[Game] Umineko - Spoilers, Theories, Interpretations

[Renall]

It seems fairly clear in both End and Dawn that Ryukishi made no accounting whatsoever for logistical time, in the same way he appears to make no accounting whatsoever for people getting wet in the rain. It clearly takes at least a couple minutes to walk between the two houses, but in Erika Time(tm) it happens instantaneously. The situation is similar in ep6; basically anything that isn't Battler's room or the guesthouse rooms doesn't exist, travel between them is just assumed, and nobody is doing anything on their own until someone shows up to actually do something themselves.

The question is, how much did this come up before that? I can't remember any instances of, for example, a near-instantaneous Shannon/Kanon changeover (that is, one which would have to have happened so fast that it becomes implausible that a costume swap could happen that quickly).

[GuestSpeaker]

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Ok, so I just switched operating systems from PC to Mac, do I now have to rebuy my umineko games? I was just re-getting to the good bits of ep 2!

[LyricalAura]

Originally Posted by GuestSpeaker

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Ok, so I just switched operating systems from PC to Mac, do I now have to rebuy my umineko games? I was just re-getting to the good bits of ep 2!

No, if you've still got the Japanese version from HobiBox you can just grab the Mac patch installer from Witch Hunt's site.

[Valkama]

Originally Posted by Wanderer

We do:

...Possible reasons for this:

• Rosa has teleportation skillz. Now all mysteries can be explained.

Most likely reason is the first one, I think. Or the last.

It is known that Beatrice is a Witch
It is known that Beatrice is among the people on the island
It is known that whoever is Beatrice is the culprit
It is known that Rosa is among the people on the island
It has been shown that witch's can teleport
It has been shown that Rosa could be the culprit
It has been proven in red that Rosa can teleport

Therefore Rosa is Beatrice and a witch and caused all the murders.

GG

[GuestSpeaker]

Phew, thanks guys, with no manga updates and the Yen Press Manga coming out every 4 months for some reason I need my fix.



Rosa is a the witch? No, not aunt Rosa! I won't believe it!

Hang, what if, yes I got it!

It is possible more than one person on the island can teleport, so so someone else could be Beatrice!

[AuraTwilight]

Rokkenjima exists in a state of quantum uncertainty, and people do not get wet when they go into the rain.

Therefore, everyone on Rokkenjima is capable of teleporting so long as their waveforms are not collapsed by the observation of the Detective.

[Renall]

It's the island from The Tomorrow People and they're all able to teleport within a short range.

[chronotrig]

Originally Posted by Wanderer

And let me tell you, the first time I played through I was tearing my hair out at the fact that they were saying stuff like It has not been specified that the time of death was between 24:00 and 1:00. It's like NO SHIT, is Rosa supposed to be a corpse before she even left the family conference!?

And freakin' Dlanor negated Erika's theory when she said From 1:00 AM until the discovery of the crime, it was impossible for the crime to occur in the cousins' room!! The hell?

The only reason it's not a logic error is because they were on the human side, which has different responsibilities. Instead they were just wrong. Stupidly wrong, and never called out for it. I don't know if Ryukishi left it on purpose to fuck with me, or if he didn't even realize this inconsistency in the first place.

Or, Erika just wasn't specific with her times (the line you quoted only gives a specific time for when she left the archive, not when she met Rosa), since she wanted to prove Natsuhi guilty as quickly and simply as possible. She wanted revenge for her loss in Kinzo's study, so her reasoning was a sloppy mess from start to finish.

It doesn't particularly matter to Erika if Rosa arrived at exactly 1:00 AM. Erika was within sight of the front door and staircase at 1:00 AM, so no one else could have gotten in or out. When she says "It's only possible for the crime to have taken place between 24:00 and 1:00!!", she really just means that the criminal could only have entered the guesthouse 2nd floor during that span of time, which is almost correct.

If she'd been more careful in her wording, she might have realized that the victims could have left during that hour just as easily. But since she took it for granted that the corpses were in the cousins room the next morning, this never even occurred to her.

Originally Posted by Wanderer

And freakin' Dlanor negated Erika's theory when she said From 1:00 AM until the discovery of the crime, it was impossible for the crime to occur in the cousins' room!! The hell?

Actually, that was Erika who said that line. This is the second line of red she uses after becoming a witch, which pretty much says it all.

[Wanderer]

Originally Posted by chronotrig

Or, Erika just wasn't specific with her times (the line you quoted only gives a specific time for when she left the archive, not when she met Rosa), since she wanted to prove Natsuhi guilty as quickly and simply as possible. She wanted revenge for her loss in Kinzo's study, so her reasoning was a sloppy mess from start to finish.

