May 26, 2020 ☼ anime ☼ video games

(major spoilers for Re:ZERO, Remember 11, and the Zero Escape series)

In the fifteenth episode of Re:ZERO, Subaru stumbles into a hidden hallway littered with the corpses of dead cultists. As he walks down the hallway in horror, he notices his body slowly freezing over. He tries to pull himself to the end, but ultimately his icy body shatters, killing him. Thanks to his “Return by Death” power, he’s brought back to the prior day, mystified by what he’s seen.

Subaru dying is a common occurrence in Re:ZERO, but that doesn’t stop this death from being shocking. Many of his deaths are directly caused by his direct failings, such as trying to fight a foe and losing, or purposefully throwing himself off of a mountain. However, the situation around this death, with the ice trap-laden hallway and mysteriously butchered cultists —who actually killed him? Could he have done anything to avoid this? We get hints later on as to why this might have happened, but the circumstances around this death are never fully explained.

If you’ve ever played a visual novel, you’re familiar with the concept of a “bad end”. Most visual novels give readers choices throughout that affect the story, allowing them to move between different “routes”, all with different sub-stories and ultimately different endings. While routes typically have a set of choices you can make to get to the canonical “true ending”, many will also have a selection of bad endings you get to when you make the wrong choice.

Usually, bad ends are rather abrupt. Maybe your love interest breaks up with you, maybe you take the wrong staircase and immediately get killed by the antagonist. Since these are ultimately not the real endings, and there may be a lot of bad endings, visual novel developers aren’t encouraged to put a ton of effort into them. However, sometimes visual novels purposely put important story beats only in bad endings.

In The Zero Escape series, sci-fi elements like time travel and “the morphogenetic field” (being able to share thoughts telepathically, essentially) help codify additional knowledge gained from bad ends as actual game mechanics—not only will you only learn things like passcodes or secret motivations from playing through bad ends, but the game will actually block you from getting the true end on your first play-through, even if you already have all the necessary information from like a guide. Knowledge isn’t lost just because the protagonist has died.

Remember 11, probably my favorite visual novel, has similar mechanics. In this visual novel, the two protagonists regularly swap bodies (and as we learn later in the game, actually travel through time as they swap), and are able to exchange and preserve information through that. While this game is generally well-received, its ending is generally seen as a disappointment. That’s because its true end is actually a bad end. It strings you along until the literal last moments, where a triumphant victory is torn away, leaving you with a fridge-horror cliffhanger, exclaiming “The story isn’t over yet! It’s an infinity loop!”. Through a rather obtuse set of choices, you can instead encounter “Apoptosis”, a supposed-bad end that provides you with the necessary context to parse the meaning of the true end. Unlike the Zero Escape games, this isn’t enforced through game mechanics—looking online it’s clear that the majority of people never find “Apoptosis”, and therefore aren’t really granted a true end to the game.

Re:ZERO is not a visual novel, but its Groundhog Day mechanic allows it to approach one. Much like visual novels, some bad ends are long, bitter fights with disappointing ends. Other bad ends are sudden, out of nowhere. Either way, all bad ends in Re:ZERO are important. Whether it’s the slow fight before, or the rude awakening afterwards, there’s always critical information for Subaru to gleam after each miserable death. And miserable it is—most Return by Deaths show Subaru in a post-traumatic state. Another character in show, after meeting Subaru briefly for the first time, describes him as having the eyes of someone who’s died many times.

It’s debatable how much Subaru actually learns from his mistakes due to his stubborn, faux-chivalrous personality, but it’s apparent he learns something. The show has a true end—Subaru is not trapped in the infinity loop—and much like the Zero Escape games and Remember 11, that true end only obtainable due to every single time Subaru miserably died, due to every bad end he came across.

Many visual novels have gotten anime adaptations, but Re:ZERO is the closest I’ve gotten to an anime that really feels like a visual novel. While a game over in a typical video game is temporary, is throw-away, visual novels have the power to make game overs, to make bad ends even more fun than winning.