The House in Fata Morgana

The House in Fata Morgana (THiFM) is a visual novel written by Keika Hanada and developed by Novect. According to wikipedia, it was released in 2012 and 2014 in Japan for PC and iOS and then in 2016 by MangaGamer for PC. Later down the line a Nintendo 3DS and a Playstation Vita version were released by Dramatic Create and the more recent versions for Playstation 4, Vita and Nintendo Switch were released by Limited Run. These versions are complete with the two DLC and short stories. It’s called The House in Fata Morgana: Dreams of the Revenants Edition and it’s the one I’m currently playing.

THiFM is very linear compared to my experience with other visual novels like The Letter. By interacting with objects and exploring the mansion when given the opportunity to do so we can pretty much unlock all endings if we save our game at every choice prompt. What’s cool about the Dreams of the Revenants edition is that it unlocks the stories in order, which means you need to get the true ending before you can access the DLC stories. Everything else is marked in grey and you can’t select it before you complete the main story, and the same goes for the DLCs. “A Requiem for Innocence” is the first tale available after playing the main story and it unlocks progressively. It’s a prequel. Then there’s “Reincarnation”, which isn’t available on PC, and as far as I know it’s an epilogue. Additionally we have yet to unlock the short stories and the extras. There’s a lot of content in the PS4, Vita, and Nintendo Switch package.

In this edition there’s also a Back Door. Take it as some sort of funny hack. By answering three questions we can unlock every story in the game. I didn’t use the option, but it’s very useful to those who already know the story and want to play the additional content in whichever order they wish. I’m currently reading “A Requiem for Innocence” and enjoying the little bits of plot that were left to the imagination when I went through the main game. In such intricate stories I tend to prefer staying in the dark about a lot of details and interpret them using the information originally given to me. I think it’s more exciting knowing less and keep wondering about intriguing details or what could have happened during certain events previously left unseen but that were central to the tragedy that followed.

** There’s spoilers for some parts of the story **

THiFM tells the story of a person with amnesia (where did I hear this before?) who ends up at a mansion in the middle of nowhere. They wake up inside the mansion and a beautiful maid – the Maid – calls them Master. We, as the Master, can’t figure things out on our own. The Maid seems to be very motherly and sweet and she’s the first person we see after waking up in a rocking chair. She seems very happy to have found another Master and it looks like for all intents and purposes we are there to stay. However there’s a lot of confusion about how we got there in the first place. The Maid warmly offers a helping hand. After all, she most likely knows more about us than we do ourselves and she’s ready to offer some guidance through the mansion’s halls and rooms enveloped in darkness. Yet, what she’s offering is not a simple guided tour of the mansion; it’s in fact a deep dive into the mansion’s history and the stories of its previous Masters. In order to do that, the Maid asks us to hold her hand and never let go. Then, we open the first door.

I’m not going to retell the whole story here. I’d like to, but it’s so unnecessary and I wouldn’t count on my memory for that! I think it could be funny to create a shorter version of the story for kids without the bloody parts and the everlasting trauma, as a tale of romance, acceptance, love and sacrifice. It’s a beautiful tale that spans hundreds of years. The first three doors we visit with the Maid are the tales of three different people whose tales ended in tragedy. The mansion is cursed by a cursed witch. I don’t know about you, but I think that a cursed witch is more dangerous than a witch, right? A witch can be good or bad, even though in the story and the period it represents, being a witch is always bad. So a cursed witch is extra terrible and comes with extra misery for everyone touched by her.

I need to confess something. I loved the story from the start. The first three doors with the contained stories of its characters were great. The first door tells the story of a brother and sister, the second door tells the story of a beast and its lover, the third door is about a man blinded by power and status and his best friend. There’s a common denominator to all these stories. A white-haired girl appears in all of them. She’s a pure, wonderful, sweet, shy girl, but she has an effect on the hearts of men and women that ultimately contributes to their demise. Who’s the White-Haired Girl is one of the central mysteries of the story. How come someone so pure and without any ill intent has such capacity to change lives for the worse?

