Good evening and welcome back.
Please go to your designated seat…
Your chair. Or sofa, if you have paid for the priority ticket.
Here is the infamous second part of the article on Cloé’s Requiem … The one in which we had to spit out facts, the one in which we had to expose all the rottenness surrounding this game!
Excited? I hope so!
… Because we, in reality, were somewhat stained by the time gap between the first and second part of this duology of articles.
“… So you didn’t even want to write?”
It will be unprofessional to say it in the article itself, but … More or less!
You know, we lost … The fire, if you know what I mean : we put off a lot of time before we started writing (to say me, Ele, I’m writing this intro on February 21st, and the release date will be between February 27 and February 28 …) and a lot of past notes saved us, they reminded us of those sleepless weekend evenings when we commented on the whole context of this title and how much we scraped the bottom of the barrel to get there to our “shock conclusions” with statements that not even the worst afternoon talk shows can give you.
But fear not. We had lost our enthusiasm simply because we hadn’t talked about it for a while …
But we are back on track. to hear about Nubarin again, Nanashi No Chiyo, their slips … You will see that we will return with all our energy , and I solemnly promise that we will satisfy all the hype we put in the previous article for this part.
… Above all, we’ll satisfy the hype for of our anger.
We are done looking at overt psychopaths, mentally dissociated people, just insanely jealous mothers, or whatever kind of person the asylum would be home to! We finished reading diaries to get information, analyze in detail dialogues to notice the good part of genius that this game has!
The anger begins! Start from THIS ARTICLE (yes, I’m not afraid to put the caps lock) what for me is the last, painful … And entertaining, for these sick bastards with a thousand eyes 1 , macro part of articles of the entire Ludi Tarantula Archives!
From this game we will go further and further down … But you will see the obvious effects of this general decline (from every single point of view) as time goes on, until the last article on Angels Of Death.
For now, with talking cats, dry expressiveness, correctors for dark circles, contradictions to the messages given by the works themselves …
… And very, very French school uniforms …
(Wow I never thought I would see Michel with a Japanese gakuran and Pierre with a cardigan.)
Sit down once again and watch us flay the ideas you can have about this game as an “innocently soared to the top of the charts”, of “oh, two such young authors made it to the top!”
Watch us skin the entire mask that has covered and still continues to cover Cloé’s Requiem!
Cloé’s Requiem – The business of children
Second Part: Four characters in search of an author
But after this arrogant introduction, let’s take a chill pill … Before we get to the hottest revelations in the article, we need to have a basis for these, right?
Let’s start with a statement:
Cloé’s Requiem, since its first show of popularity, has had outside help left and right.
“Yeah, right! And the crop circles prove the existence of UFOs! Couldn’t this damn title go on alone? You always see rottenness and marketing in everything, I knew it! ”
Thank you! You made me arrive very smoothly to the question I wanted to ask, and to which Pao will answer shortly …
“Why couldn’t this game go on on its own in the first place?”
“Wait, what about the author-work relationship?”
Oh, I forgot! For this article only, to leave you the best at the end, the categories will be swapped , so …
Pao, get the list out!
WORK DEFECTS
Okay, here I am finally back to work to face together, once again, the innermost analysis of this game to begin the second part of this journey!
And also … Hahah yes, Ele mentioned a list. Yes, a list … In fact, as we did from the first Midnight Train review, we decided to draw up a small ranking of the defects that have marked Cloé’s Requiem.
But before introducing it, I’ll give you one of my usual premises.
I know it. I know that somewhere you will be cursing me for having once again this damn piece from Mad Father article …
And it’s time to do the reckoning:
“The clarity of the main plot is essential and the preferable starting point to trace the main path […]”
So far we have in fact seen in the titles that have passed through the Back to The Future to make for most of the cases the great ascent to the red carpet for the category of games that have made the history of the current and which for the most part had the two aces in the sleeve essential for the success of a narrative title: narration and gameplay .
We have therefore seen for most of the cases positive examples to which we always refer as models of inspiration from which to take; from the gameplay exploited to expand the background in which the plot moves (this both in The Witch’s House and in Mad Father , as well as the potential unexpressed by Ib ) to a clear and linear script from the beginning on which the gameplay could support , I speak of Mad Father and in a some sense Misao.
Guys, you know what? If you “stick” to certain titles it is not just for the style , on the contrary I believe that today it is a yardstick that must be overcome if we want to start digging and aiming on the value of these works and treat them with dignity like any other fictional work and not just nostalgic hobbies that take us back to childhood, given how they have evolved. We cannot remain anchored only to the lights that decorate the Christmas tree and let slip the majesty of the fir that lies right in front of us, little noticed compared to the glow of the electronic gadgets that should enhance it and not obscure it . We cannot afford it and neither can you; at least here, with us in the Ludi Tarantula Archives. Think for a moment of Ib as something beyond the “sophisticated and elegant style with an unforgettable experience” or The Witch’s House as different from the “creepy gameover game. and full of animations “; Mad Father is not only in the dramatic content it expresses inspired by family melodramas.
What made the titles we have talked about so far unforgettable, perhaps you know inside you better than me or Ele, was their internal quality . They had a solid, homogeneous structure with clear intentions, they always knew where they wanted to go and everything that wanted to be communicated was communicated. Nothing was left to misunderstanding, or very little; indeed: this consideration has almost always turned out to be true in our eyes for most of the games we’ve talked about well .
The key is structure . Always.
And with this we are actually anticipating one of the themes that will then be dealt with in detail with the article we have planned immediately after the one dedicated to Pocket Mirror ( “Style: The Ultimate Trump Card? ”), so you know I’m giving you a huge spoiler with just that premise.
But back to us.
Maybe you too will have turned up your nose to see “Cloé’s Requiem” in the Back To The Future time-line, it was not treated exactly like “all the other games” especially for what happened since the First Generation onwards in terms of fame. People screamed about it but not too much, the youtubers played it but apart from being a bit influenced by the “final depression” they did not seem particularly active emotionally, the brand was carried forward but the news does not seem to have had any kind of feedback, the history was really circumscribed and “closed” and often there were moments in which, for better or for worse, everyone approached to interpret them as he could.
He looked a bit like “the bastard son”, the one out of place among the other titles in Back To The Future: even The Forest of Drizzling Rain could at least be connected to the author who produced Angels of Death .
So, draw your own conclusions.
Think about the 200 pages we wrote to talk about this title, on how much enthusiasm we have put into talking about it and on the in-depth study dedicated to its characters …
… And now try to welcome with me the sense of inner anger in imagining this game that did not best express the potential it had due to its failure for both of the two pillars that should distinguish these products. Every player or spectator understood one thing for another, something that could be revolutionary was underestimated even by the authors and publishers themselves. I will talk more about this when I address a speech in the paragraph dedicated to the Author-Work relationship, I can promise and assure you that I am not using this term inappropriately.
Storytelling and gameplay. Gameplay and storytelling.
So, my friend who still reads, follow me once again in exploring the ruinous structure of this game by trying to take these words literally: like a visit to a beautiful, unsafe house, because it could collapse from a moment to the next .
– Ranking: from 3rd to 1st place on the podium of the main defects of Cloé’s Requiem –
Actually this part of the paragraph, as I have reiterated so far, could be summed up in a very simple word which is stability .
Stability is built with all the elements that come together, so that is why we will almost inevitably have to try to talk about it in more depth.
3rd PLACE: NO CLARITY
This defect is therefore the first component of its instability . But … Why is Cloé’s Requiem an unclear game?
You could tell me: “hey sister, look, there is no problem in terms of structure! We know that we have to free Cloé from the curse with good feelings by playing together, it is a narrative structure organized through the discovery of the floors of the house as in The Witch’s House and we even discover the reason why Michel ran away at the beginning of the game! “.
Here, but the problem is where the game wanted to tell about the characters. For those lost in the first part of the article remember this: this is a character driven story , so first of all the actions that accomplish and define the characters we could all agree that cannot be unclear to the spectator / player .
This problem I would relegate to various factors, first of all …
-
Consistency between informations
For example, the problem that I have already mentioned in the first part of the article, we see Michel at the beginning of the game, and it does not seem at all that he has just committed two cold-blooded murders!
If the game had been a little more coherent, it would have had to be represented with disturbing elements that could characterize Michel right from the dialogues and not show this side only in game overs, as if it were an accessory feature.
Because if you treat what was for the character a very important turning point for his personality or perception of the world as an element to be overshadowed and then instead in the main scenes you just show him to me as a normal kuudere the player gets confused. You, the author, are thus deflecting the perception of the character in the public eye because a scene like this:
And immediately after a scene like this:
Placed one after the other, they are truly disconnected from each other, when compared with the context we have seen so far!
