This isn't going to be a super in-depth analysis of Layer 3 of the Tower since I'm exhausted in trying to nail down my feelings and thoughts on SinDec into understandable words, so while I can elaborate on the analog that Layer 3 of the Tower appears to be, the actual story of what goes on there and how each of the Guardians factor into it won't be discussed much if at all.
With that said,
Let us begin. Let us begin.
Layer 3 of the Tower bears resemblance to Purgatory, though it's minimal all things considered. It's still worth mentioning in case it is intentional— and because from what I analyzed of Sheol, is a parallel to it.
Something something "as above, so below".
Purgatory (Latin: purgatorium, borrowed into English via Anglo-Norman and Old French) is a belief in Catholic theology. It is a passing intermediate state after physical death for purifying or purging a soul before entering Heaven.
Sacred Tradition, by reference to certain texts of scripture, speaks of the process as involving a cleansing fire. According to Jacques Le Goff, in Western Europe toward the end of the twelfth century Purgatory started to be represented as a physical place, Le Goff states that the concept involves the idea of a purgatorial fire, which he suggests "is expiatory and purifying not punitive like hell fire"
Right here is the interpretation of Purgatory in that it is not strictly only hell fire and suffering, it can be other things such as the depiction below.
Image of a non-fiery purgatory (Gustave Doré: illustration for Dante's Purgatorio, Canto 24 in Divine Comedy). Right: Dante and companions observe. Middle: willing souls gather round a sweet-smelling tree with fruit they cannot eat, to be purged of residual gluttony.
This allows Layer 3 to not immediately conflict with what Purgatory is capable of appearing as.
The Catholic Church holds that "all who die in God's grace and friendship but still imperfectly purified" undergo a process of purification after death, which the church calls Purgatory, "so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven".
Though in popular imagination Purgatory is pictured as a place rather than a process of purification, the idea of Purgatory as a physical place is not part of the church's doctrine. However, the church's understanding has typically been that Purgatory has a temporal (temporary, terminating, non-eternal) component with only God being outside of time. Fire, another important element of the Purgatory of popular imagination, is also absent in the Catholic Church's doctrine.
The act of interacting with each of the District Guardians in this place whom in death have all been freed from the clutches of Corruption are all in varying states of sorrow and regret. In talking to them, you can either return to them the Supreme Items— the ultimate condensed manifestation of their most important and defining memories— or offer to do favors for them that will ease enough of their worries or sate their consciences enough for them to concede in returning to Abram (though if the latter is done he remarks on something not feeling right about them).
Doing the favors is moreso a bandaid to their pain rather than reminding them of who they used to be, how much they loved each other, what's important to them, and what lead to them becoming how they are now.
Adam refuses to leave when told Abram wants to see him again and will not give any prompt in asking to do something for him to try to change his mind. Malachi will refuse to return unless he knows Jadon is okay, and Jadon will refuse to return unless he gets his stuffed cat back.
A stuffed animal as a form of comfort during his darkest days.
Upon Jadon returning, Malachi will concede and also return. Gaius is in a state of utter despair, regret, and self-hatred. He believes he doesn't deserve to return because of what he's done.
The only reason he concedes is because he knows you won't take no for an answer, and requests his science friends be freed from the labyrinthine forest their souls have become trapped in. Putting their souls to rest brings a bit of peace to his mind, and he leaves behind an old photograph of him and Adam along with a note.
Heading back to Adam with these causes him to relent in his staunch refusal to return. He speaks of Gaius being softhearted and plainly expresses sorrow at not having been the reason he was like that; to have been treated with such passivity and kindness instead of the inhumane cruelty and callousness he was subjected to.
There is no true forgiveness to each other or to themselves, just tolerance and concession on going back because that's what they said they'd do. Giving them the Supreme Items back completely circumvents the favors and a weight is lifted from them. They remember what is most important to them that in their anguish and regret had been forgotten. It had been years, after all. Years of spiraling down and now that they're free, what now? All they could do was regret and regret and regret. But you free them. Clear their hearts of the pain they'd accrued through their lives, and they freely decide to return.
