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M.c.P
Mar 27, 2010

Stop it.
Stop all this nonsense.

Nap Ghost
Whew finished the game, finished a recursion, read the thread. I thought the ending was great, but I'm a sucker for tragedy.

Ending chat:
I mean, I have no idea how you could possibly not catch on to the fact that Red and Blue are really intimate. Did you skip the end credits? The whole credit scroll is a slow pan of their lives before everything went to hell, mostly involving Red pursuing her music and Blue being supportive and there for her. Plus little touches here and there, hugs, terminal chats, so on.

Others have covered that it makes sense Red's suicide means they end up together, or at least it was a good guess about what would happen on her part. I just want to add that in the fight with Royce, you can see a little farmhouse with a transistor sword through it in the background, and its the same farmhouse that Red and Blue meet up in front of with all the wheat fields.

And finally, there really wasn't anything worth doing with the sword. Cloudbank was its citizens, all voting, talking, and petitioning en mass to create the city. Red could certainly rebuild it, but it'd be just as stagnant as before. Or she could make it a personal monument, but that would be utterly narcissistic, and probably what the Camerata were trying to accomplish in the first place. No, the city was dead, and Red seemed to understand the only thing worth doing was to leave it behind.


This game just makes me really want to to think about it, especially the motivations of its characters.

Here's a question: What's swordguy's deal? We just know he didn't choose any specialties, then the info asserts that there's nobody in Cloudbank who didn't choose a specialty. Is he a ghost in the shell? Someone who slipped through? Is he unique, or have other people gotten unplugged or whatever it is he did.

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Hwurmp
May 20, 2005

Mr. Nobody's deal is only ever vaguely hinted at, like that one line about how no citizens ever refused Selection and the way his trace function is Breach().

Am I reading too much into things, or was everything in Cloudbank decided by popular vote, even personal aspects of people's lives? Remember that vote for the Empty Set's next headlining act? What if Red won the vote but didn't want to do it? Would she have been forced somehow?

Fair Bear Maiden
Jun 17, 2013

Really Pants posted:

Mr. Nobody's deal is only ever vaguely hinted at, like that one line about how no citizens ever refused Selection and the way his trace function is Breach().

Am I reading too much into things, or was everything in Cloudbank decided by popular vote, even personal aspects of people's lives? Remember that vote for the Empty Set's next headlining act? What if Red won the vote but didn't want to do it? Would she have been forced somehow?

I think you're reading too much into it, at least in that particular case. As far as I remember there were only two acts to choose from to begin with, and I interpreted it as those two being the only ones to apply in the first place.

Solumin
Jan 11, 2013

M.c.P posted:

Here's a question: What's swordguy's deal? We just know he didn't choose any specialties, then the info asserts that there's nobody in Cloudbank who didn't choose a specialty. Is he a ghost in the shell? Someone who slipped through? Is he unique, or have other people gotten unplugged or whatever it is he did.

From Blue's profile: "Subject by definition cannot be matched with census data, as 0% of Cloudbank willingly chose nonselection."

To me, that sounds like they don't track the people who choose nonselection, so of course they think no one else has done it. I would expect that there are a couple other people like him, at least in the history of the city as a whole. "Ghost in the shell" comes pretty close to how I see him, sort of as a nobody, someone who really doesn't fit in with Cloudbank.

Considering how close Red and Blue are, it seems like Blue was her muse. Red's music was considered controversial, and I think that's because she was inspired by Blue. Music inspired by someone who is so different from the city is going to cause a stir.


I just noticed something else interesting. Look at the different Function traces. Red's "Trace Status" is "intact", while Blue's is "non-recoverable". The normal Cloudbank citizens' traces are "integrated" but the Camerata are "recorded", except for Sybil, who is also "integrated". Blue's is "non-recoverable" because he can't be matched to the census data, which in turn is because he never made his Selections, if the trace data is to be believed. Seems like the Transistor has a bunch of ways of gathering data on people.

Oxxidation
Jul 22, 2007

Really Pants posted:

Mr. Nobody's deal is only ever vaguely hinted at, like that one line about how no citizens ever refused Selection and the way his trace function is Breach().

Am I reading too much into things, or was everything in Cloudbank decided by popular vote, even personal aspects of people's lives? Remember that vote for the Empty Set's next headlining act? What if Red won the vote but didn't want to do it? Would she have been forced somehow?