I will make you understand better what I mean:
If the diary scene is the reason why there will be no more scenes like the game over one then you have to put them on the same level !
We have to see clearly the contrast between his attitudes in the course of the plot!
To take Ellen as an example: many people reasoned about the cruelty of the witch towards other living beings and creatures of the house or about the famous clue of the red icon in the dark room. But all this was always supported by the underlying apathy that was shown in the character ; here we cannot consider disturbing the detail on the protagonist who easily deprives a girl of her eyes if these elements are not found in the main plot.
So my question is: why didn’t you highlight this disturbing side of him in the first dialogue with Cloé ? He seemed to be a really nice guy to her! A little off-putting, of course, but it was exactly the saving vision that Cloé had of him in her diaries.
So, going back to The Witch’s House, it would have the same problem if Ellen didn’t have an apathetic face from the start and the game showed us an image of her as the sunny and kind girl that was Viola for the sheer sake of inserting the shot on stage in the finale.
Well, I’ll tell you something about twists: these have the ability to make us feel really stupid , because, as I said maybe in other circumstances, they just toss the truth in our faces. that had been in front of us all that time .
An excellent fictional work that has this characteristic is the honest one, which never betrays the viewer and nor ever contradicts itself . It is simply based on elements that we take for granted and for this reason they create in us beliefs that seem obvious at first friction and for this we do not pay attention anymore: we avoid explaining a detail because the viewer can fill the gap with his assumptions, and then all he does is show the clues that he will ignore a priori because he is already self-convinced of his own ideas .
For those who missed it, I refer you to to the article about The Witch’s House in which we spoke abundantly of its narrative structure: the diaries of the witch constantly accompanied you to each floor to make you perceive this story as something separate from the character you commanded; you assumed that “you were guiding Viola, a simple house visitor ” simply because the game starts with this quiet girl walking into a house .
Instead, we always had the revealing detail at hand thanks to the character icon , which we took for granted as a personality trait of Viola, and it worked alone as a revealing detail. That’s why this game , not wanting to adopt a traditional or linear narrative form, did not insert dialogue until the twist (excluding the cat as a save point that serves as another telltale clue).
So, given this explanation, returning to Michel: his behaviors are among the most interesting elements of the game; but the most disturbing aspects of her are layers treated only as an accessory, as I have told you so far.
Let’s take a look at narrative facts for a moment. In short: to kill an adult man and woman with that frail body he has, Michel had to land a lot of stabs before seeing them dead – think of the facts of crime news: killers inexperienced with edged weapons find themselves raging on the victims with numerous stab wounds before killing them-, that is; this child had the fury to inflict who knows how many stab wounds on two people one after the other .
I mean, really, try to imagine the blood bath in which Michel was immersed.
The lack of coherence with what is seen in most of the time goes to directly undermine the perception that the public has about the character , however, so the game becomes a waste. I mean, what’s the point of writing such complex characters if they don’t have to be understood by the audience?
In reality there is another problem that has constituted the lack of clarity in the exposition and to talk about this unfortunately we would have to show the other side of the coin of what was one of the most unique features of the game, but at the same time we could almost define as the reason why this title could never have remained on the “crest of the wave” for long, that is …
-
The text
Choosing a purely textual narrative mode prohibits the presence of visual elements on stage , which help to remember certain scenes a hundred times more than textual ones!
Add to this …
-
Time
There is too much time between clues and this will cause the spectator / player to get distracted . In fact, I would say that the problem is the arrangement of information in the game timeline …
It is wrong and generates inconsistencies.
I remind you that in order to make such a long article in the first part my sister and I had to rely on our memory, only in this way were we able to make the necessary connections for the analysis .
To give a very, very subtle example why not take Alain’s line in the Moonlight flashback at the beginning of the game… Do you remember it? We had the opportunity to deepen the subject in the analysis of the characters. Recall that we associated the Alain-Cloé relationship with the Michel-Cat relationship: in the game the information about this animal only reaches us at the end of the second act! Furthermore, when the Michel / Alain association returns in a clearer way it is only for a game over , i.e. a variable that may not even be discovered by the player and the association much more difficult .
Let’s remember the appearances in chronological order: start of the game
Then the phrase obtainable in the gameover, close to the first midpoint (so in this case in the middle of the story)
And finally the explanation of the line that becomes obtainable in Michel’s flashback which comes much more later than the gameover described
(Speaking of abandoning the cat “in such a desolate place” I think it deviates a little too much from the intentions that were intended to be given in the game; especially if this concept is taken up again – indeed, anticipated – in such an ambiguous moment as the gameover in which Cloé is killed due to a spurt of violence )
A little experiment. Try reading the lines in this order and you will see that the correlation will be even clearer:
You see? Reading them in succession next to each other has a different effect, they give more the idea of a possible forerunner of a Corruption Arc than the random arrangement they have in the game .
Ah, and consequently to all this…
Hyde: “Lucy, You were pleaning on leaving without saying me goodbye won’t you?”
Lucy (scared): “I’m not going anywhere”
Hyde (approaching): “That’s right, you’re not going anywhere”
FHS – Live performance of Sympathy, Tenderness (reprise) and Confrontation
From the Frank Wildhorn musical Jekyll & amp; Hyde, Opening Night, March 2015
Like this. Just to fish out a trauma together with you and understand together why cases of femicide are still very widespread (and in most cases by men very close sentimentally to the victim). Oh yes, another note to consider: I would like to clarify how in the version of “Con Amore” we will talk about and in the same promotion of what was this Cloé’s Requiem all these disturbing details regarding Cloé and Michel’s relationship have been totally censored .
However, keeping on the same theme and returning to think about the problematic narrative structure there is a scene much more important that we can take as an example….
… That is the diary scene REPEATED after the flashback.
Here it is again. This scene returns in this article as many times as it does in the game: in this case its “reprise” occurs after Michel had just finished telling us about his “first murder”.
… Let’s proceed in order.
If you remember well this scene where he apologizes to Cloé and feels guilty after destroying her house it happens BEFORE Michel’s flashback, so before we could understand that all this time he had somehow associated Cloé with his cat.
So the first problem, first of all, is that much, much earlier was anticipated to us a detail for which at present we cannot make any connections.
But what could be an even bigger problem?
The main problem we encountered was its own repetition : we see it twice in the course of history in a completely decontextualized way .
You remember how long the flashback that explained Michel’s life was long, more or less, don’t you?
In the flashback we learned about: the conflictual relationship with his father; the conflictual relationship with his brother Pierre; the ambiguous and generally conflictual relationship with the maid Charlotte and then the object of comfort represented by the cat Cloè.
Now, the point is that, as I said earlier, the two authors have inserted the scene from Cloé’s diary twice throughout the game to explain to you that the comforting object represented by the cat , was transferred from the cat to the co-star, that is from an animal to a person .
As I said before: the two authors, at the time they developed to the game, have not been able to create immediate links between the main plot elements , you can see it above all in this scene that they wanted to bring you back TWICE just to explain it to you. This is where you realize that no matter how hard they tried to explain the game’s storyline they failed .
Why did I come to this conclusion?
We can see this in the flashback itself .
A lot of elements go between one important detail and another even within this flashback: after we know about the cat that was abandoned by Charlotte we have the quarrel with the father, then the plot moves back to the parent-child conflict ; then there is the scene in which Charlotte is gossiping and even her death/ her accident.
I have prepared an outline for you to understand:
We have the opportunity to get the choice of doing “pat pat”, we can understand that more or less from there that the arc of “Cloé as a cat” is starting. Let’s say that opens definitively with the reading of her diary; because it is here that the problem is revealed to us for the first time through a forced cutscene followed by the excuse made to Cloé.
Then, after the filler gameplay session such as the murder of the cello and dinner, we finally discover Michel’s flashback in which after the presentation of all the elements of his depressing life there is a direct consequence the continuation of the “confort object” theme , because we are clearly shown that the cat is the only comfort element he has left in that house and losing him is it was evidently a hard blow. Then there is the murder of Charlotte with all the explanation relating to the fact that Michel was losing empathy for human life and finally this bloody cat arc closes with a RETURN TO THE DIARY SCENE, a remnant of something old with the addition of the CAPITAL AND RETORICAL EXPLANATION in its textuality which wants to reinforce the meaning of this difficult scene.
So I would say that the problematic element that was randomly inserted here in the structure had to be patched with as much text as possible to badly reconnect the pieces of texture to each other like when trying desperately to stick pieces of paper with tape.
