As usual, there are a few things to talk about with this release. Significant spoilers follow. There's no bonus content or anything, because they never made any, so you can feel free to ignore this unless you have an interest in unimportant crap.


First of all, I want to make a minor note about military ranks. I translated the ranks of the characters according to the ranking schemes of different branches of the military: i.e., navy, army, air force, etc. At the suggestion of a commenter here, I was briefly going to standardize them all as US Marine ranks (which the actual US Space Force seems to have adopted). But in practice, that didn't feel like it was working. Given how often they were spoken in dialogue, some of the ranks seemed too awkward to use, especially "Second Lieutenant Claire".

Secondly, the game has some consistency issues. The adolescents are constantly stated to have "countless" legs, which is an odd way of saying "four". There are minor continuity errors between some scenes, like who's carrying Soiree at any given time. The guns are all laser weapons, except for the special spray guns that they make—and yet both of these types of gun take physical ammunition somehow.

The biggest inconsistency is the number of eggs that get laid at any one time. The game seems to change its mind at various points about whether the creatures lay one egg or several. Even in cases where there are clearly multiple eggs that get implanted and fertilized, it still only results in one baby. In fact, in the pirate route, there is a part where multiple eggs are laid in two holes, resulting in one child each, but then there are three babies in the next CG. The likely reason for this is that there are very few contextual clues in the script which would tell you whether "egg" is plural or not, so it would be easy for different writers, or the artist, to inadvertently assume different things.

The major thing I want to note is all the signs of rewriting. First, the pirate route: In the final product, you get locked into the pirate route by not taking Manuela's side during a choice. However, in the proper story, once Emina meets Hawkins, there are notes to the effect that making the wrong decision should put the player on course for the "betrayal" route. In other words: When Emina chooses to disclose important information to Hawkins, she makes him swear on his honour not to double-cross her. If she chooses to conceal it from him, then he's not bound by his code of honour, which would seemingly lead to him betraying her once he found out the aliens' weakness. It wouldn't be a stretch to assume that the pirate route has been moved from this point, and reworked to fit the theme of Manuela turning traitor. Just look at how hastily Mother is inserted into the narrative and dealt with, compared to the alien route.

There are other major changes to the plot as well, and you can see this in the background CGs. Firstly, this one:


I've seen this background in the gacha games, but it goes conspicuously unused in this story. Despite all the attacks and deaths, there seem to be no scenes in corridors which contain this much bloodshed and destruction.

This background is used, but the script conveniently ignores the fact that the room's been trashed. The game treats it like it's just a bit dirty, as opposed to having clear signs of conflict.

This is meant to be the cockpit of the escape craft. Except that it blatantly isn't: It looks more like a storehouse. You can also see it in the background here:

This looks like it could be the escape craft, but according to the script, the background with this filename would have been used for Chronos's bridge. In the final product, they reuse the background from the communications room for the bridge. They also reuse CGs in other places, so one does wonder why some resources had to be recycled when others were completely discarded.

Anyway, that's about all I could find to talk about with this game. So I'll leave you with this observation: Nothing would ever have gone wrong if they had just put their helmets back on.

Comments

  1. ”Nothing would ever have gone wrong if they had just put their helmets back on.”

    Mind. Blown.

    Thinking about it though, I feel like you could say this for so many alien movies lmao

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment