YMMV / AI: The Somnium Files

• Abandon Shipping: Not that there were very many to begin with, because of the clear age gap, but to the Date x Iris shippers to whom this wasn't a deterrent, the various story reveals regarding the two of them that the game trickles out, namely that Date is even older than originally thought, the two of them had a surrogate father-daughter relationship in the past, and that Date already has a clearly defined love interest in Hitomi, Iris' own mother practically annihilated this ship in the fandom. The cherry on top? For most of the game, Date is in the body of her half-brother, making the whole thing technically literally incestuous. Nowadays, you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone that will even consider them as a viable pairing, and the only real supporters of it are those who specifically enjoy the taboo nature of it.
• Adorkable:
  • In spite of his serious demeanour, Date constantly makes terrible puns during his investigations and plays games with himself whenever Aiba is looking at him.
  • Aiba herself can be really silly during Somniums. Outside of them, she gets really giddy whenever she spots an insect.
    Aiba: Date! Look! A cricket! Chirp, chirp!
• Alternative Character Interpretation: During the flashback of Manaka's death in the hands of Saito, a panicked-looking So reaches out his hand towards Saito, who dashes towards Manaka with a knife in hand. Did he genuinely care about Manaka after all, or was he worried about how word of this murder would get out and ruin him?
• Alas, Poor Scrappy: Even people that hated Ota were horrified by his death in the Annihilation Route.
• Annoying Videogame Helper: Both Pewter and Boss will constantly chime in during each Somnium to remind you how much time you have left and tell you to hurry up. Their constant reminders are considered annoying even in-universe, with both Date and even Mizuki telling them off after a certain point.
• Angst? What Angst?: The witnesses and suspects that Date psychs with are never anything more than mildly annoyed that they were forcefully drugged and hooked into a machine to have their minds searched for information.
• Anvilicious: Some considered the monologue Mizuki gives about the struggles of the gay community to be a bit too on the nose and unsubtle. However, others disagree, the blunt yet distinctly positive tangent given was a welcome bit especially considering that Japan tends to skew more conservatively on this matter. It could also be seen as foreshadowing of Mizuki's biological father, Renju, being bisexual, or as a child trying to sound mature.
• Awesome Music: Ikume Shrine's theme is a tranquil, moody piece with an underlying melancholy, fitting for the tender moments Date shares with Mizuki and Iris there.
• Base-Breaking Character: Iris became one almost immediately for blackmailing Date toward the beginning of the game in order to accompany him to a crime scene, resulting in many players regarding her as nothing more than a manipulative thorn in Date's side. This is likely such a hard sticking point due to Date having done nothing wrong (Iris invented a crime to pin on him) and the insane consequences implied should she have gone through with it. Others were able to easily let this go since she's almost nothing but sweet and playful with him otherwise excluding when her body is taken over by Saito, though she does have her moments of being The Gadfly. The reveal that she only has a few months to live and knows it also tends to garner sympathy from this crowd.
• Complete Monster: Saito Sejima is the Cyclops Killer who Kaname Date hunts for the entire game. Born with a condition that makes him only feel pleasure when killing, Saito was infamous for causing mayhem in his childhood but always got away with it due to his father, So Sejima, being a Congressman. Saito started off by killing animals before graduating to humans, killing Manaka Iwai out of jealousy for drawing his father's attention away from him. This kick-started his addiction to murder, leading him to enlist the help of Rohan Kumakura to kill numerous women for their morbid obsession, working together as the Cyclops Killer. Detective Falco started to suspect the duo was behind the murders and tried swapping bodies with Rohan to try to gain evidence from Saito, but the latter caught on and turned the tables on Falco, stealing his body out of curiosity after learning about Psyncing from him. This backfired, leaving him trapped in Falco's body with amnesia, and after recovering his memories, he vowed to get revenge on Falco and take his body back, as only his original brain allowed him to fully enjoy murder. Resurfacing as the New Cyclops Killer, Saito kills numerous friends and associates of Falco after swapping bodies with them, taking their right eye in the process. Saito shows a willingness to kill anyone, even his father, to further his goals. In the Resolution route, Saito manages to get his body back and capture Falco's loved ones, with the intent of killing them in front of him.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • PSYNCIN' IN THE MOUNTaiN has a very simple start, but after breaking the first Mental Lock the environment becomes very dark (and breaking the second lock makes it even darker), making it difficult to figure out where you're supposed to go. The completely featureless minimap doesn't help much, either.