That is really is a mess: between the points that should be part of the subplot on the association of human Chloe with the cat and the overcoming of this infantile vision is in the middle the subplot about Charlotte and her murder ( aka the beginning of the curse) . This element creates real interference!
Do you see? I propose the scheme again!
Whether this plot element had to be explained, this wasn’t the moment, because it completely distracts from what is another plot detail relating to Cloé’s objectification .
Let’s try to remove for a moment the scene where Charlotte was killed and try to propose an alternative solution .
- For starters, once we got this revelation in the flashback that the cat was abandoned in the mountains, I would temporarily stop the flashback. One could take advantage of the fact that Cloé had been standing there watching the performance to immediately make a visual link.
- Then you could show HERE how he had overcome his attachment to the girl , maybe he gets an epiphany, he has a panic attack in which he takes refuge in Cloé but then realizes he being making a mistake; he moves away and isolates itself : so we are shown in a scene in the present and not re-proposing a scene already seen that was created for another plot point.
- And then from here numerous solutions would open up to be able to face the third act: after the interruption of the flashback in fact the opening of the redemptive arc of Michel . It started with the guilt he has already overcome (Cloé’s objectification which he interrupted just in time) to face “the red eye” – perhaps from this plot point it became more and more recurrent; as if to represent a “reminder” to indicate that reminders have been interrupted.
So in short they coould have exploited the focus on “minor” guilt to reveal Michel’s “major” faults all through gradual discovery: you gradually discover what happened in that flashback and then the crime concerning the murder of his father .
So starting from this new proposal try to imagine this tormented boy wandering in the basement, the most underground and darkest place in the mansion, who since his epiphany is surrounded by the vision of red eyes until he reveals the crimes to us, spectators of him. So we could tell here about Michel’s growing insensitivity : from the beginning of the curse (the first murder), up to all the animals he killed in the meantime, up to the release of final violence for which he killed his father . A third act of the kind focused only on this reveal would have given a nice help to the gameplay that would have been more focused on this theme ( and made the l flashback of the Nocturne, or the first meeting between Cloé and Michel, in my opinion still more powerful and poetic in my humble opinion; because you see a boy treated like a saint who has recently rediscovered himself as a monster ) …
… And it would have replaced everything that third act useless and rambling which instead took place in the basement…
Tell me what the fuck these puzzles are supposed to represent and when they are enjoyable.
It, however, was a third act concentrated mainly on Michel (since it focuses on the subplot of the instruments to which blame is assigned; and the place where we have the reveal on the murders ; the place where Charlotte is seen in the form of a curse; and finally it is also the place of the final battle against Alain -we have already seen how here the defeat of Alain can be strong on a symbolic level -) : at least it would have had bases more solid!
Like, the whole mess we described could have been avoided simply by delaying information about a particular plot event to reveal it at a later, more appropriate, time. Unfortunately, this did not happen and we all replayed the reprise of a scene we had already seen due to interference…
I want to highlight once again how these two particular events come one after the other and the alienating effect they give
And to which the consequence, reviewing the scene in the diary and passing again to the point where it speaks of “having treated Cloé like shit” triggered a reaction like this in all of us:
“But what does that mean?” / “Why does it matter now?”
To conclude this first point, let’s say this too.
Perhaps someone will remember that, even without the section dedicated to deepening the characters, we already knew that the article would be divided into two parts. This is because we had already foreseen that talking about this game would be a really long operation for the work of dissecting and interpreting the themes: the reason is, as we have taken the liberty to consider, that nobody understood this game.
Returning, therefore, to our premise: they never wanted to discuss the innovative themes it brought up, even too thoroughly .
Over the years this work has been increasingly mistreated and superficialized, we will see it in the following paragraphs, however, we do not want to assign the blame only to the operation one promotion that followed, you can see here that a good percentage of this fault is the work itself .
And, in reality, there is another flaw inherent in this great issue relating to stability to be considered. I’ll call it like this:
-
The text, PT.2
In fact, in the last act, especially following the flashback of the Nocturne and the approach of the “final big bosses”, there was a great excessive presence of the text .
[…]
[…]
[…]
The text prevailed over everything and overwhelmed the feelings it wanted to tell, ending up in a spiral of retorical mental blowjobs.
In general I could say that from a certain point in the game the plot became more and more synthetic by closing badly the arcs that had been opened and introducing elements that only confused the ideas, this did not help the narrative plot already incomplete in itself.
But all this… All this actually reveals to us the sincerity and transparency in the production of this title by those who could be called true random authors. A great commitment certainly, but little experience that deserved to be acquired over time.
2nd PLACE: THE FILLER GAMEPLAY IS HARMFUL
Gameplay? Did anyone say “Gameplay”?
Yes, I’m back, EleRantula to report!
So, before going into the details that also concern the narration, which my sister will take care of, let’s analyze how the story of Chloé ‘s Requiem makes us play.
Good. As I mentioned in the appendix on the characters I wrote together with the first part of the article, this is one of my favorite Horror RPGs …
But I definitely didn’t replay it twelve times because I really liked “playing” it.
Simply because, guys, the gameplay of Cloé’s Requiem … It’s harmful.
Yes, you read it in the title. But let me explain better.
Hey, back there! I see you, what is it now ?!
“… If the gameplay is so ‘harmful’, problematic and all you want … Why don’t you put it on the same footing as Midnight Train, huh? What, do you like the characters so you ignore a gameplay totally detached from the plot and badly done? “
Ah, here it is, a classic.
It is obvious that Midnight Train is a much more serious case.
If you have seen these errors in Cloé’s Requiem …
You know what? It is comprensible.
But let’s cross every “t” : Midnight Train’s puzzles are completely decontextualized from everything we are experiencing, even if it tries way too hard to tell a “great plot”.
In Cloé’s Requiem, simply … Except for a few cases (the eyes of the dolls, the murder of the cello and the parts in the third act), the puzzles serve to introduce subplots , or in any case elements connected to the context (the various phases connected to the waitresses, which form a large part of the second floor, the introduction to the red eye symbol to indicate Charlotte and many other examples.)
Introducing subplots through a first encounter with characters / contexts /… through a playable phase is a good system to adopt.
… If only these subplots were ever developed or continued in some way!
All these ideas to create a stronger context, a more complicated plot and a larger cast… They disappear. They dissolve.
Poof. Gone With the Wind.
“Buriki Clock, if you just introduce me, without developing me… After my introductory cutscene, what will become of me…?”
“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
Oookay Ele, after this introduction, let’s go back to the base.
So here I am, I’m Pain-In-The-Ass-PaoGun. Perhaps someone will remember what I wrote in the first part of the article for what concerned the subplot of Cloé’s mother.
Given all the premises that Ele kindly gave us, I believe that the time has finally come to confront ourselves in the round with this arc. We try to understand exactly what the problem is and we tackle everything step by step.
First of all I propose here the scheme that Ele made, cause she remembered the game unlike me. Yes, I suck.
(The red wiriting are “personal notes” in Italian language that my sister used for help me…I’m sorry guys, we don’t have time to correct them)
“Well?” You must be thinking now.
“What is problematic about this scheme? It is the management of a counter-clockwise second floor gameplay! It is very geometric and clear… ”
You have no idea how confusing this game is.
We had already mentioned in the Mad Father article about the variety of actions that must be taken before moving from one area to another, however these were situations and puzzles that you could deal with from the beginning without waiting to finish the ‘previous riddle . This was Mad Father’s greatest asset.
But in Mad Father the elements correlated well with each other . There was a manageable zone and a clear division between the elements that were needed to tell you a part of the plot (see Aya’s mom perfume unlocking you a flashback, and it came back a second time when Coron stole it from you and when Aya used it to make mice escape) and those needed mainly for gameplay; you were perfectly able to understand and carry with you the crucial elements for the entire gaming experience .
Let’s take an example: the chainsaw.
It is introduced with a flashback to make you understand immediately the role of that particular object in the plot and then sen makes sure that you cannot forget by letting you use both to break free-wheeling barrels and to solve a puzzle .
Instead, for Cloé’s Requiem we needed a scheme to try to remind us how the gameplay was structured. Because it was hard to remember , making associations based on memory alone was impossible , if we want to exaggerate.
What we have realized from this diagram is that can be used to summarize all the flaws we have complained about so far …
… But let’s get our hands dirty right away and see how the narrative arcs were presented on the second floor of the house .
1 ° – THE MAID’S ROOM
So, it all begins when you finish playing the Moonlight and get the key to enter this room . The theme of maids and the association with teddy bears is introduced.
