Mask of Arcadius Characters: Ava, Asaga, Chigara
These posts are going to be talking about the characters of Mask of Arcadius with limited elements of touching on the plot because when it gets down to it Mask of Arcadius is much more focused on having a colorful cast than it is on having a coherent plot. This is perhaps for the best, as while the characters could be better, they're much more a strength of the game than the story is.
While I had an abundance of things to say about the units as gameplay pieces -the gameplay is surprisingly deep, it's genuinely worth checking out- I overall have less to say about the characters. I feel there's stuff worth discussing here, but Sunrider's characters tend to be a bit narrow in their qualities and not experience much development or even explore what they are very thoroughly. This is probably the biggest sin the game commits in regards to its plot; while I complain about the 'harem comedy shenanigans', generally the writing is far stronger when it's focused on the characters interacting naturally than when it's trying to fit them into the story it's telling. (In no small part because the story it's telling is fairly aimless and uninteresting) And then it spends a distressing amount of time trying to cram them into the story it's trying to tell, with natural interactions tending to be off to the side: conversations you don't have to see, or sequences that are technically mandatory but are deliberately patterned after filler.
With comparatively little to say, this is going to be a series of three posts that each cover three characters, starting with...
Ava Crescentia
Ava is your first officer, acting as the face of the Sunrider, ie your capital ship. She's largely played as a no-nonsense soldier who does not put up with 'wackiness' from other characters and always has a practical suggestion ready on hand.
This makes her the only character I straightforwardly like in the game.
This led to a fairly strong early impression of the story: when we first meet Ava, we get the tiresome 'main character and this girl know each other from high school' trope, and it looked likely to me that she was going to be played as First Girl Wins and I'd be constantly forced into choices revolving around how to go about sexually harassing the officer I have authority over with zero self-awareness of how utterly skeevy that is. I was also expecting the game to routinely undermine her authority for the sake of 'comedy'.
Instead, Ava is the Only Sane Woman, and her refusal to allow Shenanigans on her ship (Okay it's technically my ship but frankly the plot would be much improved if the player character was dumped entirely and Ava was made the captain, though it's obvious this was never an option on the table) is never framed as unreasonable or inappropriate on her part. Indeed, one of the most impressive things about how she's written is how she almost never engages with the shenanigans, where so many stories would have dragged her kicking and screaming into the harem comedy nonsense.
It doesn't hurt any that her voice actress really sells her combat dialogue. I have a bit of trouble buying her voice from this picture -which is more a problem with how almost nobody looks like an actual adult- but she sounds like someone who's calm under literal fire.
I may not care for the game's story overall, but I actually like Ava, and that's very much a point in the game's favor.
Eventually the plot does wrap back somewhat to exploring Ava's high school relationship with the player character, and all that was utterly dull and pointless as expected, but while it was a waste of time that didn't tie into the main story meaningfully and that I couldn't begin to guess at the intended purpose behind it, it also wasn't used to undermine the qualities in Ava that I like. She doesn't turn into a blushing schoolgirl just because your character flashbacked to when they were both in high school. There's no attempt by the plot to overtly force in a current romance between the two characters.
So even when the game is managing to disappoint me with Ava, it's still managing to disappoint me in a way that's less crushing and infuriating than most stories I could name with even vaguely equivalent characters. That might sound like a backhanded compliment, but I really mean it as genuine praise; it's the kind of failing I can more readily believe will someday lead to higher-quality work I'm still interested in. Stories that have the kinds of failings Mask of Arcadius avoids with Ava are the kinds of stories where I don't care how polished their creators become at their craft, the root failings are not going to go away and therefore I have no interest in their future works.
Mask of Arcadius?
I'm genuinely curious how things are handled in Liberation Day.
Asaga Oakrun
Asaga is what you get when someone looks at Asuka (Notice how the names are two letters apart, and phonetically are nearly identical) and decides to take away just about everything even vaguely interesting about her. And then cram in a bunch of weird other threads for no real reason.
When we first meet her, Asaga is a mercenary who talks herself up as a 'hero of justice'. She likes to right wrongs (for pay) and strike down evil (for money) and ends up siding with you in an early battle because uuuuh this is a video game and so it was already decided she was going to join your party? And then she sticks around because... this is a video game and so it was already decided she was going to join your party?...
