ARGH'S PROFILE

I like that he explains what happened to Lorenzo and Ares -- good foreshadowing, and it explains why they haven't been active -- but why doesn't he mention Darius at all? I was wondering where he was during the childhood arc, especially when it probably would have been easier to kill Claire and Yvette then. I'm honestly pretty confused why he joined a gang of bandits in the first place when he has such a specific goal and doesn't seem to like working with other people.

Also, I really cannot believe the girls afterwards. A 14-year-old straight-up murders someone and her only reaction is "haha, he wasn't strong enough to beat us"? Jesus. Cyril isn't much better either -- he admonishes them for jumping into danger, but not for murder? It may have been in self-defense, but that's still a lot for a little kid to go through

And hm, can you see Marina before the timeskip?

I liked Rutger precisely because of his simplicity, and also because he actually did stuff. (You can probably tell that that's a pretty important metric for me, eheh.) Oliver, Darius, and Raccoon just sat around being mysterious for the most part, but Rutger was pleasantly straightforward: he knew exactly what he wanted and he took it. He provided a credible and immediate threat that spurred the heroes onward, and he was satisfying to take down. I would even say he's the only one of Raccoon's lieutenants who really earned the special boss theme. He was also one of the few villains for whom a violent confrontation made perfect sense in the context of the story, instead of feeling like an awkward jRPG obligation. He's probably not ultimate villain material, but he served his role well.

And hm, maybe sociopathic was a bit too strong of a word, but it definitely is extremely selfish of her. To me, it seems like she cares more about the emotional fulfillment Mint gives her than Mint's own emotional well-being, and I that's just something I can't forgive. The problem is, I believe you said Mint's illness was terminal no matter what in an earlier conversation? Ivy seems to understand this, which means she knows her attempts to protect Mint are futile. If she's going to die young either way, she might as well live the life she wants. I actually heard something about this in regards to cancer patients -- there's a new treatment protocol in place now where patients will be asked what things they don't want to give up (since treatment is often debilitating), even if it means they'll die. Surprisingly, these patients actually tended to live longer than patients who weren't given a dialogue with their doctors. So quality of life is actually pretty important, even for the terminally ill.

I mean, I presume the point is that she is selfish and irrational, but she never really acknowledges it or suffers any consequences for it, unless you take my interpretation that Mint worked herself to death because Ivy was so terrible at communicating with her.

"Ivy actually relents to Mint's rhetoric constantly"

I...really don't see it that way. I seem to remember that Ivy always refuses to back down until Mint literally uses physical force to coerce her (or runs off and does what she wants to anyway). She does relent through reasoned argument sometimes, but those instances are exceedingly rare in comparison. That's what bothers me; I don't see the sisters as having a meaningful back-and-forth, I see it as Ivy constantly ignoring and shouting over Mint's opinions until Mint has to force the issue. She really shouldn't be surprised that Mint learned to overexert herself and ignore Ivy's concerns.

Re: fridging, the problem isn't the loss of the loved one, it's that it's always women. There are a few gender-flipped examples (A Song of Ice and Fire is pretty big on it as I recall), and they make people act like they spotted a unicorn, because they're about as rare, at least in modern literature. (This article talks about this a bit.) But Mint actually goes beyond that and runs through a veritable checklist of other cliches associated with the trope: waifish, innocent, friend to nature, emotional support, dainty fainting illness, death by dainty fainting illness... It's not just that a woman gets fridged, it's that it's a very feminine-coded woman gets fridged. I don't agree that it has a huge effect on the plot, either, but that's probably because I don't see Ivy as getting meaningful development from it, and also because I didn't make the connection to Raccoon. The bottom line is that I felt Mint contributed way more to the story in life than she did in death, so it was a poor tradeoff to me.

Might have been interesting if Ivy died, actually -- subvert our expectations -- but the older one dying is more played out. I think, anyway. I'm not an expert on literary history.

-Fair, but in that case it's weird to draw attention to it through Oliver. In my experience, if writers don't want to concern themselves with details like that they'll hand-wave it with a vague explanation and quickly move on. If it's actually going to be important, they draw attention to it to keep it in the back of the audience's mind, so I'm primed to obsess over little hints like that.