About what I had to confess. I spaced out a lot while I was reading. It wasn’t because I got bored with the story; it was because I was trying to tie the knots and to figure things out on my own, something I’m still currently doing. What’s beyond the 4th door and all the doors that came after is a bit of a blur. I wasn’t exactly counting, and when the storylines started making more sense in context, I stopped paying that much attention to the door I was at. From a certain point on it doesn’t matter that much, unless we want to make a tier list of your favourite doors and I have none. I loved all of them equally. One door has a false story, but we eventually get the right one, so it wasn’t that important.

Since this was a story of pain, trauma, suffering and, possibly, redemption, it was important for our main character to figure out who they were, who was the White-Haired Girl, who was the Maid and who was the witch. The stories of these characters are central to the plot and are related to the stories of the other characters behind the first three doors. Behind the other doors we have access to the real stories of the witch, the Maid, Michel, Michel and Giselle, more witch and then going back in time to the first story of the mansion and how the terrible curse happened in the first place. The motivation behind all this is the salvation of the soul from the corruption of the witch’s curse, by creating an opportunity for everyone to tell their stories and find redemption. Also, another very strong motivator was the love between Michel and Giselle and how much they were invested in rejoining after death to fix what they couldn’t achieve in life.

The game explores the lengths of human evil. There were some times in the course of the story that I had to take a little break to collect myself. It must have happened three or four times, because the level of torment and torture in some parts was way overwhelming. Rape, domestic violence and transphobia are a central part of some character’s stories. Also, if you happen to be a saint, never tell anyone. Do you know what people do to saints if they spill the beans? The Son of God was the first to go. 

Michel’s story was – among many others – very hard to watch. He was born with a girl’s body but never identified as one. If you have ever been in this situation – as a trans person or someone who doesn’t fit gender roles – during your formative years this story will sound equally familiar and painful. He had to deal with a family that wasn’t accepting of his identity and then he was locked up and fell victim to a noble girl’s bullying that lasted until she got bored and moved on. It was awful to see what she did to him. To make matters worse he had fallen in love with her. At first he had a female body but, after getting sick, he woke up with a male body and everyone thought he was cursed. His body wasn’t complete, he wasn’t a finished man, and that fact contributed to even more bullying and hate. It’s not hard to guess what happened to him afterwards: he was sent to the mansion. It didn’t happen only to him; some people were sent there either after a terrible experience or, if they already happened to live there, misfortune between those walls would eventually find them. 

The thing with Michel is that he is a very intriguing character and to me he’s still an enigma. In hindsight I know that he had some physical traits that served as inspiration to someone else in the story, but what the hell happened to him to make him transition only by the grace of God or was it something else more sinister? I can’t wrap my head around it. Maybe I spaced out on that part. My idea is that his suffering resonated with the witch and the only way to call him to the mansion was to make him an abomination (their words, not mine). 

It was very pleasing to watch his transformation and his reaction to his changing body, the hope he got when he finally could live as himself. Also we can interpret his existence as some sort of a prophet or an angel, someone who was called to fulfill a role he didn’t exactly ask for – one among many – but with the right motivation and for the salvation of everyone’s soul he fought until the end. Everything is dramatic in the game and the same goes for his relationship with Giselle and his quest to find her soul and be reunited with her at last.

By this point it’s very obvious that I’m just rambling. There’s a handful of souls that were called to the mansion because of the witch’s curse. Why the witch cursed those people is revealed during the real story of her suffering at their hands. It was absolutely awful and degrading. Some souls were mere connections and others were the perpetrators. It’s clear that her wrath inflicted pain to more than the perpetrators, extending itself to their acquaintances and relationships, and employing different means. After some centuries, cursing people is only fun if you have someone to share it with. 

On the matter of sharing, something really unexpected happened when I was reading a part of the story between Michel and Giselle but it could also have been a little before that. As I mentioned, I space out or lose my focus sometimes, so using the log is absolutely necessary. When I opened the log – surprise! – I found parts of the dialogue that weren’t on screen. It was the witch’s doing and possibly related with the unique nature of the chapter.

Contrary to other visual novels, in THiFM we know when we’re on the right path for the true ending. The other endings happen quite suddenly and don’t have branching paths so it makes it easier to reload a save and choose the other options. I played the game with the music volume turned to a minimum, because I couldn’t read and hear some loops at the same time especially when the music was more lively. The game’s soundtrack is beautiful but I prefer to appreciate it as a standalone thing. 