We find a note on the maids who worked in the house: therefore you have to cut the bear to unlock access to the new room, the mother’s room (this part of the puzzle could be translated as a reference to the puzzles of The Witch’s House now that I think about it, as were the dolls in the first floor).
2 ° – THE MOTHER’S ROOM
What can I say, we commented on this scene at length in the first part of this epic quest which is the article on Cloé’s Requiem.
We have described it as the best scene in the game and we can now define what is the opening of a subplot: we are in fact delving into the fate of the maids in the Ardennes household.
EVEN IF: Yes, in the first part of the article I called it “Mother’s Arc”, okay, I was wrong, but this is because it deepens a lot on the thoughts of this woman, but let’s say that at least towards the end of the diary you return to talk about the abuses suffered by the maids.
The vision of maids as teddy bears is strengthened: in short, this form of objectification of people is passed from a mother towards her daughter to a mistress towards her servants.
Thinking about it now, it’s not that it feels terrible, technically in chronological order the maids were the first to be represented as teddy bears and therefore diminished in their identity as human beings …
…But I repeat that on the one hand, for what we read in the diary, I would have preferred that the theme linked to the figure of the teddy bear, something so “cute and innocent” had been maintained towards her daughter because, I repeat, it would have not only spoke of a much stronger and more twisted bond but, also given the girl’s design , it would have been a much more impactful detail.
3 ° – CLOE’S ROOM ’
And here we have a break.
Why am I saying this? The mother killed the waitresses okay, we saw it from both points of view.
Yet I am using this term, “interruption”, because after we have already delved into a new plot aspect linked to Cloé’s past, we will unlock another maids room that we will need. to close their subplot .
But. B-but but. Sorry. But uh, just do it first?
Anyway, then we’ll get to talking well about the last room.
What I mean is that their story eventually stops suddenly before we can be told the details or have some kind of conclusion . It’s very strange because by now Cloé’s flashback should have caught all the attention of the player ; among other things, in the meantime we saw another digression because we had received some music scores and it became known that the piano broke ; then the player should be ready to go on with the main storyline … And then instead from the third floor we find ourselves back in the second , where they will go through the story of the maids again!
… And their story, so to speak, had no impact on the perception of the main flashback . That is, their fate, whether we knew it or not, made no difference . Do you remember the mother’s diary? At least there was more connection between the two topics.
About elements that will never return never again in the course of narrative development and to which it will be very difficult to attribute a precise meaning to them : in the screen of this third point we mentioned one ….
Yo, too, bro.
(Yes, we know that’s a type of greeting used in Japan)
4 ° – THE ROOM of the maids (conclusion)
Of course. We had not removed them from us: their story had yet to be finished , because they had to make us understand that their bodies had been burned and we will have to burn the teddy bears in turn to find out.
After this last action that must be performed for the gameplay only now we can define the arc of the waitresses concluded, with an important piece of the main plot which meanwhile moved on without them .
I want to anticipate a probable objection that might come to your mind: with the fact that they come back even later as wisps who prepare dinner perhaps I should doubt the narrative structure that I assumed it was meant for them and think again about the possibility that it was a purpose-built subplot so fragmented , but …. I would prefer to see that point of the game it as a sort of epilogue of their bizarre story: that is, now they are spirits; is no longer something that concerns them as closely as the deaths they suffered .
So, in short, I can say that my rage quit can be justified:
Why the fuck was the flashback to Cloé’s past if before we still had to close the story arc on the maids?
That is, I repeat, it is obvious that their story thus takes a back seat and it becomes much more difficult to remember .
And another factor not to be overlooked in this great mess that is this little arc is this…
Why are you already anticipating Charlotte’s presence in the same room?
“Ehhh because she’s a maid too!”
But what kind of crappy justification is that? No, I can’t accept it.
But damn it, we haven’t even been introduced to the character so obviously the player can’t make any connections . But we hadn’t even been made to understand that had something to do with Michel’s past!
You look at these eyes and you think they are just scene details to make the house more creepy , you think they are something to overlook , when instead you go on in the game and you only discover that they are a representation of the curse from which the main character suffers! I mean, nothing important, really.
So: the association with the cat / diary scene; the narrative arc of the waitresses on which Cloé’s flashback is superimposed, the bad presentation of Charlotte within the game; all this has to do with the very technical world of information distribution in a story.
Returning once again to Charlotte, to make you aware of the gravity of the situation I would like to shift the subject on the temporal level. Look, I try to give you an approximate time.
Considering what our playing times have been (with Ele we replayed on purpose to be able to do the calculation…Even If I admit we chatted a lot during the playing) four hours (or three…) pass before we are finally explained what the fuck the red eyes mean!
And then the point is that the red eye , something so important related to the murders that Michel committed, is not even that recurring in the game . Indeed, it appears in a room where a subplot is already closing, as you have seen.
“You’re a jerk! Those red eyes are just maids!”
Ah. So how does it work? Every maid in town when she is hired also gets a passport to the afterlife: “when you die you will acquire the eye of Big Brother”? That is, if I had to choose to picture this (that the maids are so present in the house , through eyes, teddy bears and wisps more than the mistress herself at home … Not the excuse that they died with hatred and for this reason they have “a shape of their own” I do not accept it: in how many ways they would like to but show these women?) or make a nice plot link and associate the red eye with Charlotte (which if she says “I’ve been watching you all this time” it would be nicer to imagine that from the beginning of the game those eyes were referring to this sentence)… I prefer to link to the main storyline and link the red eye only to Charlotte.
On the one hand, offering you even a minute of the title as I did in this article, it might seem at first friction an analysis of a person who gets angry for a while and “you can’t enjoy a work of fiction like a normal person ” . No, that’s not it, really.
Because these defects such as coherence within a narrative STRUCTURE deserve to be treated . The narrative structure will also be something invisible in an audiovisual narrative work compared to, perhaps, the graphic style; but it is actually the logical basis on which we build the emotions for which we will remember that work . They have to do with our experience , with what we live.
I am getting really angry about this type of flaw because, as I told you, are those types of flaws so internal to the structure itself that risk too much of altering the perception of the spectator / player compared with the work , so if they do not understand the intentions of the work itself or of the author it ends up in some cases that the spectator / player adds their own interpretations or in the worst case that they forget what they see simply because they do not understand it; and do not want to try too hard to do so if the work is not as collaborative.
So, here is a wasted opportunity; especially in cases like this game where such interesting and current topics have been dealt with.
And so I want to conclude the gameplay analysis. You saw it from the diagram we presented to you on the second floor: it is dispersive , really. And we tried to prove it to you.
1st PLACE – The supernatural content
Believe it or not, so far we have discussed two major flaws in what was just the form . That is, the way content was narrated .
This one that we will put first is not a defect concerning the form, but a very serious defect concerning the contents themselves . Nor is it a content like any other, but an element through which the entire supernatural subplot of the game is supported.
Gentlemen, we are talking about THE CATS; or the supernatural subplot that was supposed to sustain all this acid trip-
That’s right, let’s talk about these little things now. Attach the bell to Noir, Attach the bell to Blanc, good sister and bad sister and the bad sister who becomes a cat. Mew Mew, amiche vincenti…(first words of the italian opening of Tokyo Mew Mew)
Ah, no, sorry, not her.
Actually with these screens I have already partially anticipated the main problem that these cats bring … (I am referring above all to a screen in particular).
Apart from the fact that it is a background which is explained little and badly : the idea of curses taking on their own form is nice, but why a person should transform themselves right in a cat together with their own curse? I mean, what twisted point is this? But this would be part of the first two flaws on the writing and therefore on the narrative structure that we have already discussed extensively.
So … Apart from these problems, the reason I put this point in the first place is only one and it is very simple . That is, simple even if you followed Ele’s article on the characters and on the educational path that Michel pursued. And this also concerns Cloé to a large extent.
… I remind you of the screens.
(She know everything)
Here, now that we’re at it. I remind you once again the two screens of the apocalypse that we have been discussing for a long part of the duration of this article!
Okay! Okay! We are in pool position. We are getting there … You may have arrived there …….
……Here it comes…!
THEREFORE. The reason why I put this plot element first is that IT COMPLETELY GOES IN CONTRADICTION WITH AN ELEMENT, equally important in the plot, THAT WAS INTRODUCED BEFORE!
And one of the most important and difficult rules to keep in mind in a work of fiction is: NEVER LET THE ELEMENTS ENTER INTO CONTRADICTION WITHIN THEM. Because this generates paradoxes from which it is then difficult to get out and find a solution.
That is.
