#shiutpost

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Completely normal Makoto sprite sheets.

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It's that time of year to once again think about that one part in a DR interview that talked about how Makoto had coordinated with the rest of his class to throw a surprise birthday party for Junko and Mukuro, and that was the moment Junko decided to plan the killing game.

Through the series, Junko has shown more open and visceral disgust for her own birthday than anything else, but her classmates throwing a party for her and her sister was just so genuinely kind and thoughtful and nice that it made her break and made her realize how meaningful her bond with her class was, and so that was the moment that she started concocting the idea for the killing game that she later put the people she cared about so much through.

And it's partially Makoto's fault. For caring enough to plan a party for a birthday that probably normally gets overshadowed by Christmas. Think about how Mukuro became attached to him because he was the only person who would smile at her genuinely. Even though by the end of the game he was so angry about their betrayal and all the awful things they had done, he still had once cared about them so much. Imagine when he got his memories of his school life back and truly realized the full extent how much he cared about them. How do you reconcile the conflicting emotions between those two different sets of memories.

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Comparison of Makoto's inner dialogue towards various objects between chapters 5 and 6, because he just get so angry and weird and neurotic in chapter 6. He just really goes off the walls after his botched execution

or maybe it's the untreated concussion from falling down a garbage pit...

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This is the rawest line in the game, it goes so hard.

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A part that I like from dr3 is that is that it exhibited Makoto's willingness to kill when absolutely necessary.

He premeditates a trap to kill Munakata. Not to just stop him or block his path. He watches and waits until he's drenched by the sprinklers and makes sure that the pool of water reaches his feet before throwing the live wires into it in order to electrocute him. A surprisingly brutal murder method that Makoto of all people has the distinction of being one of the only non-monokuma characters in the series I can think of who attempts it (considering most of the other murders in the series just come down to essentially a bonk or stab).

And when that fails, in desperation he tries to ambush him to bludgeon him with a fire extinguisher. Now, whether or not he is even physically capable of killing him even if he did land a hit... but he still gave it a good couple of tries.

Not to mention, it's not even something reserved for his enemies.

He expresses that he'd even have the willingness to kill a person who's precious to him if he had to.

He's not an extreme pacifist who would refuse to hurt anyone no matter what. He's just a guy that does what he must in order to survive; a sentiment I've felt aligns with his character even ever since dr1 and has developed even more since then.

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How much did Yakou know?

Very long and detailed analysis of Yakou's involvement in the plot beneath the cut.

Yakou is an interesting character to me. He gets his own mildly insightful short story about his detective origins. However, I crave to think that there's gotta be more to him than just the kind of pathetic (affectionate) stressed out dad-like figure that mostly kind of nags and bosses Yuma around for the majority of the game.

Ok, it sounds like I'm ragging on him, but he does have an occasional side of him in dire situations where he shows a selfless loyalty and trust in his team that proves he takes his leadership position seriously, even if he does really rock the irresponsible mess look. And he gets to be cool in his own chapter for a minute.

But there is a moment that sticks out to me, especially in hindsight after finishing the game, and that's the prologue where you get your first and probably most substantial talk with him.

He says that he does not want Kanai Ward to change practically within the same breath where he explains how terribly he's treated as a detective in this horrendously corrupt murder infested police state.

Although he makes it clear that he has a deep personal affection and nostalgic attachment to this city that shows a bias for why he would say this, we hear from multiple people throughout the game that Kanai Ward has not been the same in recent years as it has been in the past that Yakou has rooted his love in.

So why does he feel as if any change to the current state of Kanai Ward would disrupt the "peace and quiet" it deserves?

Unless he knows something about the city that's just so fundamentally irreparable that this is the closest to peace and quiet that it'll ever get again, and trying to fix it would only somehow destroy it.

Everything about the rooftop scene, from talking about the city, to Shinigami commenting on how ominous he feels to her, to the fact that he's the person who explains the rumor that the rain affects peoples' bodies.

Highlighted text tends to be easy to overlook, but I can't help but feel like there's some significance to his usage of "illusion in the rain". It's like he knows something that nobody else can see (and an obvious foreshadowing of how the rain is one of the main means of covering up Kanai Ward's mystery).

But this segues into the themes of his later chapter which also focuses on Vivia, who mirrors Yakou in a lot of ways, beyond just being another guy who muses on about peace and quiet.

Speaking of, a mirror is what Vivia uses as a metaphor for the benefit of blissful ignorance and the potential catastrophic dangers of the painful truth.

For the purposes of this chapter, he is explaining the type of pain and the effect on Yuma's world view that uncovering Yakou's crime will incur. It also acts as a setup for the development of Yuma's conviction that he will later need to use in the final chapter of the game. But the distorted reality the Vivia explains in the mirror does call me back to Yakou's "illusion in the rain" comment.

Vivia also explains that the truth that Yuma uncovers for truth's sake will lead to the destruction of the world. While he could be referring to the world and humanity in general, in the context of this chapter, world can mean a lot of things though, such as Yuma's innocence in the way he views the world as he knows it.

Or namely, from Makoto's point of view, it could also mean the destruction of the homunculi and the only version of the world that Makoto believes they can exist in.

Did Yakou come to a similar conclusion as Makoto based on what he found out?

