Jackkel Dragon

Penalty Game

I scowled at the caller ID I was seeing. I had told Niwa not to get her involved.

I tapped out of the call tracking app. The icon listed as "GhostSense" was looking damn tempting. I could have it on every app store known to Japan within a week. Since its protection features had never been fixed, I'd bet dozens of people would anger the restless dead and find themselves in an early grave. And that rabble would fucking deserve it.

Even so, Niwa hadn't technically broken her promise yet. If I released the program now, she'd blame me. She wouldn't suffer the soul-crushing despair of knowing that her actions caused another tragedy. She'd have me as a scapegoat.

I huffed to myself. Fine. I didn't care what happened to a bunch of human refuse either way. Without being able to make a bigger statement, I'd not gain anything from their slaughter. The only people who would die are the ones who are the least threat to those worthy of living.

No, if I was going to unleash Niwa's little mistake on the world, it would be to crush her. So as long as she can wiggle her way out of a hurt conscience, there's no point.

Still, I couldn't help but seethe at Niwa's audacity. To call the person I specifically told her not to meet? She must be trying to slide by on a technicality. I popped a piece of gum into my mouth, chewing to relieve the tension. If Niwa dared to smuggle the Mask to her...

A grin cracked over my face. That's right... Niwa didn't have the Mask on her right now. She wasn't a total retard. Whatever worthless excuse of life had the Mask right now had no way of stopping me, if I chose to take it back. And I think I will. After all, Niwa should pay for siding with some common rabble over her own kind. I think she can endure a little game...

Changing course, I started walking toward the home of the person with the Mask. It wouldn't even require spiritual abilities to steal it back, I bet. And then, I have a few ideas of where to hide it that will give Niwa a rough time.

The idea kept getting better and better in my head. I opened up a web browser on my phone and downloaded a music track I was familiar with, one that Niwa was sure to be annoyed by. I proceeded to insert a line into the GhostSense bytecode to force the track to play when the program was active, ignoring system volume and the emergency setting.

By the time I was at my destination, I had a solid plan for my game. My phone was empty of almost everything except the hacked copy of GhostSense now, but I had a backup flash drive of the important files. I'd buy myself a new phone tomorrow.

I feel like one of the “hate the ending” camps seems to not understand the tone of the series. Aside from the A rank ending of the PC-98 game, the Corpse Party series is bleak and punishes anyone who tries to find the bright side of a situation. These players bought into the lies of Aiko, Misuto, and the marketing that there was a way to bring back the deceased from the previous games and that the series would have a happy ending. But like any hope spot in the series, that was only even suggested to make the final revelations more painful. That plot point wasn’t a promise; it was a trap for Ayumi and the player. Aiko and Misuto even admit that they lied to try to use Ayumi for their goals. So it’s no surprise that this was revealed to be impossible in-setting.

Another one of the camps seems to misunderstand how the ending was presented, and partially ties into the previous one. It’s made very clear during the ending that there is no happily ever after: the Nirvana will continue to be a threat no matter what. I’ve had people ask me why Ayumi didn’t just use time travel like Sachiko did, but that ignores two things: Sachiko was the most powerful known sorcerer in the series while Ayumi was the weakest, and Sachiko (without being the host of the Nirvana) could only loop 24 hours before dissolving. The actual options Ayumi was given, to my memory, were: 1) guard the Nirvana, but it would continue to work as it did since Sachiko’s time and the souls within would suffer or 2) consume the Nirvana as Sachiko once did and free the souls within, but become a non-person in history. Ayumi, always concerned about how things “should” be, didn’t think it was right to let people suffer in the Nirvana if she could do something about it. Thus the ending.

I’m sure there are other negative opinions on the ending, particularly ones that critique what it is instead of based on misunderstandings, but I haven’t seen them myself so I’m not sure I can comment on them.

For the most part, I think it was the theme and plot that really turned people off. As I’ve said before, Blood Drive is a culmination of all the other previous products, with their witch hunts and birthday parties and secret societies. So it has a much larger scope than any previous game, which may have turned off people who enjoyed the more personal scope of the previous three games. There were obviously hints of a larger picture before, but not to world-threatening extents. And Book of Shadows and 2U tended to narrow down the scope more often than expand it, so suddenly having a big picture was a huge shift in tone. Then you add to this a bunch of characters we’re expected to know, but are new to the games themselves, while fan favorites are no longer relevant. That the first half of the plot’s premise is based on a lie that hurts the player as much as it hurts Ayumi (as mentioned above) is just more to add to the sense of betrayal. This betrayal may well have been intentional, but it’s a risky move to psychologically punish the player when you have a franchise to sell.

