Board 8 > Umineko Playthrough Topic Part 6

(+) Yeah! (+)

I wasn't aware that Higurashi was a murder mystery. I don't know anything about it. I thought it was horror.

also it wasn't clear quite from the beginning. from her entrance and her first dinner time and first time chatting in the guest house she was presented as being relatively serious and it left a horrible impression because of how awful she was.

Oh dear, Episode 6. How I love it while everyone else hates it.
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i like chapter 6 so far, but it's just a pacing thing. it doesn't feel like the time to be going into more character development monologues like the ones from kyrie and rosa. it's been 5 episodes. i'm ready to start moving towards climax, y'know? especially when battler, the "main character" now has all the answers, i'm super in suspense about that and its weird go to back to things that feel like they don't "matter" as much.

like, i'm all for character development and i love kyrie and rosa and all, but my mind is on the main mysteries right now, so it's hard to care as much as i should when my eyes are on the prize.

Higurashi (at least to my knowledge- it's not all out yet on Steam) I would call a murder mystery/horror kinda like I'd call Umineko a murder mystery/fantasy
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and i also just don't feel the need for more closed room mysteries. like, so far, eva will die in vip room, kyrie in krauss's room, and now rosa in the living room. (and when i cut off earlier, maria was about to die as well presumably, or kanon)

and its like, i already have a ton of closed rooms to solve, what more are these going to add...

especially because we've skipped over a lot of the circumstances this time around anyway. we just know "adults had conference in the mansion, kids when to guesthouse" and now people are apparently splitting away from the conference and dying. the first few chapters had much more circumstancial leadup to the murders showing everyone's locations. i wonder how compelling these will be to solve atm

i like how this game does still take care with how it handles killing maria, since she is still an 8 year old

kanon is going to kill maria here but they at least make him fight the witch version of her so that it doesn't feel awkward to watch an 8 year old get murdered

i don't remember exactly how episode 3 handled it in the garden but it also wasn't as awkward as it could've been

kyrie fighting jessica - "sorry kyrie, you can't hurt her, she's invincible because of the demon's power"

kanon vs maria - "if kanon dies here he loses"

lmao

maria says she's fine with dying because they're in a closed room so it'll prove to erika that magic exists

look, my disblief is suspension'd. it's fine. this is basically in character for maria. LOL.

ah, and so natsuhi monologues to herself about her feelings as she stares at a locket in her room

i swear i don't know if this is on purpose or not but battler is writing this episode for the first time and the writing is so "tell don't show" with characters constantly monologuing about their feelings even more than usual, just like how a new writer would write

also, if new-beato is not a piece (or is she?) and was created because battler can't control her, why is she a part of the game and committing murders

like, i thought gamemaster-battler had no control over her. she went off on her own and met featherine and decided to enter the gameworld. but she's committing a murder. so was that part of battler's plan, or no...?

hachijo tohya claims that once someone has figured out beatrice's truth, they too can write accurate fanfictions

this is, of course, just like how battler, now that he knows the truth, can be game master

hachijo refers to the story as beatrice's cat box

and that really is the case, as this scene demonstrates -

even now, we alternate between scenes of magical-witch-ANGE w/ featherine, and scenes of normal human ange with amakusa and hachijo

which is real? like i said, as much as i insist "magic isn't real", they both are real, in a way. both are happening. at the same time. like the cat box. both are options.

and i don't think that's a copout

it's like if you tried to argue

"is umineko a mystery? or a fantasy?"

you could say "it's a mystery, everything can be explained with reality"

and yet, half the game is spent on witches and magic creating fantastical scenes on screen.

but you can't say it's a pure fantasy, because it ultimately always comes down to "what really happened?"

so it's both.

if the game ended without taking an official side, it might feel like a copout. but the game is what it is. it's clearly both. it'd be wrong if it ultimately came down on one side, probably? the theme, i think, is that both are valid. no matter how much you insist that the magic isn't real, you cannot prove that. hempel's whatever.

1:12am

Dels posted...

and i don't think that's a copout

it's like if you tried to argue

"is umineko a mystery? or a fantasy?"

you could say "it's a mystery, everything can be explained with reality"

and yet, half the game is spent on witches and magic creating fantastical scenes on screen.

but you can't say it's a pure fantasy, because it ultimately always comes down to "what really happened?"

so it's both.

if the game ended without taking an official side, it might feel like a copout. but the game is what it is. it's clearly both. it'd be wrong if it ultimately came down on one side, probably? the theme, i think, is that both are valid. no matter how much you insist that the magic isn't real, you cannot prove that. hempel's whatever.