-In response to the next three points as a whole, I really think that fantasy may have been a bad choice of genre for this story. It's necessary for the gameplay, I guess (since jRPGs without magic tend to be very, very boring), but for the story it goes beyond just being extraneous and starts being an active detriment. The main point of fantasy stories -- what they uniquely bring to the table -- is the ability to completely remove the story from reality and explore a different set of cultures, social mores, and laws of physics than what we're used to. Personally, this is why I love fantasy stories so much, and so it's what I look for in them. In this regard, I can't appreciate witticisms like "I don't know if I should be scared or give him candy corn" because I'm too distracted by trying to chart the sociological implications. (Like, literally chart. I kept notes on this game full of weird theories based on every scrap of worldbuilding info that sounded relevant.) So I always think it's strange (and feel a little cheated) when fantasy authors say they're not interested in worldbuilding. If you don't want to have to deal with worldbuilding, you should have picked realistic fiction -- that would have allowed you to focus on the characters and snappy dialogue without having to deal with extra baggage. Your audience wouldn't be distracted by the baggage either, allowing them to focus on your strengths, making for a better experience in general. And honestly, I think AVLRttTotS (wow that is a freaky-looking acronym) would work perfectly well as a science fiction story -- magic and the fact the planet isn't Earth never impact the plot in the slightest, so you could do everything you wanted just relying on saecelium. (And I guess you'd have to provide some explanation for the Lydians, but science fiction has come up with stranger stuff.)

Basically, picking the genre of your story -- knowing its strengths, limitations, and just basically what kinds of stories you can and can't tell in it -- is probably the most important choice a writer can make, but it's one that a lot of writers don't seem to fully grasp for some reason. Video games are probably hit by this harder than other mediums, due to how many RPGs use stock fantasy settings, to the point that many designers just use the conventions without really understanding them. I'm sorry if this sounds condescending -- you do probably already know this stuff -- but I think it's important to reiterate here.

(The scope of the story also matters here, I think -- The Heart Pumps Clay, for instance, worked fine as a fantasy story. The audience never explored the full world, so you were free to selectively feed the audience the only information that was relevant to the characters instead of having to make up a whole world, and the magical elements actually were relevant to the plot in ways that science fiction couldn't really substitute for. (Even there, though, I got distracted by the fact that Mara couldn't see herself in the mirror but Crow could. :p) You also played with genre cliches and conventions through the antagonist characters, which wasn't worldbuilding-related but wouldn't have made sense in something other than a fantasy jRPG.)

This also ties into what I think is the game's biggest weakness, which is that it tries to do too many things at once. Why are there witches? Why is there a demon from another dimension? Why is there some ghost guy being chased by Death? What do these things add to the story? They feel like invasions from some other genre, and though they might work on their own, they just feel confusing and distracting in the context of this otherwise pretty grounded sci-fi story. This applies to the zillion sidequests, too. They're a fun idea in theory, but just end up murdering the pacing. The town, in particular, is something I'm conflicted about. It's a really neat idea in isolation, but, again, feels like something from the wrong genre, and it does really weird things to the pacing since you can spend all day running around recruiting random dudes when the story is trying to push a tense atmosphere. Overall, it makes the game less than the sum of its parts. I feel like the game could have used a lot more streamlining and cohesion, maybe breaking some of the ideas up into games of their own.

-As for the problem of making isolated protags learn mundane stuff, that's actually what I like about the archetype. It's a well-established artistic technique to reevaluate things we take for granted from a fresh perspective. It's also just interesting psychologically, since people do tend to get pretty weird in isolation. I think there's a lot of potential in that, so I take it very seriously when I'm teased with the possibility. My aforementioned obsessive notes were full of stuff like "where did Ivy learn this???", because that kind of knowledge is important to her character -- how did she react to this, how is she going to integrate it into her life, what does she consider important enough to seek out, does she stumble over things we have terms for but she doesn't, etc. etc. etc. I fully acknowledge that this could just be me being weird and/or picky and not reflective of the general populace, though.

-Okay, your explanation for Raccoon does clear some things up (and a lot of it is pretty obvious in retrospect, I guess I failed at reading comprehension), but I still don't see how it led to his final actions. If he was overcome by existential nihilism -- the knowledge that his accomplishments would ultimately amount to nothing -- why did he isolate himself in a fantasy world? If anything, I think his life would be even more meaningless there. His achievements will still be undone and he'll be unable to affect the world any further. Conflating length of life with meaning of life is a mistake plenty of people can make, but I don't see someone so obsessed with the concept making the same mistake. Even if everything goes exactly the way he wanted it, his life would still have no meaning. The only thing he would have accomplished is the mass murder at the labor camp, and even that would be forgotten in time. I guess that's supposed to be the point, but I still don't see why he would even think that immortality in a fantasy world would give his life meaning in the first place. (I also don't see what was preventing him from staying with Yvette and growing up to have a healthy life that way, especially given how fond he seemed of her.)

