Round and Round, Like a Carousel – The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- Review

I want to talk to you about a quaint little video game called Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony. 

The premise of the Danganronpa series is simple: a group of sixteen students find themselves locked up in a school, and forced into a killing game by Monokuma, a mechanical teddy bear hellbent on making the kids kill each other, offering their escape as a prize should they succeed, or their own death as punishment should they fail. The games often focus on the concept of hope vs. despair – the idea of always having the right and power to make a path forward in life no matter how impossible it feels – to a point the games are often made fun of for it, but another concept they find themselves interested in often is the presentation of fiction, the disconnect between idea and representation. It’s an idea the other games very briefly play with (it’s basically a throw-away plot twist in the first game at most), but it’s one Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony is extremely committed to.

On a larger scale, though, it’s not a game I find myself particularly fond of, for a large variety of reasons. I’m not all that into most of its cast (the game’s minor characters are probably creator Kazutaka Kodaka’s most gimmicky side cast ever, and the major ones alternate between feeling like imitations of Danganronpa characters prior or extremely basic character archetypes), I think the mysteries are often extremely grating in one way or another even though a lot of them show potential (the digital world case spending half an hour on ‘the map loops’ when it’s directly shown extremely clearly on the map burns that trial so bad, man), and the game is immensely prone to going off on tangents that can stop the pacing or intrigue of any given moment in its tracks. I do think Danganronpa V3 has a couple good traits, however. The soundtrack is the series at its best, taking the first game’s grungy and metallic atmosphere and giving it a modernized and sleek refit, fitting V3’s visual style as a sort of neo-Danganronpa, returning to a form 2 left while making everything more flashy, more pop, more bright; and character designs are very stylized and striking despite the actual sprites and CGs leaving… a bit to be desired in the technical department, with an ending that’s easily the best in the series.

Goddamnit, you might say. I got tricked into letting a V3 ending apologist start talking to me, you elaborate.

Though I doubt it, I’m not sure if Danganronpa V3 is ‘bad on purpose’. That’s a defense of its metatextual aspects I hear a lot, and it’s certainly an extremely easy one to come to and understand. When V3’s actual metatextual aspects are ignored, the game acts as a commentary on seasonal rot, the devolution of a story and the detachment from meaning or interest in its concepts that causes it. So many aspects of the game are flanderizations or fakes: the Monokubs, a concept so detached from the identity of Danganronpa, dumb child characters added to bring the ratings back up, but so extreme they did it 5 goddamn times. The murders, so ridiculous and detached from someone bludgeoning a friend to death because of a mental breakdown that we’re now doing them inside of video games and involving ancient revival rituals. We used to murder people over money, now we’re doing it because Monokuma dropped the Necronomicon in our laps. Our tragic backstories used to be losing our brothers and failing to fulfill promises, now they’re our commitment to our secret duties as the teenage prime minister. In the first game, our ultimates were writers, singers, and fighters. Now they’re robots.

This is an easy argument to make, but I’ve always found it disingenuous because it approaches this kind of story from a hostile angle. While Danganronpa V3 is certainly the kind of story that requires hostility to function (no matter how you view it), it is ultimately opposed to its own existence, it is still a story that asks you to look deeply at it and come to understand it and find value from it; just as a negative symbol. Despite this, however, it isn’t particularly far out from how Danganronpa typically functions. The Monokubs are weird additions to keep interest and spice things up, but so was Monomi – a more benevolent bear robot that did the same kinds of weird, extraneous, disconnected gags the Monokubs do. The motives are ridiculous, sure, but just last game we had ‘disease that switches peoples’ personalities around’. Yes, this game has an ultimate robot. The second game had a non-ultimate robot. This isn’t meant to be a gotcha or anything, more so just coming to an understanding that the fundamental ‘bad on purpose’ argument (or any of its typical not-too-far variations) is predicated on one of two things:

• Danganronpa, as a whole, is a series that is the same in execution whether it is ‘trying to be good’ or ‘trying to be bad’ – otherwise, V3’s minor alterations to the majority of the formula would not be enough to count as ‘trying to be bad’
• Danganronpa V3 ‘trying to be bad’ is, in effect, the other games ‘trying to be good’ because of what it is ultimately trying to convey – otherwise, its efforts being similar would lead to it ‘trying to be good’

While a deeper discussion of the theory is not a particularly meaningful exercise to be performing or analyzing, and the argument itself is one I personally find foolish to pursue (even if it were true, the similarities between 2 and V3 make the argument one I feel can only truly be meaningful via hostility towards the latter), it does lead to the reaffirmation of V3’s central goal should you engage with this theory: Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, in continuing the trends the other games kept up, is trying to be bad. These traits are examples of trying to be bad because the game says they are, even though they’re the same traits the rest of the series generally uses. Why would these traits be special, then? Well, that’s easy. Because the game is trying to be bad. What proof do I have of that? Dude, did you see the Monokubs?

