Review of Fata Morgana no Yakata -Another Episodes-
| Subject | Fata Morgana no Yakata -Another Episodes- |
| By | Helpfulness: 2 Vote: 9kaisouroku on 2021-08-05 |
| Review | A Requiem for Innocence was difficult to rate. At first, I considered trying to evaluate it as separate sequel-story from The House in Fata Morgana, but this proved impossible. A Requiem for Innocence is, as it bills itself, a companion to the original story; in fact, most contemporary editions include this with the first game. It is something like an appendix for Fata Morgana, and my rating reflects its connection to the original rather than its merit as an unrelated story, because it was clearly intended for invested readers. This review can therefore also be considered an addendum to my Fata Morgana review at w2508. My questions for this game were twofold: does this add to or subtract from the rest of the story, and would I recommend it to a fan of the original? To the latter: a resounding yes, without qualification. There's no reason any person enthusiastic about Fata Morgana wouldn't appreciate this. I was initially wary of A Requiem for Innocence because it's easy for follow-up stories like this to merely relitigate familiar conflicts in new disguises—what might be called the Advent Children issue. For an example in visual novels, look no further than Steins;Gate 0. The problem in that game wasn't that the new characters or ideas were poor but that they were ultimately red herrings. The narrative was always chained to the original—its cast and its themes—and the new ideas that came with the Maho and Leskinen characters, such as the discussion of AI, the American military intelligence conspiracy, and the theme of genius vs. hard work, were never truly put in service of their own story but were decorative elements on an overlong game determined to rehash the first Steins;Gate right down to poorly replicating some of its most famous scenes and milking old material. Such sequels make you wonder if you were hallucinating that the original was good. Thankfully, this is not the case at all in A Requiem for Innocence. This is achieved on the one hand by its self-imposed limitation as a companion work, but more particularly by focusing on different characters and therefore foregrounding new themes. As to what these themes are: in my Fata Morgana review, I mentioned a conversation that I liked between the main characters, in which the male protagonist asks his female equivalent why she prays for the dead instead of the living, and she responds that it's important to pray for those who have no one to pray for them. This is a pretty good microcosm of theme in A Requiem for Innocence: the gap between worldly things and heavenly things, and the costs these characters incur because of their inability to close it. While these ideas were touched upon in the original, they are far more relevant to the two leads here and are explored satisfactorily both in the companionship they briefly find in one another as well as their broader relations. Over the course of the game, one is led to suffer for his dreams of worldly success, and the other for her persistence in separating herself from the world; this is a theme that blends seamlessly into the original Fata Morgana, especially with the depictions of irony I mention in my linked review. The new members of the cast, particularly Ceren and Gratien, are not wasted, either as slice-of-life puppets or as props for the more familiar characters. If this were one of the stories told within the meta-narrative device of the original game, it would not only subtract nothing from it but meaningfully lengthen certain dimensions of its structure. The other episodes in this collection are much shorter but of some interest, particularly Assento Dele, which is about a notable encounter in the life of Fata Morgana's protagonist during a period left mostly obscure in the original. None of these shorter pieces are as substantial as the main attraction—one is little more than cute romantic fluff—but for those of us happy to spend a little more time with these characters, they provide some small insights. Credit to Novectacle also for one of the more effective uses I've heard of the familiar Lacrimosa from Mozart's Requiem in this game. |
| 2 points |