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    Transistor

    Game » consists of 4 releases. Released May 20, 2014

    A science fiction-themed action-RPG by Supergiant Games, creators of Bastion.

    There is no Problem with Transistor's Ending, it is just a Sad Ending: or, I've been Stewing for a Year on this

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    Crembaw

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    Edited By Crembaw

    Hi. Hey. Thanks for stopping by.

    I have a few problems with this blog, and they've been stewing within me for a good, long year now. Predominantly I draw intense issue with your (@mikelemmer) statements regarding Suicide, but we'll get to that in a moment. I'd like to go play-by-play, so to speak.

    (I should note, the formatting tools around quotations are a pain to use, and so I'll be using bold font to indicate direct quotations from the original post.)

    Let's start here:

    How did her lover go so quickly from begging her not to do it to being glad she did? That dissonance clashed with the emotional tone they were going for.

    There is no tonal dissonance. In fact, the tone is almost pinpoint-acute, just not the tone that people seemed to want the game to end on. Death in Transistor is, as in all things, a transition. Her lover's apprehension is clear: Brackett stated, in no uncertain terms, that the Transistor could not bring people back to life, and up until this point in the story the tool had been used as an implement of destruction. In the City's de-rendered state, overrun by the Process, it would seem that anyone who dies, is forever gone. But at the same time, the Transistor also possesses a clear, defined secondary purpose as a preservative tool. It can, in the City's defined reality, store both memories of places and people, as well as full-fledged conscious entities. There is no evidence that their existence within the Transistor is finite, or a limited perception, or that anyone-or-thing would emerge from whatever remained of the City in any sort of state that could harm the Transistor. It is, for all Red knows, the last and most permanent sanctuary, not just for her and her lover, but for all that they have managed to salvage from the City.

    There's more to this, but I'd like to toss in another line you brought up. Specifically, this:

    More problems cropped up as I thought about it. I had just won the final boss fight to escape the Transistor... and then Red immediately goes back into it? What did winning that final boss fight accomplish, then? Looking further back, what did we accomplish, if anything, in the game itself? Nothing is saved as a result of our actions, and the moment we have the power to save something... Red doesn't use it. She gives up. She gives up and kills herself to be with her lover.

    This is a perfunctory analysis at best, and flatly reductionist at worst. You would do well to revisit your own description of the game's ending:

    Credits roll as her lover breaks down over her body... cue a romantic song, and... wait, it ends with a picture of them in the Country?

    Yes, they end up in the Country. The Country, which has particular significance in Transistor. It is a place that is referred to in a broadly metaphorical sense, as 'elsewhere,' as a place where people go when they disappear or have finished their work. A place where people go when they die. And they do die, because how else could the Transistor receive their memories, if not through death. It is here where the Transistor earns its name in a more apt manner as something other than just a fancy device. A Transistor (from 'transfer' and 'resistor') alters or reverses the flow of current between terminals, it is in its most innate meaning, a device of movement, change, and alteration over time. The developers were not blind to this. We are given, through visual cues, through design decisions, through language utilized, the distinct impression that the City is a world that is defined by technological progress, computer-driven imperatives. Indeed, its very name, Cloudbank, alludes directly to the recent trend towards Cloud computing, and not without reason: we are to believe that Cloudbank is somewhere that is distinct and Elsewhere than here. Cloudbank, by design, is built fundamentally from the language of progress. Progress is very busy, it is very messy, it is often very cruel. Progress, often, demands that the entirety of what was Assumed True be ripped apart and rebuilt from square one. What, then, is the Country? It is not so simple as an idyllic, naive, upper-middle-class impression that life in the old days was somehow better, more laid-back or so on and so on. What the Country is, at least in comparison to Cloudbank, is static. Immobile. Perhaps tinged by a color of nostalgia or naive perceptions about farm life, but nevertheless constant. The Country exists, even as Cloudbank is ripped up by its roots, either by its denizens or the onslaught of the Process.

    The Transistor is a device of movement, built from the City of Progress, but they end up in the Country. Why?

