[Game] Umineko - Spoilers, Theories, Interpretations

[Judoh]

Is it possible for them to disconnect the phone from the Rokkenjima side, but still have it go through from the Nijima side?

I think a bomb activated by an external phone call at 24:00 would be fun.

[DgBarca]

Originally Posted by Judoh

Is it possible for them to disconnect the phone from the Rokkenjima side, but still have it go through from the Nijima side?

I think a bomb activated by an external phone call at 24:00 would be fun.

Hum...like...

"-...?
- KOUNGRATOULAZIOOOON !
- Who are you ?
- ahaha.wav, I am...BEATORICH*BRAWOOOOOOOOO*"
It would be disappointing...

[Judoh]

Originally Posted by DgBarca

Hum...like...

"-...?
- KOUNGRATOULAZIOOOON !
- Who are you ?
- ahaha.wav, I am...BEATORICH*BRAWOOOOOOOOO*"
It would be disappointing...

But an explosion like that would be hilarious and clever! totally bitter sweet.

It was just a thought anyway I don't actually beleive that.

[Renall]

Originally Posted by chronotrig

Hmm, that's an interesting take on things. Still, there needs to be a way to explain the line "the gold of the Golden Land belongs to this child". Why would Beatrice need to take orders from anyone if the gold was already hers in the first place? I'm not saying you aren't on to something here, just thinking about where specifically this might lead.

It's possible Beatrice knows where the gold is, but the mastermind doesn't. Nothing says she couldn't be taking orders from a mastermind while keeping something hidden from him/her that the mastermind doesn't know.

The mastermind may well even want the gold, unaware that "Beatrice" has had access to it all along, but isn't telling the person because she doesn't consider them worthy of having it. This would be a significant blow to a mastermind candidate who thinks he or she has everything under control (Kyrie or George basically).

Originally Posted by rogerpepitone

@Oliver:
Irrevocably breaking any radio is easy. All it takes is a hammer. Without a hammer, the technique of "throw it out a window" is traditionally effective. Breaking a radio so that it can be fixed without going off the island, now that's tricky.

The thing is, breaking the phone lines and radio with a degree of subtlety makes it harder to realize there's a killer afoot who has premeditated things. If the radio simply doesn't work, it's possible for the innocents to believe it's just bad luck. If the radio is sitting there in a pile of electronics and shattered plastic, people start to realize more directly who they're dealing with.

It is strange no one is ever dispatched to go check the phone box, however. There are a few fairly obvious reasons why that would be, though:

As for the phones, while there isn't any direct evidence that they're broken, what's to be gained from lying about it? Why not just cut the line to the mainland?

• If people still assume the fake murder ploys (if they exist in all episodes) are in effect, one of the "rules" of the mystery may be that the phones are "broken." While only characters in on it may believe that without prompting, if they die or leave then people not in on it may stop each other from using the phones because they "dont' work," not realizing they're fine.
• The people who don't want the phone lines used are the ones stopping people from making calls, so they're lying to "break" the phones without physically needing to disable them (which has obvious benefits, since they can use them if they're not really broken).
• Someone suspects a lie about the phones, and is using the fake story to get someone to make a mistake. He or she may already know the phones work fine, but wants to see who acts weird about it.

We know from hard evidence in each episode that the phones most likely work just fine:

• The study is called from the parlor in ep1.
• I'm not sure anyone ever attempts to make a call in ep2, so there's no evidence the phones are or are not operational here.
• The phones may work in ep3, but again no one really uses them. It's possible Kyrie/Rudolf/Hideyoshi would have tried to call the guesthouse, but they wound up preoccupied.
• The phones clearly work in ep4. Several calls are made from what appear to be several different locations (though they may or may not be, but Battler is obviously receiving calls at the guesthouse).
• The phones most likely work in ep5. Natsuhi is shown receiving calls from a person who claims to be on the island, and nobody else even makes note of broken phones. Erika would assuredly have commented on the lines being dead if they actually were, right?
• The phones explicitly work in ep6. Battler even goes so far as to outright reserve the possibility of a closed room being communicated with by telephone, and no one objects by suggesting the lines should not work.

EDIT: This actually allows us to add to our comedy reds:

Battler is incompetent.

The Ushiromiya Family has a genetic predisposition to avoid checking inside closets.

The Ushiromiya Family will immediately and implicitly trust anything that is said through or about telephones.

[Oliver]

Originally Posted by rogerpepitone

@Oliver:
Irrevocably breaking any radio is easy. All it takes is a hammer. Without a hammer, the technique of "throw it out a window" is traditionally effective. Breaking a radio so that it can be fixed without going off the island, now [i]that's[i] tricky.

