Omori's Sweetheart

Omori’s 1 of those games where reading practically anything about it will likely result in huge spoilers.  Honestly, I’m kinda relieved that it’s done well enough that I don’t feel it really needs a rant recommending it, because I don’t even know how the hell someone CAN speak positively about its virtues without giving way too much away.  I mean, I guess “If Mother 3, Undertale, and Large Battleship Studios were a Venn diagram, Omori would be the spot where they all intersect” does the job, but it’s kinda hard to stretch that out into a whole damn rant, at least not without some elaborate details that would give plot twists away.  But anyways, if you’re not already, like, 75%-through-the-game-familiar with Omori, then it’s best you pass today’s rant up.



Omori is a pretty damned awesome RPG, if you’re a fan of surrealism, the psychology of imagination and trauma and guilt, childhood innocence and its loss, the joy and need for friendship...or just games that are designed to rip your heart out of your ass.*  And I certainly am, so I love it.  It’s artistic, emotionally gripping--even overpowering--and highly intelligent.

In that last regard, there’s a lot going on below the surface in its events and cast, particularly those of the Headspace half of the game, that’s fascinating to figure out and understand in terms of how it relates to the core conflict in Sunny’s heart and the truth of the worst day of his and everyone else’s life.  Omocat does a terrific job of creating the parallels between the features of Headspace and that which inspired them in real life, and allowing you to recognize them as such--at times the revelation feels almost like a physical sensation; I almost felt like I’d been struck when I recognized the familiarity of the tree-house.  More intriguing than that, though, is penetrating the meaning of the more important entities and happenings of Omori’s dream adventures.  And as expected of the one who functions as the closest thing the game has to a villain, Sweetheart is no different.  Behind her obnoxious hostility, below the wake of her selfishness which draws the heroes into the majority of their adventures in the Headspace’s main plotline, lies the intriguing truth: that the entity of Sweetheart was created specifically to be a misleading antagonist whose shenanigans would keep Sunny’s mind distracted, preventing him from pursuing the truths represented by Basil.

So yeah, that’s cool.  Understanding the deeper role and purpose of Sweetheart’s existence is very interesting, an elegant piece of Omori’s elaborate layered puzzle of the psyche.  Whenever an analytical discussion about Sweetheart occurs, it’s invariably about this facet, her relevance on the higher level.  As well should be the case; that’s the most important and interesting layer to examine in Omori.

But you know what?  I think something that’s overlooked is that Sweetheart is, taken only in her own right, a pretty thoughtfully-crafted character.  I mean, by all means, what’s most significant and interesting about her is the fact that she’s a mental tool in Omori’s arsenal to keep Sunny too distracted for self-realization.  No debate there.  But it’s nonetheless worth acknowledging that Sweetheart’s character was crafted with some interesting depth and symbolism in and of herself, independent of her higher-level purpose.  If Omori was a game that only consisted of its Headspace adventures, full-stop, no higher purpose and no real world components, Sweetheart would still be a pretty well-written villain.

Obviously meant to take on a similar role to Porky from the Mother series that Omori takes pride in styling itself after,** Sweetheart is an obnoxious narcissist whose complete disregard of the needs or worth of everyone around her is the cause, directly and indirectly, of most of the major problems that the Headspace’s adventures revolve around.  But while a quick dismissal of “he’s just a rotten, spoiled kid” suffices to explain away Porky’s incentive to be 1 of the most universally loathsome little bastards in fiction, Omocat put some thought and care into the background and motivation for Sweetheart.  Everything Sweetheart does, every lousy, self-serving impulse she has, every Elon Musk moment of groundless self-congratulating mirror-worship, comes back to her donut hole.