It’s a cycle, an ouroboros, an argument that proves its own reasoning with itself. It’s bad because it’s intentionally bad. It’s intentionally bad because, well, I don’t like it and it’s bad. It’s why I can’t subscribe to the theory, it’s a justification predicated on a belief founded regardless of the actual game, but it does illustrate a core concept that V3 – and, by extension, The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- – are dedicated to: We have the power to make a story that lasts forever, a story with infinite potential, a story that is perfect, complete, fully acceptable on its own. These stories can be beautiful, they can be earnest, they can be cruel, they can be everything a story should be identical to how we create stories with meaning. And yet, alone – simply read, seen, and put back on the shelf, the most basic and typical way a story is engaged with – they ring hollow, worth less than the canvas the first drafts were written and then thrown out on. Completely and utterly purposeless.

Why?

One of the reasons I find it so hard to discuss The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- (so hard that I have to open it up with a discussion of Danganronpa V3), is that its scope is simply too huge to open up like I would another game. Were I to review any other game I’ve played recently, I could explain it briefly, go into a few strong or weak points, circle around, and summarize it at the end. You can’t really do that with a 200+ hour game with 100 endings. It’s not gonna work out. This is the third attempt I’ve made at even just opening this thing up. So, why not. This game – at least a little bit – sold itself on the Danganronpa similarities, I think Kodaka would forgive me if I did the same.

The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- is, for all honest intents and purposes, styling itself after Danganronpa. A few handfuls of students are trapped inside a school by an adorable little mascot character and are thrust into a life or death situation. It’s a sell you’re used to if you recognize or know anything about the games either of its lead writers have ever made. One of the sell’s special offers is that this time, it’s a tactics RPG; instead of the kids killing each other, the school is under lock and key as part of a defensive measure. Rainbow colored invading monsters want inside, and the main goal of the game is using these teenagers and their wonderfully weird and wild weaponry to keep them out at all and any costs. Said teenagers have their movesets colored by their – to be quite honest – completely deranged personalities. Again, if you know anything about Danganronpa at all, you’ll know exactly what kind of people these kids are. You don’t know how extreme they are this time around – I imagine most of that series’ characters being transplanted into this game would make them look normal people in comparison, a fate only a few of V3’s offerings would escape – but the core idea is the same. 

The Hundred Line‘s most important difference from the games it patterns itself after, however, is its title: the hundred storylines within it. The game has 100 endings, all advertised as their own entire routes worthy of being called the ‘true’ ending. While I must get a bit ahead of myself and confess that I don’t think that’s entirely accurate, the scope and scale is still truly massive. 20+ routes, with all but one or two being dedicated to singular character-driven stories, vast branching trees, or something in the middle. Genres are just as varied, if not more so: comedy, horror, romance, murder mystery, slice-of-life… the list goes on. Horror in particular is probably this game’s favorite honestly, running the gamut of slasher, body horror, denpa, trashy B-movie, etcetera, etcetera.

This variety (or more accurately, this scope) is what lies at the core of The Hundred Line. It is a project driven by ambition, by scale, by an overabundance of stories and meaning, and the writing quality of these routes is – to say the least – just as varied. There are a vast array of phenomenal routes with Kodaka’s best character work yet, gripping stories that use their genre shifts to showcase sides of his characters other games wouldn’t have the opportunity to (a particularly infamous CG that, quite honestly, probably did a fair chunk of the game’s marketing by itself, is the payoff to one that I kinda can’t believe Kodaka threw into the game), and others… are there. There are routes that were written into the game because that route or idea probably had to go somewhere. There are routes that exist because the genre they homage exists.

