[Game] Umineko no Naku Koro ni - Ep. 4 Alliance of the golden witch

[rogerpepitone]

I think that a trap is viable for Kanon's death in episode 1:
1) The boiler room was poorly lit.
2) Nobody had been in there up to that point.

Those two points make a trap set off by a tripwire (or alternately a pull-cord) possible. (It's still very chancy, though.)

[Workworkwork]

This discussion about non-small bombs has opened my eyes to the truth.

Beatrice is really the atomic bomb, and Battler is a scientist haunted by guilt! It all makes sense now!

[Jan-Poo]

Originally Posted by Tsuyi

Wait, noo I thought we were talking about radio-waves as in some kind of device like telecommunication/cellphones, like someone from outside was communicating with him without actually being on the island. My language skills are poor, I'm sorry xD I didn't mean the waves set off a bomb or anything (I don't know the mechanics for that type of thing.) I imagined the bomb to be some sort of timed device. The bomb to kill him, and the radio-waves, being a part of the talking, unrelated to his death.

Aah sorry then I misunderstood. Timed bombs are not denied of course, 'though they would fall under the "trap" definition.

Radiowaves also are valid as long as they cannot physically interfere with the inside.

[Neofio3]

Another idea, what if we're too focused on bombs?

Rokkenjima is an isolated island, and in it are three hotel-sized buildings which presumably are fully powered. The power requirements for Rokkenjima are simply huge, considering the number of people it has. Consider if the storm causes a problem in the electric grid, snapping a power cable, perhaps, or a generator malfunction. The generator (in the boiler room?) at this point should be gas powered (which means its flammable *and* explosive). It should also be very, very large. Large enough to cause a substantial catastrophe, or kill anyone unfortunate enough to be close to it in the case of malfunction.

Alternatively, a snapped power cable landing on the ground, conveniently covered with water, due to rain.

In the first, it would also explain the event of the disturbance in the boiler room in Ep1. Someone was messing with the generator, potentially rigging it to explode at some time. It would also explain why if you're inside the mansion after a certain point (where the boiler room is), you die. Obviously, while an explosion is assured, there won't be a definite time, so it is in effect *both* a timebomb and a murder method dependent on chance (only that it will happen "soon").

[rogerpepitone]

None of the images we've seen of Rokkenjima show power cables. Either each building has its own generator, or the power cables are underground.

[Neofio3]

Originally Posted by rogerpepitone

None of the images we've seen of Rokkenjima show power cables. Either each building has its own generator, or the power cables are underground.

None of the images we've seen of the island show the mansions from the top-down either, but they're there.

In any case, an exploding boiler set as the "catastrophe", with Unknown culprit X messing with it, as supported by episode 1 and Kanon's murder scene, seems viable. It would move suspicions out of an unlikely (and frankly unstoppable) freak event like a landslide or tidal wave, back into a human murderer being capable of taking everyone out and erasing all evidence, while still being physically absent (or dead).

Also, I wouldn't put it past Ryushiki to have it as a "Shining" reference (a hotel with a checkered history is destroyed through a boiler explosion). Taken as that, Maria can be a Shining reference as well (a troubled child who can see spirits).

[Ithekro]

Hmmm. If that was the case...Kinzo being burned in the boiler room...while it brings people down there, it would distract them from checking anything in the room because their focus would be on the burnt corpse.

[Isekaijin]

You know, there is something that had been bugging me since a while.

In the Golden Land, Ange actually used magic, even though Beato's red statement specifically prohibited magic besides her own. So, I ask. What are the odds of Beatrice actually being Ange? I remember she said something about the incidewnt being her fault, or something like that.

For that matters. How much of the red text is actually relevant?

The red truth can be used for anything, right? From saying simple things such as your own name to deny theories in blue. Just to troll, since Battler has shown that he can use the red truth why he didn't try to deny witches in red?

Unlikely but I reckon it would have been funny.

