>>15613
Pokemon Empire 12.5 as /lit/erature
This story has nothing to do with Pokemon. Pokemon Empire is an allegorical story to various incidents like the Bolshevik Revolution or the latter stages of the Roman Empire where external bad actors drum up public sentiment against (often real) problems in an exaggurated manner to justify massive systemic changes that primarily benefit themselves and their kin. Empire explores the consequences of this having just undergone a revolution before the start of the game and leaving it to the reader to piece together the circumstances that lead to the regicide, the occult allegories in the Regalia as invisible hands driving the motivations of many actors in this conflict and eventually asks questions about trust, betrayal, the nature of consciousness or self, personal agency, and responsibility over our own actions with external forces acting upon us.
>Rhetoric and presentation
The game's usual rhetoric presents several conflicting world views and throughly explains in exhaustive depth a lot of the motivations and feelings behind people who often hold them, then leaves it up to the reader to consider the validity of them in the context of the other information they have within the setting. Many of the characters aren't written as conventional characters, but as carefully constructed vessels to contain certain immutable elements of human nature or certain worldviews; they act as avatars for more abstract concepts to act within the world around them. In a less carefully constructed manner, this'd come across as a lazy strawman of various ideals, but Empire does often do its due to accurately represent the thought processes behind them and only devolves into political cartoon-tier "I AM SILLY" strawmanning in a few cases, involving specific characters (more on this later). The game spends the first 8 chapters or so doing its best to not steer the player into any specific conclusions and does a decent job presenting both sides, even if you have to read between the lines to understand a lot of character's motivations when their actions don't match their words (such is life...). Unfortunately it's very easy to find a lot of these characters very unlikable due to them oftentimes representing 'solved' or obsolete philosophies and being unwilling to change in response to their circumstances, which is frustrating to see as an outside reader but also a painfully realistic depiction of how a lot of people who cling to such beliefs uncritically often behave. This naturally leads to invariably tragic (in the classical sense) ends where the paths these types of characters are walking will only lead to self-destruction longterm, entirely of their own making. Some like Alanah are the consequences of childhood innocence and naive idealism struggling to grow up and accept the world around them, while others like Soren spend the bulk of the game paralyzed by the fear of the potential to do harm in every person that his inaction and running from his responsibility make the continuously escalating situation worse.
>Regalia, madness, and corruption
Regalia, depicted in the way a lot of classical traditions depicted their pantheons of gods, are embodyments of higher aspects of nature, consciousness, or some principle that have their own free will and an unknown degree of sentience. They work symbiotically with their users, but the nature of this symbiotic relationship (the tremendous increase in power, agency over others, and ability to enact their will unchecked) is often overwhelming if not outright corrupting for the human part of the pair. It's implied this can work both ways; just as humans are influenced by Regalia, the Regalia are influenced by the nature of the person they're interacting with. There's a lot of occult symbolism in this that would require several textwalls to fully unpack, but needless to say this narrative has an impressive amount of depth for something that's wearing a pokemon fangame like a skinsuit.
>Virgil, MKUltra, and loss of self
This deserves its own section because it's easily one of the most disturbing parts of the narrative when you fully pick apart the implications of it. The idea that there exists a technology that strips apart what gives you the volition to discern good from evil, build your own principles, and act on higher reasoning than just following base instinct or simple directives on the level of a trained animal is discussed but not completely explored in full detail, but given the rest of the game's themes about Regalia's mutual influence the next conceptual step is complete one-directional influence or domination of the consciousness of the victim. While Regalia, at the behest of their wielder, can temporarily do this to others via brainwashing or hypnotic suggestion, the game goes to great lengths to show the difference in lasting damage between a Regalia suggestion and whatever happened to Virgil.
>Octavius and "The Author"
The elephant in the room. This self-insert is the single worst thing to happen to this game as literature. While the ideas he presents are usually well-substantiated, every scene he's in lowers the IQ of everyone around him by 15 points and makes other characters devolve into uncharacteristically weak strawmen of points that could be better argued just for Octavius to "YOU ARE SILLY" them. Gone is the writing style that left the reader to come to their own conclusion; replaced by pretentious and self-important lecturing. The audience is no longer a seeker of information and truth walking their own road alongside the protagonist, but being spoonfed sermons that are supposed to be taken far more at face value than everything else around them. Adding insult to injury, the narrative replaces the concept of "God", "The highest divinity", "The Universe", "The canvas of reality" or any other related concept with the self-aggrandizing term "The Author" and makes it a point to lean on the fourth wall through double entendre whenever the subject matter comes up. The underlying premises presented are still interesting and worthy of consideration, but the self-insert messenger and horrid window dressing of the message does its best to shoot the message with the messenger in every scene this unlikable cunt is in, doubly so because every character he's not BTFOing a strawman of is constantly sucking his cock. The greatest irony is that while his Kyurem is named "Vanity", likely alluding to moral relativism or "gray" being a very vain line of thought, it perfectly describes the character as a whole as well.
>Conclusion
Pokemon Empire starts off as really solid, if not verbose and dense, literature that runs into some pacing issues from the game part of the medium as well as the latter chapters being nearly completely ruined by one of the worst self-inserts to grace a fanwork outside of some shitty teenage girl dr who fanfiction. Not only does the writing style of the work completely warp around this character's presence, all of the nuance and intrigue of what made the rest of the work thought-provoking is mercilessly stripped out. It's pretentious at best and an insult to the reader's intellegence at worst. So you try and power through it, just to get it prolonged with yet another time consuming gameplay section like the stealth section breaking into Mortimer's house and you spend the entire sequence thinking about what a knob Octavius is, both as an author and character for ruining what could've been good food for thought with the most hamhanded and blunt approach to conveying a message possible.
Final Thoughts
There's nothing else out there like Empire, for better or worse. As both literature and a game, it's at odds with itself as well as some of the baffling design decisions the other half of it has made. I want to like this game, but every time I try it manages to do something obnoxious, timewasting, or starts sucking its own dick. Every time I start to hate this game, it does something fascinating and interesting that brings my attention right back. To enjoy this game requires a very specific set of brainworms despite its numerous problems, but I think there is an audience for it, as niche as it might be. Despite the rollercoaster of emotions, the month I spent playing this with you lads was both memorable and ultimately enjoyable, even if a large part of it was the social aspect of the playthrough. I'll put it right next to Pokemon Empyrean on the metaphorical shelf, because that's where it belongs.