No, that’s not a euphemism of some kind, and if you thought it was, then HA!  I GOT YOU!  You’re reading this rant without having played Omori, even though I specifically told you not to!  You stop that immediately and go to your room, young man/woman/etc to think about what you did!  For everyone who SHOULD be here, however, you know that Sweetheart literally has a round and empty space in her abdomen which speaks to her donut heritage in spite of her otherwise human appearance, and that I’m not just speaking in some crude sexual slang.***

And that donut hole isn’t just a way to make Sweetheart fit in with the rest of the residents of this dream world, who are a whole circus of cutesy living animals and foods and toys and whatnot.  I mean, okay, it IS, but that’s not what’s important about it.  What’s important is that it represents the fact that Sweetheart is incomplete.  She’s missing something, something important, from the core of her being.  Like any donut, Sweetheart’s existence is defined by absence, the absence of its center, the very most foundational part of anything and anyone.  

Now, what Sweetheart is missing is not just the mundane physical matter (or whatever passes for physical matter in a dream world) absent in her donut hole.  That’s merely a symbol that alerts us to the fact of her incompleteness.  No, that which is missing from Sweetheart is her capacity to care, to love, to form and enjoy meaningful emotional connections with others.  And how do we know this?  Well, I mean, it’s not exactly hard to deduce.  She can’t sincerely return Captain Spaceboy’s affections as a girlfriend or a wife, she gives no indication of caring a lick about her fans and adorers and in fact will harshly punish them for even the slightest infraction without any consideration of their suffering, she lets children take the fall for her misdeeds rather than be inconvenienced by consequences, and she can’t find it in herself to accept any of the duplicates of herself that she had specially commissioned specifically as her perfect suitors.  

And besides the fact that it’s just generally not hard to deduce that this chick is a bit of a psychopath, Perfectheart makes this quite clear.  If you look at her battle portrait, Perfectheart--created to be the superior, perfect version of Sweetheart, remember, which we can assume means that she is “complete” in any way that Sweetheart is not--is displaying that which she possesses and Sweetheart does not.  She’s using her fingers to cutely form a heart, cleverly and proudly making prominent that which defines her as the greater, perfect version of herself.****  Sweetheart lacks a heart, lacks what the heart represents, the capacity to love and care and connect and empathize.

And I mean she lacks that capacity entirely.  She doesn’t just lack the heart needed to be able to care for others--Sweetheart is equally incapable of loving even herself.  And on at least some level, she knows it.  Somewhere buried in her psyche, Sweetheart is fully aware that there is something fundamentally missing from who she is, and recognizes that it’s the ability to feel love.

Why do you think it is that Sweetheart makes the entirety of her existence revolve around the search for love?  She’s trying to fill that gaping donut hole in her being with what she instinctively knows is missing.  She charms Captain Spaceboy into being her boyfriend and, later, husband, hoping that the love of a handsome and desirable significant other will complete her, but each time she callously calls it off, unable to make it work because the poor guy just means nothing to her.  She lives as an idol worshiped by incalculable fans and en entire culture of sprout moles, hoping that the love of a giant collective social hole will fix her, but the adoration that she receives and demands from her followers softens her not a bit, and if anything, she seems more annoyed and frustrated by her legions of adorers’ efforts to please her.  She combines both her efforts to fill her void with romantic and with wide social love through a dating game show in an effort to find a proper suitor, but the result is likewise a combination of her other failures, an inability to care about the prospective suitor-contestants and an irritation with them for their facile veneration.

But that search for love is also clearly as much internal as external.  When Sweetheart despairs of finding the love that will complete her in others, she then tries to find it in herself, attempting at first to marry herself, and then commissioning mad scientists to artificially create a copy of herself to be her perfect suitor.  Again, failures all around, because Sweetheart is as unable to feel love for herself as she is to feel it for anyone else.

And don’t let the narcissism fool you.  It’s only yet another symptom of her emptiness.  It’s because Sweetheart knows she is incomplete, on some level knows what she’s missing, that she so loudly, obnoxiously preens and chortles and proclaims her own perfection.  Narcissists like Sweetheart often don’t shout their greatness to the heavens because it’s something they actually believe.  They do it because they know something’s missing from them, something essential, and they’re desperate to cover that up.  The repugnant volume is because they’re trying so damn hard to convince themselves of the worth they’re espousing.  You don’t shout your worth out into a crowd, into the void, and at your own mirror, when you actually believe in it.

