After reaching the main ending, I honestly had no words. Shit, I'm still blown away a week later. (Note: I really hope that spoiler-tagging this hides the whole thing, I've never actually posted here before.)

First it was Michel's past and finding out that he was originally a girl--then realizing he was actually a male the whole time but his crazy parents raised him as a girl. That, to me, was tragic not even in the "oh my god everything is literally awful" sense that the first three or four "doors"/chapters were, but more tragic in the sense of "wow, what the hell, this would be totally preventable and a complete non-issue in today's world."

I knew immediately what had happened to him once he started going through puberty and his body changed. He was born a male and had been one the entire time, but because he was lacking the one obvious piece of anatomy that men had, his parents believed he was a girl. I get that it was like 1099 and modern medicine probably hadn't even been invented yet, so they had no way to find out that he was actually male and stayed stuck in their delusions, but it just hurt to watch a little because had this happened in 2018, a quick DNA sample probably would have proved his gender long before he could hit puberty and grow into a more masculine frame, and he wouldn't have been so miserable. But I digress, this isn't real life we're talking about.

I think it was Michel's backstory that really drove home how complex this story was shaping up to be, but a week after the fact, what I remember best is the later sections about Morgana herself. That was a fun ride.

It was really interesting to see how things came together in her backstory (and the ultimate ending) and get some of my questions answered. Why were these three men cursed in this mansion? Why had she been waiting for them specifically to reconstruct and come back? Who was the White-Haired Girl and what did she have to do with any of this?

It was also a trip to gradually become almost sympathetic to the game's main villain. Up until I saw what had happened to her, I had thought Morgana was just an evil witch trying to ruin people's lives for god-knows-what reason, or maybe even no reason at all. Through the first three doors I never found myself wondering what Mell, Yukimasa, and Jacopo had done to deserve being so miserable, at that stage I just wanted to know if this was part of this "witch's curse" the game had been hinting at so far and why it was happening.

But then I saw Morgana's past and went "wow, no wonder she was waiting for these guys. No wonder she hates them." Morgana was a perfectly normal girl who had just been fucked over and betrayed at every turn in her life, and it twisted her from a nice, trusting person into a hateful, jaded husk of her former self. Nobody could undergo the kind of trauma she did and expect to make it out the other side as the same person they once were.

I think the really tragic part came when Michel learned everyone's reasons for basically stabbing Morgana in the back. The fact that they all had their reasons was hard to deal with, because it meant they weren't just evil assholes out to make her miserable just to be villains. They had their own motivations and situations, and I know that makes them good, well-written characters instead of flat villains, but normal people doing bad things for their own reasons (good or somewhat justifiable in most of their cases) are a lot harder of a pill to swallow than evil people just being evil because that's what they do.

As if that wasn't bad enough, to me the saddest part was by far the scene right after Jacopo's perspective where they go to free her from the tower and open the door to find this. And to make matters worse, her mind was so broken by the sheer trauma of it all that by the time they got to her, she was talking to herself. Her mind was splitting in two. That CG in particular kind of made my heart hurt because it was just sad. It felt like the worst thing I'd seen in the game. She was obviously in terrible condition and her face is just...that's the posture and expression of someone who has given up. It's terrible and heartrending.

Thankfully the main ending of the game was a happy one, and it drove home the point that this was actually the most complex, epic love story since Shakespeare, but man...all the shit Michel and Giselle had to go through to get that happy ending...let's just say I didn't feel better about the whole tale until I read through the amazingly silly Backstage section. That was nice and lighthearted and took the weight of all the tragedy off.

Don't get me wrong, it was a phenomenal story, but goddamn. I'd recommend it to anybody who enjoys deep, complex stories or likes it when things tie in together, but jesus, don't read this unless you're ready for some heavy shit. I nearly cried like six or seven times throughout reading it.

Now that I've gushed about it, I'm curious--for those of you who have read it (and I really hope you're the only ones even on this post, this is not a story you want to ruin for yourself), what are your thoughts?