#adhd brain truly go brrrr

[nirvanai]

Though the secret ending implies Tokiko was right all along.

oh i do have some thoughts about this! rotates diverge route in my brain. this is just personal opinion and a lot of just. interpretation and looking at things in a meta-narrative sense, so feel free to disagree entirely lmao, but! anyways.

(also im so sorry anon this got really long and rambly sldkfhgsdg i did not mean for this to happen)

for me at least, the nil ending stuff doesn’t really end as a “she was actually right!” sort of thing, but rather, it feels like more of a direct challenge to the player and their expectation of what a narrative “should” give and what a secret ending “should” be. the ending itself breaks the 4th wall directly, it gives the choice of whether or not it happens directly to the player- it even relies on (from what i understand) a random number, so you can’t cheat it. You need to play the game to see your own personal nil number.

The game is presenting you with a ‘final twist’- this world is a game, something that you as a player have known all along. It is a fictional world, Tokiko is right- they just dropped the pretense. for a very brief moment, Ryuki sees the ‘truth’ of the world, and Tokiko then gives you as the player an option: you can tell him everything, change the course of history to try to reach a “better ending”, or you can let him forget and let events play out the same as they did before. 

When I play through the diverge route content, it gives off a very strong feeling of things feeling... off. It rings a bit hollow, almost like a pyrrhic victory- it should be a better world, Uru was stopped in time, Komeji is alive, Amame is free, none of the explosion end stuff happened. And yet, it feels like there’s still a heavy cost to it, to Ryuki’s own psyche. The awareness that we granted him weighs him down- he’s disconnected from the people around him, he got promoted but barely leaves his office anymore, even Tama is more blunt about not believing him about this ‘other timeline’. 

This world should feel better, but something has been lost- not just for Ryuki, but the player as well. All of the bonds that were forged, the emotions we just went through in the story... all of them were washed away by our doing.

Now, I’m not saying this to claim “oh we as the players are villains! we’re doing a bad thing and helping tokiko win!”, because I honestly do not believe that either. I don’t think that’s the point of the ending- its not making any sort of accusation at the player, but rather, it’s asking us why we may feel the way we do about it. If it feels hollow to some, why does it feel hollow? Why does it seem to linger?

When playing games, its natural to want to find all the secrets- especially in a mystery game such as this. The ‘Frayer” question is presented extremely early on in the story, and it may linger in a player’s mind. It’s a secret, so of course you want to figure out what it means. Seeking that sort of information is an understandable, and likely intended response, especially considering this is a literal murder mystery game. Almost every LP i’ve seen has people stop and try to guess at numbers for a while before moving on, and hell, I did that myself!

So when the game gives you the nil number at the end, and asks you what you want to do with it, its just the obvious thing to do. You want more answers, you want more time with this game, you want to uncover every mystery and secret that you can. The achievements in-game help with this a bit on a meta level, too- you know there’s secrets to find, so go find them!

Objectively, in the true end timeline, people suffered far more. People died, Amame is in jail, everything that happened in the explosion end- but for all of the suffering and pain, it wasn’t a world without meaning. Ryuki and the Mizukis were both still fighting in their own ways for the truth, to solve things- perhaps the past couldn’t be changed, and that better world may not exist to them, but their world still has meaning. Things may still be bittersweet, its not a perfect happy ending- but those are rare in life. Everyone is still finding their own way forward as best they can, and making the most of the life they’re living. No matter how you’ve struggled, there is still value in that life, and finding that value is something so very important. 

(Please note I’m not saying that people should suffer in life, or that you need to suffer for your life to have meaning- rather, I just want to say that a life where you have suffered is not meaningless. Experiencing loss and hardship is tragic, and often times traumatic, but your life still has meaning and you are not defined by the hardships you’ve experienced. There is always the chance that you will find a way to make things better tomorrow, that you will find the strength to start picking yourself up if you need to, and that is important and extremely meaningful.)

In the diverge route, everything is better, but the emotional connection with the player is gone. You’ve found what you were looking for, you’ve found that ‘happier ending’, and now the game is asking you what that should mean to you. What do you consider important from the narrative? What makes a story satisfying to you? What parts of this were drawing you in, investing you? We’ve removed the facade, this world is just a game- but it was a game that meant something to you, it got you invested, made you care, and it was satisfying as a result. It doesn’t matter that it was a game- we go along with it because we care, because we want to see what happens to these characters we like, and because seeing them struggle and fight and ultimately claim that ending song they so very deserved is a reward of its own.

So to me, the nil number is essentially asking you to think about your own personal relationships to media. What is it about the ending of a story that matters to you? Is a “perfect ending” all that matters for you to be happy, or are you actually looking for something else? It’s not intended to be a happy ending, despite it being a better one- it’s nil. A process has occurred, and something has changed, yet you have no more or less than you did before.

Apologies again for rambling on here lmao I’m sure you probably did not intend for that. And again, this is just my personal interpretations of the ending- I’m sure other people will have their own too, and that’s part of the fun to me! It’s very ripe for analysis and discussion, I don’t want to present my views as the only “correct” way to look at things, I’m just giving my case here as best I can in hopes some people may enjoy reading my thoughts on the matter.

The diverge route stuff is fascinating to me because its challenging, it lingers, it makes me think about it and want more in a way that I know I’ll be better off never getting it. Expanding on the ending in the game would honestly feel counterproductive- it works so well to me because it feels hollow. We have frayed at the edges, and now we get to see what we’ve done. (not to say i won’t read fic tho bc there’s some cool fic out there already on the topic. hell yeah.)

So, yeah! I hope that made at least a little bit of sense to read through, thanks for reading if you did, and I hope that even if you don’t agree it was still a fun thing to look over lmao. 

#aini #aini spoilers #nirvana initiative #nirvana initiative spoilers #kuruto ryuki #tokiko shigure #nirvanai #nirvanai spoilers #replies #anon #adhd brain truly do go brrrr sometimes #i like just. thinking abt uchikoshi's games!! the themes n questions are fun!! #media that makes you think about your relationship to the medium is fun!! #it makes me happy and i love it so much #i love that aini does all of this #and that it's given me questions and feelings that are mine to sort through #and i LOVE thinking abt it for what it means for ryuki too #altho i dont focus too much on that in this post bc its more looking at it from a meta perspective