No wonder the existence of Perfectheart is so repellent to Sweetheart--not only is she incapable of loving herself to begin with, but the potential of being seen side-by-side with a superior, whole version of herself, and having what she is lacking thus exposed and highlighted for all to see, would surely be terrifying for her.

So yeah, altogether, Sweetheart is a pretty well-written character in her own right.*****  Granted, as I said before, this is all ultimately not what’s actually important about the character--Sweetheart’s true, significant contribution to Omori is that she’s a mental defense mechanism, employed as a distraction to try to keep Sunny’s subconscious from remembering the truth of Mari’s death.  Still, while that matter is well-established and communicated amongst players of Omori, the fact that Sweetheart is still a thoughtfully crafted villain even on the surface level of Headspace is, I think, also worth some attention and appreciation.  Sweetheart would have functioned perfectly fine as a one-dimensional obnoxious tool like her inspiration Porky, but Omocat went the extra mile in creating a psychological and symbolic cause for her villainy.
























* I don’t care if it comes from a goddamn Adam Sandler film.  It’s a great line.  Bite me.


** Maybe a little too much, for that matter.  Look, Omori, it’s really cool and great and rad that you beat Mother at its own game, and soundly for that matter, but did you really HAVE to emulate Mother's pace of battle flow and input and text?  Just like with Earthbound and Mother 3, everything goes just a teeny tiny frustrating bit slower than feels right.


*** Although let’s not kid ourselves: that pin-up you can find in the game of Sweetheart in a bikini which prominently shows said tummy hole?  It has absolutely awakened something in someone.


**** And man, it sure seems like Perfectheart doesn’t mind rubbing Sweetheart’s face in it.  I mean, not only is she just outright showing off what makes her better, she’s doing so by making a heart with her fingers--or, if you look at it another way, a heart-shaped hole with them.


***** So much so, in fact, that it’s actually a bit immersion-breaking.  I mean, she IS, like all other aspects of Headspace, a creation of Sunny’s imagination, memories, impressions, and knowledge.  So...it’s a bit puzzling that she could be such a good, symbolic, and insightful example of a person whose narcissism is a facade to hide their personal and emotional incompleteness from the world.  Sunny is understanding human psychology at a suspiciously high level for a teen whose mental development has largely been stalled since the age of 12 and who hasn’t been in a school setting since that time, and while Sweetheart’s existence is taken from real-world points of inspiration (a fictional character and a vexing candy vendor), it’s unlikely that these can account for the depth of Sweetheart’s psychology in Sunny’s headspace.

Then again, that’s easier to shrug off than the fact that Roboheart’s existence means that Sunny must apparently know Base64 encoding language so inhumanly thoroughly that he can mentally translate English sentences into it on the fly.  Ah, well, a little suspension of disbelief never hurt anyone.

Shin Megami Tensei 5's Cover Art

You know, the cover art for Shin Megami Tensei 5 is baffling.  Here, look at this thing:

OOPS!  All Asshats

I mean, first of all, it just looks kinda messy in general.  It’s as if some kid dropped a bunch of his stickers all in a pile, and just left them there, facing whatever directions they happened to land in.  I’m fairly sure that if I were to open up 1 of the boxes in which I keep my action figures I played with as a kid, the assorted jumble of superheroes and monsters and mutants that would greet me would be indistinguishable from this mess.  Heaven help you if you actually want to try to sort out whose limbs are where here; my sister and I spent a good 10 minutes on a Where’s Waldo hunt to nail down the positioning of Nuwa’s (the chick at the top) legs, and figure out that what appears to be a single leg shaped like an S on Khonsu (the green guy) is actually 2 separate legs positioned perfectly to be confusing.  If there is any possible way that transposing 1 character image on top of another will obscure the latter in a disorderly and misleading way, this cover finds it.