  • Similarly, PSYNCIN' IN THE REFRaiN is likely the most difficult Somnium because it's the only one that can't be beaten without careful use of TIMIES, to the point that you're basically required to go out of your way to spend negative TIMIES on irrelevant, but inexpensive, actions. Being the only real time management puzzle of the game, it's guaranteed to make you retry several times.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Kagami for being a Running Gag character and his surprisingly positive relationship with Date, in spite of being the butt of his jokes. You'll find quite a lot of people expressing their happiness over the fact that he was included in the dance at the end.
  • Mama for being a positive representation of LGBT community, being Date's informant, as well as her ship with another fan favorite, Moma Kumakura.
  • Mayumi Matsushita. Many fans admit that they initially believed Mayumi would be a character they'd care the least about, as a result of her cartoony design and her initial attitude towards Iris. Cue Ota's route and her Somnium, PSYNCIN' IN THE SUSTaiN, and she became one of the fan favorites. Reasons include her being a supportive mother and her Somnium showing Tear Jerker and Heartwarming Moments of her life with dementia.
  • The Sunfish Pocket Mermaid, Amame Doi, ranked second only to Mizuki in a large fan-conducted popularity poll despite being a minor character in the game with mostly flavor dialogue. This fan popularity may even have had an impact on the sequel, as she returns in Nirvana Initiative in a bigger supporting role capacity. ^Note Although the creator of the poll in question has made a point of saying that the votes for the poll were way too inflated to be entirely natural, and was almost certainly a result of botting. For example, Mizuki, the 1st place winner, got 200k votes, which is rather absurd for a very niche Japanese mystery game that didn't even sell half that many copies when it came out. There was a later, more legitimate poll, in which Amame got 16th, which is more reasonable but still notable for a minor character with only a small handful of scenes
  • Despite his Dirty Old Man tendencies (which are only brought to further heights in the sequel), Moma Kumakura has proven himself to be quite the popular character. Fans enjoy his lovable goof antics and his Big Damn Heroes moments; many wish he had a larger role as well.
• Fan Nickname:
  • B-set, for the fake Iris (actually Saito in Iris's body) in the pre-release video series.
  • Saitonort in reference to how the crimes were done being a similar MO to Xehanort.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Many fans ignore Moma's... ''attitude'' towards Iris when writing him, believing it to bring his character down as a whole. This sentiment gained strength after the release of nirvanA Initiative, which makes it so that every single scene he's in contains a reference to how he thinks of Tesa.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • Zero Escape, unsurprisingly, considering both games are by Kotaro Uchikoshi from Spike Chunsoft. If you liked one game, chances are you're going to like the other. Even certain game mechanics are the same, such as unlocking certain routes only after completing other accessible ones.
  • Danganronpa, once more without surprise, considering both games are mystery genre games by Spike Chunsoft.
• Genius Bonus:
  • Inspecting the plants at Lemniscate usually has one character noting an insect in the plants. While some of the species are given their common names, later entries list such species as Pterophylla camellifolia and Parasteatoda tepidariorum, aka the katydid and common house spider, respectively.
  • The painting at Marble is of St. Sebastian, who is associated with queer men as a representation of homoerotic desire and being unhappily closeted (as he is often, including in the painting the game uses, depicted as a beautiful young man being penetrated by painful arrows). Not only does it add to the setting of the scene at Marble as a queer bar, Mama also mentions that it was a gift from Renju, which serves as a hint at his hidden queerness for those who know the significance.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The reveal that Ota has, in fact, been running multiple To-Witter accounts to both bash and promote A-Set in an attempt to get in her good graces becomes a lot harsher when it was learned that the real reason for the review bombing scandal on Metacritic surrounding the game was one fan's obsession with A-Set as a character.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Kaiji Tang as a yakuza who's secretly a fanboy for an idol and gets into a story that jumps in tone between serious and silly? You'd think he was in a Like a Dragon substory, especially before he got announced he'd be the voice of Ichiban Kasuga in Yakuza: Like a Dragon.
  • When talking about Fake Memories, Iris alludes to people mistaking Pikachu's tail having a black tip, but never mentions them by name for legal reasons. In nirvanA Initiative, there's a popular game called "Kusemon GO", implying that Iris was referring to a character from the "Kusemon" games.
• Idiosyncratic Ship Naming: "Siren Song" for the Fan-Preferred Couple of Iris/Amame.
• Iron Woobie:
  • Hitomi Sagan. The poor woman just cannot catch a break. She loses her two best friends from high school, one of which she witnessed being killed at a young age. She took care of her daughter and treated her as her own daughter. Said girl was diagnosed with a maladaptive brain tumor, only curable through an expensive nanotechnology; and who died as a result of not having it treated on time or being killed by a serial killer in most of the routes. Hitomi's love interest suddenly disappeared with no explanation. When she got to meet him next time, she had to visit him in jail, and there he claimed to be someone else in her lover's body. She was also shot in her right arm by the person she loved (although accidentally while trying to protect her), resulting in her not being able to move it (aside from the dance at the end).