I have problems with this:

1st, the language, as it is written in English, pretty much says the two events (leaving the hall and meeting Rosa) happened at nearly the same time. Maybe it's a translation thing (unfortunately my EP5 crashes when I play it raw, so I can't check).

2nd, From 1:00 AM to 3:00 AM, Erika, Nanjo, and Gohda spent their time in the lounge on the first floor of the guesthouse.

Is "the hallway" part of "the lounge"? Normally I wouldn't think so.

Originally Posted by chronotrig

If she'd been more careful in her wording, she might have realized that the victims could have left during that hour just as easily. But since she took it for granted that the corpses were in the cousins room the next morning, this never even occurred to her.

Actually, that was Erika who said that line. This is the second line of red she uses after becoming a witch, which pretty much says it all.

Yeah, I realized it was Erika. Should have sooner by the lack of Dlanor-style speech PATTERNS.

But yeah, the whole sequence is dumb, and could have been fixed with a little re-wording.

[Drifloon]

Yeah, Ryukishi has a lot of amazing ideas for scenes that are absolutely perfect conceptually, but he often makes really easy-to-avoid mistakes when actually executing them. They're really maddening when one notices them, because one can see so easily how the flaw could have been easily avoided with an incredibly minimal restructuring of the scene.

EP5 ???? and the EP6 logic error are both examples of this, I think.

[Renall]

Originally Posted by Wanderer

Is "the hallway" part of "the lounge"? Normally I wouldn't think so.

My impression of the guesthouse from the backgrounds and descriptions is that the first floor "lounge" is basically a large open area with seating and a bar, basically a common room, with the hallway and stairs both clearly visible from nearly anywhere in the room. Erika would not have been "in the hallway" as such, but she and Nanjo/Gohda could've seen anybody walking around there or coming up/down the stairs. Essentially, they controlled traffic through that area, and that's the only way anyone could've passed by.

[GuestSpeaker]

EP5 ???? and the EP6 logic error are both examples of this, I think.

Out of interest, what did you like and what did you think was the fail?


But I agree, sometimes he's like an excited kid who has figured out a cool idea, but rushes to say it so quickly he just messes it up.

[Drifloon]

The main flaw in the EP5 ???? is how the gold truth was handled, and how the rules kept changing for no apparent reason, which has already been discussed to death already.

The flaw in the EP6 logic error is the part where Dlanor "seals" the use of blue truths regarding the window, which is just a ridiculously contrived device that isn't even needed. A red truth saying that neither George, Shannon, Hideyoshi, Kumasawa, nor Nanjo left through the window would have conveyed the point much better without giving the player the mistaken impression that they are forbidden from using the windows of the next room over in their reasoning, when the solution does in fact necessitate it.

On an unrelated note, I was thinking about the arguments for the message bottles being authored pre-incident or post-incident earlier, and I had a sort of epiphany. Could it be that Legend was authored pre-incident, while Turn was authored post-incident? The more I thought about it, the more I realised that this would actually make a lot of sense.

It's a popular theory that Yasu portrayed herself as the murderer in the message bottles out of a feeling of guilt and self-loathing caused by her somehow indirectly causing the massacre to happen. But actually, there's a big difference between the way Yasu portrays Beatrice during EP1 and EP2.

In Legend, Beatrice is never actually seen until the very end, and remains a mysterious figure hidden in the shadows. There's nothing that suggests that she's a particularly cruel or sadistic person, and is even to some extent portrayed as benevolent; it's said that she doesn't cause harm to people who respect her, and the ceremony is implied to bring everyone to the Golden Land, where they will be happy.

But in Turn, it's completely different. Beatrice appears as an actual person throughout the whole tale, and this is by far the most negative portrayal of her throughout all episodes. Why would Yasu portray herself in this way?

She continually disparages and belittles the relationships that she's supposed to care about more than anything (George/Shannon and Jessica/Kanon).

She brutally tears the guts out of the parents of the three people that she's supposed to love most, undeniably intentionally making the scene much more disgusting than it needed to be for the purpose of following the epitaph.

And she makes it even worse for the three cousins by placing that letter in the VIP room which horribly insults both them and their dead parents in a completely uncaring and cruel manner.

After that, she mocks Kanon - mocks HERSELF, in other words - before killing both him and Jessica 'for fun' and laughing maniacally the whole time. Not content with just killing Kanon, she even brings him back as a zombie to further disgrace him. And then she proceeds to cruelly belittle George and Shannon's relationship before brutally killing both of them.