[Jan-Poo]

Ange used "real" magic. Whatever this mean, you can assume that the "magic" Ange used is not the kind of "magic" that Beatrice denied in red.

[Workworkwork]

Originally Posted by Isekaijin

You know, there is something that had been bugging me since a while.

In the Golden Land, Ange actually used magic, even though Beato's red statement specifically prohibited magic besides her own. So, I ask. What are the odds of Beatrice actually being Ange? I remember she said something about the incidewnt being her fault, or something like that.

For that matters. How much of the red text is actually relevant?

The red truth can be used for anything, right? From saying simple things such as your own name to deny theories in blue. Just to troll, since Battler has shown that he can use the red truth why he didn't try to deny witches in red?

Unlikely but I reckon it would have been funny.

Originally Posted by Jan-Poo

Ange used "real" magic. Whatever this mean, you can assume that the "magic" Ange used is not the kind of "magic" that Beatrice denied in red.

You guys aren't looking at it deep enough. Beatrice herself paralyzed the use of her own magic by claiming she could not revive Sakutarou. "Her" magic might simply refer to her own crippled Endless magic, because she made MARIA deny Sakutarou.

[ijriims]

Originally Posted by Isekaijin

You know, there is something that had been bugging me since a while.

In the Golden Land, Ange actually used magic, even though Beato's red statement specifically prohibited magic besides her own. So, I ask. What are the odds of Beatrice actually being Ange? I remember she said something about the incidewnt being her fault, or something like that.

IMO, Beatrice's magic for Maria was that Maria could find her happiness, mother's love, friends in Golden Land (after Maria died. Iillusion, white lie). But she knew that Sakutarou could not be resurrected even in Golden Land since Beatrice and Maria believed that Rosa tore Sakutarou into pieces and that's the end.

Ange brought Sakutarou back to Golden Land because she saw Sakutarou in captain's cabin. The fact that Rosa did resurrect Sakutarou was made known to 1998 Ange. Beatrice's magic could not do so because she did not believe Rosa remade Sakutarou, while Ange could do so because she sincerely believed so and was the truth indeed.

This was regarded as true magic since it achieved what was deemed impossible by Beatrice. "Magic" indeed, since it was a miracle from the Beatrice's point of view. Being miraculous is what defines magic, right?

[Jan-Poo]

Originally Posted by Workworkwork

You guys aren't looking at it deep enough. Beatrice herself paralyzed the use of her own magic by claiming she could not revive Sakutarou. "Her" magic might simply refer to her own crippled Endless magic, because she made MARIA deny Sakutarou.

What are you talking about?

-This is my Golden Land. A world where any magic other than my own definitely cannot exist.

Of course "her magic" refers to her own magic, but she denied any other magic.

[Ithekro]

Beatrice's magic is the magic of the golden witch and her endless magic...since Ange is "Beatrice" in 1998...she has the same magic...therefore she is using Beatrice's magic and does not defy the red text.

Red text suggests that the magic of Bern and Lambda can't interfere.

[Jan-Poo]

Why Beatrice would try to pull trick in that situation? She said that because she was genuinely convinced that Ange couldn't perform magic there. Also Ange herself said that her "magic" is different than Beatrice's magic.

To me the simple solution is that Ange's magic isn't magic at all, she just calls it magic.

It is most probable that what Ange showed to Maria was Sakutarou, and I mean a real Sakutarou in cloth and cottons. That's what Ange means by "real magic".

[Sute443]

Originally Posted by Isekaijin

Just to troll, since Battler has shown that he can use the red truth why he didn't try to deny witches in red?

And what if the attempt failed? If he'd tried to deny the existence of witches in red but couldn't, he'd have ended up confirming their existence. You seem so sure the Anti-Fantasy side will win in the end. That's probably the way it will go, but for the sake of playing Devil's Advocate for a moment...