At a guess, I’d say that the artist was shooting for a quadrant setup, wherein the space behind the protagonist is split into 4 parts and each spot is occupied by a character symbolic to a game faction or 1 of the game’s 4 endings or something.  But with everyone asymmetrically facing different directions and stretching themselves out in an unruly clutter, whatever symbolic intent there may have been is totally ruined.  How the hell do you fuck up a straightforward, neat, orderly quadrant setup?  It’s not like this is a foreign idea to Atlus; they did the behind-protagonist-faction-split thing for SMT4-1’s cover art just fine.  But for some reason, this time around they’ve just made the whole thing look like the outcome of a failed game of Twister.

And let’s not mince words here: the art itself is pretty damned bad.  Like, it all looks okay at a glance, albeit a senseless jumble, but give this cover a bit of scrutiny, and you realize that this thing’s a damned disaster of bad proportions.  The Nahobino’s twisting himself around the way female bodies do in stereotypically bad 80s comic books, and there is nothing about the angling of his right leg and ankle that looks right to me.  And what the hell is going on with Khonsu’s legs?  The man’s left calf, which is closer to the viewer, is somehow smaller than the calf of the leg that is further from the viewer.  And Jesus Christ, look at Nuwa’s arm!  The woman’s got a branch like Sten from Breath of Fire 2, a monkey-man whose utility was having arms so long they were basically grappling hooks!  And you don’t even see the end of the thing in this picture; for all we know, that absurd little wrist the width of a ballpoint pen might extend another 4 feet before finally ending in her hand.  These characters look like they were drawn by a damned AI--and not one of the ones who draw my porn, either, those things understand proportions and perspective way better.

Still, cover art whose sin is merely bad quality isn’t something I’d usually rant on.  I mean, since I’ve already brought Sten to mind, it’s worth remembering that not once in the last 15 years have I said a single thing about the fact that Breath of Fire 1 and 2’s SNES box art in the USA looks like someone at Squaresoft/Capcom was going through a Rob Liefeld phase.  As amateurish and unappealing as Shin Megami Tensei 5’s cover art may be, surely it’s not significantly more deserving of scorn than Gobi, Ox, and Rand’s soulless Youngblood eyes, nor Bow’s pose and grin ripped straight out of a try-hard 90s drug PSA.  But SMT5’s cover art is more than just merely a tangled, poorly-designed mess.  What’s really perplexing about it is the content of that mess.

So, Nuwa and Abdiel (the angel), sure, you expect them to be in there.  They’re the major patrons of 2 of the game’s 3 factions, after all, and some of the most important characters in the game.  Hell, Abdiel’s 1 of exactly 2 individuals in the entirety of Shin Megami Tensei 5 that I could really qualify as actually having a story arc.  And it makes sense for Amanozako (the fairy) to be right there with the protagonist, since she’s the closest thing to a proper, real party member that the game can offer.

But what the heck are Khonsu and Hayataro (the canine) doing there?  Khonsu is the central figure of a goddamn sidequest in the game.  Sure, you have to have finished that sidequest in order to access the final, “true” Neutral ending, but that doesn’t actually tie him to the ending or story in any meaningful way.  If we’re going to count just any old entity whose event flag has to have been activated for you to reach the ending as someone important, we might as well throw the shopkeeper, some tutorial enemies, and Faceless NPC 14 in there with Khonsu, too; can’t beat the game without interacting in some way with all of them!

And Hayataro?  For real?  Hayataro is so inconsequential that I have to look up his name every single time I need to refer to him.  And I can say that with complete confidence in its accuracy, because this rant is to date the first time I’ve ever had to do so, and I highly doubt there’ll be a second instance.  He’s THAT insignificant.  I may have literally forgotten that Noel in Star Ocean 2 wasn’t just a random NPC, multiple times, as I played it, but at the very least I can still remember his damned name!  Atlus could not have selected a less material character to represent this game, short of just slapping a random-encounter enemy on there!  And frankly, even that’s debatable, because you’ll have spent more time in the presence of every random encounter enemy in this game than you will have in Hayataro’s.