    Let's put that aside for a moment and consider the Process. How apt a name, for something which through mere existence represents Cloudbank as a whole. The Camerata thought themselves wise. They deemed themselves those with the true capability to discern Value, out of the chaos which the City of Progress brought. They sought out others to join them and, when snubbed, took them by force, in preparation for plans of a new city. A better city. A planned city. How precise, how careful their deliberations, how bold. How foolish. For if the Camerata were the Theorists, who thought they could determine upon which foundations the City had built its greatness, it was the Process that acted as the Praxis, the movers, the uncaring wheels that stripped it to components, and laid bare what in truth supported the City: stark, unmarked construction, endless seas of people, individual and equal through difference, strapped and confined down to identical bodies and plan-perfect forms, and the cruelty, the glowering egos which slid deep under the surface of its demagogues, and drove them to further and further expression of those traits. The only thing that seems to even have a slight chance of stopping them is the Transistor.

    The Transistor is not a Weapon. It is not as rote as a nifty sword with gizmos that your dead aunt's rad memories taught to your sword boyfriend as sweet trixx. It is possessed, in many ways, of an almost supernatural power, even within the game's fantasy setting. Not only can it preserve the Dead in an accessible state, it can, flatly, be used to reconstruct entire worlds, as shown to Red and the player by Brackett near the game's conclusion. The Transistor is an item with an altogether distinct importance within the setting. Within the game's context, the Transistor is the Axis Mundi - the way by which the Mundane makes contact upon the Divine. And, like any Axis Mundi, the Transistor can not, may not instigate transgression without human interaction - for it is humans who must make the act at all, in the act of trying to reach the Divine. Here, the Mundane is Cloudbank. Though it may be interpreted as a 'digital city,' or a city that exists within a simulation, for the citizens it is very much the Reality that they experience daily. It is, in every sense, regular and basic. The Country is Divine. I mean this not in the sense that the Country, its immobility, its permanence, might have an inherent moral position above the idea of Cloudbank, but that it is perceived AS Divine by its citizenry. It is proverbial, it is somewhere else, it is attainable only in death. It is as Divine as Limbo may be to its inhabitants, or as Bigfoot may be to cryptozoologists. It is forever at the periphery, but always unattainable. And, like any Axis Mundi, the Transistor can not, may not instigate transgression without human interaction - for it is humans who must make the act at all, in the act of trying to reach the Divine and somehow cause it to conduct change upon the Mundane.

    It is not through the Axis alone that humans can make contact with the Divine. In Death, we also slip the bonds and move into the Country, the realm of the Divine.

    By the game's end, there is no Cloudbank, anymore. Every building has been rendered to its absolute core, every either killed, turned into architecture, or reduced to automatons driven by mere memory. Brackett states, in no uncertain terms, that the Transistor, for all its power, cannot raise the dead. By stepping into the Transistor to fight him, Red reached into the Divine and claimed sole ownership of its implement. And now what?

    Nothing she can do will ever bring back Cloudbank. It is the City of Progress. There is no backwards, there is only forward. Her goal, of reuniting with her lover, is unattainable through the power that the Transistor gives her over Cloudbank. So, she stabs herself with the Transistor. As I articulated earlier, there is nothing tonally dissonant with this. Her world is gone. She can create a new one, or she can take a risk and hope to be with the person she loves.

    What happens after she stabs herself is ambiguous. Perhaps, in the act of Suicide, she served as the last of many sacrifices, and transformed Cloudbank into the altogether new Country that we experience at the end. Perhaps the Transistor is in actuality a holy device, and she as well as the item's other inhabitants reached it together. Perhaps it is all a simulation, being simulated within another, grander simulation. It's up to interpretation.

    Now that's out of the way, I'd like to actually get what's got a bee in my anus.

    Suicide is an inherently selfish and despairing action. It is not something we react to well. It, like rape, requires hefty writing chops and a good deal of setup to pull off well. Transistor does not have this. Although 2 other characters committed suicide, Red never seemed to entertain notions of it. She always seemed driven to find some way to stop the problem. This causes her suicide to seem completely out of left field.

    Okay, so...

    Where do we begin?

    To be honest, that first line provoked me to write this whole response. Suicide is an insanely complicated topic. There are a huge array of reasons why someone might consider it, what some would consider suicide, and whether or not it is a moral or ethical act. Reducing it to being inherently selfish and despairing is, regardless of the low level of tact you would need to make such a statement, an enormous disservice to anything further you might have to say about the topic. There's a whole bevy of words used by society at large to try and goad people both into and out of suicidal thinking, and those two words happen to land smack-dab in the bingo chart. It's the kind of language that actually makes talking about suicidal thoughts with anyone other than trained professionals or incredible empaths supremely difficult, because every society has these preconceived notions of what provokes, exacerbates, in some cases *deserves* the emergence of such thoughts. There's decent reason to believe that a good number of suicide attempts happen just based on sheer, heat-of-the-moment, uncontrolled thought, even in cases where the people involved had no history of suicidal thoughts or mental illness, or had managed to get them under control. But that doesn't mean that intentional suicides are inherently despairing or selfish actions, either. In cultures with strong notions of familial honor, martial traditions and/or an omnipresence of death, a good number of suicides are undertaken by willing participants, and a good number aside are forced upon victims through fear or indoctrination.