As the good Richard Benson said:
“Are you fucking kidding me ?!”
That is… .Yes. Like Ichigo from Mew Mew, in this version of Cloé’s Requiem Cloé has been turning into a cat all this time!
The astral projection probably came from the cat. Yeah, as a “projection” otherwise where the hell it should project itself. By the way: why she turned into a cat and Michel didn’t? What exactly are the requirements to make this element true ?!
I don’t know if you are perceiving this as the colossal bullshit I am perceiving .
Let’s try to look at it a little from various points of view.
FIRST. As I had anticipated in the Appendix on the characters by sneaking a few sentences from Ele, the separation of Cloé into two cats has removed the possibility of having a development arc that could be as complex as that of Michel , never being able to confront his “cursed personality”.
If Cloé had dealt with this more frustrated side of her personality in a different and more human way, for example approaching her case as an actual identity dissociation disorder (therefore having only one “physical character” on stage that changed their personality), the moral would have been closed in a clear and explicit way and the message of not to pass from an excess would have been given to another in the vision of a human being (as a saint or as a demon depending on our personal advantage) , but to recognize a nuance in people between black and white which is gray , the more complex shade – and would have been a great result for the Horror RPG genre, where now almost by definition people are deliberately demonized and made monstrous …
I’m not mentioning these two at random, we mentioned their cases just when we were talking about Michel
Once I had heard two Italian youtubers commenting on the “ How filthy ” scene. When asked by the colleague “what is happening?” seeing the protagonist break the furniture, the other replied more or less like this:
“Ah, well, it’s normal for it to behave like this , in Horror RPGs these things always happen … ”
I don’t know what you think, but what I think is that when you choose a genre you are actually choosing a linguistic code . A code for talking about certain facets of characters does not make these slaves the genre they belong to .
The reason why we think that the characters in this game, if re-evaluated properly by the authors and publishers, could be revolutionary in a context more related to the sphere of marketing is that they would overturned the canons of normal characters who in a great fandom come from the sphere of “gore” which are horror narrative works and would have done it with great maturity.
Moreover, they would have done this through a more traditional narrative form, therefore with the association of the themes that occurs indirectly (and with this advance partly what I said earlier when I mentioned the team game Salvato: not necessarily the stereotypes of certain types of characters would have fallen through more experimental products such as Doki Doki Literature Club; which followed a more fragmented narrative approach – the numerous variations based on route- and meta).
SECOND, the most important.
With the existence of this clause Michel’s arc of redemption becomes a joke, because we reiterate that it is really stupid to make him regret having treated Cloé as a object of comfort , in this case a pet, if you then make this plot detail true .
I mean, really, it’s stupid. Very very stupid.
To make you realize the gravity of the situation: wanna cry? Well, get this little summary of screens in succession.
Here, wipe away your tears and now think that they made her a real cat because of this poorly explained plot detail. Doesn’t it make you angry to think how little you get it right with respect to the whole tragic aspect of her story? Something tells me that this very serious contradiction was created because they did not know how to explain the existence of two Cloés in the house. Here’s why.
PLUS, beyond these two very serious points to take into consideration, let’s just try to think that, like a virus , these two beasts of the Devil not only infected the quality of the original game, but to explain their subplot, the authors were pushed to create this abortion…
So you have to be careful. “Simply” this. You simply need to have a little more awareness, so as to decide what to keep and what to cut to follow a logical thread of the single discourse.
Really, you can add all the themes you want in a work but it is very important that the points you want to deepen do not contradict each other .
But nevertheless, despite all this anger that exploded during the writing of this article, there is an even more important point that we would like to reiterate ….
And it’s that we really have a deep affection for this game.
We continue and we will continue to take up the cudgels for it : these are not mistakes made out of pretentiousness or malice, whim or laziness for that matter but simple clumsiness of the first experience .
PACKAGING
And to conclude this great “chapter” of the article in which we demonstrated how Cloé’s Requiem is a too amateurish game for the new needs narrative drawn up for the Second Generation of Horror RPGs we will talk about Packaging in general as a further confirmation of this thesis… The Packaging will however be an appendix.
We want to treat the aesthetic style like an appendix , you got it right.
So let’s try to walk the end of our path by commenting on the graphic aspect.
I immediately start by saying that I will not bring you another screenshot of the game here to see the maps because by now, really, in terms of screenshots of this damn game I imagine that you are saturated with regard to our articles: if you rewrite a bit you can review them and realize for yourself that only the lighting of the environments is saved, because in themselves the tilesets of Rpg Maker arranged in that way are not all this marvel and make the title, unfortunately, really amateur .
On this I want to point out an important detail: certainly there do you remember the abysmal change of style of Corpse Party Blood Covered compared to the original CORPSE-PARTY (the ’96 one): you can see that a production company got its hands on it because there was an important modernization work also on the graphic level .
You see what a difference, the quality has improved a lot (even if these versions like this …. I didn’t mind the retro graphics at all I have to admit that to widen the target it was really necessary to modernize them).
Well, it doesn’t seem strange to you that for having had an external help Cloé’s Requiem -Con Amore- has kept the same bad quality of the maps?
In short, in this damn new version on which they will base a remake they have only taken care of to change the focus of the themes .
But …. As we always say: everything has its time. We will return to this topic.
So here we are talking about the packaging … On the cover I would not have anything special to say; there are the silhouettes of the characters drawn in an almost skeletal way, I am not particularly crazy about it but I admit that there is a good filling of the screen. The logo in the center, the two figures on the sides and the icons of the two instruments above and below; it’s good.
What some players have said is “unusual”, and so many of their compatriots on Freem! that released reviews also thought, is not so much in the menu (putting the character in the center with the features on the sides in my opinion is a good and very intuitive choice) as in the strange functionality concerning the equipment system of the objects .
As Ele might well explain to you, the equipment system is a default feature that the engine offers you when you start a random project; we know well that RPG Maker is a tool created to generally design fantasy titles in which there are battles to be faced and therefore weapons to be equipped, which give a certain percentage of attack, defense and other technical values to be set in based on your battle strategy. Probably the two girls at the time will have seen this default feature and will have considered it useful to assign conditions in which having equipped tot object made something happen; removing any numerical values.
What does this make us understand? Once again this detail is useful to make us understand the nature of “casual game” that had this title that did not even bother to stray a bit from the default features, both for the maps and for the UI interface.
Perfect, you are now prepared. You have had all our justifications even if in case this article will ever be seen by a wide audience, the flame will always have for the minimum paragraph a biiit less argued than the others.
But you know… It’s also to keep our conscience clear.
So now we’re in the final sections.
Authors-Opera relationship, what can I say?
Thanks to the first part, we re-introduce Nubarin and Nanashi No Chiyo , the two cousins who worked on the object of our screams:
Left: Nubarin (scenery, drawings, character design), on the right Nanashi No Chiyo (music, outline of the story).
You have already seen this image: the two girls even made it to the Tokyo Game Show.
But heck, you have seen how many problems and how little marketable the game actually is! We had an entire section dedicated to the lack of narrative clarity, the harmful and dispersed gameplay in information, as well as the fact that certain characters are the total opposite of “marketable stars”!
So why? Why did they get so high in their boom period?
Keep glued to your sets, people, because here we will introduce a real trip of various points that, when I sensed them in the aforementioned sleepless weekends, stunned me for a week.
But let’s go very slowly … Let’s review what has been for them in the period of success , and take some information that, if analyzed better, can lead to quite uncomfortable conclusions …
(They are translated somewhat roughly in English, given my no knowledge of Japanese. But I’m sure of the concepts.)
Why did I underline these parts of articles? Don’t like the writers’ choice of words? Do I want to criticize them in some way?
Nah . Here we are talking about something much more external to the precise interviews, and more related to the image that was given in general of the two authors, which (possibly, this may be a conjecture) has also brought more people to the game.
I have personally noticed that in many interviews given by them it is always quoted or in any case emphasized that “These two girls are (they had, by now. Nubarin graduated, so to speak) only 19 and 16 and have created a video game!”
Here we begin to talk about a real case of marketing operation done on the person of the authors themselves .
Why guys, if you are asked what image do you have of the “game developer” what do you have in mind?
Exactly.
But let’s get to what I mean .
Let’s talk for a moment about anime / manga culture. Fans of these types of media (call them what you want: otaku, albeit a negative term, weaboo, weeb…) are the main target of HOR-RPG, whether the audience is Eastern or Western.
We know how popular is the attachment to the imagination of the young, pretty and pure girl by this community.