It's sort of an in-between case with Blue and the answer is given in a single offhand line of dialogue. When you pass by the Selection office in Cloudbank, Blue remarks on how he "gets to hold off on Selection for another year." His reason given for non-Selection in his Function entry is "Still figuring things out." So while he didn't opt out of Selection, he was procrastinating like crazy for some reason - his encyclopedic knowledge of Cloudbank's bars and the punchline to his terrible joke ("What's the difference between an administrator, and a drunk?...I've never been an administrator") hints that he was sort of a loser before meeting Red, so maybe he just thought of himself as Red's BF/fiancee and nothing else. That kind of gets driven home in the last animated sequence in Fairview, when they're teleporting through the city - Blue muses on how "you can be anything you want in Cloudbank," and tries to convince himself that he's finally found a "Selection" he can live with.

anime was right
Jun 27, 2008

death is certain
keep yr cool
So I kind of got the gist of the plot, but pretty much the only thing I'm confused by is the level the world everyone is on:

Is Cloudbank real? Or is it just a fake and everyone's in the vats at the end? I assume everyone inside the Transistor is 100% dead without question. But I'm guessing they're still alive in the sense that they're programs within it that function based off who got put in them. Since everything got flipped upside down and junk, I'm guessing Cloudbank was not real the entire time and it's basically just a matrix.

The motivations of the villains seemed a little lost on me, but I mean it wasn't super important to the plot I guess really.

At the very least, I enjoyed the clear part of the ending. The plot is obviously supposed to have more than one layer to it, and I enjoyed the frosting. The cake is still confusing to me a little but I didn't read everyone's files and stuff.

anime was right
Jun 27, 2008

death is certain
keep yr cool
btw holy dang was this game easy. i didnt die once on hard and with a couple of limiters.

Ditocoaf
Jun 1, 2011

LOU BEGAS MUSTACHE posted:

So I kind of got the gist of the plot, but pretty much the only thing I'm confused by is the level the world everyone is on:

Is Cloudbank real? Or is it just a fake and everyone's in the vats at the end? I assume everyone inside the Transistor is 100% dead without question. But I'm guessing they're still alive in the sense that they're programs within it that function based off who got put in them. Since everything got flipped upside down and junk, I'm guessing Cloudbank was not real the entire time and it's basically just a matrix.


The story was super-vague about the exact nature of the virtual existence, but it seemed like a society that had been that way for a long time. It wasn't "fake" to them, even if they knew it was computerized. By not explaining the details or anything, I think it helps make it feel more "real" -- nobody walks around describing the fundamental nature of their existence to people who've lived that way all their lives.

For instance, "the country" is either a euphemism for death, or a less-deep layer of VR, or the "real world". But it was never explained, because all that matters (to people in Cloudbank) is that it's a one-way trip.


quote:

The motivations of the villains seemed a little lost on me
The Camerata were fed up with the constant voting thing, and the easy malleability of the world. Their whole "when everything changes, nothing changes" line is their complaint about the status quo: people could change the nature of their city, the sky, their lives, and did so constantly, but to the Camerata it all felt trivial and fleeting.

They wanted to "lock in" the most important and inspiring aspects of their society, by refining those aspects to the abstract concepts and methods that defined them. Then, changes could be purposeful and significant -- changes could matter because they'd last longer than a day.

They didn't get to that step, though. They were partway through collecting all the aspects of society they wanted to preserve and idealize, when the process went feral, and started reducing society to a fully abstract blank slate.

Ditocoaf fucked around with this message at 02:46 on Jun 2, 2014

anime was right
Jun 27, 2008

death is certain
keep yr cool
that seems pretty in line with what my hunches were then. i didn't delve too deep into the supplementary material so thanks.

