It's a narrative drenched in grief from start to credits roll. Really, it's no surprise that this game has ghosts in it. Not literal ghosts, of course.
Well--
Much like family, that's complicated, I suppose
We open the game on the gommage. We open the game spending maybe thirty minutes to an hour getting to know how deeply Lumiere is grieving; how they have grieved for the past 67 years; how they will, like as not, continue to grieve more. Lumiere is, much like the game itself, a city made more of ghosts than those that still live in it.
It's very deliberate that we start the game with Gustave. There's a lot of reasons we do this, but--one is clear from the very start. We are starting this game as a man who loves a ghost. Because Sophie is already dead. The flowers that ring the necks of those who are about to gommage are mourning garlands laid on graves that still live and breathe.
For now.
The gommage, the prologue entire--it's masterful at getting you emotionally connected to Gustave. To understanding the stakes of what they are fighting for.
And then Act I happens.
From hour one, the game works to establish how haunted Gustave, personally, is. The love of his life turns to dust in his arms, and the only reassurance he can offer her is that he's there with her. That she won't be alone as it happens. And then he reaches the continent, and death is all that surrounds him. He watches his comrades die, one after the other. And when he makes his way back to look for survivors, he instead finds an altar of corpses he willingly goes to lay himself upon. The ghosts are calling out to him, weighing down on him, and if Lune hadn't arrived when she did--if she hadn't called out to him before he pulled that trigger--Gustave would have joined their ranks.
(Put a pin in this knowledge. We will come back to it later.)
Lune and Sciel are, of course, haunted in their own ways--Sciel's ghosts are horribly painful and depressing to think about--but the game is invested in Gustave's ghosts, because his ghosts are about to become Maelle's. And he's going to join them, be one of them.
Beyond the Dessendre family's grief, beyond and above all of that--Gustave is undoubtedly the ghost that haunts the narrative the most. It's in a lot of subtle ways, outside of that first wrench of grief and the scene where they lay him to rest. His name and inspiration in Maelle's skills. His name invoked in battle. The fact that in camp scenes he is consistently brought up. In a way, he's even with the party throughout the final battle--he was the one who noticed that the chroma was lingering in the bodies of expeditioners slain by nevrons; without Gustave, there is no sword of Lumiere to clear the path to Renoir. The game shows, over and over again, that while Gustave is dead, he is not gone.
And it's in light of this, and finishing the game, that you realise...Gustave is sort of just Verso?
Rewatching Act I, the first moment this understanding hit me--with a depth beyond just thinking of them as foils of "Maelle's brother"--was when he pulled out that gun. Faced with such terrible loss, faced with such terrible loneliness, Gustave makes the same decision Verso would, a hundred times over: oblivion. And it's very deliberate, and a very stark note about Gustave's character, because it's him alone of the expedition survivors with this reaction. Verso might have been the one to spirit Maelle away from the slaughter, but alone in the manor she was firm on staying alive. Lune and Sciel, arguable more cynical than Maelle, also choose to forge ahead. To live, because the oath is WHEN one falls. When, not if.
And it's in those words that the most telling link between Gustave and Verso is made clear, in the silence that echoes from an answer and a truth that Gustave cannot give: does Gustave still believe that Lumiere is more important than any one individual life?
Rewatching that scene with eyes that have seen the end was like a bullet to the head. The characters might not know in that moment. The player might not know. But the writers do, and it's with lines like this that they set up pain in a myriad of subtle ways. From the start, Gustave was a ghost. From the start, Verso was a ghost. They're the same goddamn person.
The scene where Verso reveals he could have saved Gustave, but chose not to--in the moment, it was shocking and not, all at once. His timing had felt suspicious from the start. And as he gave his reasoning, it became clear it was...more of Verso's unintentional self-sabotage you see time and again through his character beats and history.
We know Verso has travelled with multiple expeditions. We know that he genuinely does come to care for them, despite knowing what inevitably waits for them, whether they succeed or fail; it is clear in every inch of him that Verso is a man who cannot help but fall a little bit in love with everyone around him. With those who, unlike him, fight with something he doesn't have (hope).
Verso, time and again, makes choices that are bad and hurt him. And really, if you think about it...his allowing Gustave to die was really one of these. Because of everyone on the expedition...Gustave was the most likely to agree with Verso's point of view?
Because he'd already expressed, unspoken: Maelle's life is more important to him than not just his own, but all of Lumiere. There's a reason they chose that exact framing for the question Lune posits to him way back in the first hours of the game, and it's because that's the exact thing the entire game is about. Which lives matter more?
To Verso, it is, at the end of the day, the real Dessendre family. And while I doubt Gustave would care about "real" or "painted," what he does care about is Maelle, and he would want her to live, not keep living in a world that would kill her.
Would Gustave want to kill the rest of Lumiere for this? No, of course not. He isn't so far gone in his own grief as Verso to write off the entirety of the Canvas. But if he had survived until Act III--if he was one of three remaining lives of Lumiere in the final stand against Renoir...I think he would accept the inevitable. I think he would try and convince Maelle to leave, instead of remaining to repaint the world and dead around them.
Because Gustave is a character defined by his grief in a way almost none of the others are. Lune chafes under her parents legacy but strives for it anyway. Sciel lives like life nor death matter to her and falls for the dream that Maelle can bring her husband back.
But when we see Gustave face down grief, while we see him shut down in the wake of it, we also see him accept it. In that sense, Gustave--despite the Versoisms of him, at his core--is one of the most balanced and well adjusted members of the cast, suicide attempt and all. No wonder they had to kill him.
Maelle calls Gustave "the best father and brother I ever had," and once again--she doesn't know what she's saying in that moment. But the writers do.
