"They chose to be frozen, and to stare eternally into this world of the lost. And if they are thinking at all... it is of a very distant past."
Arcaea on the surface just seems like a relatively innocent Rhythm Game with a rather elegant aesthetic. But dive into the lore and you encounter some incredibly dark topics...
- Generally, Arcaea is a very fucked-up setting that can easily drive someone insane. Imagine ending up in a world where you have no memories about what and who you are, all alone with the chance of finding company next to nil because of how expansive and empty it is. This alone is bad enough and can easily eat away your sanity, but god forbid if you really got to find out what you actually are. Chances are it's not pleasant and you're here because whatever happened to your previous life is something so awful that you don't want to think about it. And if you dug a little bit further and find out how meaningless and incoherent it is? You're going to Go Mad from the Revelation, like what Lagrange or Shirahime experienced. The only characters that avoid this fate are the ones like Kou or Ayu who are content in their Gilded Cage and didn't bother trying to dig in.
- The effects of positive Arcaea overdose in Chapter 1-ZR, the bad ending for the Luminous Sky chapter. Hikari goes out of her way trying to collect positive Arcaea to be happy, and becomes so overloaded with memories of happiness that it dulls her mind until she's rendered a mindless husk.
- How does Saya break out of the memory she's reliving in Chapter 3-3? By suddenly slitting her "fiance"'s throat with a knife just to try and get a reaction out of him. The game then proceeds to describe the wound in detail, managing to make it particularly gruesome even with Bloodless Carnage in play.
- "Heavensdoor"
by LeaF is a very dark and fast-paced track with lots of unexpected changes and nasty distortion effects. - Combined with the context, the Scripted Events in Black Fate really cement that the game is really not as innocent as it looks.
- Chapter 5 (Black Fate): About halfway through Tempestissimo, the background changes suddenly to include Tempest Tairitsu, the edges of the screen darken, most of the HUD disappears, your gauge (be it an Easy gauge at the time or the overflowed Hard gauge) is swapped out for the Tempest Gauge (which decreases on its own if you aren't increasing your Recall), and the remainder of the chart is swapped out for the next difficulty's chart (Past 6->Present 9, Present 9->Future 10, Future 10->Beyond 11). As shown in the story sequence immediately before unlocking Tempestissimo, Tairitsu isn't there to congratulate you for your efforts, She's there to kill Hikari, and what you just saw was the first hit she landed on her.
- The "Terminal Song" Scripted Event added with Black Fate is just as bad. Hikari, having endured Tairitsu's onslaught and using the last of her strength, is fracturing the world herself. During the event, the background and even the song chart itself is glitching regularly, and at the very end, the display cuts out. And once you trigger the event, there is no quitting out of it early: the game doesn't even provide you a pause button.
- There's something very unsettling about Tempest Tairitsu. On top of her soul-piercing Death Glare and Creepy Blue Eyes, there's also her sadistic streak against Hikari; she isn't even simply trying to take the girl's life. She's trying to inflict as much pain, physically and mentally on her, as much as possible. Hikari is rightfully unsettled when the girl she thought she was going to befriend turns out to be a violent, devilish creature out to rip her into pieces and takes delight in doing so.
- Chapter 6 (Final Verdict) is the climax of Hikari and Tairitsu's Duel to the Death and is as depressing as it is flat-out haunting.
- The first cutscene we see is Tairitsu and Hikari standing off, with Tairitsu being trapped in a cage of glass and Hikari staring down at her with a Death Glare. What makes this so unsettling is Tairitsu, who has been obviously contorted into a murderous beast isn't even the worst thing around here. Hikari herself is. It's an unsettling, ice-cold death glare that explicitly states that she's NOT playing nice anymore. How she acts isn't any better — it's appropriately described as "a frightening and deeply seated apathy". When she tells Tairitsu "you do not have to do this", the writing is on the wall that it means "I will kill you if you take one step further and I won't care". And this is just the beginning...
- The Terminal Song, "Testify". Its difficulty? Beyond 12. You read it right, and it's just as bad as it sounds. The screen will pulsate and become blurry on increasingly intense degrees, as if Hikari was deciding if she wants to kill Tairitsu in one final strike, and finally the lane itself breaks apart whether you cleared it, or not, then the screen fades. It's also not even called an Anomaly event, but a "Fatal Choice", and for good reason.
