Video Game / Sanabi

"Getting to the end isn't what's important."

— The Daughter

SANABI is a grappling hook-based Platform Game developed by Wonder Potion which entered Steam Early Access on June 20, 2022 and fully released on November 8th, 2023 for Steam and Nintendo Switch.

The General is a Retired Badass with One Last Job: pursing Sanabi, an elusive foe who is seemingly connected to the sudden disappearance of Mago City's 3 million residents. Though one of the initial goals is a rescue mission to find Playful Hacker Mari, she joins him on his journey to the top of the city.

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SANABI provides examples of:

• 11th-Hour Superpower: Once The General realizes the truth of his identity, his Charged Attack can be performed instantly.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The Sanabi Project is essentially the Mago Group's attempt to subvert this. By digitizing a human personality and installing it into combat robots, they could create an army of killers immune to government control or interference. The project's engineers spend a decade carefully editing the personality's memories and installing various filters and trigger phrases to keep it focused on a designated goal while still maintaining "free will".
• All for Nothing: What the Sanabi Project amounts to for the Mago Group. The company's plan is leaked in its final stages thanks to Mari's investigation, forcing them to liquidate all their staff and resources to escape the Royal Court's punishment, their only prototype goes rogue, and the Court eventually learns about the project anyway, so any of its surviving architects won't be spared from their wrath.
• All the Worlds Are a Stage: The last chapter has The General dropping into Mago City again with copies of the bosses chasing after him in the same route.
• Ambidextrous Sprite: One of the The General's arms is a mechanical grappling hook arm. Which one is it? That depends on which direction he's facing, as it swaps to the other arm when his sprite is flipped.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: Mari is playable in a single flashback, showing the events that would lead her to go to Mago City.
• Antagonist Title: Sanabi is the one responsible for bombing The General's home with their last known sighting in Mago City. That's the motivation The General was implanted with anyways; Sanabi isn't a person but a core memory that The General would keep remembering which the research team turned into the project name and the focus of his hatred. Sanabi is actually a song that The General's wife taught to Mari who taught it to The General.
• Arc Words: "Getting all the way to the end is not what's important." This phrase is said by the General's daughter in repeat flashbacks and becomes key to the plot, unlocking the General's memories, explaining his subconscious connection to the phrase "Sanabi", and proving himself to Mari. To hammer it home, the Bad Ending concludes with him saying "It's important... to make it to the end".
• Art Shift: In contrast with the pixel art of the rest of the game, Mari and her father's reunion is depicted as a watercolor-esque CG straight out of a visual novel.
• Badass Transplant: The General, Colonel Baek, and Major Song all have an arm replaced with a chain arm that allows them to grab, swing, and retract with lethal grace. Mari creates an equipable glove with the same features for herself in the epilogue.
• Ban on A.I.: The Royal Court has banned digitized personalities and combat droids on penalty of generations of death. The cynical take Mari has is that they don't want any challenges to their power.
• Bookends: Chapter 1 proper starts with The General going through a mission briefing and then preparing to jump out the aircraft until it gets shot down. The last chapter has The General go through a briefing again acknowledging his identity and true objectives before he jumps out the aircraft.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Major Song is pretty friendly and laidback for being part of the military, not to mention a surrogate Cool Big Sis to The General's daughter. She's also strong enough to heft around a giant flaming shuriken. She is also absolutely frightening to anyone facing her. When she believes the combat droid possessing The General's memories was the one who killed the original, she goes absolutely ballistic and declares her intent to tear him apart limb from limb.
• Bittersweet Ending: The people of Mago City are saved from being wiped out by the Royal Court, but at the cost of The General's life shortly after he regains his true memories and recognizes Mari as his daughter. However, the reunion finally gives Mari closure and helps her move on from her guilt of getting her father killed.
• Brain Uploading: Due to being a child, Mari thought that creating a digital copy of her father without the memory of her late mother would make him happy again. Besides being extremely illegal, this data would end up being stolen by Mago group and turned into a project for a manipulable robot army of The General.