I think we can all agree that the only reason Yasu would ever portray herself behaving in such a horrible way - and in such a horrible way specifically towards the people that she cares about most - would be because she genuinely hated herself. So as you can see, the evidence of the message bottles' portrayal of Beatrice being a result of Yasu's self-loathing is actually entirely from EP2. There's no trace of this in EP1 at all, yet it's absolutely overwhelming in EP2. Isn't it sensible to conclude that Legend was written before the incident happened, while she thought that everything would turn out the way she planned, and that EP2 was written afterwards, in despair after all her plans had failed and everything she cared about was lost as a result of her own 'game'?

Rereading the conversation between Ange and Ootsuki in EP4, this seems completely plausible. No idea is given of the time that the fisherman found the first message bottle (nor is there any indication of which bottle is which, so the bottle found by the fisherman may well have been EP2). In fact, it's said that the fisherman's message bottle wasn't even taken seriously at the time because it could have been forged. So there is no evidence that says that this bottle has to have been authored pre-incident. Whereas the bottle found by the police is said to have been found on the day of the incident. So it is pretty much impossible that it could have been authored post-incident. The proof that this bottle was written pre-incident, combined with the similarity between the two bottles, led the public to conclude that the bottles must both have been written pre-incident. But actually, only one of them had any evidence that pointed to this. So it's entirely possible that one of them (Legend) was written beforehand while one (Turn) was written afterwards.

What do you think, everyone?

[Renall]

Could be. It would solve the problem of having to hoax the police; their story is genuine and pre-incident, so what they found was found entirely honestly. It wasn't released for some reason or other (probably seen as evidence), but the "discovery" of the second bottle (which can never truly be proven to have come from where the fisherman says it did) prompted release of the first.

You couldn't do it better if you planned it. And it sort of seems like you did.

It's also interesting that the episode after Beatrice starts behaving like a dick, she starts getting gradually rehabilitated in stories that were written by someone other than the message bottle writers. It seems possible that the original intent was to introduce the rehabilitation later and maybe make Beatrice even more of a troll and an ass in Land, hence its alleged maliciously high difficulty. If Land was the third (and presumably final) "message bottle story," and the "forgery" stories started later than they did when Banquet was introduced, that would make some sense.

[qno2]

That thought actually makes Maria's plea for help in the letter that the fisherman found a lot more fitting, considering the end of Turn. At least there's a direct link as opposed to whatever magical story Yasu might've imagined for the survivors at the end of Legend (setting aside the "getting blown to pieces"-part).

Of course there's no telling how much the story was padded outside the message bottle, but having a "please find out the truth, that is my only wish" from Maria right after her laughing contest with Beatrice at the finale of EP1 always seemed like quite the incongruency, as if Yasu didn't even care how unbelievable it'd be for Maria - the way she has been portrayed all throughout EP1 - to say this. So associating Maria's plea with Turn instead actually fits a whole lot better, at least in my opinion.

And although EP1's epilogue claims that "the children were thought to have survived up to the end", which wouldn't fit to Turn, it can still be explain with the police's knowledge of Legend: if anyone would have to choose which of those two is more believable I think we can all agree that Legend would be picked. However that does raise the question (that you folks discussed exhaustively already I think) of what the message bottles even contain - just a general draft of the events, all the "normal" scenes or "normal" + "magic" scenes? Of course the meta-layer wouldn't be part of them.

[Renall]

We go back and forth on that. I don't think there's any consensus. Most characters who comment on the contents of the in-world stories are meta-characters to begin with.

[Drifloon]

The EP1 epilogue is pretty weird in general, since it says more than once that all eighteen people did actually die. Even though it's the earliest evidence of author theory, it actually doesn't seem to reflect reality accurately. Pretty bizarre, really.

[qno2]

Same for EP2 actually, it has that line (~ 'when the seagulls cried, no one survived') as well I believe. Though technically it's not part of the epilogue and could be seen as part of the story, where it'd be a true statement of course. Was that line ever used again afterwards?

Which is why I think that scrapping Land for Banquet was pretty significant for the rest of the series: maybe Ryukishi never planned for Eva (or anyone) to survive in the first place, at least no one that the 'Prime-public' knows about. Alternatively, giving early hints towards the author theory through this incongruency could've been yet another aspect of easy modo. It's as if the magic side had already given up at this point, since EP1, EP2 and EP4 (with at least EP4 being written afterwards, possibly either EP1 or 2 as well) all violate the law of magic in Prime - regardless of what the "magic" consists of, the result has to be one that can be observed and verified.