I wouldn't be too surprised if, in the end, Battler is able to tear apart the second, third, fourth, however many there will be games, only to get stuck back at the first. Natsuhi's death may have been brought about with an opponent's gun leveled at her, but there were no unidentified corpses or body-double tricks and all of the survivors had alibis (all stated in red). Unless someone has a way around that...

[Ithekro]

All unidentified corpes have their identity proven...but what about the identified corpses? Are they proven to be dead (corpses)? Also being classified as "dead" is a great alibi. No one would suspect someone that is suppose to be dead of killing someone else.

[Sute443]

Originally Posted by Ithekro

All unidentified corpes have their identity proven...but what about the identified corpses? Are they proven to be dead (corpses)? Also being classified as "dead" is a great alibi. No one would suspect someone that is suppose to be dead of killing someone else.

Aw, tore through that one so soon? Darn. But yeah, Kanon's alibi in the first game really was a good one.

[Renall]

Fair warning: This theory has a lot of problems and is merely a "first attempt" to actually untangle ep4's death order. I actually have several orders I'm considering.

Before I start with the theories themselves, here's the general reasoning:

Spoiler for How I'm Approaching Ep4:

Did you ever try one of those grid logic puzzles? You have a list of people and their heights and a bunch of vague facts like "Bob is taller than Sally" and "John is not the shortest." The way you approach that is to take the facts you have and look for hidden logical consequences of all the information you have, determine what things can't be true from what you're given, and then make educated guesses and reasonable "next steps" to get the rest of the way.

That's what ep4's death order is. We're given essentially one hard fact of numerical order: Kanon is the ninth victim, hereafter #9. We can also of course observe that Kinzo is the first person of the 18 to die and Battler is the 18th, but that's really not relevant so we can cut those two out and look at the 16 "victims."

If Kanon is #9 out of 16, we know the following to be true:

1) 8 people died before Kanon.
2) At the moment Kanon died, 7 people (EXCLUDING Battler) were still alive.

We're told that Kanon was part of "Kyrie's group." In the magic scene, this group is Kanon, Shannon, Kyrie, Krauss, and Nanjo. We don't actually know what "Kyrie's group" really was, but for the sake of this argument I will assume Beatrice meant those five people. All I can say for certain is that "Kyrie's group" must have contained at least Kanon and Kyrie.

Thus, we can also conclude:

3) At the moment Kanon died, Kyrie MUST have still been alive.

Based on the assumption of Kyrie's group makeup, we also get...

4) Shannon, Nanjo, Krauss, and three other people must have also been alive.

The game wants us to believe that, when Kanon died, the other three people alive were Maria, Gohda, and Kumasawa. But what if this isn't true?

The only "bodies" Battler finds before meeting Beatrice at midnight on the 4th are George (who is suspicious), and Gohda and Kumasawa (who, as we see later, were not killed by hanging, and therefore could still be alive). Indeed, we can't even say for certain that George died, so at the time Beatrice appears, it's entirely possible no one has died yet.

Battler finds the bodies of everyone in the following order:

George sometime before midnight. His clothes are bloodstained but there is no blood on his face. Battler says he has a wound and thinks he's definitely dead.

Natsuhi, Rudolf, Rosa, Genji, Hideyoshi, Eva, and Maria just after midnight. All but Maria have their heads half-smashed. Maria has been poisoned. According to the story we're told, the six were killed first and Maria must have come in and died later. Again, what if that isn't true?

Notice we have eight bodies already. Interestingly, these are the only bodies Battler finds until 6am the next day. From 6am on, Battler finds the following bodies:

Jessica in her room sometime after 6am. Head is half-smashed. Battler assumes she was killed after their call, but we again don't know that's true.

Kyrie in a room. Staked in the forehead. Kanon cannot be alive after this point, but he could have been alive even one minute before Battler finds Kyrie's body as long as everyone else in her group was still alive. In other words, Kanon can still be alive as late as, say, 7am on the 5th, if we assume Kyrie died not long before Battler found her.

