Discussion: The unpopular opinion about Kaede [Spoilers Case 1]

[KitsuneRisu]

Before we go on, I'd like to say that I play the game on PS4, so yeah, I have it even though my account doesn't show it. I also want to say this post contains spoilers on case 1. Although this is being posted in a spoiler sub forum, so whatever.

Anyway, before people start telling me off about how wrong I am and how bad my opinion is, I'd like to state for the record that I thought the twist was great per se, the writing was great per se, but HOW they got there irritated me. So this isn't about the quality of the game or the twist as it is; this is about something they decided to do.

Basically, I'm talking about Kaede, as your main avatar, lying to you, the player.

If you are meant to be privy to her thoughts and her activites as you play the game, I really find it difficult to accept from a writing standpoint that she would omit certain things to you only to pull out the twist at the end. She's your character, right? You hear her thoughts, you direct her actions. She thinks on your behalf and you control her to an extent. I'm sure there are other people like me who feel it's somewhat of a cheap move to say that the very person you're playing as is actually doing stuff behind your back, when that goes against the point of her being controlled by you?

It reminds me of the 'twist' in David Cage's Heavy Rain as well, when the stupid detective was basically lying to your face (and himself) the entire game for the sake of the twist and the twist alone.

I realise, of course, that in V3 the circumstances are much more different. I know that they subtly hid the actions that Kaede did in the text, and she didn't really say anything that countered her genuine thoughts. However, the game ommitted reactions that would have supported them too, and I feel that it's still a small part of the larger problem, especially when she was fighting so hard for other people's truth when in fact she was the murderer.

In a nutshack: I feel that it's cheap for the character you control to lie to you. Does anyone else feel this way?

And for people who don't feel this way, I'm open to being 'debated'. Shoot your truth bullets at me and all that. Any opinion to help me get rid of this burning irritation is more than welcome.

[Battler Ushiromiya]

However, it's not really her THOUGHTS that lie to you, it's the first person description of events. Hell, they don't even lie. The game never once directly lies to you, it just manipulates words. The shotput ball? it says she put EVERYTHING in her backpack, and it never said she put the ball down. The books? It just said she rearranged them. It never said if it was meticulous or not. And there's no way you hear your player character's thoughts at all time. Sometimes, yeah, but not always, and certainly not when running around on the field, which was likely when Kaede formulated a lot of her plan.

She was fighting for other people's truths because she wanted to find the mastermind and, if she failed, she was perfectly fine with dying for everyone else's sake. That's why it isn't contradictory that she defended Gonta, or Shuichi, or anyone else. She wasn't trying to escape, otherwise she would have taken the First Blood Perk. She was trying to find the mastermind and then, if she failed, sacrifice herself while at the same time boosting Saihara's confidence so that he could handle everything to come and trust her dream to him.

The difference in Heavy Rain is that his thoughts DIRECTLY lie to you. He thinks things that he would never think if he was the culprit. Compared to Kaede, who thinks things that make perfect sense even when you think of her as the culprit. The most iffy thing she says is right before the trial, where she calls someone in the room a "scumbag murderer", and even then, this can be interpreted as either her believing herself to be a scumbag for murdering the innocent Rantaro, which is correlated by what she says at the end of the trial, or her saying that the mastermind is the scumbag murderer, which also makes sense because it's made clear that Kaede sees the mastermind as just as much of a murderer as the one who actually did the deed, because the murder wouldn't happen to begin with ifthey didn't force them into this situation. Whenever she refers to "wanting to find the culprit", it's always in the context of finding the MASTERMIND! I knew that Kaede was the killer going into the game, so I would have noticed anything that goes completely against her being the culprit. In fact, I was specifically going out of my way to find instances and, when I didn't, I concluded that this first chapter is a masterpiece in writing.

As for the point in your first paragraph, where you say that it defeats the point of controlling a character if they're going to act behind your back, I'd say that generally that's a matter of personal opinion, but I disagree based on the context of what you make the protagonists in these games do, at least in the daily and deadly life sections: You make them move from Point A to Point B, make them investigate things, and choose who they hang out with and what they give them. Outside of that, their words and actions are their own. In narrative scenes, you don't control anything they say or do. For example, from DR1: Makoto accepts the knife from Toko in Chapter 5 regardless of whether you want to accept it or not. Another one: Makoto agrees to switch rooms with Sayaka in chapter 1. He does these on his own, with no input from the player. This is the same deal, just more murderous in nature.

Which "reactions that would have supported her genuine thoughts" are you referring to? Care to provide an example?