• Broken Bird: What Mari turns out to be. Underneath her Playful Hacker act, she's a deeply depressed girl who not only can't remember her mother without remembering how she died but has been living with the guilt of accidentally getting her father killed when she just wanted to find a way to help him let go of the pain of losing his wife.
• Child Prodigy: Mari's age is somewhat vague, but she appears to be a teenager at the oldest and is identified as a minor. She's also a genius hacker. When she was eight, she hacked the defenses of a heavily fortified military compound just because she wanted to see her father a.k.a. The General.
• Climax Boss: Major Song precedes an absolute cavalcade of significant story reveals and the last act of the game. Unsurprisingly, they're one of the most brutal bosses in the entire game. She's technically also the Final Boss, as the last chapter is just a straight platforming gauntlet to the end.
• Counter-Attack: Justice and Major Song have a counterattack pose that will instantly attack The General when struck.
• Daddy's Girl: Flashbacks show that The General's daughter thought the world of him. The fact that she was inadvertently responsible for his death is why Mari is secretly spiraling into depression in the present.
• Death Seeker: The General asking for Operation Zero to be initiated is treated as him signing his own death warrant and he doesn't plan on leaving Mago City alive out of grief. Mari also becomes this after she believes there's no way to reawaken The General's memories of her, choosing to stay behind to shut down Mago City's nuclear reactor even though it will cost her life. The General recognizing her as his daughter convinces her to live.
• Disproportionate Retribution: The Royal Court doesn't lay down punishment with a gentle hand; especially grievous offenses result in the immediate execution of not just the perpetrators, but all their relatives and anyone living nearby at the time. If anyone is found guilty of high treason or plotting to overthrow the Court itself, this penalty applies for ten generations of their bloodlines.
• Distress Call: Mari sends up a distress call stating she has vital information with her rescue becoming The General's first goal. Once she's found, she quickly spills that she didn't have any information and just desperately wanted help sent. In actuality, she just wanted to see if there was anything left of her father in the droid carrying his digitized memories.
• Doppelgänger Attack: Justice Turns Red by summoning copies to also attack The General though they can be taken out in one hit.
• Downer Beginning: The beginning of the game as The General playing with his adorable little daughter... who then gets killed by a bomb planted in their home by SANABI. The truth of course, is more complicated but no less sad.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The General's actual name is never spoken once in the entire game. He's only either called "General" or "Dad" by his daughter. We at least know his last name would be "Geum", as it's his daughter Mari's.
• Eye-Obscuring Hat: The General is always wearing a hat that covers his eyes for the mysterious badass look.
• Fighting Fingerprint: While Major Song is initially enraged at a combat droid displaying the same fighting style as The General and presumes it caused his death, it becomes the first hint for her that the droid is The General.
• Floral Theme Naming: Mari's surname is "Geum" in Korean, which translates to Gold/Golden in English. Putting the name together gives us Marigold, and Wonder Potion's official twitter account even posted an image of her with marigolds.
• Foreshadowing: Regarding The General being a machine.
  • The Chapter Select function starts from the mission briefing in the chopper. Everything before that point is just a programmed memory.
  • The health stations have a pair of wrench symbols which make sense for chain arm maintenance or for applying repairing nanobots to a robot.
  • The General can't enter the factory's red zones due to how heavily augmented he is or because he's all metal as a robot.
  • Mari mistakes one of the worker robots for The General when yelling at him because he is a reprogrammed worker unit.
  • If The General is in the Core's line of sight for too long, the game over screen is a display of deleted code.
• Four-Star Badass: The General is the Player Character and a One-Man Army who single-handedly tears his way through Mago City.
• Heroic Sacrifice: In the good ending, The General goes into the Mago City nuclear reactor to stop the meltdown and prevent The Royal Court from wiping the city off the globe.
• It's All My Fault: Mari blames herself for her father's death since the digitization of his personality led to Mago Corparation assassins killing him and taking the personality data.