Opposing Farce
Apr 1, 2010

Ever since our drop-off service, I never read a book.
There's always something else around, plus I owe the library nineteen bucks.
Here's how I took it: Cloudbank is real, at least as far as the plot is concerned. The Transistor has the power to control the Process, and I got the sense that they were both created by Royce (almost by accident, he makes it sound) but Ditocoaf seems to have a better grasp on the story than so maybe the Process was always there and the Transistor is the great discovery Royce made. Either way, the Transistor has the ability to rip people's minds--their thoughts, their personalities--out of their bodies and store them in itself as functions. Grant and Royce, and later Asher and Sybil with them, planned to use the Process to take control of the city and reshape it into something else, something ideal, using the influential and notable figures they were collecting with the Transistor to guide them and give them insight the four of them wouldn't have thought of. I'm not totally sure what their vision was or what exactly they mean when they say "when everything changes, nothing changes." Whatever their goal, though, seething went wrong, and this is another point I'm not clear on--there's a line that suggests you taking the Transistor made them lose control of the Process, but Royce seems to say the trouble started when he let Grant "borrow" the Process. The ending is mostly self-explanatory, I think, although I'll admit I'm a little lost as to some of the "how"a and "why"s of it, i.e. "How do you and Royce get to the Transistor field?" and "Why does killing Royce get you back to Cloudbank?"

e: beaten, and by somebody who sounds like they know what they're talking about better than I do.

Anyway, at this point I've done everything there is to do in this game I think--cleared all the challenge rooms, finished NG+, unlocked all the achivements, even played a little bit into a second recursion to hit level 30. It's real good, though the combat takes a little while to come together; you really need to find the right combination of skills to make it work. (I was fond of putting Get on Breach to pull enemies in for a Cull, though eventually I ended up using Tap as my bread-and-butter while using Cull and Mask stacked with as many damage boosts as I could get to oneshot anything tough.) I was kind of hoping for something more to happen story-wise in NG+, though; I'm like 95% sure I didn't hallucinate Royce saying that first line and it writes a check the rest of the recursion doesn't really cash.

Opposing Farce fucked around with this message at 03:14 on Jun 2, 2014

Oxxidation
Jul 22, 2007

Opposing Farce posted:

Here's how I took it: Cloudbank is real, at least unless we want to start getting all metaphysical about things. The Process was created by Royce as a way to shape the world on command, and the Transistor seems to be the key to controlling them. It also has the ability to rip people's minds--their thoughts, their personalities--out of their bodies and store them in itself as functions. Grant and Royce, and later Asher and Sybil with them, planned to use the Process to take control of the city and reshape it into something else, something ideal, using the influential and notable figures they were collecting with the Transistor to guide them and give them insight the four of them wouldn't have thought of. I'm not totally sure what their vision was or what exactly they mean when they say "when everything changes, nothing changes." Whatever their goal, though, seething went wrong, and this is another point I'm not clear on--there's a line that suggests you taking the Transistor made them lose control of the Process, but Royce seems to say the trouble started when he let Grant "borrow" the Process. The ending is mostly self-explanatory, I think, although I'll admit I'm a little lost as to some of the "how"a and "why"s of it, i.e. "How do you and Royce get to the Transistor field?" and "Why does killing Royce get you back to Cloudbank?"

You've got a couple of referential pronouns mixed up with the exposition near the end - Royce didn't invent the Process or the Transistor. He somehow calculated his way to the latter ("It wasn't just geography, there was a lot of math involved, a lot of math...") which presumably allowed him access to the former, which was actually a part of Cloudbank since long before any of them were alive. There's no construction industry in Cloudbank; the Process is the background...well, process, that makes everything in the city run. Royce somehow used the Transistor to manifest and fine-tune them, and was busy getting Science all over everything when Grant approached him with the Camerata's proposal. Royce was interested and lent the Transistor to Grant, to carry out the assimilation scheme, and then everything was terrible forever. I guess from Royce's perspective, if he'd been in charge of the Transistor like before, he never would've bothered trying to upload Red - Sybil basically browbeat the rest of the Camerata into approaching her with the ulterior motive of causing Blue's "accident," but that poo poo wouldn't fly with a MAN OF SCIENCE like Royce.

The Transistor battle with Royce really does feel like something Supergiant thought would be rad and kind of crowbarred into the script. The best I can come up with is that, after rebooting the Process, the Transistor basically searches its domain (that dead black area that Royce has holed up in) for a new administrator login and goes "oh, there's two people in my lobby, jolly good, please resolve your differences." It traps both their consciousnesses within itself until a resolution is met, and Red then proceeds to "resolve" Royce until he stops thinking alive thoughts.

Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 03:26 on Jun 2, 2014

Opposing Farce
Apr 1, 2010

Ever since our drop-off service, I never read a book.
There's always something else around, plus I owe the library nineteen bucks.
Yeah, I think you're right; it never occurred to me while playing that the Process was always in the background running things, but now that I'm thinking about it that's definitely the only thing that makes sense. Royce "invented" the Transistor in some sense--I mean, I don't think he found it lying around on the ground--but it's clear that he stumbled into it without really understanding what it is or how it works. Maybe it's some kind of inevitable mathematical conclusion hidden within the Process itself.

Actually, now that I'm thinking over all this again, it always bothered me how "game-y" Royce's whole "I'm going to follow you around and dole out tiny nuggets of exposition between fights" shtick is but to top it off he insists on explaining everything in the most unclear, roundabout way possible. gently caress that guy.

That Transistor battle is hella rad though.

Rosalind
Apr 30, 2013

When we hit our lowest point, we are open to the greatest change.

Oxxidation posted:

You've got a couple of referential pronouns mixed up with the exposition near the end - Royce didn't invent the Process or the Transistor. He somehow calculated his way to the latter ("It wasn't just geometry, there was a lot of math involved, a lot of math...") which presumably allowed him access to the former, which was actually a part of Cloudbank since long before any of them were alive. There's no construction industry in Cloudbank; the Process is the background...well, process, that makes everything in the city run. Royce somehow used the Transistor to manifest and fine-tune them, and was busy getting Science all over everything when Grant approached him with the Camerata's proposal. Royce was interested and lent the Transistor to Grant, to carry out the assimilation scheme, and then everything was terrible forever. I guess from Royce's perspective, if he'd been in charge of the Transistor like before, he never would've bothered trying to upload Red - Sybil basically browbeat the rest of the Camerata into approaching her with the ulterior motive of causing Blue's "accident," but that poo poo wouldn't fly with a MAN OF SCIENCE like Royce.

The Transistor battle with Royce really does feel like something Supergiant thought would be rad and kind of crowbarred into the script. The best I can come up with is that, after rebooting the Process, the Transistor basically searches its domain (that dead black area that Royce has holed up in) for a new administrator login and goes "oh, there's two people in my lobby, jolly good, please resolve your differences." It traps both their consciousnesses within itself until a resolution is met, and Red then proceeds to "resolve" Royce until he stops thinking alive thoughts.


In regards to your second paragraph, I think you're pretty right about how the it's supposed to be the two of them fighting for admin privileges. When Red puts the transistor in the cradle, she enters the transistor's world (which I guess would be the "user rights" section of a computer). There can be only one administrator, so Red kills Royce.

One thing I'm curious about is if Royce is inspired by Steve Jobs? To me, the cadence in his voice and that constant I'm-musing-about-the-future-smugly attitude is very Jobs.

Black August
Sep 28, 2003

As far as I could tell regarding the Process and the ending, I just saw it all as one big fantastical abstraction of utterly mundane computer processes. You and everyone are programs of some kind, even if you're ultra advanced AI routines or in the Matrix or whatever, carrying out your purpose like the Process. In this case, the Process is just the basic background routines of the entire world, the functions which set the wallpaper background or move files around, and somehow the Camerata accidentally smashed the "Would you like to format your hard drive? YES? OK GREAT" button, and had no idea how to stop it. So everything got formatted, and then Red and Royce managed to be there when the login screen came back up, and had to fight to determine who got to enter 'admin' for the name and password and have the clean slate to themselves. Red decided to say gently caress it and join Blue in the great Recycle Bin of computer life.

EDIT: I bloody hate Royce's way of talking, too. In a good way. Something about his cadence made me want to see Red throw her hands around his scrawny little neck and share in the whole 'can't speak' problem she has.

Black August fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Jun 2, 2014

anime was right
Jun 27, 2008

death is certain
keep yr cool
So making sense of this:

The world is. All that matters is there is an underlying process. Considering all of the people turn into programs which modify the reality you are in. You are not in reality, you are definitely in a matrix.