You'd be surprised. An R-250M shortwave receiver weighs 95kg and survives a fall from third floor onto asphalt with nothing but dents in the casing, as do many other specimens. That's a 60s late valve era device, though they got a bit more brittle since. Usually it is impossible to get at the softer parts without a screwdriver anyway, which can take a while. Blowing out the amplifier cascade also has the advantage of not making the sabotage obvious, once it's done you usually can't tell why nobody's hearing you.

Regardless, I'm not sure the radio is broken either. I'm not even sure any of the inhabitants of the island knows how to operate one or that it was kept in working order over the years. Any dialogues that mention the radio just give up immediately, even though radio doesn't work like a phone and if nobody is hearing you now, that doesn't mean nobody will respond in the next thirty minutes -- in the ocean, radios move, and propagation conditions can change by the minute.

[Oliver]

Originally Posted by Judoh

Is it possible for them to disconnect the phone from the Rokkenjima side, but still have it go through from the Nijima side?

I think a bomb activated by an external phone call at 24:00 would be fun.

I expect that it is possible to reconfigure any PBX of that era to do that. The easiest way would be to change the dial-outside-line digit, which should be configurable on just about any model -- then the expected '0-110' to call police won't connect, but inbound calls still will, as will all internal calls.

Doing that would require at least reading the manual for the PBX and having physical access to it.

[Ginrai]

Did the fifth or sixth games rule out multiple personalities as a possibility?

If not then it could be that Shannon has three separate personalities - her own, Beatrice and Kanon - with Beatrice being the dominant one. This seems to work in the first two parts though I'll need to replay the first four to make sure it actually does.

[Renall]

Well, the phone box has to be somewhere. No one ever really remarks on where it is, though my guess would be on the external part of the house. So maybe nobody wants to go out there because of the rain... but if they were serious about getting the police, surely they'd want to risk a little water to make sure the lines aren't messed up.

It's possible no one is qualified to fix the phone system though. Maybe they get a handyman for that.

[Oliver]

Originally Posted by Renall

It's possible no one is qualified to fix the phone system though. Maybe they get a handyman for that.

Actually, no Ushiromiya seems to ever operate a device more complicated than a spoon on a regular basis.

• Krauss is supposed to own a boat but it is not known if he can actually drive it himself.
• Nobody contemplates lockpicking in any serious way. It's not an easy skill by far, but you can often get somewhere with a hairpin and a screwdriver in an hour or two with no prior training if you're persistent enough.
• Nobody tries seeing what's wrong with the phones, they always take 'broken' for granted, when a cut phone line can usually be fixed by twisting two wires together if you find the cut.
• Nobody even thinks about trying the radio again, with the same 'broken' excuse, when the standard procedure is to keep trying at regular intervals unless it just won't power on.
• Kinzo's autolock is a marvel of technology to them when it's really a primitive autolock with an electromagnetic bolt release button. That sort of thing was available back in 30s.
• They think that a Winchester can be rigged to explode which I'm pretty sure can't happen if you care to unload it first -- they prefer to remotely shoot the bullets instead.
• George proposes a ridiculous stake launcher weapon, which I suspect isn't very feasible in practice due to the shape of the stakes, and will be impossible to conceal. You'd need something like a potato cannon and it would be so wildly inaccurate that scoring consistent headshots would require Bernkastel standing behind your back, but nothing of the sort enters George's head.

Basically the only person who is an exception to this in any way is Jessica, who plays an electric guitar, which at least requires knowing where to plug it.

Servants aren't much better either -- Gohda tolerates a kitchen with no ventilation while cooking on gas (huh?) and the most complex tool they ever touch is a bolt cutter. Only Shannon can supposedly get a motorboat to the islet all the way from Niijima where she rented it. Which, mind you, seems doubtful for one interesting reason. Assuming that it takes 20 minutes to get from Niijima at 40 knots, that's 25km over clear ocean. I very much doubt someone who just learned how drive a motorboat can do that without a GPS receiver (not available yet) and avoid getting lost along the way -- over that distance, a minor heading error would cause you to miss Rokkenjima entirely.

P.S. Rosa might be able to use a sewing machine.

[Renall]

The main question here is "why doesn't anyone even think to ask about that stuff?" That's the more intriguing question. If there's some kind of "game" or "play" or acting or magic show going on, then of course people aren't going to focus on that. And once murders begin in earnest, it may be too late to bother. If the family suspects the servants - and they usually do - then they've lost the only people who might have any technical expertise.

[Oliver]

Originally Posted by Renall

The main question here is "why doesn't anyone even think to ask about that stuff?"

I have a suspicion this is handwavium in action. If the phones worked, the circle wouldn't be very closed. Same if the radio worked. If lockpicking was in any way a serious consideration, most rooms wouldn't be closed. If anyone on the island was in any way good with a screwdriver, or tried anything technologically clever to defend from an anticipated murder, much of the things happening would be impossible, we're meant to swallow this and move on.

