"Four days. In four days, all of this ended. They (Alice and Cedric) both believed that, if not forever, she had at least three hundred and sixty-five. She didn't get to see him in the end. In the early morning she felt a pain and faded. Then, nothing. She remembered hearing them yelling to call. That was it."
— Alice moments before her death, Ephemeral Page, 7-6
Don't let all the colorful anime girls and insanely difficult charts distract you. This game has been compared with the likes of Puella Magi Madoka Magica and for good reason.
As a moments page, all spoilers are unmarked as per wiki policy. You Have Been Warned!
In General:
- Expect Break the Cutie to be the norm — the game's story loves to make girls lose their sanity. At the best case, it's just some characters Going Mad From the Revelation and quickly snapping out from it. If it isn't, expect something way worse than that.
Main story
- Tairitsu awakens in a tower and finds herself trying to escape it, with shards of Arcaea following her. However unlike Hikari's Arcaea which were only consisting of positive memories, hers only show her negativity. Nothing but "pain, betrayal, envy" and "dark". When she avoids them, it was to no avail — and when Hikari met her she already tipped into the Despair Event Horizon and was finding someone to kill in order to lash out her anger, with Hikari being the target.
- Sometimes they say "too much of a thing is no good". When Hikari surrounds herself with positive Arcaea, she quickly loses all of her will and becomes catatonic.
- Picture this. You're alone in an unknown world for a long time, only to run into another person in this seemingly barren world. She seems friendly at first, but she was always finding someone to torture and kill all along, only to hold it because you looked harmless. Then the girl saw that you will kill her, and goes ballistic trying to kill you. You tried your best to negotiate with her, but it didn't matter, and at one point you found out the person you thought you can befriend is a vicious beast going all out of her way to kill you, and comes dangerously close into doing so. These are the circumstances that Hikari had to deal with; trying to befriend the first person she met for a long time only to find out the other girl wants to rip her into a million pieces and beyond.
Final Verdict (And Silent Answer):
- It's not exactly doom and gloom, but there's a reason why this whole chapter demands an entire section — it's just depressing.
- Tairitsu's abrupt betrayal against Hikari and her going all out of her way to kill her has broke the poor girl so much that she finally stops playing the Nice Girl and reveals herself to be an apathetic girl who doesn't care about anything but her continued existence...and it is not pretty. Realizing that they have no chance of ironing out, Hikari makes one fatal choice — lethally IMPALING Tairitsu with a sword she wished upon as she attempts to cut her neck with a glass shard, as shown in the page image. Her eyes just stare seemingly at nowhere as she kills the other girl, and when she finally snaps back to her senses, Tairitsu is laying on the ground, dead. There's no ill will here unlike Tairitsu's unhinged, sadistic streak; Hikari just did it out of self-defensive instinct. Unlike Saya's nonchalant murder of Donovan, a lifeless glass image, Hikari's murder of Tairitsu is treated as exactly what it is in the game's narrative — a senseless tragedy. The outcry from the playerbase was such that in the few days leading up to the "Silent Answer" epilogue, they compiled a Google Doc to try to find clues on how to bring her back and to brute force any possible way they could resurrect her.
- Hikari's Heroic BSoD. Sure, she won against Tairitsu. Her continued survival is cemented as the person who attempts to kill her gets killed by her instead. Arcaea's destruction is halted. But at what price? The killer she wished she could befriend and the first person she met for some time was dead. A soul her realm "saved" was murdered by her own hands. She killed another girl without attempting to iron out her differences out of self-preservation. It was only after she clears her line of sight and found Tairitsu dead on the floor with her blood in her hands that she realized she only cared about herself for this whole time and thus had became the very villain that she didn't want to become. She understandably suffers from a guilt-induced breakdown, crying in emotional agony and berating herself for her innate selfishness and pragmatism. Seeing anyone broken to this level of low is just painful.
- To further rub salt into the player's wounds, after Hikari asks herself: "Is this anything new?", the game shows an exact copy of the first entry in Eternal Core, where she was just enjoying simple times without any regard for herself or other people. In her view, all those happier times she had was just like the very moment she killed Tairitsu; done all for the sake of herself.
- On top of being the single hardest chart in the game at level 12, the lyrics of "Testify" are in the perspective of Hikari, moments before she murders Tairitsu out of self-defensive instinct.Let me forget everything, still moonlight shines on us.
Broken heart, I don't want you to find and take a look at.
So I'll sin more and destroy my thoughts, make a mess of my hand.
I swear on the darkest night I'll end it all.
And testify.... - After this event, the game deletes all of your Tairitsu partners that aren't from a collaboration, and turns her name on all of those that it didn't delete into garbled text. That's right. What Hikari did was to make Tairitsu Deader than Dead.
- Not only that, Tairitsu and Hikari are removed from the game's startup screen. While they are restored when playing the epilogue, for a moment, you would think the story is over and there is no one left to follow.