I think it was a very well written story and I warmly recommend it to anyone interested in gothic horror visual novels with gripping stories and mature themes. The prequel I’m currently reading – A Requiem for Innocence – has a bit more of that goofiness we’re used to, but fortunately THiFM takes itself seriously from start to finish therefore making the story and everyone involved more believable and relatable. 

Cyberpunk: sex, romance and murder

I mostly play jrpgs, but after 100 hours of Unicorn Overlord, I needed a break. I have some games for Playstation in my backlog and I don’t normally collect for the console unless I find something at a good price or an exclusive. I bought two more Vanillaware games, Odin Sphere and Dragon’s Crown, which I intend to play later. However, I still had a copy of Cyberpunk 2077 laying around and never got to it after picking it up some months ago. I have a faint idea that the game had serious problems when it came out. If it had, it doesn’t anymore, just the occasional crash here and there. The most annoying one happened on a mission with Claire to participate on a street race. I suck at driving but, for some reason, I ride her pickup truck – aptly called Beast – fairly well. So I was in the middle of the first race and the game crashed. Then, I finished the race and won, and the game crashed. Then, I finished it in second place and the game didn’t crash. Well then, second place it is. I never experienced those crashes anymore and won the subsequent races. After we finished she asked if I’d help her kill her husband’s murderer during the last race. I obliged because I’m not in Night City to be a good person. I kill whomever I want, when I want, how I want and go to bed with everyone I fancy and pay for sex without a second thought.

In jrpgs we have to save the world to get the girl we like in the end. It’s real work and dedication. The character development is also so extensive that by the time we reach the end we have spent a while choosing the right things to say, advancing through a support level system, giving gifts, doing things together, a bit like in real life. In Night City, and also a bit like in real life, we can pay and have someone fake their interest in us. It’s the perspective from the other side. Since I’ve never paid for sex in real life, I might as well try it in a simulated environment and the experience was acceptable. I went to bed with a character after getting an sms to meet and it felt completely random because I didn’t know what was going to happen. It was that unlikeable Corpo executive woman right at the start of the game, when I was still getting my bearings. After the mission where she offered me money to retrieve a Militech drone, I didn’t accept it because I didn’t trust her intentions, and chose the less likeable dialogue options. So, by the time I got her sms, I chose the option «Shame. Was starting to like you…» not because I did but because I was being sarcastic. And then, bang, I ended up in bed with her. I enjoyed Night City.

Not long after, I was in another district ready to meet Evelyn and there were some folks on the street. A guy asked me something and I was so overwhelmed checking the menus and trying to learn the game that I said yes and paid a small fee. I honestly thought it was a mission of some kind. I went to bed with him, or I’d rather say, he went to be with me and that was it. So, I learned how it worked and approached a woman standing on the other side of the street and this time, armed with knowledge, I asked if she wanted to go with me and I paid the fee. I think I went to bed with more people but now, after some hours of gameplay, I don’t remember. In real life I have a preference for women, or I’d rather say, for people who identify as women, despite the body they were born with. One day I was talking about trans issues with my wife and I asked if she would consider staying with me if I transitioned from female to male. The question was relevant at the time because it came from a period where I had to figure myself out. She said yes, she would stay with me. She earned herself rank S++ with me without even knowing it. To those who are curious, I’m still very much a cisgender woman, however that realization didn’t come without some soul searching.

In Cyberpunk, people perform their gender freely and have all types of sexual preferences and fantasies. They also have agency, wants and needs. I met Panam and I was on a spree getting into bed with everyone in my way, or killing everyone in my way, depending on the mission. We were paying for a hotel room and she insisted on getting a room with separate beds. I still made an advance but she said no. Later down the line, another opportunity arose. I had to test the game. I made my advance and she said no again. Ok, a second no is much more awkward than the first one and by then I was just being creepy. I felt ashamed, but at the same time it’s only natural that not everyone is into us, contrary to jrpgs or L-word. Panam likes our V (it’s the name of our character) and that’s what matters. I see her as an annoying friend that’s always getting into trouble and calls me screaming for help and the help always involves me failing at stealth and killing everyone on my path and then getting scolded for it. I like Panam.