They were "purified" by The Batter in the stories of the Districts proper, but given their states within Layer 3, it was not perfect. By returning the parts of them that were lost in the wake of the slow downfall of this world, they are properly restored to their former glory.
They are his friends. No matter what they had become, he had never stopped loving them.
At the Second Council of Lyon in 1274, the Catholic Church defined, for the first time, its teaching on Purgatory[...]
1. some saved souls need to be purified after death[.]
|210. What is purgatory?|
Purgatory is the state of those who die in God's friendship, assured of their eternal salvation, but who still have need of purification to enter into the happiness of heaven.
The "happiness of heaven" can also be understood in the context of SinDec as the eternal rest of the void/Nothingness. It's not a matter of 1:1 Nothingness = heaven in terms of afterlife (like Sheol = Hell, Layer 3 = Purgatory), but what in Catholic/Christian belief would be paradise for those who suffered in life is heaven, the same relinquishment from pain is returning to the void in SinDec. Just like how a place can be "a hell" as a metaphor, the same applies to the void as "a heaven".
It's better than the Heaven that exists beneath Sheol, I'll tell you that much.
Unless "redeemed by repentance and God's forgiveness", mortal sin, whose object is grave matter and is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent, "causes exclusion from Christ's kingdom and the eternal death of hell, for our freedom has the power to make choices for ever, with no turning back."
But they had already been forgiven by Abram. Ever since the beginning. It's just that they had not forgiven themselves (and Adam having not forgiven Gaius— though he doesn't exactly forgive him even with the return of the Grand Bastille, he just freely lets go of his grudge rather than relenting out of pragmatism. A grudge is active hate; not actively hating someone does not equal forgiveness).
Venial sin, while not depriving the sinner of friendship with God or the eternal happiness of heaven, "weakens charity, manifests a disordered affection for created goods, and impedes the soul's progress in the exercise of the virtues and the practice of the moral good; it merits temporal punishment", for "every sin, even venial, entails an unhealthy attachment to creatures, which must be purified either here on earth, or after death in the state called purgatory. This purification frees one from what is called the 'temporal punishment' of sin".
These two punishments must not be conceived of as a kind of vengeance inflicted by God from without, but as following from the very nature of sin. A conversion which proceeds from a fervent charity can attain the complete purification of the sinner in such a way that no punishment would remain.
A venial sin consists in acting as one should not, without the actual incompatibility with the state of grace that a mortal sin implies; they do not break one's friendship with God, but injure it.
I Peter 4:8. “And above all things have fervent charity among yourselves: for charity shall cover the multitude of sins.”
The word charity in this verse is agape in the Greek. It means affection, good will, love, benevolence, brotherly love.
(source)
The fervent charity may well be, in the context of this analogy, the Supreme Items.
This act of restoring them to their former glory affects and is required for some endings. It affects the endings of "Sincere Intentions" and "Lost Purpose" (the latter's post-credits cutscene only appearing if the Supreme Items have been given away and The Judge is still alive) where certain cutscenes playing out are dependent on them being returned. Them being returned is required for the "Congratulations!" ending on top of all five Grand Items remaining in your inventory until Layer 5, and the District Guardians' souls being present in the "Fulfilled Purpose" ending also requires their return.
Due to how easy it is to get through Layer 3 by returning the Supreme Items, and how roundabout it is by having to do the favors and the end result is them still being unhappy and you miss out on two endings and an ending cutscene (and "Sincere Intentions" and "Fulfilled Purpose"'s ending scenes being impacted), the game is very strongly trying to push you into going the extra mile, doing the added legwork to get the most out of it. Otherwise you'll just be disappointed.
"Do you care?"
