Chat, time for feverish ramblings that only people in the Cytus fandom might understand because I have no one to talk to about this game:
Has lots of spoilers for the story so ✨below the cut✨
Photo ID: long screenshot with the text:
- It's really sad that the same humans Vanessa freed from their cryogenic chambers(?) were the ones to plug her unstable core into the Library and have her run Cytus. They obviously couldn't have know about her fragile core - that's the benefit we have of dramatic irony as the audience - but knowing how she couldn't interface with the atrocities committed by humans and then being forced to process everything humans did for centuries without an escape is a special kind of hell.
She sort of brought on her own downfall with the intent of kindness. There's something really fucked up about her being punished for trying to do right by humanity, and I think about that often.
- The song "Urgency" by SIhanatsuka is really sad when you consider the implications. Each song, as Ivy explains (technically, Vanessa explained it in the first Cytus, but in the context of Cytus II it was Ivy), is an emotion sample. They are the way architects catalogue and are able to save emotions they feel since real emotion data takes up so much space.
If that holds true for ROBO_HEAD as well, the song "Urgency" was probably composed as he was falling apart trying to uphold the connection for Paff and the player character to defeat Vanessa. We know he dies at the end of the encounter - later cutscenes show Nora repairing him - but it really recontextualizes the song in a fairly sad light. The track illustrates its title/namesake: it sounds urgent and melancholy. SIhanatsuka has always been good at blending melancholy into his music for this game, and it really fits for what is, unless Nora somehow repairs ROBO_HEAD, his death. The desperation to keep this connection alive at the cost of his core is evident in the track. Does Nora find it during his repairs, or is this a secret track between him and the player?
- I noticed not long ago that each character's eye color corresponds with the color of the bar above their charts. Mechanically speaking, its purpose is to show how far in the track you are, but it has some interesting implications for the perspective of the player. I wonder if it's meant to represent you, somehow, viewing the emotion samples through the eyes of the character. I'll have to pick through and play through each character to make sure my observations are correct - matching eye colors to the bar at the top - but I find my theory intriguing. As stated earlier, songs are emotion samples that capture how a character - human, architect, and possibly animal (if Bobo is to be counted here) - feels. If we are accessing the emotion samples through the eyes of the characters, does that mean they are reliving those feelings? Are they remembering when we play the songs? What are the implications of this?
Sidebar: A more recently added ending states that all of these characters are made up in the player character's mind (I don't accept this ending, I think it's ridiculous and throws off the whole story), so I wonder if we are truly seeing through these new people's eyes or just our own. /End ID