As for the sympathy thing, eh... Understanding someone's actions and motives in the abstract is one thing, trying to reintegrate them into society is another. Even if I can understand the ways in which a serial killer is the product of circumstance, I still think they need to be kept away from society for the safety of others. What Ivy and Yvette wanted was to drag him back from a self-imposed prison, potentially allowing him to harm others again. He even says this explicitly, when he points out that the world is full of people he's hurt and it's ridiculous to try and inflict him on them again. It ends up making the heroes look a little sociopathic, in that they seem to place the life of a mass murderer above the lives of the people he could potentially ruin. I get that they still see him as the Raccoon of their childhood and think he can be rehabilitated, but I think the body pit should have shocked them out of that naivete.

Maybe I'm just cold, though. Morality is certainly a subjective thing.

"For this game, giving Ivy closure was the most important thing for the story, and that's what I wanted to focus on."

I think that's exactly why I found the ending unsatisfying: I never liked or cared about Ivy. I'm sorry, but I have to say it: she reads like a cardboard caricature rather than anything even approaching a relatable character. She's a gender-flipped version of the cookie-cutter Grizzled White Dude With Tragic Past protagonist that so plagues modern video games. She's only ever allowed to have two emotions, anger and grizzled angst, but most of the time she settles for being an emotionless robot. I think the only time she ever felt like a real person was when she was overcome with emotion upon seeing Rose. She also commits what I consider to be a cardinal sin of protagonists, which is that she has no drives or motivations of her own. Raccoon's accusations were dead-on: she spends the entire childhood arc being dragged kicking and screaming in the direction of the plot by Mint, so when Mint dies she becomes a leaf in a river. There are stories you can tell with that kind of bland protagonist but I don't think a heroic fantasy is one. To me, good protagonists (like Mint and child!Yvette) are proactive and actively drive the story. We're spending the entire story with them, so they should have interesting motivations and get into interesting situations. The child arc is really good about this, but the adult arc suffers heavily from what TV Tropes calls "villains act, heroes react". The one time she does something proactive, it takes three filler dungeons to reach the payoff, then she fails at it utterly.

She is also a textbook sociopath, at least in the child arc (in the adult arc she's just kind of a nonperson). When she said Mint was the only thing she cared about in the entire world, my only reaction was "Wow, so she finally admits it." But the thing is, she doesn't care about Mint, only an idealized concept of her. Every single conversation she has with Mint, she does nothing but trample over and ignore Mint's hopes, dreams, and opinions. Like... I had an issue with a corrupted flash drive that made me have to repeat the opening of the game about three times, so I became intimately familiar with the cutscene where Mint says "Stop using me as an excuse!" and Ivy proceeds to completely ignore her and continue rambling about how she'll never make it so they should just stay in the ravine and starve. Almost every time they butt heads, Mint gets absolutely nowhere through reasoned argument and eventually just ignores Ivy's sometimes valid concerns right back. No wonder Mint worked herself to death when her dear sister did nothing but teach her to ignore everyone else and do everything herself! Ivy's behavior can't be described as anything other than abusive. At best she comes off as a yandere who wants to keep Mint safe forever even if it means depriving her of everything that makes life worth living for her. Even when Mint tries to hammer it in with her death speech, Ivy doesn't get it! Just...ugh! Every interaction Ivy had with Mint was incredibly painful and upsetting to watch, especially since I liked Mint so much.

So no, I didn't really care about her getting closure by doing exactly what she said she wasn't going to do. In the abstract, the idea of her getting the good childhood she was deprived of is heartwarming (and the use of the time distortion effect was clever), but with Ivy as the subject I couldn't be anything other than exasperated.

Egh. I'm sorry for all that negativity, but I really had to say it. Ivy ruined the story for me.

(The final battle also feels weird, on a number of levels -- like, how can Raccoon even lose when he has godlike control over the simulation? Does he just give up after you inflict 350000 damage? And I get that jRPGs need to have final battles, but I found it a little distasteful that the resolution is just helping a depressed person commit suicide. After going through all that effort, the protagonists don't even try to accomplish a nonviolent resolution? They're leaves in a river to the last. They probably could have accomplished the same outcome by just not bothering in the first place -- I guess they saved Solomon, but that's about it. The whole thing feels incredibly pointless. Maybe that was the point given all the nihilism going on, but it still felt unsatisfying.)