This is a recurring issue with Asaga. She's got a fairly clear personality, upbeat and chipper and somewhat silly -some of her voiced lines are outright memes/references to memes, such as 'imma firing my lasers'- but it has very little bearing on the actual story. Indeed, when the game decides to try to make her actually plot-relevant, it does this by revealing she's the royal heir to an ancient basically-magical bloodline, which means she's a political chip that gets kidnapped that you then rescue. A backstory dump ensues about her trying to be a normal girl and that's why she was hiding out pretending to be a mercenary, but no attempt is ever made to reconcile this princess backstory with her odd thing of having fun playing at being some kind of shonen hero, and we never see any evidence of her country wanting her back or anything of the sort so the fact that she's a Space Princess doesn't feel terribly real.
The overall result feels like the developers wanted a genki girl/totally-not-Asuka-honest character to fill a particular niche in terms of 'girl some players will want to romance' and then on a completely unrelated note decided they wanted her to be the First Girl who gets a bunch of plot significance attached to her. (With Ava most likely avoiding this fate because she's the face of the Sunrider, and thus cannot be kidnapped or the like because the game isn't going to take away the Sunrider or, horror of horrors, force the player character to represent his own ship)
It's fairly disappointing, and is also is one of many examples of the game seeming to be unclear of its own intentions with the story. Is Sunrider a silly comedy where characters quoting current-ish internet memes even though they exist in a galaxy where spacefaring technology has been around for more than ten thousand years is nothing to blink at? Sure, sometimes. Except when it's about the horrors of war all of a sudden. Or those times it's a weird rescue fantasy plot where First Girl is going to be forcibly married for no real reason to some jerkface you don't like so you can swoop in and personally save her (As opposed to sending in the team of burly marines I'd hope is actually on the Sunrider to handle this kind of mission) because... yeah.
The game also inexplicably springs a scene of her naked in the shower on you with zero warning, no attempt to justify why this is happening. Since I didn't see any warnings about this game being intended for mature audiences or anything prior to booting it up -and skipped the opening before it got around to any of its risque images, because it was a boring opening- this was rather an unpleasant shock. I hadn't even done anything to turn her into a love interest or anything! This is a mandatory naked girl scene! And no, the player character isn't even supposed to be present for this scene, so why are we seeing it?
Certainly, a story doesn't have to box itself in, but Sunrider doesn't seem to so much be covering a wide variety of ideas because life is a big and varied place as it is the creators really just don't know what they want to do except in the most broad of strokes. And by a similar token they mostly present the story so that the player character's view is the only one the audience gets, but then they'll completely at random throw moments that break that rule at the player, which includes bizarre moments like the completely unnecessary Naked Asaga Scene, which serves pretty much no purpose except to titillate.
I don't find Asaga particularly offensive as a person, but that's more because I can't even begin to believe her as a person. She doesn't hold up as a character on even a cursory level, and since she doesn't hit any notes that particularly appeal to me I'm not able to gloss over the problems with her as a character.
Chigara Lynn Ashada
Hi Rei!
Chigara is thankfully a bit less blatantly an attempt at an Evangelion expy. Where Asaga sort of takes the basic sketch of an energetic and emotional redhead and then tosses out the trauma and need to prove herself and all that other stuff that gives Asuka an actual coherent character, Chigara mostly just borrows a general sketch of visuals and has one personality trait that's sort of similar-ish: Chigara is shy, Rei is... less than forthcoming.
Outside that, Chigara is her own thing!
... now if only 'her own thing' wasn't one of many examples of Sunrider being unsure what it wants to be.
See, where Asaga is the latest member of a lineage of basically-magical princesses, Chigara is a mad scientist who can produce super-technology in her garage in a few hours... and is apparently normal or bad with technology by the standards of the people she grew up with. Our hero is faced with a basically unwinnable war against the endless legions of evil, and when he learns that not only is the blue-haired girl a reality-breaking mad scientist but she comes from an entire race of Sparks, his response is to recruit the one girl and pay absolutely no attention to the fact that he could potentially be trying to get help from who-knows-how-many reality-warping geniuses just like her only better.
Obviously the real reason is that Chigara is here to fill an appealing niche and that's really the primary purpose of these girls existing, and if the story was a lighthearted comedy that inexplicably had a moderately deep tactics game attached to it I wouldn't blink at the insanity of her backstory. But when the main plot involves a single ship doing its best to win a war against an entire interstellar empire and this is played for dark and serious drama, with realistic-ish moral ambiguity and nations/planets tired of being fought over for their exploitable resources and so on, these points start mattering.
The rest of Chigara's personality revolves around being shy and lacking in confidence and whatnot. There's the occasional moment where things work out in a memorable or interesting way: a personal favorite of mine is that she spends the early portion of the game startling every time the player character comes to talk to her, and the first time she doesn't he comments on it, clearly thinking she's getting comfortable around him... and she explains that she installed cameras to see him coming. He's understandably offput, which was a rare moment of me actually feeling in sync with the character that's supposed to represent me. Also, it's legit funny.