- The Reveal that Tairitsu, as well as everyone else in the Arcaea world were just copies of dead people. Every character you know and loved? They're all dead. Yes, this includes Eto and Luna who obviously look like children and Nami, a high-school girl who somehow only thought she was "just" inside a dream. Live Fast Die Young, indeed...
- The normal ending is one big Bittersweet Ending and averts what could easily be a hopeless, senseless tragedy. However, there's a catch. The Tairitsu Hikari revived has the soul of the real one, but with the copy's body. That's right. The Tairitsu Hikari actually tried to befriend but failed? She's gone for good, and the one who made it to the end is actually another person using her body.
- Regardless of all the sheer sadism she takes when lashing out at Hikari, at the end Tairitsu is just a girl who wants to be happy for once. Turns out she's long crossed the Despair Event Horizon because everyone hated and feared her over her talent, and eventually a global cataclysm wiped out and killed every human being in her planet. But when the copy of her soul gets summoned into Arcaea and she believed that it could give her salvation, she found herself seeing nothing but hatred, despair and all the negativity in the world, and by that point she believed that every positive thing she saw was a mere Hope Spot. The poor girl cannot take a break.
- The bonus ending when Hikari chooses to "Accept Arcaea" is very bleak and awful. As in the type where everyone ends up dead, lost, and/or depressed with no exception.
- It's revealed that Arcaea is actually made by the real Hikari when she was in her lowest point, sad and depressed. She wished for a Lotus-Eater Machine where she can take refuge, and thus Arcaea was born. The pleasant memories that the copy Hikari enjoyed collecting? Those are for the real one's own sake, presumably to bleach her despair away. Unfortunately, she can't even go into the very world she created and a copy of her was made in her place, with all the positive Arcaea she left quickly becoming a hazard for the copy.
- There's no happy ending for the real Hikari. In the normal ending, the real Tairitsu might had been granted a true second chance of life and the happiness she wished for and the copy Hikari has atoned for her own sin and displayed her first overt act of empathy by being the one who gave Tairitsu a second chance. But the real Hikari? Her fate remains unknown in both endings, and she was presumably left as miserable and lonely as she always is. Lagrange was horribly correct in her assumptions — The maker of this world cannot save herself as she wanted it to, and thus it failed its purpose.
- The ending proper. Tairitsu is left for dead, and Hikari becomes the God of Arcaea. However, having been driven by despair and self-servitude above everything else, she traps Arcaea's souls within it and seals it away from other worlds. 1000 years later, most side characters chose to encase themselves in glass, with Alice being shown in stasis, turning them into empty husks who lose all will and placing them in the same fate as Hikari's premature Downer Ending. Those who don't are left fruitlessly wandering around. On top of this, Hikari herself also becomes a Straw Nihilist Almighty Idiot who believes that people should be living for the sake of no matter how meaningless it is, and a far cry from the innocent, naive girl she once was. This is not a worthy price for Godhood.
- Out of the characters who chose to be frozen, there's people like Mir or Shirahime who suffered from brief breakdowns but learnt to move on, and overall spent their time in Arcaea way better than Tairitsu or Hikari ever did - people who found meaning in a world with no meaning whatsoever. Yet, they all somehow suffered from a breakdown after being imprisoned for 1,000 years and chose to be frozen, paying dearly for the sake of that one person who can't pull herself together, just because of the guilt of killing another girl that completely drove her over the edge.
- Lagrange, Saya and Lethe are left wandering Arcaea without an end. Imagine how Lagrange must had been felt when she had to end undignified like that...
- Alice being the person shown ensnared is Harsher in Hindsight when you consider she's one of the few characters who had found a resolve to find a meaning for her existence despite all she has been shown and faced in Arcaea. In a sense, she's still emotionally stronger than Hikari. However, because of the latter's anguish and regrets, she's forced to regress into a form where she'll never, ever think of her sorrows again.
- The copy Tairitsu never gets out alive. In the normal ending, the real one was revived inside her body, while the copy is never heard of again. In the secret ending, she's actually gone for good. At least copy Tairitsu's fate is still better than the real Hikari living the rest of her days in insurmountable despair and refusing to die for the sake of. Right..right??
