Board 8 > Umineko Playthrough Topic Part 5

(+) Yeah! (+)

gosh i sure am glad that this chapter is finally starting to treat the game like a real murder mystery

i feel like i got one of those "your wish was granted, but..." things

the chapter IS a murder mystery... BUT it's solved by the most awful detective of all time

there's a new magic character but i'm kind of over it

i'm sure she'll be just as unrelateable as all the rest

but she has a speech gimmick at least, randomly capitalized words, ooh

oh no, the bunnies showed up

did i say i wasn't dropping this game...

apparently eva summoned another magical minister girl thing

i don't really get it so i'll assume it's just a weird trick with the narration

ah yes, eva introduces her scrap of paper and the game makes it seem like she's introducing the new character

got it

oh there's a third one, joy!

nothing screams "this character isn't going to get any development or depth" more than when they're just part of a set

stake sisters
bunnies

and now these... whatever they are

i remember when i foolishly believed that episode 4 might be the limit of the magical stuff

Beatrice is in a position of trying to deny the study being a closed room and/or that Kinzo was clearly never there

And it's just... a rather silly segment when she is so obviously cornered (as is Natsuhi)

"oh, natsuhi only said she spoke with kinzo at 23:00, but that doesn't mean she saw him in the room, she obviously meant she entered the study and spoke with him on the phone"

like, come on

this is a waste of everyone's time

ah, and the next one, when natsuhi said she "spoke with father", she meant the room itself is named father and she spoke to it.

this is... pathetic...

my issue is i can't tell what the game wants me to think

it's portraying this as if beatrice is fighting some amazing battle

but it's just... really silly?

maybe it's meant to be a lesson, like we've been told, to expose how things could have been happening in episodes 1 to 4

is it trying to show us how someone may have argued about other situations from eps 1 to 4...?

eh...

"natsuhi considered herself to be kinzo, so she spoke to herself"

my god

these are worse than battler's blue truths

this is worse than the food bombs

beatrice is just making a total embarassment of herself

and i can't tell if the game wants me to feel that or if it's being super un-self-aware atm

this is just a ridiculously long segment to prove one of the most straightforward situations in the game so far

i don't get why this exists

https://snag.gy/41QXMZ.jpg

lol

after all that useless stuff though, battler apparently does feel he can come up with a theory for how kinzo left the room

i'm intrigued, but also i'm not sure why battler is even arguing to support natsuhi when it's obvious she is lying

i don't get it though - if natsuhi is the killer, why would she kill people in a way that'd make it very likely that everyone would break into kinzo's room, but then NOT use that to take advantage of the situation?

like if i was natsuhi and i killed those 6, i'd spray blood all over kinzo's bed like i did krauss's, y'know?

seems a bit weird

apparently our new theory is that kinzo jumped out the window before natsuhi left the room

laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaame

this whole section is stupid

i still don't get why battler is arguing for natsuhi's sake

i especially don't get why the magical-world-battler is also supporting it when he knows the truth

and then battler jumped out the window

uhhhhh

is this real?

so battler's argument is

"it's technically possible for natsuhi to be telling the truth, if kinzo jumped out the window to his while she was in the roon"

yeah

technically

i'll be honest, this game has lost me

i don't understand the purpose of any of this

it all feels really useless

none of this even relates to the twilight murders anyway

even if you prove natsuhi was lying here, it just proves she was covering up kinzo's earlier death

this has nothing to do with any of the 6 deaths

beatrice jumps out the window and battler catches her

so

this is the magic-world-Battler... catching the piece-Beatrice... who is NOT "our" Beato, but he's still supporting...

and now battler is officially in love with beato

yeah i guess that makes sense

oh, apparently real battler jumped too...?

okay, so we've broken the closed room by saying kinzo could've jumped from the window, and that's apparently an acceptable solution

well

uh

whatever

also, why would real-life-battler jump out a window just to prove a point

is it just because he hates erika that much?

11am

Okay.

Tea-party-Battler says that he's been here with Beato the whole time

And the Battler that fought Dlanor a minute ago was the piece Battler

so uh

the piece Battler was able to see the witches...?

I don't get it

none of it makes any sense

dlanor tells teapartyBattler that they "play opposite roles"

but

isn't dlanor anti-beatrice?

and battler should be as well?

dlanor is on bern's side, and bern is "sortof" on battler's side, or, playing for his side

so??????

i still don't get why battler was defending beatrice and opposing dlanor in-game anyway

much less why she'd say they are on opposite sides right now

virgilia and dlanor are frienders apparently. battler remarks that virgilia must have lots of friends because of how kind she is compared to beatrice

but uh virgilia is evil, right? still a super inconsistent character. this chapter she's just been entirely nice. but she's apparently secretly evil undernear it at all times? or is the evil smile and cruelty just a strange quirk...? this character makes no sense

we're using tea as a metaphor for magic here, saying that as long as it's possible that a tea set exists, it's okay to say the tea was made by magic

this is something related to "knox's 9th" but we're not explaining it and i guess i won't bother googling it

for whatever reason, virgilia and dlanor have taken this time to blatantly talk about how magic is fake

and they say it's an embellishment

and that it's jsut a fancy way to explain events

well, i already knew that, but it's weird that they are teaching this to battler so explicitly

Dlanor says that nothing matters except results - whether something happened from magic or not doesn't matter, just like how whether she feels pity or not doesn't change that she kills witches.