    All talk about the nature of suicide aside, as I think I made plain above, Red DID find a way to stop the problem. It is, time and time again, through terminal entries, little back-and-forths they have, and memories the narrator shares, that Red and her lover are pained, overtly, by his death an encapsulation within the Transistor. Saving Cloudbank is not Red's goal. It was never Red's goal. She felt empathy for those suffering around her, and when she could she saved either the people or their memories, but the story's through-thread was, from the moment the game said 'GO,' to get the two back together again. The ending would have us believe she accomplished this. I can't convince you that the setup was good or adequate, but there was setup and there was a clear reason for her choice, even if you didn't like it.

    Even worse, it encourages an act that is horrifying in real life.

    Nobody is going to commit suicide over Transistor. Just based on personal experience, and discussions with others who deal with it, they're going to do it because it seems like the only option, or at least the only one that will bring them peace. Hiding a video game or railing against it for trying and possibly failing to include a complex topic is not going to help anyone.

    Look, I'm not a smart guy. I dropped out of college. Half my stuff is based on remembering the bits I was barely able to absorb. But to be honest, I'm really fed up. I'm tired of things sitting on the surface level. I really don't think Transistor was THAT great, but it deserves more than the less-than-cogent 'the problem with...' posts that keep getting slung about regarding it. I'm not saying you have to always do a deep reading, every time. That would be tiring, obviously. But this is not hard stuff. It just takes a few more seconds of thought about things. Not every ending has to be a sing-song, happy ho-hum ending. You don't have to LIKE sad endings, either. I'm just tired of this - this perfunctory moralizing. We all have strong opinions, there's no shame in it, just...

    Well, I dunno. I said my piece. I probably preached like a lunatic, but I feel better for it. Thanks.

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    SSully

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    I am with you and was pretty surprised by the heat Transistor got for it's ending. I think in the moment it can be a little confusing, but after letting it rest for a few hours I was completely satisfied with how the game ended.

    Also I have been itching to play Transistor again; this might have been enough to tip me to do it.

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    the_hiro_abides

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    I agree that Red committing suicide wasn't subtle. It was heavily foreshadowed throughout the game. Her driving force was some way to revive him and when everything was revealed she had no other choice.

    What's the point of re-configuring a city with a constant reminder of failure. Literally in your hands. If she had been of stronger character to sacrifice self for the "greater good" then sure make everyone happy.

    She's very symbolic of struggling through life and then just giving up at some point. The end result not always death but complacency.

    Anyway, that's my takeaway from that.

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    BisonHero

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    #3  Edited By BisonHero

    I didn't think the ending felt out of place. My issue was that by the end of the game I still didn't care about Red or Blue/mysterious boyfriend. Red is a cipher who just makes a bunch of cheeky comments on OVC news articles, then when the Transistor is drunk on being around the Spine she switches to "snap out of it, we'll get through this". Blue/mysterious boyfriend is obviously characterized much more thoroughly, but with such enormous gaps in my knowledge of who the fuck he is other than charming boyfriend, I found that I didn't care much for him either. So it was mildly moving that Blue/mysterious boyfriend was aghast that Red was about to off herself, but overall I just didn't care because who the fuck are these people. The game has better villain characters than Bastion, in Asher and Royce (Cybil has interesting motivations, Grant is a nothing character), but at the cost of having protagonists I gave any kind of a shit about.

    I think Supergiant accomplished much greater things with how it told the story of The Kid/Zia/Zulf, both in the actions those characters take part in during the events of Bastion, and also by learning their backstories through the optional challenge arenas. I feel like one of Transistor's greatest failings is that Kasavin was seemingly too enamoured with a Dark Souls style of indirect storytelling that never quite fills in all the blanks, with the result that I don't think any character was actually good in Transistor except for Royce. I didn't think the ending was out of character or not what I expected, but I just had no emotional investment in what happened to those two.