But while I'm convinced this is it for the radio (few people these days know what to really expect from a transceiver except people who use one on a regular basis) and Shannon's boat trip, phones in particular remain suspicious -- not because nobody thinks to try fixing them, which is handwavium still, but because the internal lines often remain working later. There's only two possibilities -- they were never broken and someone lied while everyone just accepted it for truth, or the PBX was turned off and then turned back on again when needed, possibly with pulling the external line out of it.

[Renall]

Lying seems the most reasonable possibility. Turning the phones back on after you turned them off might make sense in ep1, but in other episodes it doesn't really seem like there's any point (either to turning them back on or turning them off in the first place). The question would then shift to who is lying, why, and who is just taking their word for it. Also possibly people who know the lines aren't broken but lie for their own purposes.

[KnightOfTwo]

What seems to bother me about the phones is that after the cousins start receiving calls in EP4 no one questions the phones working even though it would be the perfect opportunity to do so. They just witnessed the phone working and yet they don't think to use it? Did I forget something here or are they really that dense?

[Renall]

Originally Posted by KnightOfTwo

What seems to bother me about the phones is that after the cousins start receiving calls in EP4 no one questions the phones working even though it would be the perfect opportunity to do so. They just witnessed the phone working and yet they don't think to use it? Did I forget something here or are they really that dense?

In ep4, they have no reason to assume the phones ought to be out, no? The calls occur shortly after the start of the family conference. At this point, no one would really think the phones wouldn't be working. And if the lines are usually disrupted, ep4 would be the obvious candidate for the culprit not having the time to do it.

[KnightOfTwo]

Originally Posted by Renall

In ep4, they have no reason to assume the phones ought to be out, no? The calls occur shortly after the start of the family conference. At this point, no one would really think the phones wouldn't be working. And if the lines are usually disrupted, ep4 would be the obvious candidate for the culprit not having the time to do it.

It's not so much about whether or not they know the status on the phones. It's more about the fact that after Battler gets a call from Kyrie or Jessica, he doesn't think to call the mainland. Yeah the phones may not work then but I don't remember him even trying. Or am I just forgetting something.

[Dlanor .A. Nox]

No Battler doesn't try to call mainland...Krauss tries but then again that was a magical scene so I can't be too sure if he actually did.

[Tyabann]

Originally Posted by Dlanor .A. Nox

No Battler doesn't try to call mainland...Krauss tries but then again that was a magical scene so I can't be too sure if he actually did.

I'm sure that he must have tried to call the mainland (he's not a complete idiot), but because we, the readers, already know that the external line was broken, a scene of him trying to dial the police was probably glossed over. It's unimportant.

[Judoh]

Originally Posted by KnightOfTwo

What seems to bother me about the phones is that after the cousins start receiving calls in EP4 no one questions the phones working even though it would be the perfect opportunity to do so. They just witnessed the phone working and yet they don't think to use it? Did I forget something here or are they really that dense?

I Might have to check to confirm this, but I think that one of "Kinzo's" demands might have been for them to not move from where they were? Maybe the demands just psyched them out?

Originally Posted by Kaisos Erranon

I'm sure that he must have tried to call the mainland (he's not a complete idiot), but because we, the readers, already know that the external line was broken, a scene of him trying to dial the police was probably glossed over. It's unimportant.

Most of the scenes where he "detects" things are glossed over. I don't really remember many times where they narrate him investigating stuff. The only time I ever remember him being shown investigating anything is when he looked in the servants room in episode 2 and he only did that because Jessica and George were worried. It was only briefly mentioned too. The rest of the time he's fabricating alibis out of thin air for everybody.

[Tyabann]

Originally Posted by Judoh

Most of the scenes where he "detects" things are glossed over.

Well, again, it's because such scenes are unimportant.

Most of the puzzles in Umineko are based on logic and wording, not stuff like identifying the brand of a particular cigarette (which is one of the reasons why that "clue" seems so out of of place).

Come to think of it, if anyone ever did some ACTUAL detecting of the various crime scenes, like, oh, basic police work, this game would be an easy one, wouldn't it?

[Oliver]

Originally Posted by Judoh

Most of the scenes where he "detects" things are glossed over. I don't really remember many times where they narrate him investigating stuff. The only time I ever remember him being shown investigating anything is when he looked in the servants room in episode 2 and he only did that because Jessica and George were worried. It was only briefly mentioned too. The rest of the time he's fabricating alibis out of thin air for everybody.

Actually, in Ep4 there's the long protracted sequence where Battler actually investigates things seriously, examining bodies and making conclusions, though I must say his detection is still lacking a lot even then.