Artist: ク ロ (Kuro) on pixiv.com
(Something tells me this fanart will look much more disturbing to readers my appendix about the characters of the game …)
In one obviously very very subtle case, I believe that this was reflected in how Nubarin and Nanashi were treated in the indie gaming industry . And no, I don’t think it has to do with the fact that people ask thems how they organized themselves with school: even an adult game developer has to get organized with work, right? So, let’s get back to us.
“ Girls (I would add that in my opinion if they had been boys the impression on them would have changed radically…) which are very young have approached something as technical as creating a video game ?! ”
(As an Italian I had to, sorry)
What more do I need to say? The situation explains itself.
The youth and … Even gender, it seems (this detail is often emphasized in titles or interviews) of the game’s authors has been largely exploited to get the title higher, even if this game is not at its own made for a large audience.
“Oh how cute, the little girls did a game.”
Yes, since I’m a damned sadist, I want to give you the sickest or most annoying image of this thing possible. Are my morals coming into play? Certainly. Can you consider it a “normal operation”, disagree with me and consider what I say a gigantic hyperbole? Obviously.
But as a girl who is the same age Nanashi was when she and her cousin released Cloé’s Requiem, these reactions, general shock and “ cute-ization” of what actually were two game developers like any other in the world …
Pull out the sociological analyzes you want, this discourse can be further expanded. I just say they honestly make me puzzled.
But after this first revelation, we can move on to another question:
If they had this type of popularity, given more by the idea they give the authors than by the quality of the title itself, how did it affect the future works of Buriki Clock?
Fantasy Maiden’s Odd Hideout , as good a thriller as it is, but it features many unclosed subplots, a few holes in the script given in part by them, and a pretty long filler subspecies that makes the game very long and, when the plot does not go on, also quite heavy.
Trauma Traum … I don’t know if the fact that we don’t know Japanese is a big issue, but playing it with the translator we noticed (in the early stages) a general lack of linearity and lack of clarity that made the game borderline tedious. And here not even the characters are good, as they are all walking and living stereotypes.
From these two very brief analyzes you can see one thing: no one taught Buriki Clock, no matter how old they have grown and how far they have progressed with their education, that their way of doing game development had huge flaws, if they wanted to expand professionally.
So simply … They made the same mistakes they made with Cloé’s Requiem . Indeed, they worsened with Trauma Traum .
But in those cases there were neither competitions, nor the “first debut” factor to save them from the great ditch that is being forgotten by the internet.
But to see what I mean, we enter the mud barefoot (not to mention another brown substance, smelly and with a soft consistency), let’s see …
…………………………… ..
…………………………… .. 2
OK then. Let’s talk about this .
For Cloé’s Requiem: With Amore there is a file with an incomplete translation of the dialogues, so we were able to better analyze everything during our confusing actual game play.
I start by saying that Con Amore is neither a spin-off nor an extra edition (as they want us to pass) … Con Amore isn’t even a game, come to think of it, given the total lack of stimulating gameplay.
Con Amore is … A bad idea. 3
Yes, many Italians will find the quote to Yotobi inappropriate, but at least I find many similarities with the case analyzed by him, the one that concerns the italian actor Beppe Convertini.
“Your characters are beautiful, girls, fangirls and fanboys love them! What would you say to doing something else together? Like an idiocy? “ 4
-Possible sentence said by a random member of KADOKAWA to Nubarin and Nanashi.
Guys, really, people who have seen that video have surely noticed that even Con Amore is a product that aims only at “fun, tragedy and romance for boys and girls ot all ages ”!
“-Walk around Michel
-Sit on his lap “
(I would like to point out the second choice that yes, some cats do, but … This cat has a human conscience. I mean. She thought about doing this with a human brain. Furry bestiality?)
“Aw, you wanna play?”
(Furry bestiality. How ambiguous all this is.)
Okay, I’ll stop with the analogies with The Ideal Boyfriend, I risk abusing them!
I hope that this case analyzed by Yotobi has helped you to understand what the structure of Con Amore really is: very simple “playable” clips of a non-existent (because, for all that the boys of Cloé’s Requiem have done and experienced in their lives, that life is really a utopia: maybe they could be angry just because some biscuits for breakfast 5 …) daily life.
It features the four main characters and …
Goddamn furries .
Period. Really, my description of Con Amore ends here.
“But plot elements are mentioned when you go to Cloé’s house!”
Ah? So re-playing Cloé’s Requiem from the point of view of the annoying kitten considered a real “plot”?!
“But there are adds-“
Oh, let’s talk about the additions Con Amore has made to the storyline now…
… Like the justification to a rapist !
This is a plot element that deserves to be explained, along with other ABYSSAL BULLSHIT (such as the resurrection of Cloé, a cat’s dream of becoming human; Alain’s plan to have Cloé cursed so “his beloved child, sick from birth, would live forever” ) , we needed a whole game, don’t you think, fucking goddammit?!
“I’m afraid of losing Cloé. He* seemed obsessed with it ”
* In the “game” you see a “demonized” version of Charlotte (this storyline is part of the so-called abyssal bullshit …) , a cursed version of her spirit. In the scene it is quite clear that with “Him” Alain refers to HIS personal cursed version.
My God.
The curse! It was the curse that raped Chloé!
It was him*! The one who can’t be named!
Sure sure! Sick people do not exist, it is always something / someone else’s fault!
My God, I’m having flashbacks of …
SHUT THE FUCK UP!
…
…
Guys. Let’s be aware: in this product everything that must not be done is concentrated in something done for pure marketing.
A very serious thing like rape was justified to create yet another reason for “comfort”, so it was lightened (disrespectfully) in a huge way Cloé’s heavy backstory , also making her a less tragic character .
You would have found it uncomfortable to dress such a traumatized girl as a Japanese maid, eh?
(This stuff also has 91 retweets.)
We will discuss it later as one of the three case studies that we will address in the article on the “Selfish Confort Dilemma” …
But for now we can consider this recent catastrophe as a demon .
A demon that sucks out all the possible depth of any story, just because the audience has to freak out about how “keeewl” a generic hot character is in the game without fear of cheering on psychopaths, pedophiles, hysterics or just … Pieces of shit!
Moreover, to put salt on the wound of my poor and young heart, in this jumble of all that is wrong in the world they try to patch up the few clarity of plot with careless justifications by not telling any story and also joining in form of “videogame” the characters reduced to the bone and dried of all their personality, and have been used in vulgar marketing operations to beg for public!
“I’m afraid of losing Cloé. He * seemed obsessed with it ”
…
… Tu quoque Petro, fili mi…? 6
We are good, let’s try to explain to you what message they tried to launch with the new plot:
In short Cloé’s Requiem “Con Amore” already from the subtitle should make you understand that llllove is the central theme. Am I right?
“Warm”
Mh. Unambiguous word to say to the person who has just welcomed you.
“This whole world gives me warmth”
It’s global warming.
Many times Noir repeats in the course of the game that “ was loved by many people , everyone took care of her “, from the Alembert house to the Ardennes house in which we are covered with fucking cloying daily skits; instead… Blanc became Alain’s scapegoat . Let me explain.
Because they added the subplot that “Chloé would be doomed to die because of poor health from infancy”, so by a certain age she would be dead anyway?! (In the original version she was weak because she hadn’t eaten and slept for days as she said herself; even the curse had weakened her) Alain realized that not even medicines could help her, so he inquired about the curses to look for a way to make it survive longer. And since curses take on a life of their own from very strong feelings he must have seen fit to beat up this poor cat to see how the phenomenon happened. And I swear, you see scenes where you see Blanc’s corpse covered in blood and after a few scenes it’s like nothing has happened to him, but he’s just very, very pissed off.
So if the concept was not clear I repeat: if in that house the father raped his daughter it was because of Blanc , who somehow had some strange side effect about this asshole beating him up.
“I’m back”
…
“BITCHES!” (Ele’s artistic freedom)
… But also Noir, when it looked like she was killed when the house was infested with curses here and there, was able to resurrect! As it is anticipated at the beginning of the game on the other hand.
So TAN TAN she came back just in time when Michel arrived at Cloé’s home for the sanitation- I mean, purification peration. Here basically we live the plot of the previous game where the two play and look for scores (indeed the cat helps them to look for them because “the music and the scores represent the dimension of happy memories”, let’s remember) and Noir, helping Cloé to resurrect when she seemed dead, gave her back “the love received” by bringing her back to life as Blanc returned the hatred to her father , managing to prove “to the viewer” that if you do good you will receive good in return and if you do evil it will go against you; and demonstrating instead to Blanc, probably, that hate will also be a strong feeling that it will survive for a long time, but love always wins over everything and even death; in the face of the old plot in which the black cat had to kill the white one!