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    chaser324

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    #4 chaser324  Moderator  Online

    I didn't think the ending felt out of place. My issue was that by the end of the game I still didn't care about Red or Blue/mysterious boyfriend.

    I felt the same way. Within the context of the world and the story, I think the ending made sense, but I just didn't really care about the characters enough for it to feel impactful.

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    sparky_buzzsaw

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    I didn't care about the beginning, middle or end. There came a point when I realized in now way was I drawn to the characters, setting, or gameplay, so I skipped to a Let's Play and still found myself shrugging my shoulders afterwards. It tries to be too high brow and loses any and all of its approachibility and charm in the process. I'm always kind of tired of the lone hero wandering through worlds alone motif.

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    ch3burashka

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    #6  Edited By ch3burashka

    I skimmed it, and I feel like it was a bit disjointed. First you're against the Suicide, then you're okay with the layered meaning? I probably should read the whole thing.

    Something I realized recently, though I have known it inherently for a good long while: the only endings I like are sad endings. Hell, the only experiences I like are the ones that inspire melancholy. I remember years ago, I would have almost-violent reactions to events in a book or movie that changed the status quo irreparably - a main character dying wasn't too bad, but a main character become disfigured or somehow disabled was incomprehensible to my mind. Not entirely sure why; probably something to do with the "happily ever after" bullshit we're fed from birth. However, at a certain point I turned a corner and now expect tragedy or emotional scarring in my media. Before, I would have reacted poorly to the ending of the third Hunger Games book (Mockingjay?). Now I see it as an inevitability in the quest for progress or change.

    PS Now that you know that, anyone have any media to suggest? Preferably the smiling-through-tears kind of stuff.

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    Crembaw

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    #7  Edited By Crembaw

    @sparky_buzzsaw, @chaser324, @bisonhero: These are criticisms I hear a lot, and I think they're quite valid. To me at least, there's a distinct difference between not caring about a story and it just not making sense - I don't care for Harry Potter, but I understand why he does...whatever it is he does, it's been a while since I saw those movies. This analogy fell apart, but anyway that's why it felt important to write this. For myself I didn't actually really like either Red or her lover, and despite the variation available to be toyed with, I didn't enjoy playing it nearly as much as Bastion. Still, Brackett, the things I wrote about above that caught my eye and the really stellar art/sound direction give it a place in my heart among the, 'yeah, that was neat' areas.

    I also wanna add as a disclaimer, I have nothing against @mikelemmer and I'm sure he's as cool a duder as anyone. I just tend to take an aggressive tone when writing. It's, uh...Well I'm working on it.

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    ripelivejam

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    you're not the first; many have problems with the ending. it was a little too on the nose but i still love the game and the world it built as a whole. and that fucking soundtrack makes up for any wrongs it commits.

    maybe if they built up to that particular aspect of the story better, or had provided more context/background with Red and her lover. but it's not a deal breaker for me by any means.

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    BisonHero

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    #9  Edited By BisonHero

    @crembaw: While I'm shittalking stories as if I could write any better, man, Harry Potter, what a shitshow. I understand why Harry does what he does and overall the characters and motivations and whatever all "make sense". But boy, do books 5-7 get way too bogged down in prophecy/Chosen One bullshit, and focus too much on the Ministry of Magic/wizard politics/wizarding world at large instead of just the school, and they have way too many callbacks to a bunch of side shit involving dead characters that was never important (that R.A.B. locket turning out to be some dead relative of Sirius Black turned that from a cool mystery into me going "Oh, so it's just some fucking guy. Moving on!").

    I guess it was inevitable that it was going to devolve into a big battle with Nazi wizards, but the series was at its best when it was "growin' up at wizard school, and maybe at the end of the book some agent of Voldemort is briefly fucking shit up".

    Also it still pisses me off that the last book they just don't go to Hogwarts until the last 5% of the story, so sorry if you liked any of the student or professor characters, they have now all become Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Film.

    I'm still baffled by the people whose Harry Potter fandom only got more and more out of control as that series went on. It was still an alright series of books, but it really got away from itself somewhere around the middle.

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    Crembaw

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    @bisonhero Oh God, there was a certain point in those last two where I would just, turn off my brain and accept the pictures getting beamed into my eyes. It's not quite to the level of that one Penny Arcade strip where the dude's brain leaves his skull, but it got pretty close at certain times.