In jrpgs our character is usually a young boy. A clueless, naive boy for whom all the female characters fall for no matter what he does. Everyone says yes and the agency is on him to choose his partner. His love interest is by default in love with him. The only thing we have to do as a player is to rise in the ranks until the option to romance is prompted. In games like Persona 3 Portable we can romance several people (I’m not sure if we have to, to get max social link, but I think so – they changed that in Reload) and in Fire Emblem Three Houses we can only give our ring to one person. If the person is female she’ll always be interested in our character if we’re playing as male, as long as we get the A-support rank. In case we play as a female Byleth the same-sex romance options are more limited. If we play as a male Byleth and happen to be gay or curious, there’s only one romance option. This sends a message, doesn’t it? Or am I reading too much into things? All in all, thank the goddess that Rhea is bissexual. It was the only thing I wanted to know, since I refuse playing as a guy in jrpgs if I have the other option.

Back to Cyberpunk, no really means no, much like the no I had to give River Wards when we were having the conversation. I had no intention whatsoever in landing on a relationship with him, but the way they structured the conversation left a tightness in my chest. Still, I had to be true to myself. River is not my type. The last mission of his storyline was great and it had a good dose of creepy moments. The way his parents died when he was young was gruesome and like out of a home invasion horror movie. The mission went well, as much as things can go well in Night City, which is not much, just enough to get by. Then I jumped into another set of quests and I was hunting Cyberpsychos across the city as instructed by Regina.

By this time I’d already driven on my motorcycle collecting tarot cards. They have beautiful designs and I recommend getting all of them. However, the first cyberpsycho came before the tarot card hunt and I thought I had to kill him. After a while Regina started getting a bit passive-aggressive with me because I was killing what she saw as test subjects and it was most desirable to make a tiny bit of effort to keep them alive in order to save them. Well, I didn’t know about that! The last half of cyberpsychos were handled with care and in stealth mode or using my blades to defend from bullets, parrying melee attacks and doing counterattacks, or using quickhacks. Using defensive combat was as effective as using stealth. I had to take a break from my killing spree but the reward was nice in the end – probably could be nicer if I hadn’t killed the first half of them – a Playstation trophy popped and it’s always good when it does.

I still have the police side activities and some minor requests to do before progressing the main story but I don’t know if I’ll finish them. Before I make some progress, I have Judy’s quest to complete. I want to see where the main story goes but I also can’t get enough of Night City and its many secrets. It’s a nice game and much less buggy than Starfield which I also played for hours on end.

I got my first Nintendo Switch at the end of an era

Last year, I was casually chatting with a colleague and she told me she was looking forward to playing the new Zelda game that would come out in 2023. I was completely in the dark about Nintendo or Zelda since Zelda Ocarina of Time. Many years had passed and I wasn’t that much into Zelda anyway. Then, a friend mentioned Breath of the Wild. I looked up some screenshots and thought the game looked beautiful and very advanced for what I’ve seen Nintendo doing before.

After my last Nintendo console, the Wii, I wasn’t much interested in buying a Nintendo console anymore. At the time, I had money for the consoles but very little money left for the games. My experiences were always very limited. I had very little access to JRPGs. I’ll come back to this later.

Fortunately my financial situation got much better. I planned a course of action and the safest bet would be to buy a Nintendo Switch lite and the new Zelda game, Tears of the Kingdom. It looked absolutely stunning and I was looking forward to playing handheld again, for nostalgia’s sake.

After finally buying the console you can only imagine how confused I was with Nintendo’s controller layout, after so many years playing with the Xbox/Playstation layout. It was so hard getting used to. My first experience with Tears of the Kingdom was thorny to say the least. The Switch lite sits very well in my hands, but the thumbsticks were not the right size and the buttons were so small. I also struggled with reading some of the in-game text.

Naturally, after some time in Tears of the Kingdom I thought about buying a Switch OLED to use at home and using the Switch lite on the bus and/or as a second console. It was a good decision. The colors in Tears of the Kingdom popped, however I had the same problem with the joycons. It took me a while to find a good replacement and I only did it further down the line. I spent many hours playing with the joycons, just not Tears of the Kingdom.

I came to the conclusion that every action game would have to wait until I got a good controller to play. I’d have to find something else, less 3D, to play. At the time I also bought Bayonetta 3 as per suggestion of another friend but the controllers were still bugging me. I wasn’t yet familiar with the layout and it seemed that the trigger buttons were assigned to the wrong functions. It was so overwhelming that I had to try something else.

