Case 1-2: Turnabout Sisters
The thing I first noticed in my recent playthrough of this case was that it seemed to take them a while to figure out how to best represent Detective Gumshoe’s particular manner of speaking. At first they started out with appending his sentences with “see” which gave him a sort of old-time detective film kind of feeling. I’m not sure I really like that, and I’m glad they eventually settled on “pal.”
I think they did a good job of leaving Maya’s characterization in a sort of flux throughout this case. As someone who is dealing with the death of the last of her immediate family, she probably wouldn’t be acting very normal.
For this play through I chose “Go Home” when asked what I’d do as far as representing Maya, and I was pretty surprised at how involved that path was. It surprised and amused me.
I remember being frustrated with this case the first way through, because I remembered that when we picked up the note with “Maya” written on it in blood, Phoenix mentioned that it was a receipt from yesterday and when Redd said he’d seen the light stand a week ago and we needed proof that it wasn’t there, I knew it had to be the receipt… But you weren’t allowed to present it until Mia’s ghost told you it was there. It sort of gave me a taste of the procedure for the game, though, and so I never really did that again.
As far as the crime itself, I like Redd because he’s one of the few criminals who wasn’t just a bad person in a bad place at the wrong time. He knew what he was doing and he thought he could get away with it. That, I think, makes for a much more satisfying denouement, as we see in 2-4. I like the premeditated murders a bit more than the crimes of passion in this game, just because of that wrong-place-wrong-time feeling. Then again, for the most part the villains in these cases are very clearly doing wrong, even in case 1-3, the only one that I recall being self-defense.
Anyway, Redd is a fun character because of that smarmy self-confidence he has. As opposed to other characters, who, though they might be very evil, convince themselves that they’re committing these crimes for some greater goal, like von Karma, Redd is just a big fat criminal jerk who does bad things because he likes it and kills people so he can keep doing those bad things. It’s nice to have a few criminals that you can just hate without having any smaller sympathy for, because they’re so one-dimensional. I feel the same way about Matt and Dahlia. I commend revengeofthezio and sally18 for being such good players of Redd and Matt in gyakusai_rp without taking away their one-dimensional, manipulative status or giving them some sort of touching side.
I was disappointed to see Mia die, not merely because of the fact that she resembles me. I liked her slightly forgetful yet in-control meat-body persona. She’s a lot more self-assured and knowledgeable in death, and that ends up making her a more one-dimensional Obi-Wan type personality.
I realized, upon reflection, that probably part of the reason that Redd spit it up so hard and fast was because he could SEE Mia-Maya to the left of him, and he thought he was going completely crazy. That makes me smile a little bit.