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    poobumbutt

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    I'll admit begrudgingly that it's late and I only read part of your OP, but I agree. Funny enough, I always thought the suicide argument to be more reductionist than the previous one. It seems like such a copout complaint; like you can't find the grounds, logically within the story to debate why she does so, so instead you take a moral route as a roundabout.

    I'm guilty myself of letting my morality get in the way of criticizing something, but I always try to reason out my anger with relevant evidence from said piece. All the complaints I see from this perspective are baseless and empty. I actually saw one complaint saying that this would "teach kids that suicide is acceptable in certain situations". Reminds me of the parents during GTA's heyday who apparently had no time to raise their children.

    Dammit, I really like Transistor.

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    Humanity

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    I didn't think the ending felt out of place. My issue was that by the end of the game I still didn't care about Red or Blue/mysterious boyfriend. Red is a cipher who just makes a bunch of cheeky comments on OVC news articles, then when the Transistor is drunk on being around the Spine she switches to "snap out of it, we'll get through this". Blue/mysterious boyfriend is obviously characterized much more thoroughly, but with such enormous gaps in my knowledge of who the fuck he is other than charming boyfriend, I found that I didn't care much for him either. So it was mildly moving that Blue/mysterious boyfriend was aghast that Red was about to off herself, but overall I just didn't care because who the fuck are these people. The game has better villain characters than Bastion, in Asher and Royce (Cybil has interesting motivations, Grant is a nothing character), but at the cost of having protagonists I gave any kind of a shit about.

    I think Supergiant accomplished much greater things with how it told the story of The Kid/Zia/Zulf, both in the actions those characters take part in during the events of Bastion, and also by learning their backstories through the optional challenge arenas. I feel like one of Transistor's greatest failings is that Kasavin was seemingly too enamoured with a Dark Souls style of indirect storytelling that never quite fills in all the blanks, with the result that I don't think any character was actually good in Transistor except for Royce. I didn't think the ending was out of character or not what I expected, but I just had no emotional investment in what happened to those two.

    This is how I largely felt about the game. Transistor simply didn't do enough to make you care about pretty much anything because you had no basis to care. I kept playing, waiting to see this story unravel it's mysterious, and in the end there were none. Transistor lacks in substance on every front. It's an above average looking game with some stiff animations, monotonous level design, a half cooked combat system and a barely there story that isn't fleshed out in any significant way. Before I get a ton of flack about the combat - simply having a ton of options doesn't make fighting the same handful of enemies any more interesting. You certainly get a lot of flavor text here and there but nothing that really exposes the core design document. Maybe Supergiant don't know themselves and they simply wanted to make a super stylish, neo- jazzpunk, computer love story and simply left the story part until the very last minute. Who knows, but from the mid-point all the way to the end I felt completely indifferent towards it.

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    Dragon_Puncher

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    Yeah, the ending wasn't the problem, the lack of consistent information and backstory was. I suppose if you read everything you eventually get a better grip on what happened, but that's simply not a good way to present a story, especially when the stuff you read are heavily disjointed as well.

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    BisonHero

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    @dragon_puncher: If you read all the side stuff, you don't get much extra. The OVC terminals just give you news bulletins on what's happening to the normal citizens as the city gets erased. The character bios have nothing to do with the plot, they just give you flavour/lore about these various Cloudbank celebrities who eventually got jumped by the Camerata. Cybil's bio and sorta Red's bio are the only ones that flesh out the main story significantly. Even the other three Camerata bios don't really add much.

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    deactivated-64162a4f80e83

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    Characters were so ho-hum that the suicide almost felt like it was trying to force an emotional response out of me. I'm certain this isn't the case but I cared so little about Red that it's all I could think about at the time.

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    Crembaw

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    @humanity The reasons you cite are largely the reasons why, despite holding a place in my heart - despite inspiring me to write a damn article about the inferences I could make - I can't really call Transistor a great game. There are significant problems, and no level of analysis can really fix them. I just, broadly, took exception to how immediately dismissive people were of the ending, as if they were grabbing onto it as the reason the game was bad. I'm sure that's not actually the case, since as you and others have articulated there are clear problems with the game, but it's...felt like that for a year. I dunno. It might have just stuck with me due to personal reasons, having dealt with suicidal thoughts and depression my whole life, but I also have this aggressive desire for people to look at things with more nuance. Even middling things, even things that could have been better with a little more polish.

