After-Thoughts Compilation: Thought Experiments and Timeline Shenanigans

I got finished going through Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward and am now most of the way through Zero Time Dilemma and I was legitimately surprised by how many different topics of discussion it inspired me to discuss. None are big enough to warrant their own post but many are still interesting enough for me to think about that I can take a solid stance on them. So let's proceed.

Drakengard 2: Route A

Back during the PS2 era it was pretty common for games to get sequels even when they only garnered average sales due to development costs being lower than they are now. As a result, it's not really a surprise that a series like Drakengard has two sequels and a spin-off series. That said I want to focus specifically on the first sequel because of a clarification that some, particularly ValkyrieAurora want to make that doesn't really matter to me for reasons I'm about to specify.

From what I understand, it's a common misconception that Drakengard 2 follows along Drakengard 1's Ending A. Apparently it doesn't follow Ending A but a timeline similar to it. Now someone like Clemps is content to ask "Why?" and answer with "I don't fuckin' know" but I'm more concerned with the question of "Where's your proof?" and subsequently "What's the point?"

As for the first question, the only thing that ever seems to give the impression Drakengard 2 follows a different timeline is an interview with the developers. Now, this effectively makes it word of god, which I take several issues with. You see, speaking as someone who writes his own stories and is building his own game, I hate word of god. This is because at its best, it just grants a definitive answer to something that someone else may have a better explanation for but at its worst, it gives overly emotional fans a safeguard for any discussion by allowing them to say "The creator said this therefore you're wrong." Essentially, what I'm getting at is that if the series itself actively contradicts it, you can't use it, and you also can't use it if a better explanation exists somewhere in the entry itself. The only time to use word of god is in circumstances where you would otherwise have to rely on occaim's razor.

This is important for Drakengard 2's timeline placement because of how the game presents its story. To exemplify what I mean, there are a few things to keep in mind here. These generally are rooted in the question "What does the story gain from this decision" both in theory and in practice. So what does Drakengard 2 get from this decision? Well, in practice, not a whole lot.

Keep in mind its nature as a sequel. It introduces elements that weren't present in the first game, such as the bone casket, Caim's relationship with Mana, and the existence of various other creatures such as shades, gnomes, etc. The thing is, though, that sort of thing is normal for a sequel.

Keep in mind, the general idea behind a starting entry is that the best ones will do their best to be strong standalone entries because they don't know if a sequel is possible. As a result, they'll only introduce elements that are necessary for the story to function. But that doesn't mean those elements never existed and even if they didn't that doesn't mean they never could. With this in mind, you could argue that the Bone Casket always existed and that the first game just didn't touch upon it because it wasn't necessary. You could argue that shades, gnomes, and the grim reaper were always elements but were off in some other part of the world during the events of the story. Keep in mind, these things are their own creatures and technically the only things you need to worry about with humankind's enemies are the Watchers cult and the Dragons, everything else is unnecessary unless a specific cast member is associated with them in some way.

In addition, some of these things, such as the cyclops are manmade as well, so it's possible that some of these things didn't come into existence until later humans started experimenting. As for the grim reaper, well you could definitely argue that he had much better things to do.

The only way to say it's not on Route A is if something in there actively contradicts it and, for all intents and purposes, nothing seems to. Probably the biggest thing you could argue as a contradiction is Nowe himself, who only exists because Inuart merges with Furiae to create him. However, there isn't 0 possibility that this would've happened on Route A.

Consider this, for every single ending, Inuart, his location, and status are all accounted for except Ending A.

During Ending A, Inuart is defeated by Caim and Angelus but then disappears before the final act. Where he went or if he's still alive, we don't know, however, after the battle he just disappears for some time before you go to battle Mana. This is gonna be a major factor so keep it in mind.

Ending B, Inuart puts Furiae into a seed of resurrection and this results in her corpse becoming a swarm of creatures hell bent on destroying humanity, with Inuart himself being their first casualty. In other words, dead at the seed of resurrection he chose.

Ending C, Inuart gets to where he goes in Ending B but he dies next to Furiae before accomplishing his goal. Once again, he's dead.

Ending D and E are effectively the same until the battle with the queen beast so they're going to be one entry. Here, due to Furiae's survival Inuart and Furiae stay at the sky fortress waiting for their impending doom together. Romantic in a way but it at least shows that Inuart isn't going to be putting Furiae into a seed of resurrection because why would he need to?