At risk of directing your thoughts a bit, the golden truth from earlier this episode is quite relevant to what you're observing here.
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indeed it is

"You used magic to create a golden flower petal inside an overturned cup. It was a splendid bit of magic."

lucky for us, magic is such a nebulously defined term. if someone closes their eyes and imagines something happening and they believe it's real... then it is real.

magic is all based on perception. hence why magic tricks IRL are called magic even when they are not.

if we were being super pedantic, we could just use that as the reason it was golden. a magic trick can be referred to as magic.

hence why the golden truth can be used to say it.

perhaps the golden truth is different from the red because it has surpassed the idea that for a situation, only one "objective/factual" truth can exist.

and that's why this game gets at the same themes as <that other game> about whether fictional things are real. when this game takes a "real life" situation and creates a magical version of it... like how it says "those superstitions you created about a witch afraid of spiderwebs gave life to an actual being with thoughts and feelings"

well

for all we know, these characters are real

for all we know, there's an extra layer to the universe we live in, where when someone writes a fictional story, the characters within it truly do come to life on some alternate plane we can't observe, and really do have feelings

that's exactly what is being shown to us with the hachijo tohya storyline, and it's been a theme of the game all along.

like i said, i literally cannot prove that this alternate plane where magic exists doesn't exist.

i mean i'm going in circles here, i've said all this before. it's not new. not my fault the game goes in circles as well and is still teaching me the same themes i caught on to 4 chapters ago =P

now, this game is definitely still going to explain all of its mystery's from a real-life perspective. we will get answers. (...hopefully?) otherwise, it wouldn't be a satisfying game, no matter how much you argue that the magic is "real"

but essentially, the true "twist" isn't that the magic is fake - it's that it's real.

or does it depend on the player?

if you take handsomeboy, he just immediately accepted that all the stuff on screen was real and so he accepted magic was real. and he, uh, eventually realized, or is still realizing, that no, kanon and jessica weren't killed by goats, there's a real-life explanation for it, and so on.

so for him, the journey was to realize "the magic isn't real"

for me, i immediately said from the start "the magic isn't real, those goats don't actually exist"

and so my journey as a player was to eventually realize "well wait. no. the magic is real."

interesting stuff

and this sort of relates to the "piece" stuff as well.

we've seen multiple times now characters act as if "pieces" don't count. as if the gameboard characters don't have their own consciousness and thoughts and feelings. but they do? so it's real?

its like

if we invented a memory wiping device.

and i put you through an experience, and then wiped your memory. would it be as if it never happened? would the things you felt during that time not count?

because these characters on the gameboard are feeling things and going through traumatic experiences. but it's okay because they are just pieces. but how can we say for sure their consciousness doesn't "count"...?

wahahahahahahaha

battler is dead!

for the first time!

i knew it too. when they showed the buildup to finding the 6th body and it was in this guest bedroom with a chain on the door that matches the magical scenes from earlier

i had a feeling that it was going to be battler who was dead

i don't get prediction points since i didn't type it but you'll just have to believe me =P

anyway, we're talking more about how beato had to design the games to be beatable, and how she must have wanted to lose

i'm trying to remember what we said about the epitaph...

why the epitaph was important?

why beato cared about it?

something about... beatrice didn't care about the epitaph...? but it was still vital...?

i don't remember. feel free to remind me.

anyway, i don't know if battler dying in that room is actually related to the magical locked room segments or if it was just sort of a thematic similarity

here's the thing

i would like it if the answers for how the killer did what they did made sense from a real world perspective in terms of not only physical ability, but also mindset

i.e.

for example

erika exists as a "perfect" detective - she can solve this crime, but she'll do it in ways that no real life detective would ever use, like climbing windows in the rain to place seals, scanning every room in 2 seconds and memorizing every detail of it, and etc

this is all "physically possible" without magic, so it works. but it's still absurd and only done to prove a point.

battler is creating this gameboard and therefore the murders must be possible to commit by a human.