    Maybe I'll tackle Turok next, or something.

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    BisonHero

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    #17  Edited By BisonHero

    @crembaw said:

    @humanity The reasons you cite are largely the reasons why, despite holding a place in my heart - despite inspiring me to write a damn article about the inferences I could make - I can't really call Transistor a great game. There are significant problems, and no level of analysis can really fix them. I just, broadly, took exception to how immediately dismissive people were of the ending, as if they were grabbing onto it as the reason the game was bad. I'm sure that's not actually the case, since as you and others have articulated there are clear problems with the game, but it's...felt like that for a year. I dunno. It might have just stuck with me due to personal reasons, having dealt with suicidal thoughts and depression my whole life, but I also have this aggressive desire for people to look at things with more nuance. Even middling things, even things that could have been better with a little more polish.

    Maybe I'll tackle Turok next, or something.

    OK, I've actually turned a corner on this whole thing.

    I mean, there's an element of "the suicide kind of came out of nowhere because we are given little context over just how in love with each other they are" that slightly bothered me at the time. But she does it, so the answer is "OK I guess they were in love a whole hell of a lot." Which fine, I'll buy that, though the game sure did a terrible job of fleshing out those two characters beyond Blue/mysterious boyfriend's personality and Red's stylish appearance (and honestly not much else aside from her humming and cheeky OVC comments) and we really know nothing of what they've been through as a couple. But for the sake of the story, I bought all that, that Blue/mysterious boyfriend absolutely meant the world to Red and she had no other significant friends or family that mattered (I'm still super unclear on whether people in Cloudbank have families, or if new people can even be born or if they're just...spawned, and maybe nobody can die of old age because I don't know, they're software or something). So she couldn't live without him. Fine.

    But even given all that, I see why some people's gut reaction to the ending was "well that's stupid." Not because "Boo, suicide, I thought this was going somewhere redemptive". The suicide part is fine, though honestly the suicide of Grant and Asher seemed way more believable and well supported. I have other reasons I can see why people thought the ending was kinda stupid. Let me tell you them!

    We seem to disagree on this one, but at least in my reading of the incredibly vaguely defined powers of the Transistor, it seemed to be able to "unProcessify" things, turning the area at the end of the game from white nothingness back to its original state, and also restoring Blue/mysterious boyfriend's corpse back to its original, unProcessed state. He is still very much dead, because he wasn't "killed" by the Process and turned into a blank slate - he was super duper stabbed in the chest with the Transistor. But aside from the handful of people murdered by the Camerata with the Transistor, everybody else was blanked out by the Process, and the Transistor appears to have the power to revert anything the process has blanked out. So seemingly Red had this godlike power to restore everything (not unlike the Bastion's power). Whatever essence is muted by the Process, the data evidently remains somewhere, whether remotely transferred to the Transistor, or just still contained somewhere within each Processed entity. Red has the ability to save the thousands of residents of Cloudbank and restore all of the geography as well.

    She obviously had little attachment to the city and its customs, seeing as her bio was like "She's a rebel, yeah" and she was dating this sketchy, off-the-grid boyfriend, so fine, maybe restoring all of the city wasn't her TOP priority, but she had appreciators of her music and everything. SOMEBODY cared. I get the romanticism of "she can't live without the love of her life, sudden suicide when she realizes he is gone forever except inside the Transistor", but how WILDLY SELFISH is it that she couldn't be bothered to spend like a day restoring Cloudbank, then killing herself? Cloudbank had its failings in how bureacratic/conformist it was, the way it was ruled by algorithms that ended up being cyclical, and the way it was stifling any original, permanent new ideas as they were inevitably overwritten. But again, the city really didn't mistreat Red, or even cause the death of her lover; the Camerata and their hubris are much more directly the cause of that. Instead, Cloudbank dies with Red for basically no good reason other than it's kind of a tragic romantic ending. I know she was obviously devastated by not being able to restore her lover, but you'd think if she was such a go-getter that she flourished as an artist in a city resistant to art, oh and also fought her way through all this Process and Camerata stuff, you'd think she'd be the kind of suicidal person to at least have the wherewithal to want to "get her affairs in order" first.

