. This means her physical manifestation - delivering the letter to Maria onwards - is a bit problematic. If she was able to do that then she’s not dead and is able to interact with the real world, so why does she need to be revived? There are several times when other characters also suggest that they can actually see her, the best example being when Battler is in the kitchen with Maria and the servants, and they all act like Beatrice is standing right there with them. That whole seen was strikingly odd. Additionally, wouldn’t being ‘revived’ as a physical being be limiting? She seems to be more powerful in her formless state, assuming that she exists at all. Finally there’s the suggestion that in order to be fully revived, everyone involved must believe that she exists. This seems like it’s pretty significant - her existence is contingent on people believing she exists. Does this mean that if no one believes she exists, she would be completely powerless?

Questions also remain about the riddle. It’s a bit odd. There are a couple of important questions. First, who is it written by? Is it Kinzo or Beatrice? Is the resolution of the second part (everyone dies) part of the riddle, or what will happen if they don’t solve it? It doesn’t make sense that it would be written from Kinzo’s perspective, it seems more likely that we should interpret it from the perspective of Beatrice, but Beatrice as Kinzo knew her. Beatrice-the-woman, rather than Beatrice-the-golden-witch. We really need to know more about her.

As far as we can tell Beatrice-the-woman was a real person, Kinzo’s mistress who died at some point. If this is the case then there may be other ‘heirs’ to Kinzo’s riches. There are also suggestions that he supports an orphanage - the orphanage that Kanon and Shannon (and Genji?) all grew up in. While the probability is admittedly low, it has to be suggested that there’s actually an outside chance that Genji could be the son of Beatrice and Kinzo. I have never seen an official age for him, so I am assuming that Kinzo is in his 80s - he was described as having been born in the Meiji period (which was 1868 to 1913) and that he took over as the head of the family following the great Kanto earthquake (1924) and if we assume that he was at least 20 at that point, then he would have been born in in 1904 at the latest, which means he should be around 82 in 1986. Genji describes himself as having served Kinzo for over 30 years, and if we assume that he came from the orphanage like Kanon and Shannon, at around the same age, then this would place Genji in his early 50s. The gap between their ages if my assumptions are correct means that Genji being Kinzo’s illegitimate son is plausible. But probably way off. It certainly would give him a motive, and makes his constant stoicism seem very suspicious.

Returning to the problem with Eva’s closed room scenario. In the Tea Party segment at the end of the game, Beatrice displays how she would have killed the pair through the chained door, firing evil head-seeking devil spike missiles through the door. I think it’s a weak explanation personally. It certainly works, if you assume that a supernatural explanation is acceptable. However if Beatrice is such a powerful supernatural being, then why would she be constrained by a chain on a door? She is supposed to be amorphous and without physical form beyond clouds of golden butterflies. We’ve only seen her to be seemingly constrained by doors once, and in that case it was because Natsuhi had wrapped a magical ward around the door handle. Why couldn’t she pass through the chained door directly? Why did she have to stand outside, open the door a crack and fire things through the opening, unless she is as corporeal as everyone else? And if she’s constrained by a physical door like that, then isn’t she just a normal person? Battler challenged her to come up with an impossible scenario, and she created a scenario that is seemingly impossible, but not necessarily completely so. It strikes me for example that a strong enough magnet in the right place could probably be used to slide the chain back and forward, assuming that the chain is made of steel. I’m sure there are other ways to open them. Once you’re in, it’s easy enough to close it from the other side and then hide somewhere, or simply go out the window - I seem to recall someone saying that the windows could only be opened from the inside, meaning that they’re essentially one-way. There’s also the possibility that whoever the murderer was was known to Eva, and that she actually let them into the room, chaining it behind them. That’s actually probably the most plausible explanation.

Another thing which I’m still struggling with is the appearance of the letter in the study. We’re clearly meant to believe that it was not placed there and instead appeared by ‘magic’. But this is problematic, because we had previously been told that the study was the most secure location because it had an anti-magic ward placed on it. It was impossible for Beatrice to pass through that door. This assertion is also backed up by the fact that Natsuhi survived the first night despite someone apparently having tried to get through her door. So if that’s the case, how did she get a letter into the room? Even if we assume that magic has a different set of rules, this action seems to contradict the rules we’ve been told. The only plausible explanation is that the letter was planted by someone in the room, or that the letter itself was some kind of shared delusion and didn’t exist. Also, there is the outstanding issue that Kinzo managed to be removed from the room without the door having been opened.

The final puzzling piece is the epilogue. It states that when the police arrived they found the remains of the whole family, but they could never identify who was who, except for a segment of Maria’s jaw which was identified via dental records. While it’s true that the initial murders were pretty gristly and Kinzo’s body was only identifiable because he had twelve toes, this doesn’t bear out with what we saw of the fallen. Most of them should have been very much identifiable, having only been staked. Could the actual culprit subsequently destroyed the bodies, jumbling the remains up and making them impossible to identify to hide the fact that they were still alive? The fact that Maria’s was the only remains that were identifiable seems to be highly suspicious to me, in fact given her supremely creepy second personality (even Kinzo suggested that there was something seriously odd about her) I’d say that this is incredibly suspicious. Additionally the epilogue acts as if the entire family was wiped out, however several times Battler mentions he has a sister, but I got the impression she was a bit of a black sheep. I wonder if she might have been involved with events somehow.

There are a ton of questions at this point and it’s all pure speculation. I’m going to try and get to the second episode this week, hopefully it will answer a few niggles. And I know it’s probably going to completely destroy all my theories and ideas and make me go back and make entirely new, crazy theories. Which is fine by me.