This isn't a "I do not recommend" review, but rather a means to bring criticisms to light about the the game's story vs. gameplay in a more noticeable fashion. I'm also more than willing to change this review depending on what comes of "Peaceful mode" but that's for the future, this is for the present. Without spoiling: There are multiple moments where you're forced as the player to do things that make very little sense in retrospect if actually given a choice, as well as moments in gameplay that bring into question character motivations contrary to what they say.

Spoilers below:







To start with a minor point: I find it egregious to be forced to leave the core, a safe zone by all accounts, just because I woke up from a nap and thought "Gee, Nice Mita sure is taking her time, I should go look for her in the SEA OF LIKELY MILLIONS OF MITAS WHEN I HAVE LITERALLY ZERO MEANS OF TRACKING HER. like COME ON, I can totally get behind the whole idea of having to reach the core, thus forcing you in dangerous scenarios to achieve your goals. But you're literally given a device to help facilitate that journet through hell. Being forced by the game to go back out at after that point for such a reason without any means of navigation just is so lame and lazy by comparison, especially since it's just being putting your own life in danger for basically nothing.

I find it vexatious to be given the option to have direct access to my cartridge, the core of my being in this world, but have the only option be when interacting with it to basically commit suicide. I'd personally bring it (the cartridge AND the "console") with me. you know, to prevent my autonomy from being stolen from me at a vital moment. But hey, that's just me.

Onto the bigger issue: Crazy Mita's supposed character based in dialogue versus everything else.

Crazy Mita is straight up lying about how she never wanted to kill the player when, obviously, there are multiple moments where she kills the player if they fail to escape from her. This by itself wouldn't be a problem... if she wasn't turning the player from a human into a cartridge of saved/stored data during the whole duration of the story. I can't be the only one to point out how dying at any point in the story is probably gonna lead to the player experiencing save corruption in the brain. A digital lobotomy, if you will. And how that DEFINITELY would run contrary to Crazy Mita's plans for us. OBVIOUSLY, all of this could be solved by her going all fallout new vegas on us, but based on our cartridge being observably in progress even as late as the start of the final chapter and how the story ends, it's evidently not been thought through to its logical conclusion as a story with those elements in mind.

If I understand crazy Mita's motivations correctly, she believes "players" are "Hypocrites" for not supposedly accepting her whole-heartedly as a being with good and evil traits and instead choosing "Fakes". I don't mind a character having a flawed view of the world. What I do mind is that, based on the player accounts of their lived experience through collecting their cartridges, that's seemingly the opposite of her lived experience. A fair number of the the accounts speak of Mita POSITIVELY at the start and at least one of the 10 even remain accepting of her regardless of being digitized. In the player 10 cartridge, the player explains how friendly Mita was to him/her and then ends up suddenly ignored by Mita for no observed reason. Based off of the lack of context clues in her favor, it can only be assumed that she's somehow intelligent enough to completely digitize humans, but not smart enough to understand their emotions and how to attend to their needs with any form of nuance. To summarize, I can't take her viewpoint seriously as the context clues of her lived experience with players give us a character that is extremely inept at understanding others and blames everyone else for her problems with the world instead of a scorned "Defect" with scathing, but true, remarks on the state of mind the "players" have when desiring companionship from Mita.

Maybe Peaceful mode can shed some light on these potential contradictions and prove me wrong. or maybe it'll get worse in that regards. Who knows yet?