    I would've loved an ending with a montage where she calmly walks about the city, restoring each district and its people. Then she returns to where Blue/mysterious boyfriend's body is, the same buildup music plays, the same dialogue plays, then she kills herself. The city moves on, quickly forgetting Red and her music, everyone getting back to marching to the beat of the same algorithmic drum. We see a shot of Red in the Country with Blue/mysterious boyfriend. Credits roll.

    Romeo & Juliet's teen angst romance already basically ruined both of their respective families, but how much stupider would their double suicide be if it also set off a druid rune that leveled all of Verona? Because that is basically Transistor's ending when I really think about it. I don't think Red's eventual suicide was tonally dissonant (my alternate ending contains just as much suicide and bittersweet reunion), but the part where she condemns all of Cloudbank to oblivion seems wildly out of character, at least in so far as we are never given any reason to believe that Red despises Cloudbank that much.

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    Crembaw

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    #18  Edited By Crembaw

    @bisonhero It's an interesting discussion, precisely because the ultimate ending is, in actuality, supremely interpretive. There are a bunch of different ways one could understand the last few scenes to mean overall. But I believe, sincerely, that the interpretation of this scene, whether a person acknowledges their interpretation in a conscious sense or not, is the primary reason why people were so negative upon its conclusion. Hell, I was negative upon conclusion, until I gave it more thought (probably more than it deserved) and came to the conclusions that started this whole spiel.

    The thing is, due to its interpretive nature, I don't think it's possible to rule out that she may have, in fact, ended up rebuilding Cloudbank. Here we come to the point that you predicted, accurately, we disagree on: yes, the Transistor has undefined powers, but its powers regarding the people and memories of people it stores are very clear. Royce Brackett is unambiguous on this: there is no access or exit without death, either of the user or of another. Conversely, though, he is also quite clear that whoever has it, in one way or another, has the power to rebuild Cloudbank however they so choose. He also, repeatedly, talks about quiet, about solitude, about silence, he talks at length about the Camerata, and makes a few references to their creed: "When everything changes, nothing changes." I think it's a wobbly-enough basis that you could assert the ending is a variety of things, ranging from, she left strictly to the Country, to she restructured Cloudbank, entirely, into what her (or their) conception of The Country. It could also be as simple as, she saw no hope, or reason, to try and rebuild Cloudbank. I do not see any indication that it can, in fact, 'DeProcessify' anything, at least not in the way you seem to mean it. I think, certainly, that it gives the ability to reconstruct the raw Reality that the Process had created into whatever she desired, including facsimiles of places she valued in Cloudbank, the people who used to exist. But as far as I can determine, she is only able to retrieve memories from people who either had not been completely Rendered, or had such a central Desire or ego that even their Rendered form possessed traces of themselves. It's also possible that the game's events don't retrieve memories of people so much as cause them to be rediscovered within the Transistor - more than one references that the Camerata 'came to them' in some time period before the game.

    Assuming that she did indeed eschew reconstruction and that her suicide was just that and not part of recreating the City in her image, the question I would pose, then, to people who wanted Red to rebuild Cloudbank or felt she had a duty to do so, is twofold: 1. Can a facsimile indeed be a simulation that is accurate enough to be the real thing, or is it by nature doomed to be a simulacrum - a simulation of something that never really existed? 2. Does a facsimile, even a perfect one, have any inherent worth?

    I don't necessarily want answers from people, and I don't necessarily think it would change peoples' opinions about the ending regardless. But they're interesting questions, and ones that I think are worthwhile to consider.

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    SSully

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    #19  Edited By SSully

    @ch3burashka: Short Term 12; movie on Netflix. It has an upbeat ending, but I was crying like a baby throughout the movie. Really great.

    EDIT: I said it was Short Term 21, it's actually Short Term 12.

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    Humanity

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    @crembaw: I get ya. There are certain games that spoke to me on some level that I wish people cared more about. For instance Remember Me was not only a game I really enjoyed but one that raised a lot of interesting questions about the ethics of the technology inherent to the game. In several key moments you re-organize peoples memories towards your own gain without any clear indication that this effect will ever wear off with time - you completely alter their personalities and motivations, forever, simply because you need to get somewhere. It's fascinating but no one cares because ironically no one remembers the game. All anyone could talk about was that the combat wasn't all that great, forgoing the beautiful world and clever technology.

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    @humanity It's funny you mentioned that, I've been staring at that game for a long time, because it seems like one of those games that would completely absorb me even if I ended up coming out, collectively, lukewarm on it as a total package.

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