- The lyrics in the credits theme for this ending, "Last|Eternity", is no better. They're different from the normal ending, and they are extremely depressing. It's sung from the viewpoint of Hikari, now a blind idiot god with no more will to do anything other than ensuring her continued survival no matter how meaningless it is, and the souls below her who were trapped in eternal, suffocating bliss. (The following is the official English translation, see here
)The light has turned its own back on the shimmering sky,
and abandoned prayer is now falling to the earth
Thousands of images came and went in my mind's eye
What unfolds before my eyes
is simply an inorganic world
that goes on forever
No matter what truth we wake up tomorrow to face,
there will never be a peaceful time again
All hope vanishes in vain
All the future that would have existed is a mirage
Now I know how this all started and
finally found the pointlessness of my evil struggle
Dear, you were the beautiful one, not me
Those eyes, defeated by dreams, have already dried up
The whole world scatters like shards
And the body, no longer a worthless shell,
is trapped in an eternal nightmare
until it decays in solitude with emptiness- The lyrics on the last paragraph are written in Katakana instead of the usual Hiragana, possibly representing how Hikari is losing her mind and becoming nothing, just like everyone else.
- It's revealed that Arcaea is actually made by the real Hikari when she was in her lowest point, sad and depressed. She wished for a Lotus-Eater Machine where she can take refuge, and thus Arcaea was born. The pleasant memories that the copy Hikari enjoyed collecting? Those are for the real one's own sake, presumably to bleach her despair away. Unfortunately, she can't even go into the very world she created and a copy of her was made in her place, with all the positive Arcaea she left quickly becoming a hazard for the copy.
- Last but not least, there's the secret song "Callima Karma". Per Feryquitous tradition, all of the lyrics are written in her signature Conlang. But when you translate them, they're heavily implied to be depicting Hikari burdening the guilt of the murder she committed. The word "Callima" also appears in the lyrics and means something among the lines of "I will burden", so the true title of the song can be translated to "I will burden (the) Karma". As in Hikari believing that the complete end of her sanity over a span of 1,000 years is what she deserved as a result of her actions.
Side Stories
- Vita's past. Her planet was decimated by a government of Galactic Conquerors known as "The Imperium", and she moved to a planet that was supposedly "neutral" in a universal war, one that she believed she could trust. She joined a group of psychic Child Soldiers operating the NMPGM, and one day she dug a bit too deep in her current planet's Dark Secret. Too bad the Imperium was spying on the psychics and they launched an attack that annihilated them. It's a horrifically accurate portrayal of how it is to hide from a dystopian government.
- Poor Alice. She wanders Arcaea without her memories and was accompanied by Tenniel, who claims to be her brother. Alice suspected that there's something wrong about Tenniel, but when she managed to push him into revealing the Awful Truth to her...good god. Turns out she is actually a terminally ill girl who had joy with her brother who...isn't Tenniel, but a man named Cedric. Four days later, she succumbed to her illness and died. She was alone in Arcaea all along — that's right, Tenniel was an Imaginary Friend made from Alice's memories of Cedric. Tenniel vanishes after fulfilling his last task and she briefly breaks down before accepting herself as what she is. What makes this stand out is unlike Vita and Tairitsu's reason of death, hers can come across as realistic. There's also a rather darkly humorous aspect of this. All of the partners introduced up to that point are young women and a male partner is revealed out of the blue, only for the game to reveal that he is no more than an illusion and the number of male partners in the game remain exactly zero. To a player's perspective, this would be almost like giving them a Hope Spot and burning it into the ground.
- Mir is a Blood Knight who spends her time in Arcaea fighting enemies the memories throw at her. Normally, she can tell which side she is supposed to protect and who the enemies are. That is, until the last memory thrusts her into war, where the sides are unclear. Mir does not understand her purpose in this scenario and ultimately suffers from Heroic BSoD, having lost the thrill of fighting and not knowing what to do.
- Crossing with Fridge Horror, but Nami's story is pretty depressing if you consider the implications. The girl believed that she was in some dream world so pleasant that she decided to stay there forever at the end of her tale, like a little Sugar Bowl for her. But for all we know, she's dead and the world she's in is actually the afterlife, and she didn't even realize she died, thinking it was only a dream.
- Maya ended up in Arcaea either after her world was destroyed by something and she failed to (or can't) save it or worse, destroyed it and killed herself alongside it. Once she ended up there, the only memories she was able to relive from her Arcaea shards are glimpses of what happened to her before she died and tragic, pitiful memories of people suffering and crying alone. Unlike Tairitsu, she's not even given a chance to fight back. What doesn't help her case is this CG◊ where she's bearing the Survivor Guilt of the suffering she experienced back in her home world. Her sanity gets crushed to the point that she only wants to stop thinking, stop remembering, disappear, suffer, get hurt...and be happy. There's no major reveals, no girls trying to kill each other and no going mad from the revelation here. It's just depressing, no more, no less. Makes a pretty nightmarish and saddening scene to even think of. There's also a bit of Realism-Induced Horror going on, since if you remove the fantastic elements in that story, all you're left with is a chillingly accurate portrayal of a young girl dealing with crippling depression. The only saving grace is the ending is surprisingly bittersweet — after she decided she wants to be happy and break out of her sorrows in front of what is presumably the will of Arcaea, the memory shards now only reflect her face, and she moves forward to the world beyond at an uncertain path.