  • The game really puts its mothers through the wringer. Mayumi Matsushita is full of suffering. She and her husband worked themselves to the bone to open their diner and raise their son. But despite doing their best, their diner essentially died after the Kabasaki district was shut down due to the chemical plant explosion. Trying to keep their home and business, as well as provide for a future for Ota, both Matsushita parents worked themselves to the bone with extra jobs, but the debt never really subsided and Mayumi's husband died of a heart attack from the overwork. Trying to keep the family together, Mayumi tried her best to support Ota even though his aimlessness in life made him make bad decisions. When she began developing dementia, she'd forget her husband was dead and that Ota left college, which led to him thinking that she was mocking him when she brought up dorm life. By the time of the game, during periods of lucidity Mayumi saw Ota's devotion to A-Set as A-Set leading him astray and spending all of his time and money, leaving Mayumi behind. When she witnesses Ota and "Iris" knock out Date and go on the run, she has an episode and chases after him in a cab, and only stops when she had the idea of buying Ota his favorite childhood chocolate to get him back. When she saw the killer in the polar bear costume try to kill "Iris", she thought that it was Ota since she didn't know the two had been separated, and when Date became suspicious of Ota, she tried to take the blame for ALL the killings to save her son. Her Somnium is the most melancholic, bittersweet one of the whole game, aside from Hitomi's and Date's.
• Lost in Medias Res: Some feel that the game begins a bit too abruptly. The story begins with the site of a murder with the protagonist showing up and beginning a psync before we even know anything about him or the real set up of the story. And we are thrown in a tutorial level for psyc-ing which is rather abstract and dream like (like future psyncs) before we even really know what's going on, making for a rather confusing experience. And afterwards, the protagonist finds a young girl inside the inner core of the merry-go-round they are on that he has apparently all but adopted before we even know anything about him. It isn't until after all this when he is reporting to his boss back at the police station that the game begins to explain everything the player needs to know about the characters and setting that everything begins to slide into place for the player.
• Memetic Mutation: A low-res image known as "Mizup" of Mizuki making a thumbs-up pose in her route (parodying this image) makes rounds whenever something related to the series is referenced. Uchikoshi himself took note of it.
• Narm:
  • Some of the character facial expressions when they are meant to look shocked or scared unfortunately end up coming across as this due to the animation making it lean into Dull Surprise territory. The worst offender is one of Date's expressions used for a Skyward Scream during a depressing event, but it's rarely used and appears at the very beginning for the "Amazing suction!" gag which the players will likely associate that face with.
  • The event where Hayato Yagyu ends up in Saito's body for the first time, confused, amnesiac and bleeding from an empty eyesocket. It's definitely dramatic, only for the adrenaline shot put in Saito's body to kick in and Hayato does a Super Window Jump, much to the bewilderment to the bodyguards until they realise they have to find him.
  • The grand finale of the true culprit falling victim to Your Head A-Splode was meant to be a dramatic climax. But the blunt, Looney Tunes-esque execution of the event made more than a few players burst out laughing.
• Narm Charm: The dance party ending of the True End comes out of nowhere, and is a bit cheesy all things considered, but many players and viewers have come to fondly regard the ending as perfect for a game that often didn't take itself seriously, and it was heartwarming to see nearly everyone sing and dance and be happy after all they had gone through, especially after the soul-crushingly depressing Annihilation Route.
• Nausea Fuel:
  • The culprit Saito Sejima, claims during the Annihilation Route that he disposed of his previous body's eyes by swallowing them (backed up by Shoko's turning up in Renju's body after Ota Route). This means Boss' body had So's eye in it, and worse, that Date unknowingly has Renju's eye in his gut during the True End.
  • We also see the culprit pull out a few of his victims' eyes in graphic detail during the finale.
• Nightmare Fuel: A fair bit to be found in this murder-mystery game.
• Play-Along Meme: Like the characters in-game, fans have a tendency to forget the name of Inspector Kagami. Or was it Kaniza?
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Ota Matsushita was disliked for his creepy obsession with Iris and his general unsympathetic treatment of his mother whom is suffering from dementia. However, the ending of his route where he comes to terms with his faults as a person and decides to get a job to support Mayumi redeemed him in the eyes of many fans.
• Ships That Pass in the Night: Mama and Moma have only been shown dancing together for a brief moment (and have similar names), but this doesn't stop them from being shipped by the fans. The fact that the Butt-Monkey character is being paired with a Transgender character MIGHT also be influencing this.
  • There’s also a following for Boss/Hitomi even though the two never exchanged dialogue at any point in the game.
