Yeah, hi. I posted in the "what are you reading" thread a few days ago. I'm wrapping up Unlimited's many borderline-identical endings as I write this, and I'm terrified of what Alternative may bring. Pardon the long, blog-like post, but I have to get this out there.

I actually liked Extra quite a bit, so all throughout Unlimited, my heart ached for Takeru. His rapport with the squad was great, and the characters' development over the course of the game moved me, especially Takeru's. Heck, his conversation with Meiya about the old lady in Episode 9 blew me away. Overall, Unlimited is solid as a rock, and I'm dumbfounded that it took me this long to get to this series.

But for all the happy times, the shroud of death still permeated the entire game, even if we never saw a single Beta. The fact that Takeru was able to not only adapt to but thrive in that hellhole awoke mixed feelings inside me. It pained me to see him slowly start to forget Extraville, and by extension, Sumika. The letter he writes at the end was difficult to read. Nothing particularly awful has happened yet, and already I yearn for the happy times when their biggest concern was a lacrosse match.

Speaking of Sumika, though, I refuse to believe she's gone. I thought this the first time Kasumi came to wake Takeru up, but now that I've seen the endings, I'm convinced that Sumika and the disembodied brain are connected somehow. Perhaps she got isekaied like Takeru did, and was then subjected to the Hangar 90 experiments and incorporated into the Alternative Program - except I don't understand what that has to do with killing Betas. Whoever Kasumi is, she's clearly being affected by Sumika somehow. She might even think she is Sumika. The evidence is obvious: she wakes him up in the mornings, she gave him a Game Guy (drawing) for his birthday despite having no knowledge of the thing, and she called him Takeru-chan. In the endings, she says leaving the base (or, as I suspect, the brain) will make her forget who she is. There's something very suspicious going on here.

As for what that is, I can't say for sure. There's hints, but not enough for me to be confident, I feel. The biggest ones, of course, come from what Santa Yuuko said: that she wanted to produce a savior, and that she wanted to fit fifteen million semiconductors in the palm of her hand. That's obviously a reference to her lecture in Extra about replicating the human brain, so is she trying to create artificial humans? Robotic supersoldiers that can fight Betas with all the ingenuity of real human beings? It could be that the goal of the Alternative Program is to yank people out of other dimensions, like Takeru and Sumika, and transfer their consciousnesses into mass-produced robotic bodies to create an infinite supply of ethically-gray killing machines. That would make Kasumi a test run - an experiment to prove that the human consciousness can be written onto a new medium. There are obvious failings to her situation, though, which is why I suspect Alternative IV was scrapped in favor of Alternative V, whatever that is. At the very least, the fact that her first name is an anagram of "Sumika" feels significant, and the fact that her full name is written as "shrine" and "mist" is somewhat eerie.

And above all, there are still unexplained mysteries. How did cat!Tsukiji end up in Extraville? How did Takeru end up in Unlimitedland - in his house (which apparently belonged to someone else), and carrying a memento of Sumika (the Game Guy), no less? Furthermore, Tsukuyomi called him a "dead man," implying that Unlimitedland had a Shirogane Takeru who is now deceased. Who was he, and what was he doing? Where did he live, if not the house we all know and love? And why wouldn't Yuuko have found out about him when she ran a background check on him at the beginning of the game?

I just can't help but feel like I'm missing something. I've been assured that Alternative is a roller coaster of emotions that will break me, so I feel like there must be something more sinister going on. If my wild guesses turn out to be true, that's not terribly heart-wrenching. There's something more.

Anyway, I'm done now. The events of Unlimited already have me wracked with unease, so I'm scared of the emotional gut-punches Alternative is allegedly going to bring. I can make guesses, but I can't get a solid read on where this series is going, and considering that Alternative is as long as Extra and Unlimited combined... I'm on pins and needles.

EDIT: Oh, and honorable mention to the fact that Takeru can remember the events of individual routes in Extra, despite supposedly never experiencing them. Though it's unclear exactly how much of Extra this Takeru experienced.