AI The Somnium Files

So... Between Saito from the First game and Chikara from the second, who's the more horrible and evil person?

Definitely Chikara. Saito might have the higher body count (at least onscreen), but what happened to Uru went way darker than I was initially expecting, let alone everything else he did.

I bet even Saito would be disgusted by Chikara if he knew, especially since Uru is his Half brother.

Yeah. Saito may be a serial killer but at least he has the excuse that he has a mental disorder/messed up brain chemistry that led to his killings. Even Uru has an excuse in that he only killed people who harmed him (Though his whole genocide plan is inexcusable and whether Komeji trying to blackmail him counts as doing him harm is debatable.) and Amame only killed Uru in the heat of the moment. Chikara not only kidnapped a kid and used him as an unwilling organ donor for over a decade, but he performed human experimentation and took joy in torturing children if Bibi's Somnium is to be trusted.

Speaking of which, which Somniums this go around were your favorites and least favorites? Personally I'm not sure which is my favorite but Bibi and Tearer's are easily my least favorites. Bibi's because of how stressful it is with instant death and Tearer's for being the hardest one in the game to the point I had to look up a guide at one point. I also wasn't too big on Iris's at first because I kept losing the final fight, but I eventually figured it out and it was a pretty fun Somnium when you put that aside.

Edited by Chariot on Jul 3rd 2022 at 1:09:47 PM

Bibi's is the worst for sure. But I liked Tearer's since it's going off the usual Zero Escape-style room, and so I skipped the last couple puzzles since the first number in the third room being 9 made the other two very easy to guess.

The sudden One-Winged Angel in Iris' made me laugh the hardest out of anything in the game.

The Shoma ending really got me. Sad but then uplifting.

It made going through the alternate route harder though. Poor Komeji.

Edited by Cortez on Jul 4th 2022 at 4:42:34 AM

Out of the Somniums I've been through so far (I think I'm about to hit the final sequence of events on Ryuki's side of the story) "Nearly Interesting" has stuck with me. The fact that you're "competing" for Amame's traumatic memories is a messed-up, voyueristic concept to begin with, but throw in Komeji, Mizuki, Iris, and Gen proctoring in dead-eyed Creepy Monotone, Komeji emceeing the back half from inside a body bag, some macabre foreshadowing, and the canned studio laughter going off at highly inappropriate moments I found the whole think extremely unsettling. It doesn't help that I already most associate Bach's "Air on the G String" with Se7en and End of Evangelion (speaking of, I certainly did not see that Shout-Out to the infamous "Congratulations!" scene coming).

Wrapped up Ryuki's side of the story and I'm wondering how much death and evil in these games would've been prevented if So frickin' Sejima could keep it in his pants.

By this point Tearer's true identity isn't a mystery at all, I'm pretty sure I know who the masked woman is by now, and I can think of a plausible way that the bodies were cut so cleanly but I still have no idea how the left half of the bodies (I'm going to assume the other victims' left halves are going to start showing up in the present as well) were preserved so perfectly outside of made-up sci-fi technology or the Horadori Institute ginning up fresh clone homunculi or something.

After the reveal that Ryuki's seizures sometimes result in him losing his memory for hours at a time I have to put an asterisk next anything he says or does in his own story that isn't corroborated by other characters because that's the perfect cover to whip out those "you thought it was X, but it was actually Y!" twists and hide other information from the player. Gen and I think Date made off-hand reference to some things (like something about a rocket in Shinjuku?) that I never saw and the game already tried to gaslight me about the existence of Liberty Island so I'm not feeling very trusting ATM.

I wonder if Ryuki did end up wiping Date's harddrive?

I have just finished the game. I will say this. Tokiko Shigure manipulating the player into serving her Moksha on a silver platter is the PEAK of meta twists.

Someone trying to put Amame Doi as a Draco in Leather Pants in the YMMV of Nirvana Initiative is kinda hilarious. And wrong.

I mean its already kinda hilarious nobody has moved her character page from first game despite putting major spoilers for second game in it last time I checked

I like what they did with Chikara at first they seem like a goof, but we slowly get to see what a bastard he is.