Most of the time, though, it's just irritating, because it doesn't seem to make sense. Why is Chigara shy around people? Because she's supposed to fill the niche of a girl that's shy and you help her come out of her shell and blah blah blah. That's it. The game doesn't have a better answer for you. I'm not interested in her stuttering attempts to function around her fellow human beings, because she's only slightly less bad than Asaga about not feeling like a remotely real person.
Eventually the plot comes back to the whole 'entire race of super technologists' thing, which actually kinda makes finding out Chigara is one foreshadowing. On the one hand I do kinda want to give the game credit for that point, as it's genuinely an uncommon success. On the other hand, it further highlights the issues with Mask of Arcadius' inconsistent tone -if the plot left 'Chigara is a super scientist/engineer, bordering on magic' at being a justification for her operating your R&D screen with the occasional moment of comedy based on it, I could wave it off as kind of like Gameplay And Story Segregation, only wholly within the plot; some parts of the story are Serious, some parts are Not So Serious, and you're not supposed to try to apply the Not So Serious parts to the Serious parts. That is something plenty of stories do.
But then it intrudes on the Actually Serious parts of the plot, dragging my attention back to 'no, seriously, why did my character not pursue these points at all?'
I think she's overall better-handled than Asaga, but ugh. The super-scientist-race thing. Ugh.
------------------------------------
Next time, we cover three more characters, including the one I hate most unfortunately.
While I had an abundance of things to say about the units as gameplay pieces -the gameplay is surprisingly deep, it's genuinely worth checking out- I overall have less to say about the characters. I feel there's stuff worth discussing here, but Sunrider's characters tend to be a bit narrow in their qualities and not experience much development or even explore what they are very thoroughly. This is probably the biggest sin the game commits in regards to its plot; while I complain about the 'harem comedy shenanigans', generally the writing is far stronger when it's focused on the characters interacting naturally than when it's trying to fit them into the story it's telling. (In no small part because the story it's telling is fairly aimless and uninteresting) And then it spends a distressing amount of time trying to cram them into the story it's trying to tell, with natural interactions tending to be off to the side: conversations you don't have to see, or sequences that are technically mandatory but are deliberately patterned after filler.
With comparatively little to say, this is going to be a series of three posts that each cover three characters, starting with...
Ava Crescentia
Ava is your first officer, acting as the face of the Sunrider, ie your capital ship. She's largely played as a no-nonsense soldier who does not put up with 'wackiness' from other characters and always has a practical suggestion ready on hand.
This makes her the only character I straightforwardly like in the game.
This led to a fairly strong early impression of the story: when we first meet Ava, we get the tiresome 'main character and this girl know each other from high school' trope, and it looked likely to me that she was going to be played as First Girl Wins and I'd be constantly forced into choices revolving around how to go about sexually harassing the officer I have authority over with zero self-awareness of how utterly skeevy that is. I was also expecting the game to routinely undermine her authority for the sake of 'comedy'.
Instead, Ava is the Only Sane Woman, and her refusal to allow Shenanigans on her ship (Okay it's technically my ship but frankly the plot would be much improved if the player character was dumped entirely and Ava was made the captain, though it's obvious this was never an option on the table) is never framed as unreasonable or inappropriate on her part. Indeed, one of the most impressive things about how she's written is how she almost never engages with the shenanigans, where so many stories would have dragged her kicking and screaming into the harem comedy nonsense.
It doesn't hurt any that her voice actress really sells her combat dialogue. I have a bit of trouble buying her voice from this picture -which is more a problem with how almost nobody looks like an actual adult- but she sounds like someone who's calm under literal fire.
I may not care for the game's story overall, but I actually like Ava, and that's very much a point in the game's favor.
Eventually the plot does wrap back somewhat to exploring Ava's high school relationship with the player character, and all that was utterly dull and pointless as expected, but while it was a waste of time that didn't tie into the main story meaningfully and that I couldn't begin to guess at the intended purpose behind it, it also wasn't used to undermine the qualities in Ava that I like. She doesn't turn into a blushing schoolgirl just because your character flashbacked to when they were both in high school. There's no attempt by the plot to overtly force in a current romance between the two characters.