but if the answer is that the human only killed this way because its a game, and they did it by doing really unrealistic things (like those things erika does), then it's not super satisfying, y'know?

i'd like it if the reason a human killed in this way still makes total sense as an answer even without the context of this "game created by gamemasters" thing

for example, (danganronpa series spoilers) the murders in the first game aren't super complex, but it makes sense. oh, we had a fight in the locker room and i killed you. you came to my bedroom and i murdered you. etc. celeste's plan is the most complex but even then its presented as a necessity. jump ahead to game 3 and you have "kirumi murdered ryoma in one room then she made a rope system and swung him down into a shark tank" and its like, why tf did she do that? she could've just killed him in the gym, hid the body, and won. she did it because its a video game, and even though the things she did were physically possible, it was still absurd that someone would execute a murder that way. i want the murders commited by humans, preferably in all 6 episodes, but at least episode 1, to make sense as something a person would reasonably feel they needed to do, with no videogame logic.

i'm still sort of holding on the idea that episode 1 really is the set of events that was "real", and will have the most concrete explanation. but idk, we'll see.

wow, battler seems like he's trying to be pretty tight-lipped with the red but then he confirms that 4 people are totally innocent of these first 6 murders?!

why?!

the problem with these new mysteries is, like i said, there's no real context

we barely saw the on-island events

we're just told "these 6 people all ended up in a closed room alone when they took a break from the conference"

well, okay. i've seen closed rooms a million times. this isn't new or interesting.

chein roku chein roku chein roku

masutah kii

it's a little bit unsatisfying if the way battler reaches the truth is just "he died and went on a spiritual journey off screen and now he knows everything"

hopefully we kind of go back to it and actually see how battler learned it, or something...?

"A truth with no observers is the same as an illusion." - Bernkastel

Battler wants to win to prove that he understands Beato's game

But Beato's ultimate goal... was to lose...

So by allowing Erika some packing tape and some red, maybe he's still proving he understands it. By building up to his own loss?

i almost feel bad for erika

she doesn't know how to react to battler actually being kind to her

lol, apparently not

the north wind and the whatever sun strikes again!

but just like with episode 3's thing, it's not even that much of an act?

erika is pathetic and pitiable. bernkastel really does torment her and will torture her for eternity?

so, like, sure, it was an "act", but?

2:23pm

lovers try to solve how to do the second trial

it would be cool if erika put the packing tape in rooms other than the murder scenes. i.e., for example, in the servant's room with the keys, or a storage room that had tools that could've been used, or etc

we're acting like we're in trouble because battler confirmed in red that "everyone" was in these two rooms

and now we're sealing them with packing tape

and yet despite the first 6 all being confirmed dead, and the other 11 all being confirmed to be in these two rooms, there is going to be a pair of 2 more corpses showing up. so... that doesn't really mean erika's in a good situation.

oh. cornelia asks gertrude exactly that. why is erika closing herself in.

the cleanest solution would be that 2 people somehow get killed while they are in these rooms.

but that'd be... pretty hard to imagine.

these are good posts
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but this is exactly the kind of more interesting situation i was wanting. the first set of closed room murders was yawn, seen it before

but the group being split into rooms of 5 and 6 with everyone sealed in...

and if a murder still happens... not that's interesting

My first time through this part, I think I was pissed/annoyed lol. I won't go into detail because I feel like any little thing I say could be construed as a spoiler, but my thoughts on mid-late Ep 6 have changed a lot. I look forward to discussing these scenes with you later, Dels.
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Tom Bombadil posted...

these are good posts

whoa watch out there tom you're reaching the limit of what you can say without spoiling anything!

erika may not have the "detective's proclamation" which guarantees her survival because "the detective can't die", but she still knows battler made this game for her and therefore she must be safe

at least, that's what i assume

my question is:

is erika trying to solve this for real?

or just trying to find any human to pin it on?

for example, last time, it seems natsuhi was really innocent. erika didn't actually solve the case.

but this time, in order for me to be invested in this chapter, i'd like to imagine she's trying to find an actual killer.

and my question is also: is it the same culprit for all 6 episodes or not? it's hard to believe it is. but if it is, does erika know that, and know that whoever she suspects here must also be capable of the first 5?

so, while erika is investigating the first 6 corpses, believing she sealed everyone in safely, 2 more will die