Royce discovers a way to backdoor the system. Nothing changes in the world because everyone is secondary. You cannot rewrite the laws of gravity. The admin key or Transistor allows you to bypass this. So you become god. So anyway, whatever Grant does messes everything up and the Process, which is a higher level than you, attempts to fix everything by reformatting it all. Since you are data, and the transistor is data, it also tries to delete you in this formatting process. Grant tries to gain access to more power by putting people in the transistor, this is messed up, and the admin key/access is granted to Red in the failed assimilation. Along the way, your own data is corrupted (your voice). After the reboot and killing Royce, the whole world is gone. There's literally nothing besides you an the admin key which is also Victor. Since there's nothing left, you kill yourself, since Victor isn't actually Victor. He's just data of data.

So in the end, I think Red realizes there's literally nothing. Anything she builds will be pointless since she's god, but she cannot create life, she cannot create people, and even god cannot bring Victor back for this reason.

Red's final fate was a choice between being able to create whatever universe you want with no life in it, or die. She chose to die.

I'm not sure what my final takeaway from it is though.

Baku
Aug 20, 2005

by Fluffdaddy
I have no clue if that was the intent or not, but I read the bandages on Blue's wrists as being related to suicide or cutting at least referentially, rather than an arbitrary fashion choice or him being a boxer or something. I've known a lot of people with those problems in their lives, and it fits in with this image of him as a shiftless and depressed person who only eventually finds a sense of purpose in loving and being loved by Red. Maybe they're covering up scars from before he met her.

Just a weird little detail I thought maybe others didn't see.

Sardonik
Jul 1, 2005

if you like my dumb posts, you'll love my dumb youtube channel
Well I really liked it, except for the ending. I really thought it was something of a wasted opportunity for Red to not do *something* before hopping down to the country. Even a website with a dead community deserves a tribute page.

In a way, I feel like Cloudbank can be viewed as a metaphor of or indeed directly as an internet forum community. You have the different users of the community, generating content, making names for themselves, with all the different personality types. You have the detached long-time admin type who is tired of the status quo in some way, and tries to impose a forum software change of some kind, and things go wrong. Sort of like that time YCS came back and the stylesheet was hosed on the entire forum, but the problem is on a grander scale in Cloudbank :v:.

The game speaks of a broader conflict between users and admins. Red gets put on probation essentially, unable to speak/post by them. Maybe even hellbanned, in that it's questionable any of her comments made it :v:.She basically found a way into the admin control panel, but she still can't stop the inevitable collapse of the community since the admins turned their back on the community. 'The country' also feels like it could be 'the wider internet'.


Anyway I'll probably give it another playthrough or two. I think it was a bit rough around the edges, wish area transitions were better marked, and what paths are optional areas, and I wish the game was a little better grounded, but still, very good.

Ghetto Prince
Sep 11, 2010

got to be mellow, y'all
Did the game ever explain those densely packed little things that look like cattails and pop when you walk through them? I figured they were the remains of people (avatars?) who'd been processed.

Sardonik posted:


The game speaks of a broader conflict between users and admins. Red gets put on probation essentially, unable to speak/post by them.

That actually makes perfect sense, good catch.

Opposing Farce
Apr 1, 2010

Ever since our drop-off service, I never read a book.
There's always something else around, plus I owe the library nineteen bucks.

Ghetto Prince posted:

Did the game ever explain those densely packed little things that look like cattails and pop when you walk through them? I figured they were the remains of people (avatars?) who'd been processed.

My guess would be they're just little packets of loose Process poking out to the surface (not unlike what Royce talks about in the Weed comments).

xiw
Sep 25, 2011

i wake up at night
night action madness nightmares
maybe i am scum

Cpig Haiku contest 2020 winner
I definitely read them as processed people, too.

JuniperCake
Jan 26, 2013

LOU BEGAS MUSTACHE posted:

So making sense of this:

The world is. All that matters is there is an underlying process. Considering all of the people turn into programs which modify the reality you are in. You are not in reality, you are definitely in a matrix.

Since there's nothing left, you kill yourself, since Victor isn't actually Victor. He's just data of data.

So in the end, I think Red realizes there's literally nothing. Anything she builds will be pointless since she's god, but she cannot create life, she cannot create people, and even god cannot bring Victor back for this reason.

Red's final fate was a choice between being able to create whatever universe you want with no life in it, or die. She chose to die.

I'm not sure what my final takeaway from it is though.