Krauss at the backdoor. Head half-smashed, staked in that wound.

Nanjo and Shannon at the well. Heads half-smashed, stakes next to them.

Kinzo in the boiler. Burnt, but we know why.

Gohda and Kumasawa in the shed. Fake-hanged and shot in the foreheads.

Spoiler for Okay, So What?:

Basically, we have a problem. Battler absolutely finds seven bodies just after midnight. But everyone else is grouped. Gohda and Kumasawa are together. So is Kyrie's group, whatever that group may be. Yet there's an odd number of people who must still be alive. Who is that loose person?

There's also the issue of when Kanon dies. Kanon cannot be dead until 8 people are before him. The moment Battler finds 8 bodies, Kanon is either already dead or will die by around 6-7am the next day (and no one else will until that time). Well, Battler only finds 7 before 6am. Jessica is the 8th he finds, and at that point there's still a lot of wiggle room.

My hypothesis is this: Some people remained alive when Battler first entered the mansion; if Kanon was one of these people, it becomes much easier to posit a death order. If everyone died in a big cluster the first night before Battler got inside, establishing an order is nearly impossible.

Battler entered the mansion at midnight and almost immediately went to the dining hall. So Maria and the "First Twilight" victims can't be the ones who survived until sometime between 12-6ish. The people who could have, however, encompass basically everyone else (minus George if you don't think George's death could be faked).

From this, imagine two scenarios: "George Dead" and "George Alive."

Spoiler for George Dead:

Battler finds eight bodies by midnight: George, the "First Twilight," and Maria. He sees Beatrice, so everyone is not yet dead. We don't know these are the first eight people to die, however we can be certain Kanon might be dead at this point, and thus the people who die after him can also be dead. This is a muddy scenario and that's why I don't like it, but I'd hypothesize the following as a possible death order:

George, Maria, Natsuhi/Rudolf/Eva/Hideyoshi/Rosa/Genji, Kanon (#9), Kumasawa/Gohda, Jessica, Kyrie, Krauss, Nanjo, Shannon.

It's hard to explain this one, but my hypothesis for the missing weapon is that it fell through a 20cm gap in the well grate. There are other, better theories but I don't have them developed enough yet.

Spoiler for George Alive:

Jessica, Maria, Natsuhi/Rudolf/Eva/Hideyoshi/Rosa/Genji, Kanon (#9), Kumasawa/Gohda, Kyrie, Krauss, Shannon/Nanjo, George.

Battler finds seven bodies by midnight. George's death was faked. Jessica is ordered to tell Battler that George is dead on the phone and killed, but Battler later realizes the story was impossible (however, he fails to realize what this means). Shannon or Kanon kill the six First Twilight victims (Maria is poisoned beforehand to spare her the pain of it). Kanon is killed, either by Kyrie or by Shannon, who after speaking to Battler as "Beatrice" has lost faith in the plan. Kanon's body is somewhere inaccessible to Battler, like Kinzo's study. Kyrie acquires whatever it is that can smash heads. George goes back to the shed where Gohda and Kumasawa were. He has previously told them to fake suicide to keep themselves safe (alternately, he has already really killed them, but for this to work Maria and Jessica have to die after Kanon instead), and he lets himself back in and kills them, replacing the padlock with a new one. He then hunts down and kills Kyrie, reclaiming the head-smashing thing (whatever it is). He then kills Krauss, and tracks down Nanjo and Shannon (Nanjo is trying to escape to Kuwadorian, and Shannon and Krauss were willing to go with him, but Krauss had to stay back to defend them). Enraged, he kills them, and in despair that Shannon turned on him, wanders off to kill himself.

These are just kernels of ideas. I think I can come up with much better ones as I narrow down just who could have died and when. I want to stress that this is 90% guesswork based on a few shaky assumptions. For instance, if "Kyrie's group" doesn't refer to the people shown in the magic scene, this entire thing is rubbish.