And the space Khonsu and Hayataro occupy...with Abdiel on the lower right and Nuwa on the upper right, it seems obvious that Hayatero’s and Khonsu’s being in the opposite quadrants is meant to imply that they’re representing factions just as Abdiel and Nuwa do.  So that just makes this all the more puzzling.  Why in the world would Chaos be signified by Hayatero, the mere combat partner to Atsuta, and not by Koshimizu, the actual damn patron of the faction?  Koshimizu’s the obvious counterpart to Abdiel and Nuwa in the game.  Hayataro’s like the henchman of a henchman.

And what is Khonsu doing there at all?  I mean, yes, okay, Neutral has 2 separate endings it can get and, as mentioned, 1 of them requires you to have finished a series of sidequests in which Khonsu figures heavily, but even if we were to pretend that he’s got any actual thematic significance to the faction of Neutrality, he still is certainly not so important in his sidequest capacity that you could rationally consider him a patron of the faction like Nuwa, Abdiel, and Koshimizu are.  And why should we even pretend that far? The fact is still that Khonsu has no actual thematic or philosophical ties to Neutral, especially not the version of Neutral that this game’s ending champions--why is the guy who proves that demons can be benevolent to humans being touted as the symbol of an ending which bans all demons from existence?

I’m not even going to bother questioning why the fuck 1 of Lahmu’s tentacle mouths happens to just be sitting disembodied in the background.  There’s just not gonna be a good answer to that.

Lastly, in addition to talking about who’s on this cover when they shouldn’t be, let’s also talk about who’s not on this cover when they absolutely should be.  Namely: Tao.  Where’s Tao?  Shouldn’t she be here, too?  Tao is maybe the most important figure in her own right within this miserable excuse for a story, the nearest approximation you can get to the traditional SMT Heroine like Hiroko and Isabeau.  As I said earlier, I can only assume that Amanozako’s on the cover because she’s the closest thing to a consistent companion that SMT5 has to offer, so why wouldn’t Tao, the other substantial companion-ish ally in the game, also be here?  She’d be a good counterpart to Amanozako, in that regard, providing another case of the 2-sides-opposed thing that the quadrant setup allows for.  Not like there’d be much problem with adding her there, either; Tao would basically just be covering up Abdiel’s ballerina-posing leg ineptly overlapping with Hayatero’s limb, and Lahmu’s completely inexplicable tentacle-maw.  No great loss on any of those counts.  Then again, given the level of skill with symmetry that’s been evident thus far with this art, no doubt Tao’s presence there would translate into having her stretched into an unholy pretzel like some glitching asset in a Bethesda title.

As far as Shin Megami Tensei 5’s sins go, having a bad piece of cover art is about as light and harmless as they come.  This is absolutely 1 of those rants--those many, many rants--about a subject that I myself fully admit doesn’t really matter.  Still, egregious incompetence when it comes to the little things is so often the first warning sign that the same poor quality permeates a product to its core, and that’s certainly the case here.  With Shin Megami Tensei 5, you really can judge a book by its cover.

Fire Emblem 15 Stray Thoughts

You know, I actually am finding that I really like these mini-rant collections quite a lot.  Most of my thoughts and criticisms about an RPG don’t necessarily amount to a full essay’s worth, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to say my piece about a game nonetheless.  This is turning out to be a really handy way to get this junk off my mind without having to pad it out.  And it’s handy for a game like Fire Emblem 15, a game which is fine, but not remarkable enough that most of my impressions about it have been particularly strong, but also juuuuuust dumb enough at times that I do want to poke fun at it a bit.



- Toward the end of the game’s prologue, Celica asks Mycen if he thinks she’ll ever meet Alm again, to which he responds, “I do.  So long as destiny wills it.”

Uhhh...so if I’m working with an adequate understanding of the definition of the word “destiny,” then what you’re saying, Mycen, is, “Yeah, I think it’ll happen, as long as it’s something that’s gonna happen.”  Yeah, uh, just as a heads-up: literally anything and everything that happens does so because destiny wills it.  That’s how destiny works.