I played on my Playstation for a while and kept finding people in my local second-hand market selling Nintendo Switch games. I bought some exclusives I was curious about. Shin Megami Tensei V comes to mind but I bought many more. I kept playing and getting used to the controllers little by little.

I wanted to know more about current-day Nintendo and the Nintendo Switch. What have people been playing in the last 6 years? What about 10 years? What have I been missing? My next stop was YouTube. If there’s something I love is lists. Lists of books, games, music. If I have a list, I’m happy and I feel in control. The 20 best RPGs on Nintendo Switch, the 10 best Switch exclusives as of 2023, 10 Nintendo Switch games to look forward to, 10 best strategy RPGs on Nintendo Switch, and so on. I watched everything and made my own lists according to my personal taste.

I have never played a strategy RPG before. I heard high praise for a game called Triangle Strategy. I loved the name, it sounded so good. The artwork was like something I’d find in a game 20 years ago, but now it looked even better, much more refined. The colorwork was beautiful and the combat seemed a bit out of my league but I was willing to try. I did and I absolutely loved it.

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For a bit of context, I’m not new to gaming. I started playing games when I was a teenager with a Macintosh dungeon crawler called Scarab of Ra, with Doom and Prince of Persia on PC, Mario games on Game Boy, weird games on Game Gear, more Mario games on a console that was supposed to be a copy of a SNES with about 100 games, Mario Bros. included. I spent hours playing everything. When I was older, my passion was point&click adventure games like The Longest Journey, Grim Fandango, Siberia, The Secret of Monkey Island, etc. Then, my parents bought me a PS3 and I had a GameStop close by so I could buy, sell and trade games like The Last of Us, Uncharted, Heavy Rain, God of War and others. When I got another PC I played Morrowind, Oblivion, Dungeon Siege, Need for Speed, Silent Hill 2, Dead Space, Sierra games and many more. However, there’s a pattern here if you haven’t noticed. No turn-based or strategy RPGs.

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You can imagine how puzzled I was when I saw that people were still into turn-based RPGs, of the anime sort nonetheless, and that strategy RPGs played on a grid were still getting made and weren’t a thing from the past. They were on the Switch and they did a deep, satisfying dive into my list. There was a particular youtuber that often mentioned Fire Emblem. It was at about the same time that Fire Emblem Engage was released. He was constantly comparing it to Fire Emblem Three Houses and I remember I found the name a bit silly. So Nintendo wasn’t only about Mario, Zelda and Pokémon. It was a relief. I kept digging.

There was a lady on YouTube who was absolutely fascinated by Xenoblade Chronicles, the Atelier series and JRPGs in general. Some of those tittles were added to my list too. I remember she is a big fan of Steins;Gate. As you can guess, I had no idea what a visual novel game was, even though I’ve played games with intense narrative but not at the point of not having any gameplay at all. This was completely new to me. I’d be so happy if I was still 14. I loved anime and manga but everything was so hard to come by. I still remember Ramna 1/2, Saint Seiya, Ghost in the Shell, Evangelion, A.D. Police from when I was a teenager and very actively looking for anything coming from Japan.

Now we had visual novels on the Switch. Not only on the Switch but also on other platforms. The thing is that reading a visual novel on a TV screen is next to impossible to me due to my eyestrain. I can read them comfortably on a smaller screen, therefore more games were added to the list. By this time I wasn’t only focused on exclusive titles but also third-party titles available on the Switch.

I still have my Playstation with a subscription, and I found the remaining titles there. I don’t derive the same pleasure from playing some RPG titles on Playstation than I do on the Switch, but having them on my PS+ helps me spare some money to buy more physical games for my new system.

When I was at the end of my first Triangle Strategy playthrough I took a peek at Fire Emblem Three Houses. After the first cutscene and the little initial dialogue with Sothis I closed the game and decided to finish Triangle Strategy first because I knew I was in for a treat.

Meanwhile Tears of the Kingdom is still stuck at 10h of gameplay and now without the controller hindrance I could maybe go back and resume my progress. I can’t say that I’ll finish the game because the combat is unapproachable to me and the traversal has many annoyances I don’t have the energy to deal with. It’s still the game that got me into the Switch at the end of an era (according to recent rumors), and for that, it deserves all the credit.

Sits perfectly in my hands 🙂