I think your interpretation is the bleakest I've seen so far. Whether someone exists as data or as a copy of data doesn't really matter, especially if you hold the opinion that cloudbank is entirely digital. In terms of software if you make a proper copy of an object, say in C++, you invoke a copy constructor and it creates a new object with the same data as the old. The only difference between the two objects is that they are located in two different memory locations (cloud bank vs inside the transistor in this case) but if the data contains everything that makes an individual unique then it's only the data itself that's important. I don't think its plausible to assume the guy in the transistor is somehow not the real blue, especially given the ending. He is real to red which is all that matters to her.

I mean if you really want to get nitpicky, people's bodies are constantly changing and cells are constantly being replaced; neurons constantly establish and destroy connections too. The you that you were 2-3 years ago is dead forever and will never come back. Does that mean you are just a fake copy?

So that makes it a choice between living alone with ultimate freedom in the real world, or living in the confines of the transistor with the love of your life, an easy choice for Red. We know what choice Royce would have taken if given that option. Though interestingly enough I think the rest of the Camerata would have taken Red's choice given what goes down in the game. Royce is really the odd guy out with his lack of connections to others.

JuniperCake fucked around with this message at 11:17 on Jun 2, 2014

Solumin
Jan 11, 2013

Opposing Farce posted:

Yeah, I think you're right; it never occurred to me while playing that the Process was always in the background running things, but now that I'm thinking about it that's definitely the only thing that makes sense. Royce "invented" the Transistor in some sense--I mean, I don't think he found it lying around on the ground--but it's clear that he stumbled into it without really understanding what it is or how it works. Maybe it's some kind of inevitable mathematical conclusion hidden within the Process itself.

Actually, now that I'm thinking over all this again, it always bothered me how "game-y" Royce's whole "I'm going to follow you around and dole out tiny nuggets of exposition between fights" shtick is but to top it off he insists on explaining everything in the most unclear, roundabout way possible. gently caress that guy.

That Transistor battle is hella rad though.


I actually found that part really hilarious, though maybe not at first. When you exit the Backdoor in that area, you catch Royce saying something like, "And that's the true purpose of the Transistor." Blue/Victor asks him, "...wait, repeat that," and Royce just shuts up. I think the entire point was that he wasn't really telling you anything. I don't remember exactly what he tells you, but I think it was mostly confirmation of things that you already knew from other parts of the game. He's just...talking. Strange, disjointed, and self-centered verbal diarrhea.

Opposing Farce
Apr 1, 2010

Ever since our drop-off service, I never read a book.
There's always something else around, plus I owe the library nineteen bucks.
To be fair I'm pretty sure only Red can hear Breach/Blue/Victor/Rucks/whatever that guy's name is. Just a little bit before that Backdoor Royce says you can hear the people inside the Transistor, but only some of them--only the ones you know. Royce might be able to hear someone inside the Transistor--maybe Grant, maybe the other Camerata--but I think Red is the only person who hears what we hear.

Sardonik
Jul 1, 2005

if you like my dumb posts, you'll love my dumb youtube channel

Opposing Farce posted:

To be fair I'm pretty sure only Red can hear Breach/Blue/Victor/Rucks/whatever that guy's name is. Just a little bit before that Backdoor Royce says you can hear the people inside the Transistor, but only some of them--only the ones you know. Royce might be able to hear someone inside the Transistor--maybe Grant, maybe the other Camerata--but I think Red is the only person who hears what we hear.

If you turn on Subtitles you can tell in the Sybil fight that she can hear and recognize the voice in the transistor. Something along the lines of 'that voice, we killed you', or some such. I'm pretty sure she hears the voice. She also says some kind of messed up things in general.

Opposing Farce
Apr 1, 2010

Ever since our drop-off service, I never read a book.
There's always something else around, plus I owe the library nineteen bucks.
I'm pretty sure Sybil isn't exactly entirely a "person" anymore.

What's up with her, anyway? Everyone else the Process gets seems to just die and turn into a Trace--why is she the only one who becomes a monster? Did something happen during Red and Blue's escape to turn her into that? Does she respawn all those times by the same mechanism you and Royce do? And speaking of bosses--what about The Spine? Did the Process just decide to make a bunch of giant worms on a lark? It doesn't get a limiter or any source comments from Royce so I'm not sure there's any real significance to it other than being a big thing to fight. None of this is really important but I was kind of hoping to learn more about them by the end of the game.