• It's the Only Way to Be Sure: With the threat of Mago City's imminent nuclear explosion, the Royal Court plans to make it completely disappear in the literal sense.
• Just a Machine: When Mufin gives out, The General is apathetic and calls it just a machine pretending to be a human while pointing out that there's a upgraded replacement robot for Mari to use. Mari has a Laughing Mad reaction as The General is unaware that he himself is a machine.
• Kill the Cutie: The opening of the game has The General's adorable little daughter killed by a bomb planted in his home by SANABI. It's ultimately subverted — the daughter was not killed, and those were programmed memories planted in him to drive him into revenge.
• Last-Second Ending Choice: The end of Chapter 4 presents the General with 2 choices:
  • Going Down: The General follows his mission and pursues SANABI to the basement. He slaughters everyone there trying to overload the nuclear plant with the last survivor attempting to tell him that SANABI doesn't exist before brutally executed. With his objective complete, the project is terminated and The General knows that what's important is making it to the end. This sends the player back to the title screen.
  • Going Up: The General goes back up for Mari and gets into a confrontation with Major Song with this path leading to the rest of Chapter 4 and 5. After realizing the truth of his existence, The General re-enters Mago City to save Mari and stop the nuclear meltdown.
• Leave No Witnesses:
  • A very upscaled example. Everyone in Mago City, executives included, is being purged to avoid giving any information away about Sanabi after they found evidence of the files being leaked with a planned nuclear meltdown for good measure.
  • After the Sanabi project was completed, everyone involved in its development was killed to avoid leaks.
• Life/Death Juxtaposition: Coupled along with a Heaven/Hell Juxtaposition. During the Last-Second Ending Choice at the end of Chapter 4, the stairs going down has an ominous red glow that makes it look like the floor is covered in blood, giving the impression of death, violence and hell, while the stairs going upwards is bathed in white light and is lined with flowers that gives the impression of life, goodness and heaven. Sure enough, those are the paths to the bad and the good endings respectively.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: Mari is actually The General's daughter, though The General we've been following isn't Mari's real father but rather a copy of his personality uploaded into a worker bot.
• Minor Living Alone: As revealed in her playable flashback, Mari has been living in an apartment by herself since the death of her father.
• Missing Mom: The General is only seen raising his daughter by himself. His memories of his wife were actually erased on his digital copy and he is a widower due to her dying to a bomb meant for him.
• No-Sell: Major Song will instantly counter any grabs with the chain arm and has to be taken down with charge attacks.
• Once More, with Clarity: The start of chapter 5 allows for seeing certain memories again, how they've been edited to influence The General into being a revenge-driven weapon and what actually happened to The General in reality.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: The unlockable Legendary difficulty makes The General die in a single hit.
• One Riot, One Ranger:
  • The General is recruited out of retirement to go after Sanabi and he drops into Mago City by himself to handle the situation there. Subverted. That's actually a false memory implanted into him. The Korean military shows up in Chapter 4 due to the imminent nuclear meltdown.
  • Enforced near the end. Colonel Baek and Major Song want to help, but The General tells them to stand down since them engaging would mean treason against The Royal Court's orders and their subsequent deaths.
• Playful Hacker: Mari is an energetic hacker who occasionally geeks out and reenacts her favorite anime poses. It turns out the high energy is only an act she put on to get the robot with her father's memories to recognize her. In actuality, she is a very depressed and objective-focused.
• Properly Paranoid: The Royal Court put a harsh blanket ban digital personalities and combat droids, apparently to prevent themselves from being deposed. It's later revealed that the Mago Group was indeed planning to stage a coup using The General's personality data.
• Replacement Goldfish: The General is increasingly reminded of his daughter by Mari and steadily grants her the same protectiveness. That's because Mari is his daughter, or rather, The General is a digitized copy of her father's personality.
