thru my beilschmidt angst delirium ive been going thru this week ive been thinking about ludwig as a guy who is way more self-destructive than other-destructive when he's in a bad state of mind, mostly in the post-war era and onward, especially regarding gilbert's health decline and eventual death.
ive said it before im a broken record but i'm a proponent of german collective guilt manifesting extremely intensely in ludwig and that kind of leads to him kind of having a thing like a lot of interpretations of matthew do, a state where he keeps his suffering quiet and to himself to not inconvenience others. for him it's more because he wants to be a good example and a good boy and a good country. he wants to be better than his forefathers were and better than he used to be so he holds his outward image up higher than his personal wellbeing. which is not a good thing when gilbert's health gets really bad.
so i think lud is a drink yourself to sleep ponder driving your car off of a cliff and self harm at night in your bathroom type of guy. i know canon is kind of built off of the joke of ludwig being angry and yelling at people, but i really think that's more of a shallow thing, and mostly other people projecting onto him when he's just. autistic. and very german. i think he's really polite, timid, and anxious.
ludwig is such a cerebral character to me! gilbert is too, but there's layers more to ludwig that make him so strange and complicated. out of everyone taking gilbert's death badly he takes it the worst.
surprise, it's sufjan stevens again! The Only Thing sums up this vibe pretty good.
(and gilbert kind of does the same thing - maybe where ludwig learned this from - of hiding his suffering from others, but it's borne from a classical place of hiding weakness to look better to others, to look strong and invulnerable, not to be what you think is considerate. gilbert is loathe to cry in front of anybody, including himself. he's the punch a hole in the wall or in the mirror then go on like normal type. he weeps for his own death and panics about it but where nobody's around to pity him cause he hates pity.)
yapping about Kill the Past under the cut cuz im now free from the 25th ward finally
THE SILVER CASE
-it feels cliche to say the first game was my favorite but uhhh haha. knowing suda, The Silver Case probably didn't fully accomplish what it set out to do but to me, it's so self-contained and demonstrates such ownership of a style that mostly came out of necessity that i can't not admire it, and i'm also so fond of my playthrough of it which was so fresh and curious, compared to the other two games which were fun but I was thinking too much abt how it connects to TSC
--also just the way i played this game is so special, i was very committed to the darker aesthetic to the point where I only played past like 10pm for a while, which is funny cuz the opening of the game is straight up paranormal but by the 2nd chapter transmitter loses that edge until debatably lifecut. tokio is also haunted and paranormally but by that point i just started playing normally. it sorta reminds me of paranormasight which starts out so spooky and the curses are very present but a few hours in it sorta reverts to being a pretty normal feeling but still very good detective mystery. at one point a character does an escape room ala zero escape and its funny. but TSC doesn't stray from its initial vibe as much as paranormasight at all.
-i also played the parallel stories of TSC separate from each other rather than alternating, which made placebo such a slog but i almost feel like I appreciated both stories more that way, even though i would have loved to experience how placebo compliments transmitter
--despite not clicking with placebo at first, tokio is like one of my favorite characters this year hes such a fucking Guy. and you experience him so intimately in placebo in a way i can't even describe but is effective by the end.
---theres a bizarre and esoteric mental link in my brain between tokio, ange from umineko and fucking flynn moore from the furry visual novel Echo because of them being like surprise deurotagonists (sp?) that get fucked up from having to search for the truth about the past and how theyre all chained by it. do you think they would put happy colors in my padded cell or would it just be all white.
-I also feel like I came out of TSC a lot clearer than I did FSR or 25W, I'm sure I missed several details at first but the shelter kids stuff and kamui as more of a role and a criminal influence than as a person wasn't that hard to wrap my head around even though I thought the silver eye stuff was so whatever. i kind of wonder if part of the reason i clicked with it faster was because I'm such an mgs2head, and the whole kamui thing is sorta like what the solid snake simulation appears to be at first
-also the mackerel phones video about Kusabi is so good and feels like a must watch for how well researched it is and how accurately it nails the feeling and message of transmitter.
-TSC also uses film window a lot better than 25W and it might be worth researching how the latter being a phone game affects things but i just got off that game
-also would kinda love a translated version of the PSX version someday just to feel how different it is. idk if certain ppl hate the official translation so much maybe they should do it themselves ooooh
-i havent read 4.5 and i meant to do so before 25W to have that context about sumio and sakura and i kindaaa didnt so lol i have to do that eventually.
FLOWER, SUN AND RAIN
-"flower, sun and rain" is like a speech tick to me in the way of like, rupaul on the weakest link immediately defaulting to chaka khan when he doesnt know the answer to a question
-i wish i felt flower, sun and rain the way I felt TSC. i had a decent time with it and even had a good sense of humor about the more obviously tedious parts and the OST, and I get how mundane it's supposed to be, what it's saying about living in peace and the lie of paradise, but it didn't click with me as much. maybe a pitfall was being so attached to TSC when i played, i was probably looking for something i shouldn't have instead of just enjoying the game for what it was altho i didn't hate it or anything.
