Initial analysis of 1987: Cosmic Overture

This post also contains some spoilers for Honkai Star Rail version 3.4.

I want to start by saying that I really loved this chapter, just so we're clear. To get into why, though, I think it's worthwhile to touch on what's so strange about it, at least within the context of gacha games.

Historically, Reverse as a whole has had a problem with violence, or combat. The problem is this: the writers don't really tend to write conflicts that can be neatly resolved through violence, but the game still wants to include enough combat to keep players engaged, so a majority of battles in the story are either 1). contrived or 2). abstracted.

Contrived encounters are encounters that don't really contribute to the story. Think of all the times there's a random detour where critters attack and you have to fend them off, for example. Contrived encounters are pretty common in games that feature combat, I'm sure you can think of examples from your favorite games where there was a brief detour from the story just to do some shooting or whatever.

The more unique thing Reverse does is it abstracts a lot of its combat, has 'combat encounters' that actually represent something else. On a small scale: Marcus "fighting" the cops in Vienna at the start of chapter 6 can be read as her just getting harangued and arrested. On a larger scale: the time in "London Dawning" where you had a 'battle' with a particularly troublesome stain on a pot, or the time in chapter 9 where you fought six signposts as a representation of Team Timekeeper navigating the prison. So again, the vast majority of fights in the story either could be cut without changing the story, or else are representative of some kind of conflict that isn't as life-or death as the violence of battle would imply.

In Cosmic Overture, literally every fight is either an abstraction or a contrivance or both. And the reason for this is that this is essentially a story without conflict. It's very naturalistic: a group of scientists (and hangers-on) try to invent something to solve a problem, they squabble a bit, they come together, and in the end, they succeed, though not without some risk. The stakes, then, feel largely personal and character-driven. Even though characters constantly talk about how their lives are at risk, how they might die, I personally didn't ever feel like that was very likely. Instead, we're asked to care about Kiperina and Voyager and Name Day and Hissabeth and Pointer: why this experiment is so important to them, what their world will look like after it's done. In a word, it's a "quiet" story, and this is the only time I've ever seen that out of a gacha game.

Most gacha games look a lot less like Reverse and "Cosmic Overture" -- largely nonviolent stories, where conflicts between characters are usually inflamed, escalated, and then mostly resolved by words instead of combat. Most look a lot more Honkai Star Rail: bombastic*,* mythic struggles, for the fate of humanity. Or at least for the benefit of your employer.

It's interesting, because Star Rail and Reverse are quite similar thematically, advancing similar brands of humanism and existentialism (though of course Star Rail is much less political). But despite the similarities, the way that these games go about conveying these themes could hardly be more different. In Star Rail version 3.4 "For the Sun is Set to Die," we see the character Phainon engage in a multi-billion year futile battle against fate and the gods beyond the sky to save his people -- a battle that sees him lose his humanity, and tragically kill his friends again and again. It's mythic, and grand, and there actually is value in that. Phainon is a character who prioritizes other people's desires and happiness over his own, and this leads him to a point where he both loses his sense of self, and eventually starts harming the very people he wanted to protect and cherish. And even though his billion-year ordeal is completely unrelatable, to the point of absurdity, the human motivation at the center of it was very affecting and moving to me, as someone whose trauma sometimes manifests similarly to his.

In short, the thesis: big, grand stories like Phainon's convey commensurately big, grand emotions. And I was left crying by the end. But the scale of this life-or-death style of storytelling can also be a detriment, by papering over nuance, and simplifying emotional takeaways. I think that Star Rail is trying to tell a story about grief, and complex trauma, and moving forward even when you know things are hopeless, when you are powerless and insignificant in the face of the universe. It's easy to point to certain plot elements and lines of dialogue and explain, "yeah, that's what they were going for." But I don't feel it, because the scale of conflict begins to make everything feel a bit abstract and distant. In contrast, Cosmic Overture was able to communicate almost the exact same themes, and actually make me feel them. I didn't cry at the end of it (okay, maybe one tear). But since finishing it, I've been thinking about it a lot more, feeling very strange about it, just sitting in silence and experiencing the themes they wanted to convey.

By being so naturalistic, grounded, and quiet, the story provides a lot of space for contemplation, and emphasizes the humanity of its characters. When Hissabeth talked about breaking a pen and then crying for days, just releasing everything she had built up when her parents had died, I couldn't help but remember the time when, years after being thrown out by my parents, and never letting it bother me, I played a chapter in Before Your Eyes that reminded me of the piano lessons my mother gave me and suddenly my pillowcases were soaked with tears and I had gone through three boxes of tissues. The emotional specificity the writers are able to convey is impressive, and so is the thematic specificity.

Aside from its exploration of marginalization politics, Reverse has always been a story primarily about existentialism, a philosophy that advocates accepting and understanding your own insignificance and meaningless, the chaos and nonsense of the universe, and continuing to move forward and pursue meaning anyway. We see Kiperina almost literally say this word for word, after beating the abstract Storm Syndrome hallucination boss at the end of "Cosmic Overture:"

"My existence will be small and short... there are no answers to be found, none but the answers we chose for ourselves... there's no time to be spared on regrets in the moment... I must keep going, or die trying." She might as well have said, "I see! As a result of my struggles and difficulties and questions throughout my character arc, I have grown to become an existentialist!"

But Reverse is never content to be so on-the-nose. It provides, at the end, much more nuance to the existentialist thesis, in the character, and music, of Voyager. Voyager is an ancient, eldritch alien who, in the vastness of space, came across a record in a satellite: a tiny, human hand, reaching out to nothing, which will never in our lifetimes make even a shred of progress towards the nearest neighboring star. But to her, regardless of the futility of our efforts, we are important and consequential. We humans look up at the stars and see ourselves as meaningless. The stars look back at us, and see us, all our wars and deaths and loves and losses the birds in the sky and the feet on the ground as wonderful, impossible, things: to quote another game: "a violent and irrepressible miracle." When Voyager says, "how beautiful the stars are," she's talking about us.

In Honkai Star Rail's lore, by following a particular path, pursuing a certain ideal, you can eventually attract the notice of a god, and gain the power to shape the world, and also the power to, like summon miniature black holes or something for combat purposes. "We may be insignificant," says Star Rail, "but with enough suffering, and determination, and commitment, we can make ourselves significant. We can fight to shape the world. All the millions of deaths, the billions of years of trauma, will one day be worth it." It's an appropriately mythical conclusion, but it is also, in our world, false. In our world, your struggles may well not matter or make a difference; you will never draw the gaze of distant gods. If you want to get anything out of Star Rail's existential framework, you have to abstract and analyze it into metaphor.

In Reverse:1999's world, we may be insignificant, and doomed to be erased by the storm, but the lives we live, the connections we form, the art we make, is already meaningful. Maybe it just takes the gaze of an eldritch space god to remind us of that.