- Nintendo made an interesting attempt in this game to add a more traditional battle encounter system with the incorporation of some (very mild) third-person POV dungeon-crawling.  It...doesn’t really work, honestly.  Generally speaking, Tactical RPG combat systems just make encounters take too long to get through for mundane run-into-enemy fights to feel like anything more than a chore.  Random encounters when you weren’t specifically hoping to grind some levels was easily the most annoying part of Final Fantasy Tactics for me, and FFT, at least, allowed for some proper leveling to come from them, whereas the capacity for unit growth in Fire Emblem games is pretty strictly controlled and thus these little battles generally don’t offer much reward for the time you put into them.  Additionally the actual process of navigating these dungeons is so rudimentary, and the dungeons themselves designed so half-heartedly, that the whole experience is bland and tasteless, even by RPG standards.

Still, it is kind of interesting that it happened at all.  Fire Emblem isn’t given to mixing up its formulaic gameplay elements with anything more than some benign window-dressing here and there, at least from what I’ve seen of it, so this approach did catch my eye.


- Hey, it turned out Mycen was right, the thing happened because it was fated to happen so it did!  What he didn’t realize, however, was that destiny also willed Celica and Alm’s reunion to be written by a goddamn pod-person whose only training at being human was reading tweets between feuding Youtubers.

Seriously, Alm and Celica’s reunion quarrel feels like 2 tabletop players were intentionally competing to see who could fail the most persuasion checks in a row.  I’ve seen incompetent writers artificially heap on the melodramatic short-tempered misunderstandings, but jeez.  We go from Celica tackle-hugging Alm so joyfully that she nearly sends them both tumbling over the balcony to their deaths, to stacking enough spontaneous accusations and truly absurd overreactions within a less than 3 minute conversation that Celica’s storms out in a huff at what a stubborn jerk Alm is, with him basically muttering “Nuh-uh, YOU ARE!” to her back.  If you programmed an AI to write scripts for 1 Life to Live and fed it nothing but dialogue written by George Lucas, this is the scene you’d get.


- Since we’re on the subject, the beginning part of that reunion isn’t handled much better.  Celica ecstatically exclaims that she’s finally found Alm after all this time, and it’s like...what do you mean, found him, and what do you mean, after all this time?  You’re only even on this continent for your own unrelated quest, Celica, you weren’t looking for Alm.  And if you had been, it wouldn’t have been all that hard; up until 2 weeks ago, the kid had been sitting in the same village you left him at for the past 7 years straight!  No “finding” was involved in this matter.


- Clair: “You think you can walk up to a woman and ply her with a few compliments?”
Me: “Clair honey are you aware of which franchise you’re in?”

Seriously, though, it’s a trite, cheap business that even after Clair properly and justifiably rejects Gray’s shallow wish to get into her pants, FE15’s ending tosses her to him like a piece of meat anyway.  Even if the writers want to completely disregard it, I completely agree with Clair’s proudly stated belief that the person she falls for should actually know her as a person before loving her.

In fact, I think I may agree with her sentiments a little more than SHE does, because her immediate, obvious, and skin-deep infatuation with Alm at the moment they met is exactly the behavior that she’s criticizing Gray for...


- They really oversold the whole conflict between Alm and Celica, to a degree so exaggerated that it ought to legally qualify as false advertising.  I mean, the title cinematic opens with Alm and Celica reading a book about how Mila and Duma fought each other, and, in just so natural a fashion, tell each other, “Oh well let’s promise to NEVER fight each other like that, how silly would that be, amirite?” which has never, ever been said by any children who weren’t 100% guaranteed to someday try to kill each other.  And then the game opens with a spoiler of the scene near the end of the game where Alm’s stabbed Celica with the Falchion.  The game’s selling you HARD on the tragedy of war pitting 2 people in love against each other fatally.