Opposing Farce fucked around with this message at 14:47 on Jun 2, 2014

Sardonik
Jul 1, 2005

if you like my dumb posts, you'll love my dumb youtube channel

Opposing Farce posted:

I'm pretty sure Sybil isn't exactly entirely a "person" anymore.

What's up with her, anyway? Everyone else the Process gets seems to just die and turn into a Trace--why is she the only one who becomes a monster? Did something happen during Red and Blue's escape to turn her into that? Does she respawn all those times by the same mechanism you and Royce do? And speaking of bosses--what about The Spine? Did the Process just decide to make a bunch of giant worms on a lark? It doesn't get a limiter or any source comments from Royce so I'm not sure there's any real significance to it other than being a big thing to fight. None of this is really important but I was kind of hoping to learn more about them by the end of the game.

I think Sybil might have got hit with something when the transistor glitched out from hitting Blue. Maybe it was just the natural consequence of being in an area being absorbed back into the process, maybe she had some sort of extra camerata safeguard that prevented her from being formatted completely. As to the respawning thing I wouldn't read too much into that, they probably just realized the boss fight wasn't lasting long enough with only one phase.

More than anything I think they just wanted a boss, and it couldn't be all human.


The Spine is a really large component of the process. It's always there behind the scenes, maybe not in the form you see it in the game though. I think it's analogous to a construction/demolition algorithm.

haveblue
Aug 15, 2005



Toilet Rascal
The Spine seemed to me to be a really fundamental part of the system architecture, analogous to, say, init. If it's something responsible for part of the existence of Cloudbank at all it would necessarily have to be large and powerful in comparison to any of its contents.

The whole game reminds me of a semi-notorious hack someone did that merged ps and Doom, so you could run around shooting your own processes which would kill them in the command-line sense.


My Spine question is why does it reappear after Red blows its head off and kills its heart (:black101:)?

Oxxidation
Jul 22, 2007

haveblue posted:

My Spine question is why does it reappear after Red blows its head off and kills its heart (:black101:)?

I'm pretty certain that's because there's more than just one Spine. It's there to drive home just how hopeless the battle against the Process has become - hey, buddy, remember this building-sized Process that drove Blue half-crazy and took you the better part of an hour to beat? Have another one! Could be more where that came from! It's impossible to beat them back through attrition alone, because they'll just keep respawning.

Motherfucker
Jul 16, 2011

I certainly dont have deep-seated issues involving birthdays.
Why did the Camarilla try and stab red / successfully stab reds fiance?

Oxxidation
Jul 22, 2007

Motherfucker posted:

Why did the Camarilla try and stab red / successfully stab reds fiance?

You can thank Sybil for that one. She started scoping out Red as a candidate due to her level of influence on Cloudbank's populace and unusual Selection combo, and then started developing a fan-crush on her instead. But she saw how Red was already taken, and set up the Camerata's hit knowing that Blue would be there (but telling the Camerata Red would be alone), hoping that Blue would take the bullet. No idea what Sybil was hoping for after that ("Oh, Ms. Reisz, you're a stranger who has stabbed the love of my life with a giant USB stick, kiss me you fool"), but since Blue's assimilation is what caused the Transistor's fatal error, so it's a moot point.

Wittgen
Oct 13, 2012

We have decided to decline your offer of a butt kicking.

Motherfucker posted:

Why did the Camarilla try and stab red / successfully stab reds fiance?

Sybil was in love with Red and manipulated things. I don't think it's clear whether it was out of jealousy or because she hoped to spend quality transistor time with Red. Probably both.

docbeard
Jul 19, 2011

I stayed up way too late finishing this last night

On the whole, I liked it a lot, but not quite as much as I liked Bastion.

I keep going back and forth on the ending. It's not comfortable, and I suppose it shouldn't be. It feels true to the story, and to who Red is and what she values, but I'm not sure if I like it or not, if that makes sense.

I guess it's not so much a suicide as it is a decision of which world she'd rather live in. And looked at in those terms, it was a pretty obvious decision once it became clear that she couldn't bring back the people that the Process had, er, processed, nor even the people in the Transistor (including and especially her lover, but I don't think just him). Unlike the Camerata, who (with the possible exception of Sybil) didn't really care about the people of Cloudbank (except as resources to 'improve' the city), Red didn't care about anything else.