There's also very little to explain the differences in killing methods, though I gave it a go.

Still, I figured someone ought to give it a try.

[Arkwright]

Only recently have I begun thinking about the mystery aspect of the story. In order to start making a theory I began with some basic core assumptions that I would build it around. One of those is based on analyzing the red truth for the final mystery: "Battler's killer in episode 4 is not human."

However I find it hard to believe he was killed by a trap or a bomb or something like that. If there is a "time bomb" or something similar in Rokkenjima then why was there no sign of such an event in any of the police investigations, and why did Eva survive in episode 3 since presumably she didn't actually know where Kuwadorian was?

My thoughts:

Spoiler for Ep4 final mystery analysis:

A- Ushiromiya Battler. I will now...kill you.
B- And right now, there is no one other than you on this island. The only one alive on this island is you.
C- Nothing outside the island can interfere.
D- You are all alone on this island. And of course, I am not you.
E- Yet I am here, now, and will kill you.

Analysis:

A- "Now" is not a vague term. The red truth the witness-Beatrice is about to say applies to the moment of Battler's death.
B- This is also not a vague statement. "No one" is alive on the island except for "you," so even if there are multiple Battlers only the narrator-Battler is alive on the island.
C- "Outside the island" is not a vague term. You are either on the island, or you are not. A person on a boat is not on the island. However, "interfere" is a vague term and is the one point of frustration in trying to make a logical statement from this. The most direct way of understanding this, though, is "Nothing outside the island can interfere with Battler." In other words, Battler cannot be affected, directly or indirectly, by any actions taken from outside the island. Thus, his killer is on the island.
D- Restatement of A with new information. Battler did not commit suicide.
E- "Here" is not a vague word. It could be, if the speaker was not saying "this island" multiple times. The killer is definitely on the island.

So we have two conflicting statements:

-The killer is definitely on the island.
-The only one alive on this island is you.

If we assume both are true and not just the second, then one explanation that fits both (the only one I can think of at this time that doesn't conflict with something else) is: "Battler's killer in Episode 4 is not human."

If we consider Sakutarou and maybe the Siestas, then it's not unheard of for an object to be animated by a witch and speak to a human. If this were a sci-fi story and not a magic mystery set in 1986, one might say that Battler was killed by a robot or an alien or something. I also think it's a bit of a stretch to say that "Beatrice" is a gun, or a car, or a trap or something like that, although it's never impossible.

So my working theory is that Beatrice is an animal of some sort. There are no records of any animals on Rokkenjima, but that doesn't rule it out. It's probably reasonable to say that an animal would be sufficiently non-human to weasel around the "there is no one other than you on this island" restriction. If the animal is sufficiently large, it can explain some of the murder methods and perhaps some witness accounts, and if it is trained (dog/wolf?) then it can be at the command of some higher culprit.

The first obvious thing to pop up counter to this theory is Eva-Beatrice's statement in the third game: No life forms other than humans have any connection to this game.


However this does not necessarily apply to other games. If Beatrice is an inanimate object then it sneaks around the "life form" rule although I find this animal theory somewhat easier to swallow than "it was a trap" or "the killer was hiding on a boat in a typhoon next to a rocky island for the purpose of convenient questionable red truth."

The one thing I do not like about this theory is that animals are such an easy way to circumvent the red truth regarding the number of suspects on the island.

Edit: Actually, now that I look at it written down like this, I can understand the idea of a trap set specifically for Battler. If the person who set the trap (Beatrice) is dead, then their dead body is here, on the island, and that doesn't prevent them from "killing" Battler.

I still don't really see a time bomb due to the above reasons.

[Tsuyi]

For the animal theory, wouldn't it be the animal who killed Battler, and not Beatrice? Considering the red text in which she specifically says that she will kill him. After all, an animal can not be viewed the same way as an object or a weapon, it is another life form altogether....