I wish their relationship/subplot wasn't so shallowly written because the scene where Lien does the dance for Kizuna was very sweet.

This game's still really good at feeding you that one piece of information that makes everything start to fall into place. I saw the twist of the masked woman being another Mizuki coming from a mile away since a mysterious masked individual put me in the mind of K; I went into the game thinking she was going to turn out to be an aged-up clone made during the timeskip from Mizuki's lost eye or something like that, then thought that maybe she'd been surreptitously experimented on the same way that Shoma had until the truth came out in Kizuna's Somnium. I suspected that some sort of shenanigans were going down when no one made much of a fuss about the other body halves showing up in the "present" (with Komeji in particular being treated like he'd died the other day instead of years ago) and how weirdly inconsistent/underwritten parts of Mizuki's side of the game was feeling but it didn't all come together and click for me until she offhandedly tells Shoma that she has a younger sister and the following sequence of events all but outright tells you the true nature of the timeline. I knew they'd use Ryuki's episodes as a way to hide info from the player!

Somniums: The other Mizuki's was pretty good, very tense and unsettling and the stealth portions didn't bother me once I realized that coming into contact with the glowing objects were what were triggering the QTEs where Chikara turns to look at you (it's real impressive how monstrous Chikara ends up portrayed as when you only have a single real conversation with him in the whole game). In Tearer's Somnium I had to give up and have Aiba solve the second escape room for me but I managed the other two just fine and solved the final password via context clues rather than actually solving the equation (and when I did try to solve it I ended up getting a number that was way off so just as well). It was actually a little jarring to hear Tearer's voice go from the super deep artificial modulated tone to Billy Kametz, not just because I wasn't expecting to hear him again.

I'm just going to assume that since the appendix claims that ABIS uses the prototype Psync machine as a backup that they brought it up to full spec after the events of the first game because otherwise Date and the other Mizuki should've been unable to psync with Tearer through his mask.

Edited by ComicX6 on Jul 13th 2022 at 7:45:19 AM

Honestly the two things putting me off Lien/Kizuna is that it started out with him stalking her and Kizuna acting like he was only with her out of pity when he'd been simping hard for her prior to the incident. If they'd left out that I would've been able to accept it a lot more easily. Still cute though and the best ship of the three or four the game focuses on.

I got spoiled that Mizuki had a sister, but I didn't expect Mizuki to be a clone or that the Masked Woman was said sister. I also got spoiled about the secret ending. Surprisingly, I managed to avoid spoilers for the actual big twist. The only thing that tipped me off to the timeline being wrong was how people treated Komeji's death as being recent instead of six years previous and even that wasn't enough for me to figure out the twist. I completely missed all the other hints.

Edited by Chariot on Jul 13th 2022 at 12:06:19 PM

Until it was mentioned in the game itself the possibility had genuinely never crossed my mind that Boss's daughter would end up being Bibi. I thought that was just going to be another one of the game's running gags! But like, duh, we were playing as her in the exact same time frame that Aiba was supposed to be on a "secret mission" for Boss and how'd Bibi get access to her otherwise? I suppose this means though that there's a good chance Saito killed her during either the Annihilation or Ota routes though...

Finally finished the game. I was pretty impressed with the core mystery and how Uchikoshi figured out a way to have two halves of the "same" body appearing fresh six years apart that made sense within the logic of the story and not involve the supernatural or sci-fi mumbo-jumbo. That would've been beyond me. There are definitely a lot of scenes earlier in the game that I want to review because there's so much foreshadowing that you only realize in hindsight and I'm sure there's a lot more that flew over my head entirely. I never fully got behind the first game's criticism that the Somniums were pure Trial-and-Error Gameplay but this one did a great job of compromising between gamifying them further and using them as storytelling vehicles. Nefarious Institute, Naixatloz's Intentions, Nested Insecurities, Neurotic Inception, and the Nearly Interesting/Nightmare Irreconcilable pair were my favorites. I can't say that the plot is as tightly written as the first game's given that it's more hand-wavey and the nature of the timeline/two player Mizukis twist handcuffs it a bit but the amount of moving parts that were accounted for, many of them very subtle, were impressive.