• The Reveal: Just what happened to the 3 million citizens of Mago City who practically vanished into thin air? They're all there. The General's perception was simply altered by the Sanabi project so that he couldn't notice them or the blood. That way, all the other discrepancies he'd notice wouldn't appear as important. After all, a digitized personality manipulated into being a revenge-driven robot soldier doesn't need to notice anyone besides their target.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: The prologue shows the aftermath of The General killing everyone who got between him and the weapons dealer who sold the bomb that killed his daughter. The player gets to control him walking out past the corpses and bloodstained hallways. Though the memory was altered, he did go after countless criminal organizations after his wife was killed.
• Sand Worm: A robotic crusher serves as the Chapter 1 boss. It looks and acts identical to a sandworm being capable of swimming through the city and actively chasing after The General.
• Savvy Guy, Energetic Girl: The General is all business and only concerned with tracking down Sanabi while Mari is an excitable Playful Hacker who regularly geeks out. They're actually more alike in temperament than it would appear at first glance. Mari is just putting on an act in the hope that The General would recognize her as his daughter.
• Shout-Out:
  • When entering the Market District, Mari geeks out over merchandise from Mach Hedgehog, The Legend of Greenhat Boy, Mega Uario, and Time Samurai.
  • One of the pieces of equipment Mari retrieves from the Factory is a Nintendo Switch.
  • Before her last confrontation with The General, Major Song acknowledges that his efforts had saved Mari, but she ultimately still has to destroy him for being a combat droid, saying "That's that, and this is this."
• Something Only They Would Say:
  • Colonel Baek and Major Song instantly salute and recognize the worker droid as the real General once he finishes the squad's motto.
  • Mari lashes out at The General for being a weaponized corruption of her father, but breaks down into tears and hugs him after he plays Sanabi on the harmonica.
• Stepford Smiler: What Mari turns out to be. Her Playful Hacker personality is something she exclusively put on for The General in the hopes that he would recognize that she's his daughter. Outside of him, she's an incredibly depressed young girl who's spent most of her life obsessing over finding her father's personality chip.
• Stuffed into the Fridge: The General's daughter is killed in a targeted bomb explosion which brings him out of retirement and after Sanabi. It was actually his wife who died, but the memory was modified for the Sanabi project as he would give up on revenge in each early iteration for the sake of his daughter.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: The nature of the Mago City coverup involves the mandatory suicide of all executives, liquidation of all human workers, and destruction of the city itself via nuclear explosion. Much later turns out to be justified, as the company was plotting to overthrow the royal government itself, the punishment for which would have resulted in the next ten generations of the perpetrators' families, relatives, associates, and neighbors being kill-on-sight.
• Those Were Only Their Scouts:
  • After taking out the crusher worm, it turns out there are plenty more of them ready to be activated.
  • With Justice, it turns out that their personality had been digitized and mass-produced with the General showing the countless Justices before them.
  • When the central factory's core is taken out, all the other cores start lighting up as they activate.
• To Be Lawful or Good: Major Song acknowledges the good deeds that The General has done in Mago City, but states that they have to take him down due to him being a combat droid. She flips her opinion after finding out that the droid really is The General.
• Tomato in the Mirror: The General is actually a robot with the personality of Mari's father.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: The credits sequence shows what happened in the aftermath of The General's Heroic Sacrifice. Mari has enlisted as a soldier with her own variant of her father's chain arm, the citizens of Mago City are safely evacuated after it comes to light that the central factory has begun expending energy at an out of control rate, and Justice still patrols Mago City to dissuade any opportunistic thieves attempting to loot the abandoned city.
• You Just Had to Say It: Mari is incredulous at how The General keeps jinxing them with Stock Phrases that are Tempting Fate.
  Mari: Why don't you just get down on your knees and pray for something bad to happen?!
• You Killed My Father:
  • The General is motivated by the death of his daughter by the bomb Sanabi planted with nothing else to live for besides revenge. That's the modified version of his memory anyways. It was his wife who died due to criminal organizations targeting him and he did pursue them, but he retired for the sake of raising his daughter.
  • Mari lost her father to Mago Group and refuses to leave until she's had her own revenge. It's not revenge she's after, but her father's personality data back and the dim hope that he can recognize her.