Like Vivia in chapter 4, who did not want the culprit to be revealed, it seemed like Yakou had the full intention of not cooperating with investigating the Kanai Ward mystery until he was forced to by a directive from Number One. Even so, he came off as if encouraging the detectives to drag their feet on it for the sake of staying out of trouble.

But we know that he is not lazy, unmotivated, or stupid. In a world where you're competing with people who are fast-tracked into the WDO if they have literal super powers, Yakou was inducted by pure detective skill. He had definitely been spending a lot of his time laying low and investigating Kanai Ward himself, because he didn't trust the UG or the WDO if they turned their attention to the city.

Yakou already knew about the homunculus research in some way.

Even if he didn't know about everyone being a homunculus, he at least knew enough that he believed that the city itself would be shattered by the involvement of the UG and WDO.

And then we get to chapter 5 with the mindless zombie homunculi.

Except, they're not all completely mindless. As a matter of fact, I had come to notice something about all the non-aggressive homunculi: they all seemed to have some degree of awareness about Amaterasu's research.

The fake Zilch, who was one of Yomi's closest advisors and knew about all of Dr Huesca's and Yomi's activity in the lab concerning homunculus research, and was implied to be the one who killed Yakou's wife for whistleblowing. Fink, who was propositioned by Makoto himself to infiltrate the lab, and who was then killed by Makoto for 'knowing too much'. Dr Huesca, who was the head researcher for the homunculi. And the former CEO, who was the prime overseer of the research.

And then there was Yakou, who gives Yuma the video evidence of Dr Huesca's death at the hands of the homunculi as he explained the results of the experiment. The easy explanation is that Makoto planted this video on the zombie Yakou to be given to Yuma in the restricted area.

However, another thing that the non-aggressive zombies had in common is that they seemed to be stuck thinking about what seems to be their final thoughts before their death, barring the former CEO who was unusually lucid compared to all of them.

Considering this, I feel like Yakou's final thoughts were for Yuma to expose the truth about the homunculi for him, and to give him the DVD as the key evidence he needed. Whether Makoto gave Yakou this video, or if Yakou already had this video himself, his final thought before dying was to make sure Yuma got it.

I always thought it was a bit strange for Yakou to go and decide to murder Dr Huesca at the slightest provocation by Yomi, and then had this whole complicated coverup plan. If Kurumi could look into Yakou's background for only a day and come to the conclusion that Amaterasu had killed his wife for whistleblowing, then Yakou himself would've definitely already known and could've tried to kill Dr Huesca a long time ago.

I don't think the provocation was by Yomi's letter. I believe at some point, he had found out that Huesca and Yomi could possibly leak information about the homunculus research. He decided to kill Huesca as a gambit reveal Yomi's involvement with leaking research before it could get out into the public and destroy Kanai Ward, and he entrusted this truth to Yuma and the rest of his detectives. Yakou knew that the lie that they were living, the one that was keeping Kanai Ward together, wasn't going to last much longer.

This conveniently aligned with Makoto's motives to oust Yomi. Makoto, the one who also knew that Yomi would cause the lie holding Kanai Ward together to unravel, and who happened to introduce Fink to Yakou. Fink thought that Yakou did not know about Makoto orchestrating their meeting, and perhaps he was right in that Yakou didn't know that it was Makoto specifically, but maybe Makoto was the one who tipped Yakou off to Amaterasu's homunculus research possibly being leaked and may have even given Yakou the DVD.

Makoto may not have exactly manipulated Yakou. It just simply that both Yakou and Makoto similarly knew that the UG sticking their nose into Kanai Ward about the homunculus research was incredibly dangerous. Makoto simply gave Yakou the ultimatum and means to stop Yomi. The difference is that Makoto's goal was to get rid of Yomi and assume full control of the city in order to further suppress its secret, but Yakou's goal was the provide the truth to his detectives in order to fix things.

And I wrote all this BEFORE the Yakou DLC came out.

Where we find out that Yakou has had the prototype cure for homunculi the whole time. And depending on whether or not his wife here is a ghost or a hallucination, it seems like she had always known that there would be a need to regenerate the zombified brain cells of homunculi. Yakou might've been biding time not only to try and figure out how to reconcile the whole homunculus research issue without the UG destroying Kanai Ward, but maybe also for someone to finish research on this medicine.

TLDR; Yakou had always known about the homunculus research and was hiding it because he believed that the info getting leaked would cause the destruction of Kanai Ward by the hands of the UG. In the end, he figured out that the secret would not keep up for much longer, and his plot in chapter 4 wasn't for revenge, but to entrust that Yuma and the rest of his detectives would be able to uncover the truth and work out a way to save Kanai Ward.

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Kodaka saying things like Makoto Naegi is more confident, level-headed, optimistic, and a better communicator than Yuma

And seeing that he also apparently calls Shuichi the most fragile out of all the protagonists...

I want to power-scale all of the protagonists. Who's the strongest? I'm going to put them all into an arena.

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The voice actors of the first trial's victim/culprit of the series coming back to voice the protagonist and mastermind who face off in the final trial of the series is such an English dub win in V3. I have to wonder if it's a coincidence or if it's a fun easter egg they decided to do.

(But Shuichi having the voice of one of my all time faves, Ai Haibara from Detective Conan, is a huge Japanese version win. Especially right after Conan himself was a previous protag.)