All very nice, too bad that:
1. These WERE NOT the issues that the original game treated. That is, the story of Cloé’s Requiem was something much more “internal” and mature, we explored the different human facets as we had to see together. It was the story of this boy who had a growth path ; ideally moving away from a social context in which there was child exploitation (it is also mentioned in a dialogue between Charlotte and Michel to say – she was happy to sleep in a bed warm and get some bread every day, while Michel simply believed that they had hired Charlotte only because it was cheap given her young age-; so, to say, this theme was not so hidden ); a social context in which children like him and Pierre were used as a source of income , a social context in which there was silence where the girls became sexual objects , a social context in which there was the objectification of the same waitresses literally torn to pieces like soft toys, because used as an outlet for the frustrations of a high-rank crazy woman (it would have been too gore and unrealistic as an element, but it can’t be more explicit than that…).
…From all this context we have simply seen how Michel, destined to grow as a future executioner had the courage to become aware of his sins and then GO AGAINST THE CURRENT; and in all this it seems to me that in the world we live in, considering the easy distortion of the image that you can have of your neighbor a refresher on all these issues related to objectification can only do well.
In short: we know that probably following the epilogue of the game he will go to prison as he says he has to “go back”; therefore after the expiation of his guilt we can feel reassured that he will become a responsible and conscientious adult and , why not, who will be able to actively intervene against future abuses that he could witness during his life. Really, again, realize how important this experience he had was.
2. This is a message (the one Con Amore delivers) that we honestly perceive as very simplistic: surely there is some truth regarding the rotation of karma, if we want to put it this way, but to say that “if you receive hate you will cultivate hatred and if receive love you will cultivate love “, put in such an abstract way and REGARDLESS of the personality of each one … It puzzles us. In short, everyone faces the difficulties of life in his own way, again: see Michel himself from the original game that managed to detach himself from the abuses he suffered in first person!
But let’s say that this second point “is a detail”, let’s not dwell too long.
Anyway, let’s get back to us.
Guys … This type of story, characters and justifications want to replace the original truths that we analyzed in the Trump Card.
“We have decided to make a remake of Cloé’s Requiem!”
And there are the two furries.
…
I need soda, I need to have the energy to give you the second big reveal about this game.
I go and come back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBlFHuCzPgY
…. Okay, here I am again .
So, guys … Let me put up with this umpteenth stab in the heart and answer this question yourself:
“Why are they doing a remake, possibly changing the whole tones of the story and the characters, because of these kittens making everything so much more beautiful and cute?”
Here, someone raises their hand … There, in the back row!
“For money!”
…
Eh… More or less.
If they only wanted to squeeze the product it had to be more marketable, and only then could they do remakes, releases on consoles and so on.
You see how sen did it, right? Their product left the road open for them!
In many promotional images we continue to see Alfred as a monster exactly as he was seen in the original game, there has been no work of softening, indeed.
That is to say: this is the actual header found on Steam .
In my opinion there is something else underneath.
Let’s see, in view of this remake, if there have been any promotional art on the game …
No.
Useless or without context art does not count …
Nothing, I can’t find anything!
Nothing… No cursed pianos, no murders of musical instruments, no cursed Cloé, no very disturbing Alain…?
Strange. To be the game they now push as a workhorse (or rather, how they clung with their nails to their previous successes …) there is little promotion of its true content .
Well guys, from this sudden remake and this lack of promotion of the Cloé’s Requiem that came before “Con Amore” … I can theorize that for the authors, given what they want to do now with these poor guys , it is very likely that the original Cloé’s Requiem was just a draft.
Or to be more exaggerated, an error .
A jumble of concepts that they have tried to put together in a plot, but which they have still felt incomplete, because many of these are not explained or left too much to interpretation.
But at this point, even with remakes, reboots and so on and so forth: in these times, people are fighting on who is best distributed …
“I’m afraid of losing Cloé. He * seemed obsessed with it ”
[…]
“Keep Cloé alive for as long as possible … How can I do that?”
Bad writers always come out no matter how cute and well designed the characters are. Buriki Clock wanted to make Cloé’s Requiem less “amateur”, but above all to make it something more marketable …
(FUCKING SHITTY CA-)
… But we have seen the effects of this.
But why, I asked myself?
WHY ?!
Why do they do…
All of this…?
…
Then, the epiphany.
Thinking about what we have said so far, and then move on …
Nearly everyone you see –
Like him an ‘her,
An ‘you, an’ me –
Pretends to be
A pillar of society –
(from the interview at Famitsu)
A model for propriety –
Sobriety
An ‘piety –
Who shudders at the thought
Of notoriety!
The ladies an ‘gents’ ere before you –
Which none of ‘em ever admits –
May ‘ave saintly looks –
But they’re sinners an ‘crooks!
(Famitsu)
(Promotional art for the novel “Cloé’s Requiem: Andante”)
Hypocrites!
Hypocrites! 7
Here.
Do you remember the first concept we introduced to you in this second part of the article?
“Cloé’s Requiem, since its first show of popularity, always had outside help.”
Eh, eh. We finally get there!
Notice that it will not be the first time we will talk about Kadokawa, who seems to be the cause of all ills regarding the commercialization of Horror RPG.
So, as always, we go very slowly, because only from these images the theory will seem to the limit of conspiracy.
Indeed, we explain just those.
What made me exclaim: “There is a very interesting and rotten system behind it!”?
In the reprise of Façade, as the first image I showed you this:
Where was the very first introduction of Cloé’s Requiem made to a larger audience, and where could it be more visible?
Comptiq, magazine published by Kadokawa!
With what competition did they become popular?
And what platform was this contest on?
NicoNico, platform of a subsidiary company of Kadokawa !
After the initial distribution phase, where were the two authors interviewed?
ch.nicovideo.jp/ indies-game/blomaga
As you can see, it always has to do with NicoNico.
(This is probably my conjecture, but also the fact that on the aforementioned site the game was described as a “masterpiece” even though it didn’t have such a huge fanbase, and it wasn’t even so well received in the West, something that Angels Of Death for example had …
This makes this more of a marketing operation than a genuine interview.)
(Famitsu)
But in any case we can see that the two main interviews were released only on certain platforms:
Exactly, only platforms belonging to Kadokawa or subsidiary companies to it .
So, unless every single distribution company in all of Japan is somehow from Kadokawa … It didn’t just manage the publishing ion of the novels …
… But the entire distribution and future marketing of the Buriki Clock brand . From start to finish.
(I defaced the photo of these two poor girls just to make you understand in a disturbing way what I’m talking about?
… Yes.)
There was no case. There is no genuineness in the “success” that this game has made in Japan.
And you know what?
It must have sounded strange to us from the start! In the West this game was forgotten after a year … Because there was no “Kadokawa” to cover the two authors.
For us it was an indie game like any other.
In fact, referring back to what I said, about the fact that this game is not made for a large audience, like what the products advertised and distributed by Kadokawa typically have …
* Update from last time!
The guy on the left is one of the characters from… Uh…
“Luciano Family”…? Something like that…? (The online translator is… Eh.)
Content is shared and created by Buriki Clock simply because Nubarin works on it. *
Remember the original designs, guys. Remember the style, the palettes, the types of expressions that were given to the characters.
Nubarin’s drawings have different facial expressions depending on the character . A bright character has a cheerful laugh, and a cool character has a modest laugh. It also depends on their personality. You can tell which character they are by just looking at their face without the hair. -Nanashi No Chiyo
Most likely the main features of the game have been changed to make them more relevant to the “portfolio” of the distribution company which took it under his wing.
Everything I wrote paragraphs and paragraphs about was something that, according to a major, would never, ever work.
So, returning to the “Author-Work Relationship” question in the case of Cloé’s Requiem…
Well, it’s an unnatural relationship, not 100% decided by the authors. It was chosen for them to portray the relationship between a title that could be a masterpiece (if only it had more capable hands to model it) and authors who were inexperienced at the time, and now corrupt, if we want to use hyperbole …
It is a simply “non-existent” relationship, and without any hope of recovery.
The only thing we can do now, we few fans of that messed-up videogame draft, is to wait for the most “complete” product, what it should have been, already having our vision reddened and with the irrepressible desire to destroy libraries .
And at the end of this I want to bring a little talk about the characters: again PaoGun is here with you.
I anticipated what I meant before and now I can express it:
They cannot be distinguished anymore.
Nubarin, Nanashi, do you realize what you could do?