I do think the wildly varying quality of the game’s stories comes about from its guest writers as opposed to any real notable inconsistencies on its leads – there are writers who consistently make the game’s best routes and there are writers who consistently are crashing and burning – but it does contribute to its ultimate goal in style: the game advertises itself on that massive scale, on the idea that no matter what story or path the player carves for themselves, it will be one they find organic and true. While I find it an idea that The Hundred Line admittedly fails to truly live up to perfectly – roughly a fourth or so of the endings are ‘you picked the wrong side of the coin flip and died’ endings, but even those are consistent marks of specific writers or routes (about a third of those endings are attributable to a single route that acts almost as an adventure game-style story) – the success rate is a lot higher than may initially be expected.

But there runs an inherent risk to such an unwieldy idea: homogeny. A cast with a sub-20 size stuck in a single location is not a premise that inspires hope in being told there are hundreds upon hundreds of hours of stories to tell. Yet The Hundred Line, smartly, I feel, uses its guest writers to dodge that feeling. Some use their space to throw everyone into a zombie apocalypse. Some use it to give them all fish heads. It works out pretty nicely. Even the game’s worst routes add something unique and interesting, and even if I don’t like them (sometimes ‘unique and interesting’ can be a bad thing), I very much appreciate them being there.

The only area I think the game’s variety really fails in is its gameplay. I think the tactics combat is certainly enjoyable, but it’s definitely not the core selling point. It’s got a puzzly flavor to it, less ‘figure out what stats your units specialize in’ and more ‘check AOE combinations against each other’, with a lot of its more RPG-style tools like stat buffs or debuffs saved for bosses. The general focus is on playing fast and loose: mobility is consistently good among the cast, and you’re encouraged to kill units in dying attacks (referred to as Last Resorts) to wipe out chunks of the battlefield in one go and grant passive bonuses to everyone left alive. While it plays nice and fast, and gives the game’s strategy a very unique flavor, it certainly is not difficult: once you have a handful of endings finished, with minimal competence, you’ll realistically have the tools to beat basically any battle the game throws at you, and generally it doesn’t really have ways to spice that challenge up. There are a sizable variety of units, bosses, and mechanics, to be sure, and almost all of them are distinct and provide something interesting and of value, it’s just that the game is so easy there’s little reason to engage with them after a certain point (once you level her up a handful of times, one of the game’s units is capable of one-turning every single battle in the game just by spamming two moves over and over while slightly buffed), and certain routes will even do away with them entirely.

Despite this, I don’t feel the tactical gameplay is The Hundred Line’s priority (it ultimately comprises a relatively small portion of its 200+ hour playtime), and I believe a more useful argument for the game’s success in depth comes from analyzing its cast. The immense scale of The Hundred Line means that it has to have extremely strong character writing from the outset: with so many stories handled by so many writers, having characters that are versatile, engaging, and capable of evolving in so many ways is crucial to creating an experience that is in any way compelling. One of the biggest problems Danganronpa has is that its cast often has little time to spread their wings, and such a limiter can feel like it encourages weaker character writing at times. So many cast members can end up repeatedly falling back onto specific bits, or at best die much too early to even reach that point. While obviously something like Danganronpa is not a series that lives and dies by deep personal character-driven stories and growth arcs – in some cases I do think its tendency to cast aside characters on what feel like whims to be a narrative advantage – something like The Hundred Line has to. It simply can’t afford not to hold an extremely vested interest in its cast.

But the game’s cast is not particularly different from a Danganronpa cast prima facie: a lot of archetypes feel like direct pulls or minor alterations to that series’ personalities. Takemaru Yakushiji, a gruff, uncouth, constantly threatening thug with a heart of gold, Moko Mojiro, the unendingly kind and unendingly passionate wall of muscle, Ima Tsukumo, the little shitface who insists on causing problems for entirely self-centered reasons, and so on it goes. This presents an interesting difference that I think helps break the game apart from the surface-level version of the typical Danganronpa comparison: the game must use the extremely strong and brash personalities it has created and allow them to be what lead the stories. While the game has a ‘format’ a la DR – stay in the school, fight invaders, stay alive – the characters are very often driving the scope of the story as opposed to any higher level factors or some grander scale themes each DR game must focus on. The wider scope of stories and less oppressive format allow them more agency and room for expression, and it allows for some characters who I would never expect to get depth were they put in Danganronpa (partly out of lack of necessity) to get entire dedicated stories for themselves. There are admittedly cases of a character’s necessity getting in the way of their agency – even if I quite like Tsubasa Kawana, the game’s expert engineer, it is a tad annoying she gets so many almost haphazard bursts of focus just by virtue of being the character that makes various mechanical macguffins, and this can be a recurring issue for a few characters with a distinct utility or function.