Ending A is the only one without confirmation. Sure we can assume he died but Drakengard 2 suggests that he got to the bone casket before Angelus became the next seal, which if you think about the process of events, he had ample time to do if he got direction from some outside source. Where or for what purpose we have no idea but we do know that pact partners can communicate telepathically with each other, even those they did not a pact with, suggesting that such a thing is possible.

Everything else is something that was introduced in Drakengard 2 that 1 doesn't contradict and though in practice the game doesn't benefit much from it, it wouldn't benefit much from it in theory either. Keep in mind, Drakengard is a series that operates on multiverse theory, which means there are different timelines where different things happen. Meaning that for a route similar to Route A to have occurred it would have to have been possible within the universe in general. Now sure if you wanted to make a sequel to Route B or C instead then you have a lot more room because those two endings are so drastically different from the others. However, a Route similar to Route A doesn't leave a lot of room for potential since anything possible along this timeline would also have to be possible along Route A itself, the only difference would be character choices earlier up that would fork it away from that exact ending, although Drakengard 2 still assumes that Ending A itself is more or less unchanged going forward so that's pretty much it.

So from here, I would like to present the Chinese Room. The Chinese Room is a thought experiment in which someone is trapped in a room in china, they can't get out and no one else can get in. They get letters from the other side written in Chinese in the form of questions. However, they do not know how to read Chinese. But there are books inside the room with the questions and appropriate answers written down verbatim. So the person writes the correct response to each question and sends it through.

The people on the other side think they're having a conversation with an actual person, but the person on the inside doesn't know what's being written either way. The point of this experiment is to show that just because you simulate understanding doesn't mean you actually understand. But here's the kicker: all understanding is rooted in some form of information gathered throughout your life.

This thought experiment was intended to go along with robotics and the idea is to say that it doesn't matter if you know what something's made of as long as you know how to operate it.

Same thing applies to Drakengard 2 in a sort of non sequitur kind of way. If it could have happened on Ending A, nothing suggests it didn't happen on Ending A, and nothing is gained by it not happening on Ending A, then it may as well have happened on Ending A. Why bother making the distinction when saying "It follows Ending A" is a much more simple and accurate way to put it?

Junko Enoshima: The Ultimate Danger

Danganronpa follows a group of people that are seen as complete elites in their fields. Most of these characters you run into are superhuman in some capacity, to the point that even luck can be a superpower in the hands of some of these characters. That's why it's so problematic that Junko reigns above all of them.

Although you may not notice it at first glance, there's plenty of material that suggests that Junko may be the closest thing to a natural born Izuru Kamukura in the Danganronpa universe. Although Hajime Hinata was turned into Izuru Kamukura through artificial means, he had very few advantages over Junko herself.

To illustrate, Junko is known as the ultimate natural fashionista. However, she is also great enough as an analyst to pose as the ultimate analyst in Hope's Peak Academy to the extent that no one was able to guess that she couldn't possibly have been that. She has enough artistic skill to have designed Monokuma herself and seemingly developed the Monokuma's themselves with her own engineering skill. She was capable of building her own artificial intelligence on par with the ultimate programmer Chihiro Fujisaki, and though her combat skill is nothing to write home about, you could argue that that's purely due to lack of dedication if you look at her twin sister Mukuro Ikusaba who was the ultimate soldier and capable of going toe-to-toe with Peko Pekoyama the Ultimate Sword Fighter and trained assassin.

Junko was skilled enough with stealth and evasion that Kyoko Kirigiri was the only one able to follow her trail and even she was caught in a situation where she couldn't do anything because she didn't have hard evidence.

She has a great enough understanding of people that she knows exactly what she can do to make them do her bidding no matter how big or small, and she was only bested in the first place because Kyoko and Makoto were able to back her into a corner in her own game.

Junko is known as the ultimate despair but, in reality, that doesn't make her dangerous. Despair in itself is equivalent to depression and being the ultimate of depression is like being an ultimate little sister, that's not really how talent works no matter how much the characters want you to believe it is.

Junko is dangerous because she is capable of weaponizing talent, she has so many at her disposal, she constantly gathers more, she recruits people who have what she doesn't, and is capable of applying all of it in exactly the right areas. In a lot of ways, Junko is the true final boss. Where every other character is the ultimate at what they do, Junko could very easily have been the ultimate talent.

NieR Automata: Taro's Deception

Now I'm incredibly behind on this mainly because I never found a good excuse to talk about this but I'll do so now. I have a lot to say about the DrakeNieR series that I'll probably start up a fresh post on it later. However, for now, I want to discuss the deceptive marketing behind NieR Automata, specifically how I was probably the only one who wasn't fooled by it.