The emotional core surrounding the Endas and Amame were very strong. Like many I'm sure I was absolutely shocked that Amame of all characters ended up with the final culprit role and how brutally tragic her story ended up being when all was said and done. Her final Somnium where you realize what all the macabre stuff in her first one was foreshadowing and the context behind those leading, prying questions is laid bare was pretty powerful stuff that hit like a ton of bricks. In contrast I found it a strange how the game shied away from some topics that should've been slam dunks insofar as the character writing went. I mentioned how shallow I found Lien and Kizuna's subplot despite there being plenty of fertile ground there, but there's also the fact that, even though it was Mizuki's motivation for taking the case (and joining ABIS to begin with?) nothing's really done with Date's disappearance and when he comes back at the end of the game the whole thing's treated like a joke and an afterthought. Or how, given her route in the first game was all about the definition of family and was one of that game's emotional highlights, she doesn't seem that bothered by learning that her whole life is a lie and that she was actually a science experiment born in a lab. I think she briefly mentions her parents once or twice after the reveal and never again. Don't get me wrong, I did really love how Mizuki just wholehearted embraces the idea that Bibi is her sister without reservation, much more wholesome than wallowing in Cloning Blues angst, but it feels like a missed opportunity to not give the subject a deeper dive when I know that the writing's more than capable of it. I think if Mizuki got two or three more scenes of downtime to herself to sort through everything (like when you'd occasionally visit the shrine in the first game) that would've fixed the issue. The conversation she and Bibi had with Kizuna's father about their time in the orphange togetherduring the epilogue was very sweet at any rate.

In some areas nirvanA Initiative was better than the first game, in other areas it wasn't quite as strong, it all evened out to a worthy sequel that I very much enjoyed, warts and all. The last thing I did on my playthrough was listen to the full version of the song that gets unlocked and it left me a bit misty, so the game did something right (that song also makes a good followup to the big, dumb, goofy Dance Party Ending. If there's a third game I can see it going 50/50 on whether it continues with the simulation theory plot or goes in a different direction. I personally don't consider the nil number ending the "true" end that overwrites the Resolution route since it feels deliberately designed to surgically remove the game's emotional weight and can see it being Another Time'd in the event of a sequel. Or maybe that timeline it could be the spoiler-free version of the game; I don't think any of the major spoilers from this one would require a "Date wearing a Saito mask"-tier hand wave going forward. And I suppose they'd also keep the multiple protag approach since we never got to see Marco in action and he did get as far as getting a proper real-world design and 3D model.

Edited by ComicX6 on Jul 19th 2022 at 11:29:28 AM

Finished the game, it was great being able to finish it blind

It's interesting how both culprits ended up being sympathetic and the most loathsome characters ended up being Chikara, one of the victims.

I do wonder What Tokiko ever saw in him. Speaking of Tokiko, i am not sure how to feel about them.

Do you feel the want to Achieve Moksha?

Sidenote there is bit of character page error I think? I don't think Bibi is a clone from template, she is original modified human and Mizuki is clone of her with "perfected" genes

Correct. Bibi is the original. Mizuki is the clone.

Having beaten both AI games, I can say, despite some of their narrative flaws, I actually don't mind the sex jokes and the general absurdity of the humor, because it's a really good usage of weaponized tonal whiplash. Ai is a series that benefits from the player being as confused, not knowing what exactly is going on, and using the humor to give the player whiplash actually works great as a misdirection tactic. I could be overanalyzing this, but I think it's a really cool aspect for the series a lot of people criticize

Date being horny can be trite for some but for me it never failed making me laugh.

Uchikoshi is teasing AI3

Doesn't surprise me given how Nirvana Initative concluded and how much Uchikoshi can no doubt wring out of the symbolism surrounding the Rule of Three and how it relates to eyes.

I am pretty excited to see the new AI on Bibi who is considered to be a male than a female. That is something to be in the mind to say the least. Let's just wait for now.

Edited by Echidna on Mar 29th 2024 at 9:12:52 AM