On the whole though, there are a lot more cases where The Hundred Line feels interested in using a majority of its characters to explore its themes, instead of its characters (barring the immediately relevant main ones) being vessels for the game’s themes to be imposed upon. The immense time and depth increase also means the characters are a lot funnier on average: barring a single character, I don’t think anyone’s running bits are particularly unfunny, and in most cases they’re Kodaka’s best version of them.

I think one of the game’s strongest qualities, however, is ultimately its political bent. It’s a relatively isolated area of the story (with a small set of exceptions, only Kodaka’s routes ever put much focus into it, a decision I imagine was made both for the sake of variety elsewhere and for the consistency of his messaging to come through) but the shadow that it casts over the rest of the game is a viciously harsh one. While I cannot attest to knowing Kodaka’s political views, The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- puts an extremely heavy focus on the evils of colonialism and imperialism, the death and appropriation of culture in service of war, and especially the evils of propaganda and human experimentation. My biggest point of appreciation is its almost comically direct refusal to ‘both-sides’ the conflict: the game very often makes such a form of argument in a brief ‘but what if they’re also the bad guys’, only to immediately shut it down or chastise the audience for engaging or agreeing with it. 

The game’s politics, while obviously based on and pulling from Japanese imperialism (particularly pre-WW2 Shōwa-era conflicts and ideologies, I’d wager), feel extremely applicable to modern-day conflict: the game perfectly manages to capture the vicious callousness and cruelty, saturation of propaganda, denial of guilt on the culprits’ end or humanity on the victims’ end, all the horrors of war that have become much more apparent and transparent with the advancement of modern technology and communications. Kodaka’s irreverent tone, one that so often pops up in Danganronpa, finds itself extremely apt when covering such topics.

Kodaka’s love of writing stories about themselves shines through and elevates The Hundred Line because the game is, ultimately, a piece of propaganda. It is varied propaganda – jumping between pro-war vs. anti-war, the good of the people vs. the good of the self, ethics vs. progress – and in all its variety and meaninglessness, it asks a question: 

What part of this story do you find value in?

When the entire game is shouting at you, espousing hatred and vitriol in the same capacities as love and peace, what do you take out of it? The game’s core messaging – the evils of militarization, colonialism, and nationalism – is extremely obvious; but a story that is so cruel, so loud and vicious and domineering about its ideologies no matter what they may be pretending to be at any given time (even routes about the ways in which peace can be made and reparations can be enacted feel almost intended to be read as over-the-top, cuddly, disingenuous propaganda at times – a critique of the ease with which some believe war can be solved, providing an almost too-easy breezy solution, though not a critique of that desire), is one that forces you to ask yourself: what value do I get from this? 

There’s an obvious answer that stares you down in the face, but that message acts as an affirmation. ‘War is bad’ is not a call for change: it is something you see every time you see the word ‘war’ in a book. The hells of war have been written out in stories, purchased from bookstores, read in full, put back on the shelves, rotted over time, and thrown out over and over throughout history.

What is the point of a story that can be thrown out?

The primary difference in how Danganronpa V3 and The Hundred Line ask this question is that Danganronpa V3 is the kinder of the two. It is a game that preys on those who desperately want a Danganronpa V3, but it wants to show them why they don’t need it. As funny a sentiment it may be to read, the world does not need Danganronpa V3. It arguably did not even need a Danganronpa 2. The world needs stories with love and care put into them. It may be cruel, it may deride the reader for making it there, for themselves needing Danganronpa V3, but its goal is not to make a bad story. It hits every beat it has to hit: wacky characters, fun mysteries, great soundtrack, unique style. It is as earnest as it can be while communicating that there is no reason for it to exist. Stories can only mean something to the reader if they mean something to the creator – if you truly need Danganronpa even after V3, you will find that meaning and you will make it. That is the beauty of fiction. That is the beauty of truth.