- After you unlocked everything, you'll be instantly greeted with the most shocking cutscene in the entire game; Hikari impaling Tairitsu by the chest with a sword she wished upon, the former staring at nowhere blankly and the latter just staring at it in shock. The implication is that Hikari was killing Tairitsu out of self defense and on reflexes alone. Unlike Saya's case above, only the picture itself is Bloodless Carnage, but the game itself goes out of its way to describe the murder Hikari committed."As soon as it stabs through her — sets within her body — the blade swallows her life, her blood and essence quickly filling the glass. And then, the glass slowly begins to shatter and fade."
- The game throws one last surprise against you at the end of the chapter; your partner Tairitsu are all unusable and her name is replaced by bakemoji. And as the post-credits scene of this chapter indicates, Tairitsu was already dead by the time she enters Arcaea, and what Hikari did was to render her Deader than Dead.
- Hikari's Fatalis variant might seem innocent enough, but a close look reveals that something is very wrong. Unlike Tairitsu's Tempest variant, it's not a outright threatening Death Glare, but her expression almost looks empty and soulless, as if she could kill someone without even batting an eye. And she makes well on that threat — look no further from what happened to Tairitsu when she went a bit too far.
- Post-epilogue, if you lock Fatalis Hikari's skill and play "Last" without touching the screen and wait a while, you'll get an "Accept Arcaea" button that appears below the "Refuse Fate" button. If you click it, you'll receive an absolutely nasty alternate ending that looks like as if Hikari became Kriemhild Gretchen and took over Arcaea. It's just so irredeemably depressing and nightmarish that it would change your view of the game — forever.
- The Reveal that Arcaea is actually a place created by the real Hikari for her to refuge into and a place for solace for the dead, and every other character in this world is Dead All Along. And save for Tairitsu, Alice and Vita, we don't even know how the rest died...
- The reason why Tairitsu died. A god or angel literally wiped out every single human in her planet by calling forth a total doomsday scenario.
- The ending proper - Hikari Ascends Into A Higher Plane Of Existence, but leaves Tairitsu dead. Gone was the innocent and naive sweetheart, and in her place a nihilistic, empty goddess who finds no joy in her newfound state, remaining as broken as she is after the tragedy. As for the side characters? Most of them chose to be frozen alive in glass and rendering themselves empty husks of their former selves knowing that escape or liberation is impossible at this point as Hikari watches believing that she had granted them happiness, with Alice being shown as one of the victims with a massive shard going through her heart (pictured). This has apparently been going on for 1000 years, all because a guilt-ridden Hikari can't get over becoming a murderer.
- Out of the side characters who chose to be encased, there are people heavily implied to be the likes of Mir or Shirahime. Even if they broke down briefly after experiencing an unpleasant revelation, they still pulled themselves together rather quickly, only to have all of their Character Development in their side stories undone because of that one person who just can't. And Kou, Ayu and Vita weren't even mentioned.
- Lethe, Saya and Lagrange didn't choose to let themselves frozen, but Saya and Lagrange are left wandering for an eternity without any positive outcome or purpose, and Lethe was still tending to memories as always. It's implied that they only managed to stick by sheer willpower and conviction.
- Vita's world brings upon imagery of the Warhammer 40,000 universe complete with an oppressive galactic government that's literally called the Imperium. It's obviously not as ghoulish as 40k, but there is an universal war, Vita and some other children are psychics who take control of a planet-destroying Kill Sat used for "peacekeeping" and said Imperium can easily annihilate anyone who knew too much so long as they know about you, an all-too-familiar haunting sight for anyone who knows anything about that tabletop game.
- Maya's story is a horrible portrayal of what happens if you get the short end of the stick by the world of Arcaea. To put short, it's just depressing and nightmarish. There's no lore drop, no conflict, no going mad from the truth. It's just a girl who just happened to have a very bad time in Arcaea. Her world ended and she (presumably) is unable to or can't stop it, the Arcaea shards that flock her are nothing but people suffering and crying alone and she's bearing and reeling over the Survivor Guilt from her world's end. In the end, all she wanted to do is to run away, close her eyes, cry and never think again; at least Tairitsu sees similar things and is still capable of fighting back, something that Maya can't do.
- Insight is a really creepy character that invokes something that is completely unnatural and unknown to Arcaea. Not only she looks way more intimidating than any other character (resembling more like General Esdeath than an actual Arcaea character), the way she speaks reeks of Condescending Compassion towards Maya and sounds more like a predator locking in onto their prey, and possesses unnatural powers that allow her to enter Arcaea as an alive human being and create weather (like the blizzard Kanae ran into) while there is previously none.
It's behind you.