And it’s all just leading to this wet fart of a narrative payoff.  Yeah, Alm and Celica have a battle to the death--because Celica is under a villain’s mind control.  Yeah, Alm’s forced to kill Celica during the battle--a death she is immediately resurrected from; I’m talking from corpse to opening her eyes and striking up a conversation in 1.5 minutes.  Nintendo, you tremendous nincompoops, there is not the slightest element of epic tragedy nor irony in Celica and Alm taking up arms against each other if 1 doing it out of mind control instead of choice!  And there is likewise not a shred of weight or pathos to the idea of this fight leading to Alm unwillingly killing Celica if she’s gonna pop back right as rain in less time than it takes Hulu to run a commercial break!  Alm and Celica never willingly clash, Celica recovers from death at a rate of literally, mathematically more than 10,000 times the rate at which I recover from the mere inconvenience of a poison ivy rash, their armies are not marching in conflict with one another, and the one and only time they don’t get along, EVER, is, as mentioned above, so absurdly unnatural that I have to assume that it was actually penned by a bowl of yogurt.  The grand, dramatic tragedy of fate and circumstance turning cherished loves against one another that was implied and as good as promised is nowhere in Fire Emblem 15.


- So Alm and Celica were, at least for a little while, raised by the same grandfather figure.  And when they were reading that story about Mila and Duma’s conflict, their promise not to fight as did Mila and Duma draws a clear symbolic parallel between the pairs.  Similarly, in a few other ways late in the game and in the ending, this idea that Alm and Celica symbolically represent Mila and Duma is reinforced.  Alm and Celica, the main couple who get married in the end.  And Mila and Duma, the dragons, who are brother and sister.

Oh Fire Emblem, you are just incorrigible.  Even when you don’t actually have incest, I can tell you’re thinking about it, you rascal.


- I know that, by this point in the story, Berkut is certifiable for a stay in the looney bin or a stint as the CEO of Gearbox Entertainment, but I nonetheless cannot help but wonder about the logistics of his proposal to hold his and Rinea’s wedding atop Alm’s funeral.  How do you see this happening, exactly, Berky?  You gonna get down in the grave and balance on Alm’s casket, exchanging vows as the pallbearers start shoveling clumps of dirt down onto your tux?  Is there gonna be 1 preacher guy saying “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust” while another preacher guy sits on the first one’s shoulders and starts up with, “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today,” each of them passing a Bible back and forth between them and hastily flipping between relevant passages?

Or maybe you see yourself climbing up on top of Alm’s funeral pyre--finally got to be king of that hill, buddy, congrats!--and exchange rings with Rinea as the mourners hose you and the pile down with kerosene and toss a match?  I mean you’ve already made Rinea into some eternally-burning witch, so I guess roasting yourself is in the spirit of the whole “what’s yours is mine” marital thing.


- I guess reasoning out how one conducts one’s wedding atop a funeral is a moot point when the intended deceased soundly whups your ass, though.  But at least Alm’s final victory over Berkut gives us this equally stupid gem to mull over, as Alm despairs over having been forced to kill his last blood relative: “Don’t you get it?  I’ve spent enough of my life alone!”

Oh, yeah, buddy, for sure.  Yeah, you were really spending your life alone, alright, what with the grandfather who raised you, and the 4 steadfast friends who were always there for you and even marched off to fucking WAR solely for the sake of supporting you.  Yeah, no, you’re right, I guess none of them fucking count because they don’t happen by dumb chance to share your genetics.  How fucking tragic, Alm, that you only had people who loved you and stood by you in your life, when you could have had Berkut instead.


- Duma’s final words are to advise Alm and Celica to let his and Mila’s “grave mistakes be warnings of where not to tread” as Alm and Celica lead the world into the future.  Um, weren't your "mistakes" just the fact that after enough time had passed, each of you lost your minds?  So...your advice boils down to "don't go violently insane."  Uh, yeah, thank heavens you mentioned it, Duma, doubtless that was at the top of their to-do list.