The Hundred Line, in turn, is almost a cautionary tale. It is a hollow, vicious, screaming monster of a story that lasts hundreds of hours, uses that time to loudly scream incompatible and incoherent propaganda at you, rushes around to every single genre it can think of, viciously steps over its own toes to make up new bullshit on the fly, throws you into uniquely miserable slogs over and over, smashes you in the face with random bad endings, rips its aesthetic from a series that ended by begging to be ended… all while still being a story that, genuinely, earnestly, wants to mean something. Its characters are well-crafted and deep while still being consistently funny! Its theme is competent and meaningful! Its aesthetic is arguably the best version of itself yet! It has an entire RPG system with an immense variety of bosses and scenarios tied to whatever story it’s pulling out at any time!

But this kind of story, as much as it cares, is – to be quite honest – evil. If Danganronpa V3 was a game that wanted you to move on from it, tell you it shouldn’t exist because it has served its purpose, that it is okay to not need a story, an idea, in perpetuity – a story is valuable because it means something to someone, and stories should exist for that purpose – The Hundred Line preys on those who didn’t listen. It is the exact kind of awful, evil story that will exist in perpetuity if the world clings on to things like Danganronpa V3. It is long and hollow and constantly arguing with itself and it manages to do so while still being uncompromising in its vision and goals – in communicating ideas such as the horrors of war, the evils of denial of accountability with the innately human desire to desperately be seen as a good person, and the way that a blind adherence to and adoration of fiction, of stories, can be turned against us and make us monsters in the most realistic way, makes it impactful in a way no story shorter, no story less uncompromising, ever could. We must actually actively find meaning in fiction, find what it means to us, instead of falling into complacency. While Danganronpa V3‘s goal is to say “the world does not need a Danganronpa V3“, it says so not because it’s also saying “the series sucks and shouldn’t exist anymore”, but because such a story is born out of procedure, out of constantly making more and more without a desire for meaning; The Hundred Line, on some level, feels designed as the natural aftermath of doing so.

The Hundred Line is 100 stories, all of which are written to be as independent and meaningful as the next, each with the potential to be the one that speaks to any one of us, and it’s up to you to find out what the game, what its endless, uncompromising, and at times cruel story, means to you, because if you don’t, then there is nothing it can consistently, truly mean. It’s a confusing game when looked at holistically, trying to judge it on the merits of all of its endings at the same time, but it is an undeniably intentional decision. It is a hallmark of Kodaka’s writing to make stories about themselves and their own messaging; the Danganronpa series can attest to as much. But is it ‘bad on purpose’? Well, is Danganronpa V3 ‘bad on purpose’?

But Kodaka was not the game’s only head writer, after all.

Kotaro Uchikoshi’s contributions to The Hundred Line are vast: he is directly responsible for leading the game’s guest writers, writing multiple routes, and about a third of the game’s routes tie back into the story his own routes tell and the themes his own routes focus on. Unfortunately, I very much do not like these routes.

While I phrase my praise of The Hundred Line’s almost confrontational writing as almost positive failures (“randomly throwing you into bad endings” and “making up things on the fly” are traditionally seen as inherent negatives), I think these are all intentional points. Yes, the game will throw you into bad endings easily, but even when frustrating, it often earns a reason for it. Maybe the route is patterned after adventure games. Maybe the option presented is intentionally horrifically skewed in regards to the game’s or route’s morals. Maybe you just straight up got a choice with an objective answer (a la “who did this crime?”) incorrect. The game will throw you into the most draining parts of itself for functional reasons: there’s nothing saying you have to do the ridiculously long boss gauntlet route in one go, it exists for the gameplay purpose of there being such a gauntlet, and that failure to adapt, in a game so clear on the ability to pick up and put down routes as you please, is a mark I feel is left on the player as opposed to the game. Most of the game’s more confrontational behaviors I have mentioned so far feel designed to be accommodating – cold and hard slaps in the face every so often to mess with you and remind you of its core ideas, but still nothing but a slap.

I don’t think it’s fair to say Uchikoshi didn’t ‘get’ The Hundred Line – he certainly influenced a lot of its storytelling, with any route he had a hand in very obviously being ‘one of his’ – but I do think he was completely disinterested in a lot of its ideas. His stories and contributions are very literal, very direct, very scared of the kind of attitude The Hundred Line’s other routes are dedicated to, and most importantly, very disconnected.

