#ok im done whining for now lolol time to play the emotion route

[sillyguyhotline]

k. i finished logic route today and i'm beginning to play emotion route, but ngl, i'm not exactly sure if i'm the biggest fan of 3-1b so far? i sort of mentioned it in some of my ramblings last night but i do feel like the sense nankidai created earlier in the game, that everyone's actions have severe impact, have been diminished slightly. i feel like part of that is because of the introduction of the dolls; when you have a mechanic where an exact replica of the dead can be brought back to life, deaths begin to feel like they have less meaning. hence the whole q-taro thing. i do think that he got a satisfactory ending to his character arc, and his death definitely made me sad, but his doll just showing up and being like "yeah im not actually him im a doll lollll" and then fucking dying felt so rushed. same with alice/reko's death. maybe it's just because there's nobody left to significantly grieve the surviving yabusame sibling, but i honestly feel like everyone forgot about them dying as soon as they did. sara should have been a lot angrier imo. plus, we got 2 major human deaths and all the dummies got killed off. in the span of HALF a chapter. that just doesn't rub me the right way. it amazes me that a chapter segment that took me 9 hours to complete managed to feel so rushed, but it definitely did. deaths in this game don't feel consequential anymore, and it doesn't feel like nankidai did that on prupose. like i said yesterday, one of my favorite things about the game prior to chapter 3 was how human the deaths and the grief suffered afterwards felt. but now barely anyone bothers to acknowledge the deaths that occurred before this chapter, and the ones that do happen in this chapter don't feel processed that well. i'm really, REALLY hoping that this is because everything that's happened to sara in the logic route has desensitized her and that it'll be different in the emotion route, but that's probably not going to be the case.

i also mentioned this as a joke a few days ago, but the stakes feel so much lower. i mentioned that midori was just sort of fucking around and not really doing anything, and i don't like that very much. the group is essentially held to their own objectives. there's a timer for how long keiji has until he's incinerated, but it doesn't actually come into play in the game. in chapter 1, the threat of the oh-so-suspicious Main Game was looming over everyone's head. in chapter 2, the characters were held to clear time limits. even in 3-1a, they have a clear, floormaster-motivated objective of tagging him. now everyone, including the floormaster, is just fucking around and doing whatever and i'm not a huge fan of that.

shin just also isn't a threat during this chapter. at all. he has one offhanded line about how he views everyone as no different from midori (a sentiment that he already voiced almost word for word in 3-1a anyway) and that's it. my thoughts on this are kind of mixed. on one hand, i think it's kind of interesting that as much as shin promised to be a threat and to avenge kanna, the threat posed by saving him is actually the toll that his actions had on sara. his manipulation motivated sara to put more value into her own life, which consequently led to her voicing those thoughts to ranmaru and ranmaru literally fucking hanging either alice or reko. he turns sara into the monster she never wanted to be and compromises her leadership. i sort of like that. however, while that makes sense in terms of writing, it doesn't in terms of the story itself. you're telling me that he showed her one shitty ai and then was like "ok cool im just gonna be a chill member of the group now" ??? it just seems like another example of things no longer having consequence and i'm not a huge fan of that.

overall, it feels like nankidai set himself up to accomplish too much this chapter. he introduced too many new characters and too many new plot points, and addressing all of them came at the consequence of character development and the writing style from the previous chapters.