So even when the game is managing to disappoint me with Ava, it's still managing to disappoint me in a way that's less crushing and infuriating than most stories I could name with even vaguely equivalent characters. That might sound like a backhanded compliment, but I really mean it as genuine praise; it's the kind of failing I can more readily believe will someday lead to higher-quality work I'm still interested in. Stories that have the kinds of failings Mask of Arcadius avoids with Ava are the kinds of stories where I don't care how polished their creators become at their craft, the root failings are not going to go away and therefore I have no interest in their future works.
Mask of Arcadius?
I'm genuinely curious how things are handled in Liberation Day.
Asaga Oakrun
Asaga is what you get when someone looks at Asuka (Notice how the names are two letters apart, and phonetically are nearly identical) and decides to take away just about everything even vaguely interesting about her. And then cram in a bunch of weird other threads for no real reason.
When we first meet her, Asaga is a mercenary who talks herself up as a 'hero of justice'. She likes to right wrongs (for pay) and strike down evil (for money) and ends up siding with you in an early battle because uuuuh this is a video game and so it was already decided she was going to join your party? And then she sticks around because... this is a video game and so it was already decided she was going to join your party?...
This is a recurring issue with Asaga. She's got a fairly clear personality, upbeat and chipper and somewhat silly -some of her voiced lines are outright memes/references to memes, such as 'imma firing my lasers'- but it has very little bearing on the actual story. Indeed, when the game decides to try to make her actually plot-relevant, it does this by revealing she's the royal heir to an ancient basically-magical bloodline, which means she's a political chip that gets kidnapped that you then rescue. A backstory dump ensues about her trying to be a normal girl and that's why she was hiding out pretending to be a mercenary, but no attempt is ever made to reconcile this princess backstory with her odd thing of having fun playing at being some kind of shonen hero, and we never see any evidence of her country wanting her back or anything of the sort so the fact that she's a Space Princess doesn't feel terribly real.
The overall result feels like the developers wanted a genki girl/totally-not-Asuka-honest character to fill a particular niche in terms of 'girl some players will want to romance' and then on a completely unrelated note decided they wanted her to be the First Girl who gets a bunch of plot significance attached to her. (With Ava most likely avoiding this fate because she's the face of the Sunrider, and thus cannot be kidnapped or the like because the game isn't going to take away the Sunrider or, horror of horrors, force the player character to represent his own ship)
It's fairly disappointing, and is also is one of many examples of the game seeming to be unclear of its own intentions with the story. Is Sunrider a silly comedy where characters quoting current-ish internet memes even though they exist in a galaxy where spacefaring technology has been around for more than ten thousand years is nothing to blink at? Sure, sometimes. Except when it's about the horrors of war all of a sudden. Or those times it's a weird rescue fantasy plot where First Girl is going to be forcibly married for no real reason to some jerkface you don't like so you can swoop in and personally save her (As opposed to sending in the team of burly marines I'd hope is actually on the Sunrider to handle this kind of mission) because... yeah.
The game also inexplicably springs a scene of her naked in the shower on you with zero warning, no attempt to justify why this is happening. Since I didn't see any warnings about this game being intended for mature audiences or anything prior to booting it up -and skipped the opening before it got around to any of its risque images, because it was a boring opening- this was rather an unpleasant shock. I hadn't even done anything to turn her into a love interest or anything! This is a mandatory naked girl scene! And no, the player character isn't even supposed to be present for this scene, so why are we seeing it?
Certainly, a story doesn't have to box itself in, but Sunrider doesn't seem to so much be covering a wide variety of ideas because life is a big and varied place as it is the creators really just don't know what they want to do except in the most broad of strokes. And by a similar token they mostly present the story so that the player character's view is the only one the audience gets, but then they'll completely at random throw moments that break that rule at the player, which includes bizarre moments like the completely unnecessary Naked Asaga Scene, which serves pretty much no purpose except to titillate.
I don't find Asaga particularly offensive as a person, but that's more because I can't even begin to believe her as a person. She doesn't hold up as a character on even a cursory level, and since she doesn't hit any notes that particularly appeal to me I'm not able to gloss over the problems with her as a character.
Chigara Lynn Ashada
Hi Rei!
Chigara is thankfully a bit less blatantly an attempt at an Evangelion expy. Where Asaga sort of takes the basic sketch of an energetic and emotional redhead and then tosses out the trauma and need to prove herself and all that other stuff that gives Asuka an actual coherent character, Chigara mostly just borrows a general sketch of visuals and has one personality trait that's sort of similar-ish: Chigara is shy, Rei is... less than forthcoming.
Outside that, Chigara is her own thing!
... now if only 'her own thing' wasn't one of many examples of Sunrider being unsure what it wants to be.