For those who don't remember anymore pre-release footage of NieR Automata brought into focus some very specific characters. These are 2B, 9S, A2, the YorHa Commander, 6O, 21O, Adam, Eve, and Pascal. These advertisements put a heavy focus on 2B, 9S, Adam and Eve in particular which caused a lot of people to start theorizing about the plots. Specifically how Adam and Eve might have something to do with the Cult of the Watchers, how Automata in general is tied to NieR and its Gestalt Program, and how 2B got so messed up in the desert. 

Now I'll admit there is some deception going on here that I wasn't initially able to discern. For example, I, like many others, thought that Adam and Eve were going to play a much bigger role than they ended up playing. However, that wasn't as much because of what they showed but rather about what they didn't show. With Adam and Eve, apart from distinct designs which made them resemble YorHa troops, very little was actually shown about them apart from their formal introductions and Eve's boss fight. Because so little was shown, it was entirely possible that there was much more but that was a psychological tactic to make everybody think there was more when in reality there wasn't.

However, the other two pieces, I was not in any way fooled by. Let's talk about 2B first since that seemed to be the more concrete of the two. Now, keep in mind, before Automata's release, we didn't get much information about YorHa or the androids apart from those two facts. However, very little was suggested about the capability of an android, specifically whether or not they could actually go into someone else's body or if something like that is possible or even a good idea with someone as clearly rogue as A2 was. With that in mind, when I saw that desert scene with the short haired B model and everybody else was asking "What happened to 2B?" my question was "Why did A2 cut her hair?"

Visually, it made more sense to me that this would be A2 rather than 2B. Firstly, A2 and 2B have very distinct body types, with 2B having a much fuller figure on both the top and the bottom, A2 is generally a lot more slender. In addition, the outfit she was wearing was identical to A2's and if 2B was the one who got beat up, you'd think she'd be wearing a variation of her own outfit, not someone else's. Finally though is the hair itself. While 2B does have short hair, you'll notice it's in a bit of a bob, with the hair frilling out to the sides in the middle before curving back inward toward the bottom. The short haired B model on the other hand had a very inward middle with an outward bottom, which is what happens when you cut long hair not when you dirty up short hair. Mud, sweat, grime, and other substances don't necessarily make your hair behave in a different way, they just make your hair heavier. If that was supposed to be 2B, it might flair less in the middle, true, but it would still curve inward or at least point straight down. There's really no reason for it to flair outward at the bottom if this is 2B's hair. All of these things made me immediately think "This has to be A2" or at least when I first saw it that it's not 2B since I wasn't aware of A2's existence until Clemp's shorter review of Automata, at which point it made sense to me. A2 cut her hair, and for what purpose was unknown. The in-game reason is there isn't one, the real reason was to deceive people, which didn't work out well with me.

Secondly is the connection to Project Gestalt. Although very little was suggested in the trailers, we did get enough to know about the Council of Humanity who reside on the moon. Now, a lot of people, like Clemps, assumed it was a retcon and that humanity somehow survived the events of NieR. However, my immediate reaction was that the Council of Humanity had to be fake and most likely comprised of information within the Sleeping Beauty server or something to that effect. And while the answer wasn't quite so detailed, ultimately I turned out to be right.

This is important because while retcon may be a tool used frequently by Netherrealm for example, Yoko Taro doesn't do retcon. If anything, he'll just make you think it's a retcon to facilitate twists. That's exactly the reason I didn't fall for it.

Speaking of which.

Zero Sequel Dilemma: Retcons

As I write this, I am not all the way through Zero Time Dilemma, I'm entertained enough by the story to continue progressing but I'm doing so at around an hour per week or so. As a result, some of what I say may be invalidated by the remaining time I have left with the game, though I kind of doubt it.

However, what I wanted to talk about with Zero Time Dilemma was retcons and generally bad writing. The thing with this is that there are a number of things that a lot of people complained about with this game, however, I don't think all of them are warranted. Although there are things in the story that either clearly are retcons or at least a limitation of the game setup they chose to go with, there are some things here that are fairly well executed.

When I went to write this, I was startled by how few retcons I actually found thus far. Sigma basing Luna off Diana given the events of this game I thought had to be something the developers didn't realize didn't make sense until it was revealed in the game that Diana studied with Sigma following the events of the Radical-6 outbreak, who most likely did so because of her time in DCom with him.

