At long last the struggle has ended. I vowed not to touch another game or write another post until I’d put Persona 2 behind me, now the day is here at last. I feel so relieved!

I must have written like 20 different posts whining about a game that no one was forcing me to play, so I’m going to go easy on the negative stuff today. Let’s see, positives… positives… I liked the soundtrack. And I think I might have liked the story if the pacing had been better and the writing had been less heavy-handed.

I’m used to JRPGs that preach to the player. Most of them have one or two “main” messages (usually “You Are Not Alone” or “Believe In Yourself”) that they stress, and a few other messages that are up to you to interpret for yourself.

Innocent Sin, on the other hand, has a lot it wants to say, and it’s very, very anxious lest you miss any of it, so the characters keep hammering the same points in over and over again. “Did you get that? Should we say it again? I don’t think you got that, let’s go over it again.” If they’d simply moved the game along and left me to make sense of things, maybe, just maybe, I would have had a better reaction. As a matter of fact, I read an anecdote the other day that illustrates what went on between me and Innocent Sin over the past couple of weeks:

A woman bought a bottle of cod liver oil to give to her dog so he could have a healthier and shinier coat. Every morning, she pried the dog’s jaws open and forced the liquid down his throat. He struggled, but she persisted. He doesn’t know what’s good for him! she thought. Faithfully each day she repeated the process.

One day, however, the bottle tipped over and she released her grip on the dog for just a moment to wipe up the mess. The dog sniffed at the fishy liquid and began lapping up what she had spilled. He actually loved the stuff. He had simply objected to being coerced!

The woman is Atlus, the oil is Innocent Sin‘s story, and the dog is… not me. I’m too pretty to be a dog. But you get the point. I wish they’d just spilled the story and let me see for myself how I felt about it. The forced repetition just brought on stress, boredom and annoyance. Not to mention it also made the story move at a snail’s pace because they kept going over each point several times before introducing something new. Plus it also made character conversations awkward because they had to stand around spouting stilted, unnatural lines about dreams and ideals and friendship just for the player’s benefit. I started taking screenshots after a while:

These aren’t just isolated incidents, it’s been like that all through the game. If you take a shot of vodka every time someone says “dreams” or “ideals,” you’ll be dead long before the credits roll.

I resent being treated like an idiot with the attention span of a parakeet, like I’ll miss the grand messages if they don’t keep bringing them up. Whatever happened to Show, Don’t Tell? Especially since in the end it turns out eeeeverything was caused by a pair of elder gods just messing with mankind for the lulz. This makes the real final message: “Dream all you want and struggle all you want, without a god on your side you’re still screwed.” Not very grand, is it?

And of course, all the way to the end they kept doing that thing. That thing I hate. That thing where they know what’s going on but they won’t tell me:

But anyway, I’m feeling much more charitable about the whole affair now that I’m actually done with the game. I said I wasn’t going to complain, so I’ll stop here.

When I think back on Innocent Sin, I’ll probably have more bad memories than good. I’ll probably remember the cruel encounter rate, the torturous, badly laid-out dungeons, the irritating characters, an interesting story poorly told, how long it took me to finally get round to finishing it, the bullshit “amnesia” plot twists… but I’ll also remember that I somehow managed to finish it despite all those flaws. I don’t think I can ever play it again, but I don’t hate the game, I don’t hate the characters and I don’t rule out playing Eternal Punishment one day in the future.

Right now, it’s time to finally start Atelier Elie!