[Game] Umineko - Spoilers, Theories, Interpretations

[LyricalAura]

Actually I'd go so far as to say that because the sea of fragments is infinite, brute-forcing the witch's darkness is impossible. If you advance a theory carelessly, the witch can turn it against you and elaborate an illusion endlessly. I suspect this is what happened with the "man from 19 years ago" nonsense.

Blue truth is just as double-edged as red.

@Will: Perhaps the number of walls with footprints leading to them should be taken as a hint that the culprit didn't walk?

[Jan-Poo]

If it's small to the point where you have to leave it up to luck rather than your deductive skills

That wouldn't be "small" that would be "zero". If a riddle is truly "solvable" it must be solvable with the elements provided, no matter how small that chance is it must still be more than zero. If there aren't enough elements to reach a single solution then the riddle cannot be considered solvable.
If you believe there are 0 chances to reach a single answer with logic alone then you don't trust this mystery to be solvable.

Actually I'd go so far as to say that because the sea of fragments is infinite, brute-forcing the witch's darkness is impossible. If you advance a theory carelessly, the witch can turn it against you and elaborate an illusion endlessly. I suspect this is what happened with the "man from 19 years ago" nonsense.

That doesn't make any sense. A witch must answer with a red to any blue.

[Renall]

A valid question though: What restrictions are there on the blue? Battler in ep4, upon gaining the blue, says he can use it like a shotgun to just shoot theories until one sticks. Then he... really never uses it that way.

But what if the human player did? Surely there must be some rule about that, otherwise you could just talk blue text until your meta-jaw gets meta-tired and leave the witch side with a heck of a puzzle when it's their turn to respond.

[Will Wright]

Originally Posted by LyricalAura

Actually I'd go so far as to say that because the sea of fragments is infinite, brute-forcing the witch's darkness is impossible. If you advance a theory carelessly, the witch can turn it against you and elaborate an illusion endlessly. I suspect this is what happened with the "man from 19 years ago" nonsense.

Blue truth is just as double-edged as red.

@Will: Perhaps the number of walls with footprints leading to them should be taken as a hint that the culprit didn't walk?

In that case we would either have no culprits or a flying culprit. Either way that would be bad for us!

Or translating to Umineko, we would either have an Orient Express situation("everyone is dead inside the game. everything is a game to test if Battler is fit to inherit the Ushiromiya fortune as everyone else was deemed unworthy. everyone is faking their deaths. Their "deaths" refer to them retiring from the game.") or "Ryuukishi is screwing with us and even if we get the right solution he will change his solution half way through the game so we won't get it right."

...Which he already foreshadowed by saying that it's a legal move for witches!

[LyricalAura]

Originally Posted by Jan-Poo

That doesn't make any sense. A witch must answer with a red to any blue.

Not true. The witch only has to preserve one mystery to win, and she doesn't have to respond immediately either. So if you advance a bad theory, she's free to retreat temporarily and then lay all kinds of supporting evidence to sucker you into thinking you were right, all the while ensuring that your belief will prevent you from solving some other mystery.

[Jan-Poo]

BTW

Spoiler for orient express:

There's a blatant infringement of the 12th Van Dine rule here.

Clearly the Van Dine rules are way too much restrictive.

Not true. The witch only has to preserve one mystery to win, and she doesn't have to respond immediately either. So if you advance a bad theory, she's free to retreat temporarily and then lay all kinds of supporting evidence to sucker you into thinking you were right, all the while ensuring that your belief will prevent you from solving some other mystery.

She HAS to reply immediately at the end of the game and then you just repeat the shotgun system for every single mystery.
But this is not my point at all. I wasn't talking about a strategy to beat the witch when I started this discussion. This is not the point.

[Will Wright]

That wouldn't be "small" that would be "zero". If a riddle is truly "solvable" it must be solvable with the elements provided, no matter how small that chance is it must still be more than zero. If there aren't enough elements to reach a single solution then the riddle cannot be considered solvable.
If you believe there are 0 chances to reach a single answer with logic alone then you don't trust this mystery to be solvable.

I don't trust this mystery to be solvable, I think Ryuukishi got the words guessable and solvable mixed up. But just because I'm not sure of something, it doesn't mean I will give up on trying to solve it.
[quote]

Spoiler for orient express:

There's a blatant infringement of the 12th Van Dine rule here.

Clearly the Van Dine rules are way too much restrictive.

Hilariously, it doesn't break Dine if you twist it around enough.

Spoiler:

Only one person killed him. The other 11 are innocent and just stabbed a corpse. As for who did though, that shall remain a mystery.

