Mask of Arcadius Characters: Icari, Claude, Sola

Icari Isidolde

No, that's not a spelling error. They really made her last name 'Isidolde', when 'Isolde' is a real name that doesn't look and sound like an abomination.

I also hate Icari's not-a-plugsuit design. I'm not exactly a fan of the design of these things in general, but Icari's in particular has large portions in a color that's so close to her skin tone color that her form-fitting suit ends up looking more like a barely-there stripper outfit. It's bad enough that I'm trying to play a cool tactics game and don't really like it when the game suddenly intrudes with Sexualized Naked Girls, but Icari is unavoidable anytime I'm playing said cool tactics part of the game and seriously it looks like her breasts are just out.

Icari herself is yet another example of the game not knowing what it wants to be or do. Icari's combat/voiced dialogue makes it pretty obvious what the creators were thinking with her: Icari is a tsundere, hating and loving you in the same breath. Nonetheless, this trait is not even slightly in evidence within the story until the last Ryder pilot joins your team and she starts pulling tsundere stuff at them. The player character? Yeah, no, she's a psychopath for him. And not like a creepy obsessive lover psychopath who murders her rivals or something at least tangentially related to a tsundere, but just plain a cold-blooded killer with the only excuse offered being an attempt at a sympathetic backstory boiling down to 'the bad guys killed my family, so now I'm fine being a monster to literally everyone in the universe'.

Once the plot stops trying to make her a real participant in it her creepy behavior fades away, and for a bit there she basically doesn't have a personality at all, only really gaining one once she's got a girl to tsundere at, but it's pretty hard to shake this strong and consistent first impression.

It's one of the more amazing examples of 'what is this game even trying to do, seriously' since they do eventually get her to fit into the tsundere mold (If you gloss over that the normal expectation would be she'd being tsundere-ing at the player character), which is a bit sad because honestly I actually quite enjoy her once she's tsundere-ing at Kryska, and yet I can't help but feel like that fact is a product of the devs botching their story.

That her Ryder is badly screwed over by the game design doesn't help, either.


Claude Triello

I'm not going to mince words: I hate bubblegum candy here.

When we first meet her, she comes across as just kind of a ditz with shades of Sailor Moon-esque 'boy craziness'. I wasn't grabbed by this particularly, but it's not like it set any alarm bells ringing. I got a bit uncomfortable once it turned out she was a doctor, because I kind of figured this was going to turn into some 'wacky' skit with her hitting on the player character when he's her patient, and that's creepy in a fairly fundamental way, but I figured it would be more innocently horrible than anything else.

Then when he headed in for a 'checkup' she went straight to talking the player character into getting naked and (wo)manhandling his bits. Explicitly.

Naturally, this 'comedically' involves other characters stumbling into the scene and somehow coming away with the belief that the main character is not being raped by a creepster, just to max out the creepometer.

Literally the only saving grace to this whole thing is that Ava eventually comes stumbling in to report that Claude is a sex offender who's no longer a doctor due to her malpractice and gloriously fails to 'wackily misunderstand' what's going on.

I'd actually kind of love the whole sequence if only Claude weren't made a permanent part of the crew who does, in fact, eventually take over sick bay for good. If she were a one-off character who gets kicked to the curb for her godawful behavior, I'd actually be inclined to take the whole thing as a very pleasant Take That at all these horrific sequences being played for laughs in other media, a kind of 'and reality ensues'.

But she's a permanent member of the cast, she does take over sick bay permanently, and while the player character never treats her as a romanceable option the game still handles her in a way that deliberately leaves it open for the player to view her in such a manner.

There's people who like that kind of thing in a fantasy context, and if Sunrider was much more clearly sicking to a fantasy context in which the player character is a heroic do-gooder saving the galaxy from cartoonish evil with no real-world consequences whatsoever and romancing All The Babes to boot, I'd be able to put the whole thing under 'not my cup of tea, moving on'. What you like on your private time that doesn't affect anyone else isn't any of my business.

But then the game periodically wants me to take its human drama seriously, where horrific conditions drive small children to attempt to lead complete strangers to a gruesome death for money to feed themselves and then the small child gets caught in a crossfire and dies in a visibly bloody manner. (That's not hypothetical: it actually happens in the game)

You gotta pick one. Either this is a world that's waving away a lot of real-world consequences and it's okay for Claude to be a rapist and for the player to potentially find the idea of a rapist being interested in them hot, or this is a world in which terrible actions have terrible consequences in which case she's a rapist and get her off my damn ship.