And Virgilia says that's not true - how you feel about things matters just as much, like enjoying your mom's cookies more than the bakery's cookies

needless to say this was already a theme of the game that i called, what, many chapters ago? that the magic stuff is someone interpreting thigns in a way to make them "feel" better. just like episode 4 already taught us

so... tell me something i don't already know, umineko

dlanor clarifies some rules, she says that a piece can be controlled by the gamemaster, sure, but they will still do things that are roughly in line with their personality

well, yeah, that makes sense. i don't think anything battler or natsuhi has done is like totally off limits for them, but it's still clearly forced

anyway i guess we're repeating the episode 3 thing because piece-battler and teaparty-battler are both super super strongly on beatrice's side and willing to defend her at all costs and are basically in love with her

because ???????

this is what;'s weird about episode 3, it introduced a narrative arc and then goes "haha it was all fake" but then that same exact narrative arc continues to play out in the next episodes so it wasn't... really... all that fake after all...?

And so, Dlanor says that she understands that she is just Lambda's piece...?

She admits she didn't fight with her full strength because Lambda prevented her from it

So, like, is this entity speaking with us right now a piece? Or the real Dlanor? I thought they were the same...

This game makes no sense

Dels posted...

and Erika is one of the worst fictional characters I've ever experienced

At least we agree on this one.
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Umineko certainly plays fast and loose with the structure of the meta narrative and what it means for the characters in it. I think there is an underlying reason for all of it, but it makes it hard to expect any consistency.

Ep5 seems to create a new top level narrative layer, where the viewpoint Battler can observe the structure of the games without caring particularly about specific episodes. Theoretically this layer always existed, Battler just wasn't really conscious of it before. Bernkastel and Lambda have always existed solely on this layer. But they can blend together a lot.

As for if Virgilia is evil, well, as Beatrice's piece she is sometimes put into that role, I guess. I don't really understand how that works with the rule about pieces having to act true to themselves. The magic layer was full of inconsistencies in that respect. At least, the Virgilia that's in the top level has no reason to be evil.
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Dels posted...

so battler's argument is

"it's technically possible for natsuhi to be telling the truth, if kinzo jumped out the window to his while she was in the roon"

yeah

technically

i'll be honest, this game has lost me

are you saying you WOULD put it past Kinzo

well I never
---

I did not like Erika much to begin with. Like, I "get it". She's a weird parody/commentary on the detective character archetype seen in mystery novels. But like, she just kinda sucks. While it WAS refreshing to have someone actually try to solve the mystery in a succinct way, the way she want about it wasn't fun (and it wasn't SUPPOSED to be fun, but that doesn't make it any better to read).
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I've basically hinted at this, without necessarily being aware of it, but the gist of what's happening here is that I want my characters to be relateable in some way. I need to at least see something in a character that makes me say "oh, I can understand that"

So Natsuhi is obviously relateable 'cause she's super innocent and tries really hard to do what she feels she's "supposed" to do as her role as head wife. Eva is a total bitch but then she gets a "I secretly want to be a better person" thing plus backstory of being bullied as a child and I'm like "oh okay that's nice i also want to be a better person". Rosa is Rosa but like, I get it, her life sucks, etc. I am nothing like Rosa but I am a human with feelings so I can still connect.

But then you have characters like Erika, but also this extends to almost every witch, where there is just nothing I can relate to. There is not a single thing about the way Erika acts that is anything like a human would act other than a psycopath. She has no motivation, because, well, she's a "piece" who is aware that she is a piece. She knows she's not a real human, or a witch, just a toy. And there's no backstory explaining why she's an asshole except that she was created to be one. She has no complex thoughts on this.

And that's how I feel about most of the witches. There's nothing about Gaap that makes me think "oh, I can relate to the human emotions she is feeling". Virgilia and Bern were roughly relateable at first because they were actually nice people for a while, but then one took a plot-twist turn to become evil and the other just slowly became an asshole with conflicting motives. (So Bern... wants to help Battler.... and is fighting against the bad guys... but it's only because she's "bored"...? Or to resolve a grudge?)

This is too many words to explain a very basic point so I'll stop here.

But my standards aren't that high. Dlanor seemed boring as hell but then she visited Battler and said some stuff about her feelings and now I'm like "Okay she's cool". I don't need much. I just need something that makes sense that feels human.

Not that I can only relate to "good guys", as I may imply by saying Virgilia and Bern were okay when they were good guys. But these were traits that set them apart and didn't make me actively dislike them.

Beatrice is basically the only one who can get away with being a total bad guy (but not really?) and still be relateable, and obviously she is the game's core focus so this is on purpose.

I wouldn't mind if someone said they hated EVAtrice for similar reasons, it's technically a contradiction that I'm not rating her low, but idk, I like her design and her evilness is more fun to me. Plus she did have a backstory that explains it.

Like you say though, she exists as a sort of over-the-top parody/commentary character designed to fulfill a certain role, and people who have tastes that aren't mine may like that, but I am a person who primarily enjoys stories for character development, and so I view everything through that lens

Sceptilesolar posted...

As for if Virgilia is evil, well, as Beatrice's piece she is sometimes put into that role, I guess. I don't really understand how that works with the rule about pieces having to act true to themselves. The magic layer was full of inconsistencies in that respect. At least, the Virgilia that's in the top level has no reason to be evil.

Interesting way to look at it. But of course, we just said that you can only make a piece act a way they'd usually act. Also, was that really a piece-Vrigilia in the "golden land" at the end of episode 3?

Not too concerned about it, at any rate...