Dine is restrictive, sure. But once Ryuukishi claimed to follow it, that's like saying "HEY LOOK AT ME I CAN BEAT NADAL IN TENNIS...Oh uh but I changed my mind. So let's forget I ever said that."

...That's my problem with Dine in Umineko. It's an empty claim.

[LyricalAura]

Originally Posted by Will Wright

Dine is restrictive, sure. But once Ryuukishi claimed to follow it, that's like saying "HEY LOOK AT ME I CAN BEAT NADAL IN TENNIS...Oh uh but I changed my mind. So let's forget I ever said that."

...That's my problem with Dine in Umineko. It's an empty claim.

Forgive me if you explained your reasoning earlier and I missed it, but how does stating two rules on Bern's game board translate into all twenty applying to Beatrice's board?

[Will Wright]

Originally Posted by LyricalAura

Forgive me if you explained your reasoning earlier and I missed it, but how does stating two rules on Bern's game board translate into all twenty applying to Beatrice's board?

No problem, I wasn't very clear before.
If you argue that Dine doesn't work for any episodes other than episode 7, then you could argue that Knox doesn't work for episodes 1-4. Moreover, he was referred to as "Wright of the 12 wedges" so at least 12 of the rules apply. If they don't apply, then THEM EXISTING IN THE FIRST PLACE MAKES NO SENSE.

The reason for the Knox rules was that Beato's board wasn't allowed to break them. No matter what she did, they wouldn't be broken. If Dine doesn't work in a similar fashion, then it serves no purpose for existing.

If it only applies to Bern's story, then it had no purpose being there. Then Ryuukishi was just going "hey you guys wanted Dine right? HERE LOOK AT HIM. Oh he has no effect on the story so far. BUT LOOK AT THOSE BEAUTIFUL RULES."

It's a plotless, bizarre mess. Ryuukishi better make clear what he thinks of the Dine rules quick. Not explaining how they relate to the story would put us in a stalemate, as using/not using them to solve the mystery would have the same effect.

Rules are only rules if they are never broken. If they only apply at a specific moment of the game, then Ryuukishi made a terrible terrible decision that serves to no purpose other than to make it seem like his mystery is fair when it really isn't. It's easy to obey a rule for a certain period of time. It's not easy to obey a rule for the entire time.

[cmos]

Originally Posted by Will Wright

Ryuukishi better make clear what he thinks of the Dine rules quick. Not explaining how they relate to the story would put us in a stalemate, as using/not using them to solve the mystery would have the same effect.

I think it was pretty clear that if Ryukishi wanted us to use them, he would make a TIP with a complete list of the rules (or rather their Umineko interpretation) and clearly state them in red, like he did with Knox's rules. All Will did, was citing few really useless rules. That's it.
It seems that some people got a false hopes about them, though. Myself included. We thought that Wright is going to deny all love in the story, but instead we got a good, caring, big-hearted detective, who quit his inquisitor job, because he's tired of their cruel and heartless methods. That would imply that he won't use some of his rules anymore at all.

[Will Wright]

Originally Posted by cmos

I think it was pretty clear that if Ryukishi wanted us to use them, he would make a TIP with a complete list of the rules (or rather their Umineko interpretation) and clearly state them in red, like he did with Knox's rules. All Will did, was citing few really useless rules. That's it.

Which begs the question of why they were there in the first place. If they serve to no purpose for the story, then they should not be there.

[Jan-Poo]

I think we have witnessed a "broad interpretation" of at least one rule.

There must be a corpse

To whom Bern simply answered with a "all clues are here". And how exactly that solves the problem? There still wasn't any corpse.

[LyricalAura]

Originally Posted by Will Wright

Which begs the question of why they were there in the first place. If they serve to no purpose for the story, then they should not be there.

I think that, rather than rules, it's better to think of them as "properties that many fair play mysteries have." Neither Knox nor Dine is used by every mystery author because they can be too restrictive -- it's possible to play fair while not following every rule to the letter. Every author (including author-characters) has the right to decide which ones to follow, if any, and a given mystery might even have some of those properties incidentally without the author having set out to follow a particular ruleset.

Part of Will's character is that after a long history of ruthlessly applying the Van Dine rules and earning his nickname, he became disillusioned with the way the SSVD does business. It shouldn't be that shocking that he doesn't want to arrogantly apply those rules to someone else's game anymore. He only used the bare minimum to ensure that Bern's game was solvable. Contrast that with Erika, who force-fed Knox to everyone who would listen and used it as a weapon to wreck games.