--ideally this also gets a translation on its original console cuz I like some parts of the PS2 soundtrack and id love to experience all the art assets and music in PS2 quality.
---sorta tangent. i love the opening tracks for all of these games but Anata no Tameni might be my favorite, beyond just being amazing its so dramatic and unlike the rest of the series and it really stands out. the ds opening in comparison might actually be my least favorite because of that lol
-i think that the mondo/kodai revelation is so funny just because it's an idea you'd either keep in the back of your mind or just wave off because of how dumb it seemed but regardless it's constantly staring you in the face. assuming you even played TSC before this
--sumio was never super proper or anything, i don't think, but his personality here compared to TSC is so funny, he can spend 20 years with bottled up rage and fake his way into an incompetent police force without slipping thaaat much but here he has enough small inconveniences to hit a kid over it. kind of an interesting play on like the salient thing about personality and the self being buried and it feels like an early version of like a shiroyabu situation. not the last time i will compare sumio and shiro.
--i also think its funny that the model of sumio mondo looks pretty similar to kodai compared to the key art of mondo and we should explore that one day
-i wanted more out of toriko kusabi, she was a fun diversion and i didn't expect her to be a tokioesque second protag or anything but idk. she was fun when she went against sundance and at the end and her being like a subliminal kinda suggestion to sumio's buried memories of her father i think is cool. in a less meta sense it's also cute that shes working for her dad i wonder if tetsu has to like try not to step on christine everytime he comes home from the bathhouse at like 2am. actually i dont remember what their family situation even is
-speaking of kusabi i think him like being the guardian/ferryman for sumio's journey is so so beautiful and true and i like that he gets to pull him back from the depths the way sumio sorta inadvertently did in parade/kamuidrome.
--its also really funny to me kusabi just disguises as a chubby white guy. it was probably a fatsuit but i feel like kusabi could be like 50lb away from being a bear anyways. its like the grocery store deli scene in bobs burgers.
---i also appreciated parade from transmitter way more playing this and thinking about sumio. when i played parade the first time i loved connecting the dots on everything but then it kinda got buried by kamuidrome and lifecut. and now im such a shooter for sumio kodai. look at me talking about the previous game wooo.
-i think the character designs in this are funny for how little of them you can actually see. everyone loves yayoi and yayoi is such a serve but my other fav is ken. all the punk details are completely lost in the actual game. the models also super undersell stephen carbione's look, cuz in-game he sorta looks like tokio but then you see his key art and its like yea he would look like that.
-tokio was in this game
-i think edo macallister should be a bellhop in every video game with a hotel ever. im going to the other side of the country soon and if the guy behind the desk at the hotel isn't edo i will be severely disappointed.
-i love that its hyenas. i think there should be like tokio morishima as an anthro hyena and he still has his domesticated turtle or at least like hyena sundance or yotaro or something. i think ppl would be quick to anthropomorphize tokio as a literal turtle guy.
-the eleven children stuff is whatever, i do like that theres a bunch of sumios running around but idc for all the other implications and like step and remy and koshimizu and whoever else. is sumio mondo still deaf and mostly relying on lip reading? cuz i dont think that gets brought up again. i mean he wakes up to a phone ringing every morning but i guess those are the clones. if the hearing is referenced early in fsr and i just missed it then that would be very cool. maybe thats why the voices for the characters are abstract and illegible. maybe flower sun and rain is the best game ever.
THE 25TH WARD
-what if we were all protagonists.
-i dont think this game uses film window as well as TSC but i do like the art and how much of it there is in correctness and matchmaker, also the different styles.
-i love yotaro osato sadly hes so funny and fluffy. hes osato in my notes and in normal convo but i want to call him yotaro affectionately. i do love tsuki too hes such a sufferer.
--i think theyre a teeeeny bit like like p4 adachi and dojima if they were both murderous.
-i feel bad for the lady that gets murked immediately in correctness i had a funny voice for her in my head
-shiro and kuro god bless them are funny and parallel sumio and tetsu to me. both sumio and shiro grapple with their criminal power, although sumio goes against the hc unit while shiro attempts to but finds himself back with them at the end, and while kusabi over time softens quite a bit and learns from sumio in a more overt way than kuro being literally the "japanese dirty harry" and not having as much of an arc, they both are compelled enough by their partner to rein them back in. just the surface level so i dont have to write a whole essay in a stream of consciousness type of post
--what even happens to them bc as far as i can tell, shiro just continues to be a tool of the state and kuro maybe? shoots her superior and then the 25th ward blows up.. with them on it? like okay at least tsuki got outta there.