Sigma, Junpei, and Akane were criticized for being out of character. However, given what we had to work with in terms of information from 999 and Virtue's Last Reward, Junpei was the only one who needed an explanation and we got one. Phi got less screen time than a lot of people wanted, which is fair, although it's only because Phi is dead in more timelines than the rest of D-Team.

Phi being patient 0 for Radical-6 strikes me as unnecessary but that doesn't contradict anything by itself. The alien fax machine seems like an asspull, although it seems to be the solution to Clover and Alice's issue of being trapped in the future with the rest of VLR's cast, which makes it somewhat plausible, I suppose. In all honesty, I was expecting a consciousness transfer and some form of cloning technology, which this effectively is to an extent, although I'm not sure Alice is actually psychic like Clover.

However, there are still some issues here, appropriately enough with the answers to the plot threads left hanging in Virtue's Last Reward. Specifically the fact that Brother created the decision game to get radical-6 released, which I'm pretty sure everyone who played the previous game knew he had a hand in regardless. Not only that, but he also did it to kill one specific person and killing 6 billion people out of 8 billion created a 75% chance of success. In addition, apparently this person is a terrorist who has never been spoken about before and who will cause humanity to go extinct outright. And that Brother is actually Delta, the twin brother of Phi and son of Sigma and Diana sent to the past to save their lives from starvation.

Okay, let's list some reasons this is stupid to the power of infinity:

1. Besides the retcon coming out of nowhere, it wasn't even necessary to begin with. This retcon suggests that Brother did this to save humanity from someone who'll destroy it when in Virtue's Last Reward, he was established as someone who wanted to wipe out humanity and replace it with clones of himself and his younger brother, which was the entire reason Dio existed. That original motivation already painted him as someone who is morally driven and narcissistic at the same time, seeing the corruption he sees in everyone except his younger brother being cause to wipe them all out. As a result, we didn't need to make Brother seem more like a well intentioned extremist because he kind of already was, just less so than this new motivation.
2. Brother creating the decision game is both paradoxical and retarded. Firstly, because it creates a time loop in which he cannot be born to create the decision game until it's already happened, and secondly because one of his motivations to my understanding is to prevent his own birth. If he wanted to do that, he could've just chosen not to create the decision game, that would've done it because rather than creating two paradoxes, that would've removed from play the element creating the paradox in the first place.
1. Addendum: His motivation was actually to cause his own birth but, as I said, because of the multiverse theory the series operates on he can't actually cause his own birth unless he was already born to begin with, hence his plan shouldn't have any reason to work anyway.
3. Him being related to Phi by blood is pointless. We never knew much of anything about brother himself or Phi prior to Zero Time Dilemma, and though people would like to know more about Phi I'm sure, most fans probably wouldn't care about her past all that much because she didn't know much about her past either. In reality, all we wanted was to see the timeline that Akane and Sigma tried to create because that was the unknown element that the story was setting up with the sequel bait ending.
4. Not necessarily a plot hole, but this makes the perversions of Sigma toward Phi in Virtue's Last Reward extra disturbing because he was sexually orienting himself as a 67 year old man toward his 20 something biological daughter. Granted his mind was a 22 year old but it doesn't change the subtext.
5. If brother only wanted to kill one person, why didn't he? We know he could have since he was suggested to be the strongest Esper as far back as Virtue's Last Reward and it wouldn't have taken too huge of a leap to do it. If he was able to see far enough into the future that he could create the events accurately that would lead to Virtue's Last Reward entirely intentionally, then I think he could figure out the name of a single person quickly enough to snipe them or something. What I'm getting at is that if saving humanity was his real goal, he had the ability to find the one person who'd wipe them out and just do so. He didn't need radical-6 in the first place. Again, this is another problem with his change in motivation.
1. Addendum: Apparently part of his plan was to use the cast of the game to do his bidding for him but that shouldn't have been necessary. Between reading minds and manipulating people's actions, he could use this ability to find that specific person and then make them kill themselves. Especially the way he says he's read the minds of millions, as if his mind hack has a huge range that is far outside the scope of even just a single city.
6. Why didn't Sigma figure out that the adult Phi was his daughter? After finding out about her hair being dyed from red to white, and knowing about the alien fax machine he used to send both Phi and Delta into the past with Diana, why didn't he ever put 2 and 2 together? No, the memory drug is not an excuse because Sigma and Phi are both actively capable of jumping timelines, the way Akane and Junpei simply can't.
1. Addendum: This is explained in the game, although Akane and Junpei being unable to jump is retconned out of existence in this game as well, which just creates more problems.
7. If Brother was really as noble as he wants us to believe in this game, why did he even create the Myrmidons? Keep in mind, Dio was a 4th generation Myrmidon and a clone of the boy named Sean, whose name is given in Zero Time Dilemma. And why was Dio made an assassin if his only reason to exist was to help Brother make VLR happen? By the time Dio is even born, we're well on our way toward that ending anyway and VLR suggested that Dio had killed others long before the AB game. Why would a man who wanted to save humanity even need an assassin?
8. If Free the Soul was already around ten years before 999, how would Brother possibly have founded it? The alien fax machine gives us a time that puts his age somewhere around Gentarou Hongo, Ace from 999, possibly even a bit younger.
1. Addendum: By the time of the game he is 124, which suggests he should've been dead long before VLR in the first place, which justifies the next point.
9. Also in VLR, Brother's motivation was spawned by a war that got his brother killed. Are we supposed to believe that was World War 2? If so, how would brother even be alive by the time of VLR? And don't say he wasn't, because Dio legitimately referenced him as "an old man" which he wouldn't have been if the man were actually dead. And don't say esper powers either because those are only suggested to allow you to transfer your consciousness or communicate telepathically, they say nothing about prolonging your life, especially when every other esper in the series seems to have a normal lifespan biology-wise.
10. Is the alien fax machine supposed to be how brother cloned Sean? I kind of doubt it given when he died but, if that's the case, how were the Myrmidons created if Akane and Sigma were allegedly in possession of the device after Zero Time Dilemma?