[cmos]

Originally Posted by Will Wright

Which begs the question of why they were there in the first place.

Because he wanted to make a cool and powerful meta-guy as a detective, whom Bern will defeat. That would make the final battle with Battler much more interesting.

If they serve to no purpose for the story, then they should not be there.

That's not how Umineko works. And the most of them really aren't there.

Originally Posted by Jan-Poo

There must be a corpse

To whom Bern simply answered with a "all clues are here". And how exactly that solves the problem? There still wasn't any corpse.

Actually, she used Devil's Proof about the corpse, that was countered by his 1st and only then she said that "all clues are there".
You could speculate that Beatrice's "corpse" in this case is Lion.

[LyricalAura]

Originally Posted by cmos

Actually, she used Devil's Proof about the corpse, that was countered by his 1st and only then she said that "all clues are there".
You could speculate that Beatrice's "corpse" in this case is Lion.

Or that since Beatrice is a fictional character, her "corpse" is a finished novel, and so she was actually right there in the coffin the whole time.

[Leafsnail]

Originally Posted by Renall

A valid question though: What restrictions are there on the blue? Battler in ep4, upon gaining the blue, says he can use it like a shotgun to just shoot theories until one sticks. Then he... really never uses it that way.

But what if the human player did? Surely there must be some rule about that, otherwise you could just talk blue text until your meta-jaw gets meta-tired and leave the witch side with a heck of a puzzle when it's their turn to respond.

He looks kinda prepared to do it in episode 4 tea party, though. He always seems to have another crazy theory whenever Beatrice denies one of his. She just gives up before he gets too far with it. I suppose that could be cautioning against that type of behaviour ("Trap? Suicide? Accident? Simultaneous murder? Discoverer was in on it? Everyone else was in on it? Some zany combination of the above?")- you just end up with one ridiculous theory after another.

[Jan-Poo]

Originally Posted by cmos

Actually, she used Devil's Proof about the corpse, that was countered by his 1st and only then she said that "all clues are there".
You could speculate that Beatrice's "corpse" in this case is Lion.

Originally Posted by LyricalAura

Or that since Beatrice is a fictional character, her "corpse" is a finished novel, and so she was actually right there in the coffin the whole time.

Those are broad interpretations of the Dine rule. Read the explanation, it says "the deader the corpse is the better it is". There's absolutely no doubt that Van Dine was talking about a real dead corpse and he was talking about a visible manifest and apparent corpse.

Lion doesn't qualify as a corpse, s/he is alive an well, nowhere close to be "as deader" as possible. A book also doesn't qualify as a corpse strictly speaking.


So in the end if Van Dine rules apply in umineko they are absolutely not the way Van Dine meant them to be and they have such a free interpretation that their intended purpose was completely twisted.

[Oliver]

Originally Posted by Jan-Poo

So in the end if Van Dine rules apply in umineko they are absolutely not the way Van Dine meant them to be and they have such a free interpretation that their intended purpose was completely twisted.

Dine rules don't say the actual murder itself must happen before it is solved. It just says the clues must be presented before it is solved, so that the reader has an equal opportunity. Isn't this what happens in Ep7 really?

Ryukishi did say he wants to present Ep7 out of chronological order, well, this is how.

[Jan-Poo]

Now I have the feeling you are just contradicting me for the sake of contradicting me.

You should know as well as I do that no Beatrice corpse appeared before Will solved that particular catbox. And Dine most certainly intended the corpse to appear before the start of the investigation or at least soon after it begins. Else this rule is kinda pointless.

[Oliver]

Originally Posted by Jan-Poo

Now I have the feeling you are just contradicting me for the sake of contradicting me.

Contradicting for the sake of contradicting, possibly, but I am an equal opportunity contradictor, and will contradict anything that presents a sufficiently interesting opening for a contradiction. This opportunity looks sufficiently interesting.

Originally Posted by Jan-Poo

You should know as well as I do that no Beatrice corpse appeared before Will solved that particular catbox.

That was precisely my point. Dine rules do not prohibit that at all. They prohiibit the act of solving from occurring until sufficient clues have been presented to the reader -- but they do not prohibit the crime that is the cause of mystery itself from occurring after it has been solved. In fact, structurally it is identical -- in a regular mystery you normally do not receive a description of how the murder occurred until it is solved. It is perfectly legal for a mystery to start with a corpse having been irrevocably disposed of by the murderer already, isn't it. As long as sufficient reason is presented to think it was a murder, it's Dine-legal, "the corpse is in the story".

Now, the act itself is moved all the way to the end, but what else do you expect from a murder of a concept?