But assuming he never planned for it, would've Umineko just stayed a normal mystery with trollwitches but without all the meta-layers and post-modernism? Useless to think about as we'll never know for sure...

[jjblue1]

Originally Posted by Drifloon

The main flaw in the EP5 ???? is how the gold truth was handled, and how the rules kept changing for no apparent reason, which has already been discussed to death already.

The flaw in the EP6 logic error is the part where Dlanor "seals" the use of blue truths regarding the window, which is just a ridiculously contrived device that isn't even needed. A red truth saying that neither George, Shannon, Hideyoshi, Kumasawa, nor Nanjo left through the window would have conveyed the point much better without giving the player the mistaken impression that they are forbidden from using the windows of the next room over in their reasoning, when the solution does in fact necessitate it.

On an unrelated note, I was thinking about the arguments for the message bottles being authored pre-incident or post-incident earlier, and I had a sort of epiphany. Could it be that Legend was authored pre-incident, while Turn was authored post-incident? The more I thought about it, the more I realised that this would actually make a lot of sense.

It's a popular theory that Yasu portrayed herself as the murderer in the message bottles out of a feeling of guilt and self-loathing caused by her somehow indirectly causing the massacre to happen. But actually, there's a big difference between the way Yasu portrays Beatrice during EP1 and EP2.

In Legend, Beatrice is never actually seen until the very end, and remains a mysterious figure hidden in the shadows. There's nothing that suggests that she's a particularly cruel or sadistic person, and is even to some extent portrayed as benevolent; it's said that she doesn't cause harm to people who respect her, and the ceremony is implied to bring everyone to the Golden Land, where they will be happy.

But in Turn, it's completely different. Beatrice appears as an actual person throughout the whole tale, and this is by far the most negative portrayal of her throughout all episodes. Why would Yasu portray herself in this way?

She continually disparages and belittles the relationships that she's supposed to care about more than anything (George/Shannon and Jessica/Kanon).

She brutally tears the guts out of the parents of the three people that she's supposed to love most, undeniably intentionally making the scene much more disgusting than it needed to be for the purpose of following the epitaph.

And she makes it even worse for the three cousins by placing that letter in the VIP room which horribly insults both them and their dead parents in a completely uncaring and cruel manner.

After that, she mocks Kanon - mocks HERSELF, in other words - before killing both him and Jessica 'for fun' and laughing maniacally the whole time. Not content with just killing Kanon, she even brings him back as a zombie to further disgrace him. And then she proceeds to cruelly belittle George and Shannon's relationship before brutally killing both of them.

I think we can all agree that the only reason Yasu would ever portray herself behaving in such a horrible way - and in such a horrible way specifically towards the people that she cares about most - would be because she genuinely hated herself. So as you can see, the evidence of the message bottles' portrayal of Beatrice being a result of Yasu's self-loathing is actually entirely from EP2. There's no trace of this in EP1 at all, yet it's absolutely overwhelming in EP2. Isn't it sensible to conclude that Legend was written before the incident happened, while she thought that everything would turn out the way she planned, and that EP2 was written afterwards, in despair after all her plans had failed and everything she cared about was lost as a result of her own 'game'?

Rereading the conversation between Ange and Ootsuki in EP4, this seems completely plausible. No idea is given of the time that the fisherman found the first message bottle (nor is there any indication of which bottle is which, so the bottle found by the fisherman may well have been EP2). In fact, it's said that the fisherman's message bottle wasn't even taken seriously at the time because it could have been forged. So there is no evidence that says that this bottle has to have been authored pre-incident. Whereas the bottle found by the police is said to have been found on the day of the incident. So it is pretty much impossible that it could have been authored post-incident. The proof that this bottle was written pre-incident, combined with the similarity between the two bottles, led the public to conclude that the bottles must both have been written pre-incident. But actually, only one of them had any evidence that pointed to this. So it's entirely possible that one of them (Legend) was written beforehand while one (Turn) was written afterwards.

What do you think, everyone?

I like this theory. It sounds very interesting and explains the difference in the portrays of Beato which had always bothered me. I think I'll go recheck EP 1 & 2 to test it.

[DaBackpack]

A random observation while rereading the escape scene from EP4.

Virgilia, the Siestas, Shannon and Kanon all refer to Shannon as "The Gatekeeper."

Huh. Maybe I'm looking too deeply into this, but...