Gustave is the Verso and the Renoir who is capable of doing something we see the Dessendre's struggling with time and again: he is the father and brother capable of letting go. And his death really foreshadows both endings: in one, Maelle cannot let go of the Canvas, and in the other, Verso cannot let go of oblivion.
You think in false dichotomies, Lune told Verso once. It's not always an either/or situation.
Because yes, there is a world out there, maybe, where Maelle could have kept the Canvas, where she could have granted Verso his oblivion without the rest of the world going with him. A world where maybe Maelle could find balance in being Alicia, where she could leave the Canvas and return and know that Renoir would not erase it in her absence because he trusts her.
But that world isn't here. It's not the world we get, because at the end of the day this game is about grief and not moving on. It's about repeating the same patterns and cycles and hoping that things end up differently this time.
It's a game about ghosts.
And the kindest thing you can do for a ghost is lay them to rest.
This post is about the final relationship conversation between Verso and Maelle, so it's got pretty big spoilers for the full game beneath the cut!
The reveal that Verso intentionally allowed Gustave to die is incredible.
First, on a narrative level, I think it's natural to feel like maybe Gustave's death scene was a little contrived. C'mon, you're telling me Verso showed up just in time to save Maelle but not in time to save Gustave? How convenient for the narrative, right?
That he did this on purpose completely recontextualizes the whole thing. It's not contrived at all. It's Verso being Verso.
Second: holy shit, the decision to have Verso, the player character, do something so incredibly unsympathetic is brilliant, as is the decision to wait to reveal it until we've already come to understand who Verso is and why he makes the choices he does. Gustave was a good man, full stop. He was kind, generous, brave, intelligent both academically and emotionally. He was mature, strong, yet gentle. The player likely has come to really love Gustave by the time he dies, and for good reason. He's just a legitimately really great guy.
And Verso let him die. On purpose. Because he thought Gustave would be an obstacle to his ultimate goal, a goal that he believes deep down is his only choice. And because he knew achieving that goal would lead to Gustave's death anyway.
Which brings me to the third point: Verso never knew Gustave, and if he did, he might have chosen differently.
Verso worried that, if Maelle learned the true nature of the Canvas before they fought the Paintress, and learned what the Paintress's defeat would mean, she would refuse to help save Aline because she wouldn't want to lose Gustave. And he's probably right about that.
But Gustave, I think, would have agreed with Verso.
This is a blindingly hot take, I recognize, but in Act I, I think we see Gustave's true priorities. In the really great "fuck the mission" scene, Lune asks Gustave if he still believes saving Lumiere is the most important thing, or whether he would choose Maelle over Lumiere. Crucially, Gustave never answers the question. He tells Lune he hopes he still believes that, but he never says he does.
And his decision to die to save Maelle was not about the mission. If he was prioritizing the mission, he would have fled with the Lumina Converter, even if it meant losing Maelle. But he couldn't do that: deep down, in that moment, he chose Maelle over Lumiere.
The most important thing to Gustave was his sister. If he knew staying in the Canvas was killing her and preventing her from healing from her trauma, I think he would understand Verso's choices and even support him. For both of them, their sister is the most important person in the world, and they would both do anything to make sure she's okay. I really believe Gustave would have made the same choice as Verso, and Verso will never know.
There's something just so poignant about it all.
And Maelle accepts Verso's answer. She accepts Verso, even after he admits the truth. (It does seem like she already suspected it, too.) It's probably not lost on either Maelle or Verso that, by this point, they have each taken a sibling from the other--Verso letting Gustave die, and Maelle erasing Alicia. They have also both contributed to the death of almost every single person in the Canvas, too, though only one of them did so knowingly. (It probably helps that Maelle believes she can bring Gustave back as long as she can kick her father out of the Canvas, too.) So she accepts Verso's actions without hate or even anger.
The funny thing is, just before reading this post, I was just reading the comments on this excellent video on Verso's character and one of the comments actually made a similar point, that ironically, there might well have been a third, better outcome to the ending choice, if Gustave had lived. Think about how important Gustave and Maelle are to each other, how much he was willing to sacrifice for her sake, and how much she loved and looked up to him. If any character might have been able to convince Maelle to return home rather than waste away in the canvas, if there was anyone she might have listened to, anyone who could have found another way to grant Verso peace other than forcing her out and wiping out the whole canvas...it was probably Gustave.
Effectively it gives Gustave's death a tragedy not unlike Aerith in Final Fantasy VII. The real hero of the story, the one who could have made a difference and achieved a better outcome, dies far too early. And our deeply flawed protagonists are left picking up the pieces. Except, unlike Cloud who, for all his faults, is able to pull it together and achieve the better outcome for the world that Aerith wanted and died for, there are only two outcomes, with one lesser evil, for the Dessendres. There's no hero in these endings. Just a family torn by grief and a world that was doomed before the game even started.
This also just drives home to me how much of an insane creative risk Verso is to position as a protagonist. Like, just think about it. Killing off your incredibly likeable initial lead and replacing them with a stranger. Having this character very clearly withhold knowledge and motivations from the party and the player, all while they control him. And then having him effectively continue the goals of the final boss, wiping out every character you’ve come to love. and giving the player the choice to side with him, or against him. All while ensuring that the player actually still likes, sympathises and maybe even agrees with him enough that they might choose his ending despite all that.
And on top of all that, revealing Verso is the reason our initial player character died...and you still end up seeing his perspective enough that plenty of players still chose his ending. That's hugely impressive writing.
This is the kind of risk I haven’t seen a studio take on a player character since Raiden in Metal Gear Solid 2. And just makes me respect the game even more.
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