None of the other writers really ever meaningfully engage with Uchikoshi’s concepts unless doing so is the entire point of the route (and sometimes the only point – what I’d argue to be one of the game’s worst routes is the full 100 days long, has almost no progressing storyline throughout, and ends on a 15 minute plot dump in its ‘main’ ending), and in turn, the most Uchikoshi ever pays attention to the political themes or character ideas is writing them out of his stories. He’s one of few writers to split up the Tsukumo siblings in one of his routes, so commonly paired together in almost any activity they do… and almost immediately forces them to sit out of the story because character work isn’t something his routes are interested in outside of ‘propping up the Uchikoshi girl’. He’ll press the reset button on a character’s psyche so their personality is no longer getting in the way of what he wants to do as a writer, a decision constantly presented by other writers within their own stories as a very thematically important moral failing!

Rather, his routes are dedicated to an overarching mystery/romance merge that lacks the political and metafictional intrigue that Kodaka enjoys engaging with and a decent lot of the guest writers enjoy using for a backdrop, one that often gets entrenched in explaining itself and what’s happening. It often feels like he was negotiated with numerically – “I need to reach 100 endings, here’s an empty character slot and a couple open routes, write whatever you want, have a nice day” – and the web he crafts with the space he has feels like it works against The Hundred Line’s goals of versatility and encouraging organic meaning. A core selling point of the 100 endings, one that the game is built off of, is that each ending should be meaningful, should feel legitimate enough to be a ‘true ending’. The game generally makes a valiant effort at it (again, even if I’d say roughly a fourth of the endings fail in that regard, it is still a remarkably high batting average for this large of a game) but Uchikoshi’s stories fail intentionally: his stories have correct golden endings in a game almost completely averse to the idea elsewhere.

I overall do not find myself a fan of Uchikoshi’s works in a serious manner (an opinion I attribute to a personal general disinterest in the style of stories he writes, as opposed to any failings of his as a writer), but even here, it pales in comparison to basically anything else I’ve read or seen of his. I don’t think Uchikoshi is a bad writer, but his contributions to Hundred Line are consistently disinterested, flat, droning, and ultimately encompass the game at its worst. In a game so vast and invested in weird and out-there ideas, his stories look at the surface level concept, look at the base explanation for why and how the game is happening, and say, “that’s what I want to write about above all else”. 

This is of particular difficulty to talk about for me because I feel the immediate response that must be thrown back at me is obvious. “Isn’t that another way of the game expressing and using its variety?”, is a legitimate argument. It is unfair of me to claim the game uses elements typically considered weaknesses as totally intentional efforts to enhance the experience, then turn around and say “but the other guy just writes bad”. You could well make the argument Uchikoshi’s contributions are intentionally counter to the rest of The Hundred Line’s stories – that a story so dedicated to asking a reader to find meaning out of something so unwieldy and cruel would naturally smack itself in the face, dare you to hold onto such a meaning as it cuts the world’s ugliest jig through the world’s ugliest story locks for the game’s most boring, cliche, ‘mystery box show’ storylines – but I don’t imagine it being such a spiteful game.

The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- is vast. It is enormous, it it ambitious, it is insightful, it is an honest exploration of ideas that only become more and more important as we find ourselves more and more exposed to the horrors of propaganda and war and the fact that we live in a world where such things are more accessible to see and learn of and understand than ever. It is a game led by the desire to, above all else, desperately demand you find meaning from it. The comparison between it and Danganronpa is one made often, one I think is often made in good faith by those who have actually touched the game, and it feels far more intentional than simply a stylistic pull, or one made because it’s ‘the Danganronpa guy’: The Hundred Line itself is, as cheesy as it may sound, a battle between hope and despair, a story that demands you triumph over it – over its vast, unending, constantly intimidating scale, over all the different themes and messages and stories it can spew out at any given time, over all the deaths and atrocities it and its cast go through or commit – and find hope in it, find some level of meaning that can carry you forward. Maybe that meaning will be found in its themes of sacrifice and saviorism. Maybe that meaning will be found in its romances or friendships. Maybe that meaning will be found in the route where everyone gets phones and you get to see everyone’s typing quirks. Maybe that meaning will be found even when the game spits in the very idea’s face and writes off the very idea of storytelling as a hollow lie.

But you will find that meaning.

And once you find that meaning, find some level of truth and earnest in that fiction after running in circles desperately trying to find one for yourself, then the story has served its purpose. And that fiction, that truth, now one and the same, can lay itself to rest.