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.