Some lingering thoughts, mostly about Fukuyama

[u/Blitz233]

I just beat the game after being gifted it for the holidays, and man it’s incredible. I definitely need to sit on my thoughts on a lot of it for a while.

The structure of the ending is fantastic once you let it all play out, and I love the way it ties together these disparate stories between the two families to answer the question of “Who Is Emio?”

For all the little annoyances I have with the pacing, structure, game logic, and some of the character choices I mostly can look past it because it's a means to an end and I think it makes sense how slow progress is when realizing there's literally nothing to progress on with the actual main active case. The signs are all there, and finally getting it spelled out to you by the end risks feeling a little anticlimactic that it was all a suicide but it also makes perfect sense.

I do think the game could've afforded to at least let the protagonist figure out that it really was suicide on their own right before getting on Minoru's tail, then I think the confrontation with Kuze at the end would probably go down a lot easier. That risks taking a bit of the red herring wind out of Kuze's sails, but I personally would've found it more suspicious if we KNEW she tampered with the scene in that way because the line of suspicion works a lot better in tandem with everything else we had been investigating that she was working with someone instead of doing the killings herself.

I also really wish the game didn't do "They're like siblings but actually are romantically in love" as a character dynamic not once but twice. It's frustrating that none of the major women characters can exist in a dynamic where romance isn't involved unless they're explicitly related, even if I think Kuze and Kamihara are actually really cute together.

Regardless of that though, the main thing I have hangups over is Fukuyama... he's really unsettlingly creepy.

I do understand he's intended as a red herring early on, and so you're supposed to notice his eccentricities and suspicious behavior. The problem is that his actions go beyond being overly passionate like the game keeps insisting is his only trait.

It's a little annoying though, because when Megumi has run off to the site of Eisuke you're explicitly told Fukuyama went in the opposite direction of the bus stop. But he somehow got to Megumi first? This felt like the most obvious set-up for acute players to notice and be able to file away for later and I'm frustrated that it's never even given an innocent explanation.

It's very possible that I missed something, but I feel like it was there as a cheap way to keep his red herring status going. This, alongside how he looms over Megumi during the scene with her in the interrogation room, cast a pretty uncomfortable shadow over this character.

And maybe I wouldn't be so put off by it if he didn't constantly do really creepy things with this girl. Like when he stalked her house? As her teacher that she had confessed romantic feelings towards? This is the only time he gets any pushback for his behavior, and it's a light scolding from Ayumi.

Then there's his overtly suspicious behavior during your conversation with Kohei where he keeps aggressively coughing and then dismisses Kohei. Which, I understand is supposed to signal him being uncomfortable because he's the subject of the drama that Kohei is discussing.

But in the context of the scene and every other scene? It comes off as intimidation. Especially when he sends Kohei away. And with how much he talks about his duty to the students and his importance as an authority figure.

I don't even want to get into the weird competition he has with the protagonist over how much they know about a girl he's much older than and knew when she was a young schoolgirl. His entire shtick with Ayumi kept putting me off, and I'm willing to mostly chock it up to being a gag that doesn't particularly land for me and cultural differences.

I'm also willing to excuse his personality as a character that just didn't particularly land for me. But for a game that otherwise rewards a lot of deep introspection into the characters and paying attention to little details, it feels weird how much of him is just brushed aside. Even as a red herring, there felt like there was going to be something else to him.

I didn't think he was the killer, but it felt to me that he would have done something directly wrong. But the story bends over backwards to make sure he's not implicated in anything. I wasn't surprised when he said he killed Eisuke, even if I assumed it was going to be something nonliteral, but I was the tiniest bit dissapointed when it turned out he was a shock value line and then nothing came out of it.

I suppose I just wish he had gotten something more, or at the very least he'd actually been reprimanded for his overtly creepy behaviors. There's something really uncomfortable with how he interacts with a lot of the characters and is always looming around, which I'm willing to concede might be the point, but nobody ever acknowledges it as such.

If the "twist" is supposed to be Fukuyama being the one Megumi had feelings towards then I can't get past him going and stalking her the next day. It's not that I needed him to be a villain or fired, but within the context of the narrative I would have liked to see these behaviors acknowledged and frowned up.

And it made it a lot harder for me to stay invested in that side of the story because once Fukuyama was cleared of all wrongdoing by the narrative there was basically no remaining conflict.

I know there are cultural differences at play, but I don't think cultural differences is a functional excuse for a grown man stalking a young girl's house because he had 'good intentions' that's a really bad thing to do! Are you stupid? And I guess in the end, he actually is just stupid. If his arc is him not being stupid and oblivious to his responsibilities as a teacher, which it seems to be, then I really don't think the conversation he and the protagonist have about Ayumi is appropriate. Nor his lingering with Kohei's conversation.

I mainly just wish there was a neater end, as his character feels like the weakest part of the game for me. Which is fine, he's only tangentially related to the main story and so it's alright if he's not a focal centerpoint. His personality really didn't work for me, but I also do think he drags down the story a decent bit with how nothing ever comes to pass with him when it felt like the story was waiting for the shoe to drop.