You came from the current of “controversial games” par excellence and this feature could make your characters unique (since they are the only highlight that could be saved from this game ). But now they’re just like so many others. You have lost because without Kadokawa (and Enterbrain … We will talk about this company in the future) you go nowhere.
Return the dark circles to Cloé! Give Pierre his falseness, for God’s sake! In addition to being the most “guessable” character in the removal of all his muscular tension and mimicry that distinguished him in the character design …
You who had the courage to approach a main character to the figure of a rapist allowing him a path of redemption; you who made us understand how the heck was the “educational” system to which the characters were subjected in this era … An era that, although it may seem distant in many respects, is it is actually very close to today’s society .
You who have for this dismantled piece by piece a stereotype as old as the world of now put this mask back on him ?!
It’s the same character.
Yes; I know that type of examples, with those kind of chibis is not very brilliant because the key of type of marketing operation is the stylization and simplification of character design, I know perfectly well that there is a deep economic and cultural context behind all this… But we certainly wouldn’t be so angry if we didn’t have to confront this context in which the sense of content has been completely transformed with help of some types of “games substitutes”; provided that, as we say from the beginning, no type of promotion is addressed to the controversial issues of which the original game spoke. Let’s talk about a passage like Façade in dividing this case study into “game and market”. The more controversial side of the title was removed in order to be sold and paid with its identity.
A catastrophic change that can be summarized in two simple images:
From Michel facing Alain…
… To the cat who now confronts this man for help our youngs characters.
If you follow Back To The Future from the beginning you have seen the case of Corpse Party from the distant 1996 to Blood Covered: the background has been enriched , the cast has grown , the graphic style was even changed but the sense of substance did not change ; that is to see characters close to us, therefore ordinary people , who face an adventure in a world supernatural showing different facets from their normal habitual context .
Ayumi, the typical badass, reliable and serious class rep (also very classic in the anime scene) …
brings out the worst in her by demonstrating her infantility, albeit in two different ways.
Sachiko was always there as an antagonist to bother everyone! And therefore not even the meaning of the spirits was altered since they could be these positive or evil depending on their psychological conditions at the point of death.
The protagonists did not change : you could recognize them because they were the ones who stayed the most time on stage and you saw them every time having to make decisions, make choices, act to move forward and face obstacles.
They were always responsible for their actions, there was not something or someone facing difficulties for them. Let’s realize why we can’t do this for a character driven title like Cloé’s Requiem: in the original game it was all about telling a path of inner growth. Cats were a visual concept, “a metaphor”, and making them active protagonists completely altered the meaning of the work .
As Ele had already mentioned, we are witnessing a general deresponsibility of the faults of the characters and of all their complex and twisted facets to sell them better .
We can conclude this painful journey by reflecting on the tragic irony that hangs over this brand: Nubarin and Nanashi have treated, immediately and in turn applied to their own characters the path of objectification exactly as made their own protagonist in the first game. They did what their work denounced!
Here is the quote at the title of the article. In addition of course to the quotation from the great Pirandello’s work, “Six characters in search of an author”, I wanted to consider the chapter “Five characters in search of an author” of the game “The Simpsons” released for Wii, Nintendo DS, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2 and PlayStation Portable a narrative arc in which the characters face a level in which they will have to defeat their own author , Matt Groening, of which we have reported here a picture of the final cutscene.
PROFESSIONAL THERMOMETER
And what to say at the conclusion of this? The liquid is low: this is an amateur product . Its “professional nature” is constructed, fictitious … So yes, by now you have noticed it: we are gradually destroying the thermometer of professionalism from article to article .
To this I can add only one consideration: marketing should enhance a product, not distort it .
I perfectly recognize that for the title that was produced it could have been a bit difficult to find a long-term positioning in the market, but it was not impossible to achieve this goal without sacrificing its complexity.
This case study was really important to deal with to bring you an example , perhaps even classic in some ways, of a side effect . But side effect of what exactly?
The entry of indie developers into a market, as vast and ruthless as that of audiovisual products in the East.
So, yes, that’s exactly what it looks like. It is exactly the conspiracy theory that you would have expected but … After all we will deepen a discourse on “who is behind” for this very reason.
In fact, we wanted to clarify one thing: we would not want you to think that we are satisfied with the conclusions we have brought you in this article . We are not satisfied because we generally don’t like simplistic formulas: what we want to tell you is not: “Kadokawa is Satan!“, That is, there are so many dynamics to take into consideration and then, damn it, if it is a major a there may be a reason, who knows how many “departments / fields” (I do not know the professional term) it is divided: simply from this case it only emerged that in relation to this independent work they had, according to our interpretation , little interest; because both they, and the authors consequently, are more concerned with forcibly wedging Cloé’s Requiem into a type of market that did not belong to it than seeking the potential to make it emerge differently . This was the kind of discourse we wanted to come up with.
This is why the research work for the article on how the world of videogame publishers works in the independent field (restricting ourselves to the cases of the current RPG Horror for obvious impossibility of covering, only in two people, an area of research SO VAST that a team deserves) becomes necessary in order not to fall into hasty conclusions.
Understanding who they are, what types of contracts can be stipulated; because what was done between Kadokawa and Buriki Clock was an affiliation , which is a very different operation from a normal type of contract that editor and developer agree to a single game – we all know that Kadokawa does not only occupy the videogame field, it is precisely a corporation: a multifaceted company-; and then there is certainly the case of Corpse Pary, which we have already dealt with in the Ludi Tarantula Archives, in which new subjects have taken over the creative field), so the question arises spontaneously: how and to what extent they can access changes in the creative field? These and many other factors are not of secondary importance. And then, again, understand who the most influential subjects are , what their brand identity is and what types of products they distribute *, and of course how the scope of distribution works and how many opportunities these can offer.
* In the case of Kadokawa in relation to Cloé’s Requiem, perhaps the idea was ipopetically this:
“the product is too dark for our audience , we want to reassure the audience (or any reason related to the target they wanted to turn to) but the tearful story and pretty characters are an excellent advertising to make the product known as a lucky “casual game masterpiece” and consequently encourage the purchase of the tool “…
(You don’t know what very great topic we spoiled, you will notice it when we deal with it in the future with the case of Angels Of Death)
Because let’s remember, after all, that in the market the first goal is to obtain a source of income and above all of resources to bring the business into a virtuous circle of production.
… So…
This is really just the beginning.
We have only seen on one side of the coin what it means when an author and an editor / distributor little interested in the quality of the single work and more oriented towards mere consumerism meet: the results cannot be very happy if the author (in this case) is unable to fully understand, and therefore place somewhere, his own creative work.
Man is not one, but two,
He is evil and good!
An ‘he walks the fine line
We’d all cross if we could!
It’s a nightmare
We can never discard
So we stay on our guard
Though we love the facade
What’s behind the facade?
CONCLUSION
Therefore, from here on the final stage of the Back To The Future column will begin, the column created to include, through individual case studies , how the Horror RPG market is evolving today .
With the next article we will have a different example of the path that has taken from “amateur product” to “professional product” whose beginning of the production history is certainly different from that of Cloé’s Requiem and of which the team extends from two people to about eight.
Gentlemen, we are referring to the ambitious and spectacular …
… Pocket Mirror .
____________________________________________________________________
1 “ … Entertaining, for these sick bastards with a thousand eyes”:
Quote to “ The Trail To Oregon ” , a Team Starkid musical. The character of the Father in the song Dysentery World describes with horror the spectators as “of a thousand eyes”. Also, he asks viewers if watching them die would entertain them, “sick bastards.”
Since in the first part, with Façade (who will return, as in one of his thousand Reprise in Jekyll & Hyde), we were talking about musical theater … It seemed right to mention the modern one too, right?
2 “…………………”:
Quote to Cloé ‘s Requiem itself, who in its direction uses immense periods to lengthen the time.
3 “Con Amore is … a bad idea”
Quote from the video by youtuber Yotobi: “ The Ideal Boyfriend” – The Late Show with Karim Musa | S2 Ep.14 ”
4 “ Your characters are beautiful, girls … Idiocy?”
Another quote from episode 14 of the Late Show with Karim Musa
5 “… Cookies were stolen for breakfast ”
Dialogue existing in Con Amore.
6 “Tu quoque Petro, fili mi?”
Petrus (“Petro” in the ablative case) is the translation of “Pietro”, a translation in turn of “Pierre”.
Adaptation of the famous phrase “Tu quoque Brute, fili mi?” Literally “You too Brutus, my son?”.
The first sentence that Ele learned while studying Latin, it is assumed that it was said by Caesar to Brutus after the 23 stabbings of the Ides of March.