- Arguably the biggest point of Alm’s character development in the first half of the game is the fact that he’s proving that all men are equal and that social status does not dictate ability, as a peasant who achieves martial and leadership prowess that surpasses the nobles he’s surrounded by.  The game seems very intent on setting him up to be an icon of the idea that greatness is within anyone’s reach, and assuming importance based on circumstances of birth is foolish.

And then the writers go and reveal that he’s actually the son of the Rigellian emperor.  They throw 70% of the development they’ve given Alm over the course of the game, along with every single argument he’s ever made on the matter of merit through ability rather than birth, out the window.  They just rip up their own script, drop it in the toilet, take a big steamy dump on it, and slam their fist down on the flush lever like it owes them money.  There is now absolutely nothing whatsoever to say that all the villains’ sentiments in the game’s first half about nobles being the only individuals qualified to lead were in any way wrong.  Great fucking work, Nintendo, you really brought your goddamn A Game to this installment.


- So Faye is a woman who’s in love with Alm, but she never even stands a ghost of a chance of being with him because when filling out his Generic RPG Hero Application, he checked the “Path of Least Resistance” box under the Love Interest section.  And so this is the ending Faye gets:

“Unable to get Alm out of her mind, Faye returned to her old life in Ram Village. Eventually, she met and married a suitor who claimed he did not mind her pining for the king, though her habit of vanishing without notice for days at a time continued to worry her new family.”

Wow, awesome.  So Faye never gets over her love of Alm, lives a life so joyless that she frequently has to call in sick to her own marriage, and as a bonus, the innocent sod who married her gets to live the rest of his life knowing that he’s what his wife settled for--and it’s a transaction she regrets.

Faye wasn’t even in the original Fire Emblem 2, you know.  She was made exclusively for this remake.  Nintendo made the conscious, specific choice to invent Faye just so she could be miserable forever.


- You know, on that note...a lot of people criticize the direction that Fire Emblem has gone with its character interrelationships, making the games a veritable fleet of possible ships where each cast member has multiple potential romantic mates for the player to choose among.  And to be sure, it’s crassly indulgent pandering, it’s usually skewed unrealistically heavily and often even unfairly in favor of heterosexual pairings, it in large part caused the catastrophically idiotic Deeprealms Babysitters Club of FE14, and it frequently becomes a very troubling Eugenics 101 course for its audience.  Critiques of turning the series into the equivalent of a preteen giggling and mashing her dolls and action figures into each other in pairs according to whatever mad whimsy enters her head are quite fair.

But I’d like to point something out here: giving the player no agency over the romantic destinies of the cast of Fire Emblem 15 sure hasn’t done Clair, Faye, or Rinea any favors.  Especially Rinea, Jesus Christ.  I mean, not for nothing, but a more pandering Fire Emblem title would have meant that the player potentially could have saved Clair from a guy, one whom she’s outright and fervently said she has no romantic interest in, managing to brute-force his way into an off-screen marriage to her.  There might, after all, have been some options for Clair with someone whose romantic history with her could be summed up by more than just “Durr priddee gurrl hurr” and “Durr priddee gurrl yell at me and say she no like me? Even better!”  And excessive fanservice might at least have meant that Faye would get some love interest options written by an intern or a janitor or a guy who accidentally wandered into the wrong room or something, just anyone in the building who wasn’t a writer whose ex-girlfriend by suspicious coincidence also happened to be named Faye.

Rinea, not being an actual party member, would of course still be completely screwed and stuck in 1 of the Worst Romances in RPG history.  Look, it’s not a perfect solution.  But still, multiple romance options, even if motivated solely for juvenile and pandering reasons, at least means less chance of a decent character having her romantic fate railroaded without recourse by a writer whose subconscious resentment toward women seems to underscore a lot of the game.


- Let me see if I’ve got this right, Nintendo.  So in addition to everything else that makes Edelgard just truly, sincerely awful...you’re telling me that she’s not even a character in her own right, but rather a more gullible knock-off of Emperor Rudolf, from the Fire Emblem that directly preceded hers?