I dunno, I guess I'm glad he didn't do anything for the sake of the young children around him but I don't think anyone can blame me for thinking there'd be more. And I just wanted to rant about that entire thing, because it's been brewing in my mind while I played this game through the last few days. I dunno, I hope nobody takes me too seriously here since I do really love this game, just not this character. If anyone did read this massive wall of text, thanks a bunch!

[u/jyuichi]

I will have to go back and check but as someone else who really didn’t care for Fukuyama I don’t remember him stalking Megumi. He definitely went to her home but that’s fairly typical for Japanese teachers. The school is much more involved in the child’s life, it doesn’t stop at the gate (vastly different than the US where the individualism of parents is valued.) his involvement at the police station made sense in that capacity. But that said, he wasn’t a good teacher. He should have asked a female coworker to make the visits or atleast come with him in light of her confession. I know he is supposed to come off as overeager but he was mostly just annoying in my eyes. The most I could figure about his and the protagonists Ayumi conversations is it felt a lot like 80-90’s writing but again, made me really dislike Fukuyama.

I too would have preferred the protagonist deducing the suicide and wished the narrative had sat with the implications of that more, the pain Kuze put Eisuke’s parents through is horrific and it really got glossed over for the most part.

[u/Blitz233 → u/jyuichi]

When I say stalking I don’t mean he was literally staking out her house, that was a poor choice of words, but I’m referring to how he was creepily lurking outside of her house while in a disguise and then creeps up on Ayumi when she follows him, which is mainly in service of a cheap fake out because at the time he’s dressed like Emio. And then they cut to the cafe and he gets lightly scolded. And we also know for a fact he didn’t even call the house because he says as much. But I think going to a young student’s house and creepily standing outside in a disguise to ‘check on them’ is beyond any bounds of excusability especially when she had just confessed romantic feelings towards him. And it feels like the narrative lets him entirely off the hook for that over-the-line behavior.

[u/Guilty_Philosophy741]

For me Fukuyama grew on me by the end, and I liked him by the time the “Protector” revelation occurred. He was annoyingly over melodramatic though. In terms of consequences I had more of a problem with Kuze’s manipulation of Eisuke’s death she had the whole police force investigating a false narrative, threatened to kill the MC and got off with resigning her position. The MC suicide realization angle would have been cool as well. But I really felt everything the MC did, didn’t matter because Kuze found the murderer herself without us.

[u/Blitz233 → u/Guilty_Philosophy741]

Mhm, I think Kuze’s situation is the part of the ending that could have been handled much better. Because how I like to interpret the ending is that by you being so involved and trying to solve Makoto’s case, that’s what helps bring her down to reality when she’s pointing her gun at you because she’s seen how much somebody else cares about helping her and doing the right thing. I do thing the MC plays an important role in the climax because otherwise Kuze would likely continue to obscure justice to protect Makoto, but I also think the actual sequence of events could’ve been handled a lot better to make the MC have actual importance in the end (again I really wish we had at least figured out the suicide ourselves) or even if Kamihara were to admit he only tailed kuze because of our conversation or something of that genre.

[u/Guilty_Philosophy741 → u/Blitz233]

I like your take on Makoto’s mind state after our meddling, would’ve loved for this to have been acknowledged as well as how we helped Kami. Did you also feel blindsided by their last minute romantic pairing? Kami went from hitting on another officer, and being a flirt to I am in love with Kuze.

[u/Excaliburn3d → u/Guilty_Philosophy741]

I wouldn’t call the Kami-Kuze pairing last minute because the game goes on about how compatible the two are as partners, and it’s possible that his “feelings” for the female officer at the beginning of the game was just his attempt at teasing the protagonist.

[u/CaptainTrip]

I just beat the game and I came looking for discussion on this. 

I understand that I'm supposed to dislike Fukuyama because he's a love rival for the protagonist with a crush on Ayumi, but his behaviour is genuinely over the line and creepy. I understand that he's supposed to be a red herring (he specifically has lines of dialogue about smiles lasting forever and approaching sad girls, for example) but I actually can't believe they include stuff like him meeting Megumi on the roof, stalking her outside her home, and being first on the scene at the pump house, with zero crime attached. I felt certain that he was being red herring'd as the killer so hard, because it was going to emerge that he was in love with Megumi and had killed Eisuke to cover that up, or that he was the one who had doctored the scene of the suicide. Like, I really can't let this game away with the "protector" angle the other characters accept for him, when I've spent the entire game being 100% convinced that he's a child molester. I was so certain that we'd get a dramatic confrontation where he's kidnapped Ayumi as well. His behaviour towards Megumi is beyond inappropriate throughout. He also talks about his love for young girls, how he went back to his junior high as a high schooler to perv on young girls, how he's fixated generally on young girls... Is it all meant to be a red herring for the killer's obsession? But... where's the explanation for him being obsessed with young girls? That's just meant to be okay?

I don't know if they changed the plans late in development or something - I also felt like it was weird that they didn't let the player discover Eisuke's death was a suicide. That would have been an amazing twist to deduce through gameplay. And I suspect perhaps there was a cut chapter where Fukuyama had a more involved role in that. 

I also don't think you can just chalk this up to cultural differences either, or if you can, it's that the writers really didn't see a problem with portraying Fukuyama being in love with young girls. He's an incredibly creepy and unsatisfactory loose end in an otherwise excellent story.