(As a side note about plot and characters, I recently saw a post complaining about how Misuto dies “halfway through” the game. This confuses me, since he dies at the end of Chapter 08, which is the ninth chapter out of eleven, if you count Chapter 00 as a chapter.)

I’m not too surprised that the main controversy has died down, since it’s been years now and many of those who were the most upset are simply gone. That said, I’m still bummed out about how the community has dwindled to what it is now. I didn’t expect Corpse Party to be a big fandom forever, since I always knew the series would end eventually and it’s a niche franchise to begin with. But I was hoping that the community would at least continue to interact and create together. Especially since Corpse Party has such a large number of finished fangames compared to the main series entries and relative popularity, I thought the series could live on for a while through fanworks. But then a lot of those people, the creative people, ended up dropping out of the community during the conflict and things sort of dried up.

Not sure what you were going to say about Dead Patient, since your second message hasn’t shown up for me yet, but I’m personally not optimistic it would be able to revive the fandom in the West. For one, the game won’t get an official localization until it’s finished, and Chapter 2 has been in development for at least 5 years. The second, bigger thing is that it’s very much a “post-Blood Drive” game that builds off from elements of Blood Drive. (DPN even fixed a visual discontinuity between DP and BD and added a Satoshi extra chapter.) So people who refuse to acknowledge Blood Drive (which some people who remain Corpse Party fans have stated they are) would not be able to enjoy the game. It also has elements that I’ve heard described as “not fitting” in a Corpse Party game. (As an example, someone once said that about zombies in the CPD2 game “Fatal Operation”. Dead Patient also has zombies, and in a more prominent role.)

I feel like part of the problem was the nature of the game and its localization. Whatever you feel about the game itself, it was tied heavily to almost every Corpse Party product leading up to it, serving as a grand finale to the Heavenly Host story arc and everything connected to it. However, a lot of those products were never translated and involved other media, some of which is not popular outside of Japan (like audio dramas). So there was already an information lockout for Western fans that didn’t want to learn Japanese or read summaries. And then the localization was… not good. I generally tried to give XSEED the benefit of the doubt, but the main editor for the Corpse Party series literally went on record about how he didn’t give his all for the game because he didn’t like the direction it took. And thus we have nonsense (3rd person narration changed to 1st person with no regard to proper narrator choices) and flat-out mistakes (almost censoring Hinoe’s rape by accident). People who only play the game in one language and never read the forums won’t know these were issues with the localization, they’ll assume it’s bad writing from Kedwin and Kamishiro. (Like Kedwin’s strange ability to warp calendar dates beyond logic.)

And then there was the fandom itself. The “haters” were the most vocal, as they often are in any situation. Whether they hated the direction the story took or the shift in the type of horror depicted, they shouted down anyone who dared to like anything from the game. I know a few people that left the fandom because they didn’t feel safe with their opinions anymore. And since the less passionate people were scared off, there were fewer people left around in the communities I kept track of. Of the 5-6 people I knew, only one is still in the community and we don’t talk much anymore. And due to the delay of future Corpse Party products aside from the live action films and BR 3DS, there wasn’t enough to keep talking about once people tried to move on from Blood Drive. Too much of the community in the places I knew had gone, so those who were left had little more to say.

Personally, I felt like the big reaction to Blood Drive was almost the end of an era in my life. From when I got into Corpse Party in early 2013 to Blood Drive’s English release, it felt like I met and interacted with a good deal of people. Depths of Despair and Fatal Operation were released during this time. Corpse Party was a niche fandom, but it was big enough to be lively while small enough to know the big names, even if you didn’t talk to them. Then Blood Drive hit, and things fell apart. People left… they hated what Corpse Party seemed to have become, or they couldn’t handle the fandom conflict, or they simply stopped caring. The CPD2 games with the weakest releases came out during this period, where even acknowledging Blood Drive was a bad idea. (And those games did, so I have to wonder if that affected them as well.) One by one, the people I considered friends drifted away. The only person I met from that time that I still regularly talk to has moved on to an MMO, and doesn’t seem to like being reminded of the Corpse Party days.

Overall, I do agree that Blood Drive divided the fanbase. I could keep going on about what I thought and felt over the years, but at this point that’s probably just rambling. Ultimately, I’ve become numb to Corpse Party. I’d still say that I like the series, but it’ll never be quite the same after what happened to the fandom. I’ve been told by several people many times that I shouldn’t let others’ opinions make me enjoy something less, but that might be a lesson I learned too late in this case. Because, honestly, if I were to say why I don’t participate with the Corpse Party fandom anymore (fanfics, fangames, discussions, etc.), it’s because of the fandom itself. It became so toxic that it burned away the things I had liked about it, and it never really seemed to recover, as far as I know. But I’ve also distanced myself, so maybe it’s rebuilding without me in it.