See, where Asaga is the latest member of a lineage of basically-magical princesses, Chigara is a mad scientist who can produce super-technology in her garage in a few hours... and is apparently normal or bad with technology by the standards of the people she grew up with. Our hero is faced with a basically unwinnable war against the endless legions of evil, and when he learns that not only is the blue-haired girl a reality-breaking mad scientist but she comes from an entire race of Sparks, his response is to recruit the one girl and pay absolutely no attention to the fact that he could potentially be trying to get help from who-knows-how-many reality-warping geniuses just like her only better.
Obviously the real reason is that Chigara is here to fill an appealing niche and that's really the primary purpose of these girls existing, and if the story was a lighthearted comedy that inexplicably had a moderately deep tactics game attached to it I wouldn't blink at the insanity of her backstory. But when the main plot involves a single ship doing its best to win a war against an entire interstellar empire and this is played for dark and serious drama, with realistic-ish moral ambiguity and nations/planets tired of being fought over for their exploitable resources and so on, these points start mattering.
The rest of Chigara's personality revolves around being shy and lacking in confidence and whatnot. There's the occasional moment where things work out in a memorable or interesting way: a personal favorite of mine is that she spends the early portion of the game startling every time the player character comes to talk to her, and the first time she doesn't he comments on it, clearly thinking she's getting comfortable around him... and she explains that she installed cameras to see him coming. He's understandably offput, which was a rare moment of me actually feeling in sync with the character that's supposed to represent me. Also, it's legit funny.
Most of the time, though, it's just irritating, because it doesn't seem to make sense. Why is Chigara shy around people? Because she's supposed to fill the niche of a girl that's shy and you help her come out of her shell and blah blah blah. That's it. The game doesn't have a better answer for you. I'm not interested in her stuttering attempts to function around her fellow human beings, because she's only slightly less bad than Asaga about not feeling like a remotely real person.
Eventually the plot comes back to the whole 'entire race of super technologists' thing, which actually kinda makes finding out Chigara is one foreshadowing. On the one hand I do kinda want to give the game credit for that point, as it's genuinely an uncommon success. On the other hand, it further highlights the issues with Mask of Arcadius' inconsistent tone -if the plot left 'Chigara is a super scientist/engineer, bordering on magic' at being a justification for her operating your R&D screen with the occasional moment of comedy based on it, I could wave it off as kind of like Gameplay And Story Segregation, only wholly within the plot; some parts of the story are Serious, some parts are Not So Serious, and you're not supposed to try to apply the Not So Serious parts to the Serious parts. That is something plenty of stories do.
But then it intrudes on the Actually Serious parts of the plot, dragging my attention back to 'no, seriously, why did my character not pursue these points at all?'
I think she's overall better-handled than Asaga, but ugh. The super-scientist-race thing. Ugh.
------------------------------------
Next time, we cover three more characters, including the one I hate most unfortunately.
Some pretty good things, although i have a few minor nitpicks with yours.
ReplyDeleteA: The rest of the folks on Diode got killed in the disaster, so that's why Kayto doesn't bother looking for them.
B: Claiming " is apparently normal or bad with technology by the standards of the people she grew up with. "... maybe Chigara's just trying to be humble, or something? Frankly that makes more sense. Diode wasn't so much "race of super beings" as "science station which somehow? attracted a significant portion of the galaxy's most talented scientists."
C: I'm not seeing how Asaga's runaway princess thing is incompatible with the wannabe hero of justice thing? Like, Asaga didn't want to be a princess, she wanted to be a storybook hero instead.
A: Kayto doesn't know about that at the time the concept is introduced. We only MUCH LATER learn that they're supposed to all be dead.
DeleteB: You seem to be glossing over the 'normal' part of 'normal or bad'. The point is that Chigara isn't a one-off exception whose people of origin is irrelevant, but rather that her exceptional abilities in science is explicitly grounded in 'you can expect this kind of super-science from anyone back from her home'. Whether she's being humble or actually IS bad by the standards of her people was accounted for in my statements already.
B2: The plot of Mask of Arcadius explicitly presents Chigara's people as magical super-scientists who are better at science than ordinary humans by a wide margin for no particular natural reason. It sounds to me like you're pulling from the sequel or something, because Mask of Arcadius is unambiguous in this regard.
C: Asaga's runaway princess thing is that she wants to be normal, instead of someone of importance. So she runs off to be someone ABnormal and VERY important who will be in the public eye if she succeeds in her Hero Of Justice persona, simultaneously utterly failing at the 'be normal' goal AND making it virtually guaranteed people who know she's a princess will end up discovering her. Your interpretation, while it would work, has the key problem that it's not what was actually written.