The game is heavily weighted towards Abram's side of things— pertaining to his friends and himself if you bother to spend additional (optional) time in the Districts after felling their Guardians. If you just follow the path God has laid out for you (that being you being sent right to the red save block after completion of each District and immediately leaving for the next Zone), things remain feeling more faithful to the original OFF and its lack of extensive story. If you care enough to search for secrets and interact with everything you can instead of mindlessly doing as you're told, you learn much about the City, its Guardians, and its leader. Not just going from one boss battle to the next leads you to uncovering lore. Lore about the war, about the Guardians' attempts at protecting their people and themselves and the extents they went to, and what lead to the end of all things.
Then there's the Outside. The Outside despite its red and black Corruption is actually representative of Zaphkiel, not Abram, though the mistakes claimed, due to the color scheme, leads one to believe they apply to Abram. Or more rather, that they're exclusively talking about Abram. But they aren't; these mistakes are Zaphkiel's as well.
While the comment states these are Zaphkiel's mistakes, due to the coloration of the Outside likely leading a person to assuming the mistakes spoken are referring to Abram, and the mistakes are phrased vaguely enough so to be perceived as applicable to both Abram and Zaphkiel, I believe these mistakes are also his. Basically the game deliberately playing on your assumptions trained from the rest of the game that "red and black equals Abram" to do something like this.
Both of them share the fatal flaw of betrayal, after all.
And the Outside is representative of Zaphkiel more than this: as the Blank Burnt, implied to be a representation of Abram akin to the stick figure of him in Layer 3 of the Tower, states this after being spoken to enough times.
While I know for certain regarding the mistakes, I do not for this dialogue. Either the Outside sans the Tower is a product of Zaphkiel that became Corrupted, or the term "false god" doubly refers to Zaphkiel and Abram. On one hand, "false god" makes me think Zaphkiel, on the other, "exposed heart" makes me think Abram. There are no such developer comments that clarify this, so this remains ambiguous.
The Outside is a secret area unlocked after the Tower has risen. Much like Layer 3 of the Tower, it is easier and faster to progress if you care about the people involved within the story than merely brute-forcing your way through everything. It is faster to tell the Blank Burnt the mistakes than to fight him. Yes, the ghoul lair fight is long and difficult, but it is not mandatory: if you know what his second mistake is, you don't have to go through that.
The Blank Burnt's battle is very difficult yet yields very little experience. As though the game itself disagrees with your decision and doesn't reward you relative to the difficulty of the battle. And the eyes become contemptuous of you or become solemn.
You are rewarded with more information if you choose to seek information out. This game— and especially the Outside— is about interconnectivity. It is about community. It is about those we love.
It punishes you for not caring (or caring for the "wrong" person wrt saving Magdalene over The Judge) and rewards you greatly with swathes of knowledge should you be willing to go the extra mile. To go through hell to know; to understand.
How far are you willing to go? How much do you care?
Zaphkiel is basically an afterthought in the Red route but still feels very shunted in the Blue route, but this is deliberate. With his lack of involvement in his own route until the Tower, as I've stated, it mimics the lack of story saturation of the original OFF. Things are more ambiguous and unknown and you're left to draw your own conclusions from only the minimal base amount of lore presented to you. In the Red route this isn't the case. Things are more defined, leaving next to no room for alternate interpretations. You are told the story as it happened and exactly as it happened. It is not a case of only telling enough of the story for one to draw their own conclusions and run with them.
How apt to them.
Zaphkiel has no friends. He shunned the hand extended to him by Abram and it shows. He only has himself, while Abram and his friends build upon each other.
This story is heavily weighted towards them once you know about them, but this story was instigated in the first place by Zaphkiel and his selfish grief. A grief born from a desperate desire to make his Father happy. He loved Him and in the wake of His death could not move on. His purpose was to be His companion in His remaining days, yet yearned to do more than what he was made to do. Fixated; stuck; obsessed with the past and shunning those with the same naive, innocent aspirations he once held, for if those aspirations could've fixed things, he never would've had to do what he did to His remains.