I did like the implication that the Process was evolving its own forms of life.

Opposing Farce
Apr 1, 2010

Ever since our drop-off service, I never read a book.
There's always something else around, plus I owe the library nineteen bucks.

docbeard posted:

I keep going back and forth on the ending. It's not comfortable, and I suppose it shouldn't be. It feels true to the story, and to who Red is and what she values, but I'm not sure if I like it or not, if that makes sense.

Yeah, I kind of felt the same way. I dunno, I mean the ending fits the story and it's definitely what they were building towards--there's a pretty clear hint of "we both know it won't happen" to all of the "maybe I can get out of here/I'm going to find a way to get you out of there" talk--and it's basically the canonical ending to a classical tragedy, which on the whole this game very much is. But at the same time I think maybe that's the reason it bugs me, since killing yourself to be with your lover always struck me as shortsighted at best. Romeo and Juliet were deliberately written as idiot teenagers, after all.

One other question, just kind of something I was curious about : Where does the name Victor come from? Calling him Blue I get, I've seen him called Breach and that makes sense, sometimes I just call him Rucks because seriously, I guess Mr. Nobody never caught on but I could've seen that happening; Victor I have to assume comes from somewhere out of the game or maybe I just missed something.

Unrelated, but the music in the last couple of areas reminds me a lot of the music in Bastion's last couple of areas.

Opposing Farce fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Jun 2, 2014

Glazius
Jul 22, 2007

Hail all those who are able,
any mouse can,
any mouse will,
but the Guard prevail.

Clapping Larry
Sybil's file says she's a very organized person. If the Process is defragmenting people's consciousness runtimes, that might have helped her hold on to a little bit of non-Process thought.

Oxxidation
Jul 22, 2007

Opposing Farce posted:

One other question, just kind of something I was curious about : Where does the name Victor come from? Calling him Blue I get, I've seen him called Breach and that makes sense, sometimes I just call him Rucks because seriously, I guess Mr. Nobody never caught on but I could've seen that happening; Victor I have to assume comes from somewhere out of the game or maybe I just missed something.

Unrelated, but the music in the last couple of areas reminds me a lot of the music in Bastion's last couple of areas.

There's a silly rumor circulating that if you beat the game seven times, a new mode called "Recurrence/Relations" unlocks that includes extra incidental dialogue, including Blue's name. It's fake as hell and confirmed as such.

jkyuusai
Jun 26, 2008

homegrown man milk

Opposing Farce posted:

One other question, just kind of something I was curious about : Where does the name Victor come from? Calling him Blue I get, I've seen him called Breach and that makes sense, sometimes I just call him Rucks because seriously, I guess Mr. Nobody never caught on but I could've seen that happening; Victor I have to assume comes from somewhere out of the game or maybe I just missed something.

Best I can tell, this joker mentioned it and now people keep using it.

efb

Opposing Farce
Apr 1, 2010

Ever since our drop-off service, I never read a book.
There's always something else around, plus I owe the library nineteen bucks.
Ah, all right. I didn't get the game until a little after it came out and I wanted to avoid spoilers so I came into the thread late.

Motherfucker
Jul 16, 2011

I certainly dont have deep-seated issues involving birthdays.
So I've been kicking major rear end with

Tap(Jaunt;Load)
Void(Crash;Split)
*freeslot*
Mask()


Generally I use ping() with get() in my free slot so I can drag people into my instant death radius, than I use my void which will crash and apply double void thanks to split, followed by tap which will generally do in the ballpark of 1750 damage in one shot, OR if I really need to make someone dead I'll use mask, than tap, the unmask putting it up to like 2500 but generally I use mask at the end of my turn so I can more readily pull another void and tap combo without having to worry about being hurt between turn()

Turtlicious
Sep 17, 2012

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

jkyuusai posted:

Best I can tell, this joker mentioned it and now people keep using it.

efb

I mentioned it because it's true. :colbert:

How do I delete my save? I'll just re-do it.

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Legit Businessman
Sep 2, 2007


jkyuusai posted:

Best I can tell, this joker mentioned it and now people keep using it.

efb

There's a list of names which have been targeted by the Camerata. All of the other names are known characters. You also see the same name on a poster at the start of the game wearing a similar style of clothing, with their name on the poster as well.

It is a mystery, but one that gets explained eventually.

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