Past that initial incident she's never quite so egregious again, but that initial incident overshadows nearly everything else. The only thing that's actually a decent bit and part of this character is that one of her voiced lines for hacking enemy craft is to excitedly exclaim she just downloaded their entire porn collection... and after a few beats of silence confusedly remark 'space whales?' Which is legit funny, but it's not really enough to make her tolerable.

Particularly frustrating is, as I've said, how she eventually takes over the sickbay anyway; it gets treated as surprising and mildly concerning and then ignored as acceptable afterward. No! It is not acceptable! Why is this happening! Why has no one thrown her out the airlock!

I actually ended up playing most of the way through the game once, deciding I was unhappy with how I'd spent money on upgrades (Too much investment into Missiles, for one), and going back and redoing the campaign from the beginning, and it gave me an opportunity to see a scene I'd skipped over before under the idea that it was a 'this is how you romance Claude' and I was pleasantly surprised to see the player character really not liking her trying to turn some alone time into a sexytimes thing, which helped soften my hatred of her some.

But I still really dislike her. If she is meant as a 'yeah, comedic rape by a woman isn't actually funny, dude' sort of character, the actual handling is pretty miserable; it could easily have been done far better, without ever coming across like the game is basically endorsing rape done by women as No Harm No Foul Moving On.

It doesn't help that she's the only character who really just plain has no place in the plot. Other characters, the story tries to fit into the core plot. Success is usually middling to poor, but I can see what was supposed to be going on and go 'ah, this is why this character is in this story'. Claude really is just here to have the attempted rape scene and then stop existing in the plot. What was she doing when we found her? Why does she have a Ryder when she's an ex-doctor thanks to her malpractice, given Ryders are expensive war machines and she doesn't have her own Chigara to justify it? Why is she here beyond apparently finding the player character highly attractive?

None of these questions are ever answered or even raised.


Sola vi Ryuvia

So I mentioned already that Chigara and Asaga are pretty clearly patterned after Rei and Asuka. You'd think that would mean I can't claim Sola is pretty clearly patterned after Rei, because why would a story blatantly make two expies of the same character, but alas, you'd be wrong.

Sola borrows Rei's aesthetic less blatantly, but she's got almost exactly the same hairstyle as Chigara, she's got the whole 'seemingly emotionless girl' thing Rei has, she's got the 'my life is worthless and I do not fear death because of this feeling' not-quite-deathseeker thing Rei has, and the same 'not quite baseline human and thus has special powers' bit.

Things diverge once you get into details, but it's kind of amazing how Rei-like Sola is, especially given Chigara much more obviously looks like a Rei expy and ends up only moderately so.

Also like Chigara, Sola ends up not fitting in very well when the story wants us to take it seriously, though it's a bit less obvious since she's pretty much never played for laughs the way Chigara is. Sola is an ancient Ryuvian princess (Except kind of not but whatever) from 2000 years ago when Science Was Way Better, and just like Chigara she gets recruited and very little interest is expressed in the possibility of leveraging her situation to try to go find supertech that could change the war. It's not anywhere near as bad as with Chigara, since Sola herself is not some kind of crazy Spark and it's been 2000 years so her social connections are irrelevant, and eventually her backstory reveals she wouldn't have known much of anything about eg ancient Ryuvian military stocks, but it's still difficult to buy when the games tries to be Dark And Serous that the cast wouldn't think to ask Sola about this kind of stuff.

To her credit, while Sola is nowhere near as competently-handled as Ava -but hey, no one is- she does actually escape the Asaga problem of her personality and plot role being entirely disconnected. Sola's detached, quiet behavior fits her generous circumstances as a shellshocked survivor who as far as she experienced things has lost her entire existence, and also fits her backstory and yadda yadda. The backstory is... not very sensical, but if you gloss past that and ignore how little attention the plot is paying to someone who really ought to be one of the more important characters, Sola is actually competently-written!

And not creepy, which helps boost her in the rankings after Claude and Icari's handling.

As an aside, whoever wrote this game made the extremely bizarre decision to have everyone refer to Sola's time-displaced state by saying she comes from another 'timeline'. Not another era, or time. Not the ancient past she comes from. Another timeline. The script is not riddled with weird Engrish or anything like that, so it's just jarring how consistent this bit of wrongness is. This isn't some specialized bit of quantum mechanics terminology or something, either, where it's technically wrong but I can see how a layman would screw it up. I can't think of another piece of fiction that chose to describe 'I'm from the far distant past' as 'I come from another timeline', or anything comparably nonsensical.

I have no idea what's up with that.

Next time, we wrap up talking about Mask of Arcadius by covering our final three characters.