#blickwinkel

Woodlice-eating spider

Dysdera crocata, which is one of the few predators to hunt pill bugs

Was ist die Wahrheit?

Alle meine Patienten berichten mir Dinge aus ihrem Leben, sehr oft haben diese mit anderen Menschen zu tun. Durch ihre Geschichten entsteht in meinem Kopf ein Bild. Ich empfinde die Tochter meiner Patientin als unsympathisch, ohne sie jemals getroffen zu haben, wundere mich über die Engstirnigkeit der Eltern einer jungen Frau, empfinde Mitgefühl im Angesicht der Trauer über den plötzlichen und unerwarteten Tod des betagten Ehepartners.

All das ist in diesem Moment richtig. Für uns beide, die wir in diesem Raum sind.

Doch sobald ich diesen Raum verlasse, streife ich diese Version der Wahrheit ab und nehme die soeben gehörte Geschichte ohne Bewertung in mein Gedächtnis auf.

Denn manchmal kommt es vor, dass ich beide Seiten der gleichen Geschichte höre, weil sich mehrere Parteien in meine Obhut begeben. So höre ich auch die Perspektive der vermeintlich abweisenden Tochter oder des ebenso trauernden Sohnes, der den Tod seines Vaters in Anbetracht der langjährigen Krankheiten und des hohen Alters völlig anders betrachtet als seine nun einsame Mutter.

Auch das ist die Wahrheit. Aus einem anderen Blickwinkel.

Für einen in Sibirien lebenden Menschen ist Wasser nur flüssig, wenn es erwärmt wird.

Für einen Menschen mit Rot-Grün-Schwäche ist Gras grau.

Die Wahrheit gibt es nicht. Also kann sie auch niemand verkünden. Kein Elternteil, kein Vorgesetzter, kein Wissenschafter, kein Politiker, kein Nachrichtensprecher.

Sie könnten sich alle irren und deshalb ist es auch anmaßend, aus ihrer individuellen Wahrheit etwas für andere abzuleiten. Es wird immer einen anderen mit gleichwertigem Amt, Titel, Lebenslauf geben, der das Gegenteil behauptet. Und auch er hätte Recht.

My general thoughts on this game was that it was really well-executed and an excellent game. I enjoyed the characters, setting and plot. I’ve read others’ reviews about how they felt that this work was dull compared to Uchikoshi’s other works, but I didn’t feel that way at all. His usual mind-blowing plot twists a la Zero Escape, AI: The Somnium Files and Ever17 were definitely present in the game, as well as the whole ‘alternate histories’ and ‘parallels worlds’ stuff. I also enjoyed seeing the cast unlocking their special abilities one by one and seeing what abilities they have. The characters were really likeable too.

WARNING!! Spoilers start from this point! Includes spoilers for the Zero Escape series, AI: The Somnium Files and Ever17 too.

I liked how Uchikoshi utilised the whole ‘the person paying the game is involved as part of the plot’ thing again. I actually played and completed Ever17 recently, before World’s End Club, and I liked how he wound the player’s involvement into the game itself in both works. In Ever17, it is revealed that the true protagonist was actually Blick Winkel, which just means ‘perspective’ in German, and is meant to represent that player themselves. The protagonist characters in both Ever17 and World’s End Club needed to rely on the player to relay information regarding the histories of timelines they have not experienced, in order to get the true ending. Actually, come to think about it, this very trope is also present in both the Zero Escape series and AI: The Somnium Files. Though in Zero Escape, the ‘player’ is only actually acknowledged in VLR’s Another End, and in AI: The Somnium Files, Date just knows about things from alternate timelines (like the Annihilation and Mizuki endings) without any explanation as to why.

I liked how the creators designed Reycho with the concept of a ‘typical mute video game protagonist’ in mind, and later go on to justify why he is that way. It was even parodied in one scene, when Kansai said that he’s essentially like a video game protagonist with no personality. When Reycho was destroyed and it was revealed that he was being controlled by someone all along, I thought it was going to be revealed to be the player themselves, but it turned out to be Pochi instead. I think the creators expected players to think that way, so they intentionally introduced a bait-and-switch in there. It still turned out that the one who has actually been controlling everyone was the player all along in the end anyway.

I did feel upset when Reycho was destroyed, and hoped that they would bring him back at the end, with a personality of his own, and was glad that things turned out exactly as I had hoped.

My favourite part was when they rode the 12-person bicycle together, and I liked how the only ones weren’t pedaling were Chuko, Mowchan and Vanilla. Chuko is too short to reach the pedals, and Mowchan is probably just lazy to pedal. Vanilla is of course, not pedaling as she’s a ghost.

Was anyone disappointed that though Vanilla and Pochi were shown to have special abilities too, we didn’t get to use them? I had thought that we would get to play as Vanilla for one of the parts in the ending, with her ‘Ethereal Body’ ability.

The endings to both Ever17 and World’s End Club played out pretty similarly too, with Coco asking Blick Winkel to be her boyfriend, and Pochi asking the player to be his best friend forever.

To be honest, when I first played the game, I had expected that it would be more similar to the Zero Escape series due to the ‘death game’ in the underwater theme park (And yeah, the setting immediately made me think of Ever17). I didn’t think that the developers would code the whole ‘death game’ just for the part in the beginning, and was expecting that it would have both death game and platformer sections, similar to how the Zero Escape series has different sections for the escape games and the actual decision games themselves. I was a bit disappointed when I found out that the rest of the game is just a platformer, but I enjoyed them a lot either way, especially with the ability to use the kids’ special abilities.

I also thought that at the end of the game, it was going to repeat the part in the beginning where they all got destroyed by Pielope, and was confused when it didn’t. I went back to play the part in the beginning again, and finally understood what was going on. Those events were representing a timeline where the player never intervened, so none of the kids got their special abilities, thus Pielope called them impressive for making it that far ‘unawakened’.

Oh, and I thought that the part at the end where Pochi spelt ‘heaven’ wrongly was kind of dumb, and I had to switch the language to Japanese to confirm that it was just some lost in translation thing. I was right about it - the Japanese version had Pochi saying that ‘Tengoku’ (‘heaven’ in Japanese) was 7 letters, and the payer has to spell out ‘heaven’ in English.

By the way, did anyone notice that the voices didn’t match the text on a few occasions? I counted at least three such occasions. Either the staff responsible for inserting the script accidentally got a copy of the old script, or they changed the script after the voices have already been recorded.