He lost his only friend and spiraled; becoming consumed by envy, pride, and greed.
...He lost his friends and spiraled; becoming consumed by wrath as a fault of his pride.
Trapped in a past that damned them and now is destroying the present. Ruining everything they sought to fix.
The game says to you, "not caring about the plights of others, spending time to get to know them, and bonding with them will only lead to a disappointing conclusion. It may take longer to reach your destination, but the time you spent lingering around others; getting to know them, will make it more than worth the while. So much so you won't even realize how much time actually passed. So much so you see it as natural than as a burden; an obligation; a nicety."
The game asks for you to care.
This game is about community, pain, hardship, the ties and relationships that bind us to one another regardless of whether they're friendship, acquaintanceship, husband and wife, enemies, etc. It is merely a commentary— at least in some part— on interconnectivity and through that being its core narrative, serves to highlight what it is like to understand and empathize with those outside that web of connection; the isolated that would typically go forgotten or dismissed.
You learn about Zaphkiel and understand why he did what he did, but it doesn't excuse it. Understanding may make you care for him too— or at least just serve to humanize him.
While the game is weighted towards Abram and his friends, due to the equal prominence of Zaphkiel, you are made to see the negative to Abram's positive. In a photo, you typically only notice the subject of the picture and everything else in the background is just noise. Zaphkiel is that, but due to the imbalance, on a Blue route, the sheer amount of things pertaining to him and are unique to him are fully made cognizant in one's mind in how few they are. The absence becomes prominent, but it doesn't feel so prominent when you aren't comparing them, focusing on one person rather than a group.
The Blue Zones tell you a lot about the kind of person Zaphkiel truly is, but what do the Red Zones say of Abram? Nothing, really. If anything, the narratives of Layer 2's Zones is inverted from the base narrative of the Zones and Districts. For the Zones and their association with Zaphkiel, there is a lack of anything pointing to his association barring the Grand Items. For the Districts and their association with Abram, if you care to look, you will find how deeply he is ingrained into nigh every aspect of them. For the Blue Zones, they are meant to be a perfected restoration of the original Zones yet portray much of who Zaphkiel is, alongside his memories being tucked in areas that don't exist in the original OFF versions of the Zones (and two of which reside in remnants of areas that came into existence as a result of the Corruption). For the Red Zones, they are devoid of Abram in the informative way of how the Blue Zones characterize Zaphkiel or how the Districts characterize Abram; he is present due to the effects of the Corruption, sure, but it's markedly different than the Blue Zones or Districts. This lack of him for the most part is more akin to the lack of story saturation of OFF.
This is to say, Zaphkiel is equally as important as Abram despite not having a number of friends through which he is further characterized. The only other people Zaphkiel has interacted with extensively aside from Abram and Gaius were Hugo and Vader Eloha. I need not explain why they're unable to further characterize him.
The game asks you to care about the stories of not just the interconnected, but those who are isolated. It is asking you to care about the subjects of these stories. To understand them and not antagonize or favor any one person, for no character in this story is a scion of virtue or are irredeemably evil. Some characters and their stories are more relatable and palatable to some more than others, but no character is all white or all black. Gaius, Adam, Abram are perfect examples of this as their stories in their Districts and in the past involve(d) interacting with others so you get to fully see and contextualize them on an interpersonal level, whereas Malachi and Jadon had isolated themselves come the events of Sincere Deceit proper and Zaphkiel is Zaphkiel.
The game asks you
This story is a tragedy, and by nature of being this, offers catharsis. It presents to you sorrow, asks you to care; to connect with the characters within. Even when the only outcome is oblivion despite your wishes and intentions, Sincere Intentions and Fulfilled Purpose say to you "this story mattered. Despite the pain and sorrow; the endings a farewell for the grave, this story mattered."
Their lives mattered despite how short the time they had was and how difficult the pain they endured.
The game says to you,
Goodbye.