--on the shiroverse timeline. theres conflicting sources on if his immortality is a kamui thing or a sumio mondo thing or something else and thats funny. the sources all being fan wikis and tvtropes because fuck this game that zero people played and negative people have documented.
-i need to like hold myself back from analysing meru as trans because its so clearly done for shock value but it somehow aged really hilariously now with how prevalent trans egirls are. liek theres a strange almost unearned truth to how meru exists online versus irl.
--kind of all of the gay/trans mentions in these games are like this although kusabi you can at least take in sorta good faith?
-i need to think abt what i thought abt tokio here. its increasingly funny how online he is for being a normal dude in the late 90's early 2000s.
--his portrait in yumi is kind of a hear me out but all the cgs of older tokio look crazy. tokio in general looks a mess in this game and its funny. look at him try to be masc
-i mentioned mgs2 above and the 05 chapters of these games are so reminiscent of the s3 plan and the patriots with the frontier etc using the city to collect data and the protags having to figure out where they fit into it. during TSC, i was paying a lot of attention to the story as it related to the advent of technology. it felt really relevant to kamuidrome and all of placebo but mostly ended up as background/context to the story. it was used a lot more here and i really liked it. chat logs are a great framing device in all the routes since they add so much flavor and emphasize the loneliness of life in the 25th ward (semi-related: in both TSC and 25W, the environments are devoid of people in film window, and i think this works way better for 25W than it did for TSC). placebo is yet again a good example of this with tokio only really interfacing with the world through his computer most of the time
--in terms of twists, i might actually like "the city is just a means of data collection ready to be wiped at any moment/it resembles a computer more than an actual city and life there is so impermanent that its hard to tell how real it all is" better than the end point of tsc which was "they were trying to mass process children to find a means of immortality" which i was so whatever on even though the game is trying to be crazy and also say something about like life and aging in society, but in tsc i like "they were mass grooming perfect civilians and inadvertently making them susceptible to crime" as a conclusion a bit more. but i mean 25W also poses so many more questions than it does give answers so.
---despite everything i think it was an interesting idea for suda and masahiro yuki and masahi ooka to create the 25th ward almost as a sandbox to explore more of the ideas of the first game like how the internet affects human connection, communication, sharing of information, and how people are affected by criminal power/kamui. it was a cool idea in the original but i love actually getting to see shiroyabu steadily become more unhinged (death filing), kurumizawas pervasiveness, tsuki and osato coming to grips with their own (esp osato's immense) criminal power, etc. in spite of all of the loose ends and craziness, sometimes you really need a space to work out your ideas and express yourself and i commend grasshopper for doing that so i could have played this on a nokia in 2005. in japan
overall these were video games. very excited to forget everything about them when i fixate on something else. tsc might actually be one of my fav things i played this year. would love more analysis of the 25th ward, theres some essays/interpretations floating around and ghenryperez will get to his video on it eventually. maybe i need to be the change i wish to see but also boo putting effort into writing and analysis sux.
i started sudas works with nmh, then 2 before stopping until i played killer7 a year ago and really liked its style and sense of humor. i think this happens to a lot of people, and then a year after that i started tsc. i wasnt originally that interested in nmh tsa but now that i know theres hello 25th ward characters in it i might have to try. and then nmh3 after that. and then i also wanna play twilight syndrome/moonlight syndrome when that gets a translation because of lunatics. and i also got killer is dead when it was on sale for like 2 bucks. we can enter the greater sudaverse.. together
T3nna whimpering and whining about "what did I eat...?" while his stomach just keeps swelling and swelling. Maybe he swells up so much he has to ask someone else to undo his belt and pants for him, just so it'll have room to keep going
T3nna getting invited to a party that Queen is hosting, getting offered a full bottle of battery acid instead of a glass due to his size, drinking the entire thing on an empty stomach.
Getting really drunk and really nauseous, really fast.
His gut audibly sloshing, rounded out with the gas escaping the fizzy drink, his perfectly-tailored evening suit making the bloating incredibly obvious. All the stumbling and wobbling around just keeps shaking up the carbonation and making the bloating worse.
Maybe he freaks out over feeling like he's about to puke, only for nothing but gas to come up. Maybe he gets too secure in that, and the next time he gets nauseous he doesn't do anything because he thinks it'll just be another burp, until he suddenly vomits down his shirt in the middle of a conversation.
guhhhh I reeeally love interpretations of BS Spam where he's a massive sleaze. Horrible tacky rings on every finger, sweaty, jittery, coked TF out. I'd looooove to tie him up and peg the shit out of him until he pukes, which probably won't be long with how much he drinks. And ☝️ the fugly $2,000 suit stays ON