Danganronpa: Despair Incarnate

No, this next part is not about Junko, at least not specifically. It has more to do with Danganronpa V3, which I actively chose to avoid because of how I view the series. You see, the game was founded on Hope's Peak Academy and the people who attend it. It's so foundational to the series as a whole that every major player in the series is somehow associated with it, so when I heard about V3 a game that doesn't take place at Hope's Peak Academy, I decided to give it a pass because Danganronpa begins and ends at Hope's Peak Academy and the anime that tied up the trilogy, while not the happiest or the strongest ending, was satisfying enough that I don't want to revisit it. Enter Joshscorcher, someone who made a top ten list of bad endings which brought up V3 which apparently retconned the entire series into being a game show. I'm not clear on the details because, like I said, I didn't go through it. However, apparently by this game the show had gone through 49 seasons after the anime ended, which I take severe issue with.

Again, all the stupid parts about this.

1. Although there were game show elements suggested at the end of the first game, that part was only from the Hope's Peak students who Junko decided to use to ruin everyone's hope. Everything else was suggested to be diagetic. This didn't change much in Danganronpa 2, and Danganronpa 3 didn't even have a game show element, that part was just a lie to manipulate Mitarai into brainwashing everyone and one of the three arcs was just backstory for the Goodbye Despair cast.
2. To say the entire series is just a game show within a visual novel/multimedia series trivializes everything the characters are going through. Why should I care that Sakura suicided to rescue her classmates in Trigger Happy Havoc if I know she never died? Why should I care about Fuyuhiko being a kind Yakuza when I know he's just an actor? These aren't minor gripes in the slightest, we're not dealing with people playing characters where the characters die but the actors are fine, this is where the characters themselves are in a plot that could ruin their lives only to then find out that that plot is a plot within the plot and that none of this is actually happening. What I'm getting at is that it ruins the credibility of the world if you make it diagetic only to then say none of it really happened. This isn't the same as setting your game in a game show, however, as that can have elements of world building depending on the type of game show it is.
3. What about all of the character progress we went through in the first three entries? Makoto went from scared and unsure of himself to being a hero of justice in a way, Hajime went from a normal kid to a bioweapon into a dilemma where he'd have to choose between one or the other and transcended that fate to become something in the middle. Chiaki's sacrifice in Danganronpa 3's Despair Arc is what set the series in motion and makes her presence in Goodbye Despair all the more heartwarming and heartbreaking for me. All of these things are invalidated if we know that the characters were never in any danger. 
4. Don't be meta just for the sake of it. Referencing the 4th wall every now and again is fine if you do it right but you can't just turn the entire series into a 4th wall break. At that point, everything stops mattering.

Keep in mind, all of this is an issue with the final ending, not necessarily the game as a whole. For all I know, it could be fine well before that but, even if it is, the ending invalidates not only this game but all other events that came before it as well.

I think that's everything that I had in mind. I hope this was entertaining to some people. Otherwise, have a nice day regardless.