  • Boss/Moma also have some fans of their own, despite only indirectly interacting a couple times in nirvanA Initiative. The ship is strengthened by the existence of Mizuki Kuranushi AKA Bibi, Boss' adopted daughter who used to work for the Kumakura Family; Fanon for these characters usually sees Moma as Bibi's father figure, making the three of them into a family.
• Signature Scene: Date dodging the bullets from the Yakuza, because Aiba told him a porno mag was at his feet.
• Squick:
  • So, a middle age man, impregnated Manaka, who was literally a high school girl at the time.
  • A grown man Date tries to get a high school girl Iris to talk about dicks and breasts or to show him her... something may be this or may be just a character quirk in a game full of similar jokes. Then we learn that he's more than twice as old as Iris and almost became her step-father when she was a child (and probably still going to become that now). After all the revelations he still behaves like this.
  • The fact that Saito ate the eyes from his victims of the New Cyclops Killings.
  • Saito yanking out his own eye, twice, during the True Ending.
• Superlative Dubbing: The English dub for the game has received pretty much universal praise, where even the minor characters give great performances. Especially when they change their tones and vocal direction when it's other characters in different bodies.
• That One Level:
  • PSYNCIN' IN THE MOUNTaiN. Wide, open map with a lot of space to go? Check. Objects that seem identical yet all need different actions acted out on them? Check. Darkness that covers the entire map and only grows in size the further you go? Also check. Every level is more or less a Moon Logic Puzzle with actions that make no sense, but this level features nearly nothing but them, like worshipping a rock and tackling a hole in a tree. Expect to having to open the map very frequently.
  • PSYNCIN' IN THE CURTaiN is possibly the most difficult segment in the game, as it has a lot of steps, many of them not being very intuitive, and a rather strict time limit. And nearly every choice you make has 3 to 4 options, with only one being correct for each. And at the end there is one interactable object, namely Hitomi, that seems like it would be important yet is really just a waste of time (and once again with 4 options to waste time on). And if you get unlucky with skull timies, you may just be out of luck as certain mandatory options take a large chunk of your time limit. It is extremely unlikely that you will succeed on your first or even second attempt if you do not have a guide.
  • PSYNCIN' IN THE REFRaiN is incredibly strict, requiring creative ways of mitigating time penalties and having situations where the whole thing can be rendered unwinnable. Perhaps justified in that outside of a Controllable Helplessness segment, it is the final Somnium of the game.
  • On PC, PSYNICN' IN THE MaiN crashes extremely frequently, occasionally near the very start, to the point where the whole thing borders on being a Luck-Based Mission.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: It really depends on the route, but a lot of the cast can end up playing an very minimal role in the story. For example: Iris may get significant plot importance one moment, but can be extremely insignificant as she's a victim in three out of the five routes with no other role to play.
  • Similarly, Mizuki only gets actual focus in her route, with Boss pointing out that Date's actually not doing a good job of giving her attention.
  • Another character with lackluster focus is Mama who, despite being Date's main informant for the criminal world, almost never has information that can help him or that he isn't able to find out himself elsewhere.
  • Despite being directly related to part of the Big Bad Duumvirate, Moma gets surprisingly little time in the spotlight, and his dynamic as a foil to Rohan is implied for the most part. His "clean gang" efforts are also constantly made fun of, even though they present an interesting counterpoint to all Rohan has done.
• Unpopular Popular Character: Date is a total pervert, a distractible manchild, and loves cheesy puns, all of which gains the ire of a lot of characters (even his friends), and the fans love him for how pathetic he is. It says volumes that when you look up his name on YouTube, the top results consist of videos such as "Kaname Date needs to go to horny jail" or "Kaname Date cringe compilation." You will end up loving Date so much that you want to kick him down a flight of stairs.
• Values Dissonance:
  • In Japan, those brought into police interrogation don't have the right to have a lawyer present during questioning and while the right to silence exists, it's seen as something only a guilty person would invoke. This is why none of the witnesses and suspects brought in by ABIS have attorneys and why the only person to utilize his right to silence is the shady So Sejima.
  • The general view of child abuse in Japan is that it's a personal problem that should be handled by the family and outsider intervention is discouraged. Upon learning that Shoko was physically and verbally abusive to her then eight year old daughter and that Renju was more concerned about his company to put a stop to it, Date's essentially did nothing but scold them for being bad parents. A similar view is held towards bullying. When Date learned that Mizuki was being bullied in school, Aiba advises him to teach her to fight her own battles and that getting involved himself would only making things worse.
  • Japan has far harsher views on single mothers and children born outside of marriage than western countries, which is why Date is briefly taken aback upon learning that Hitomi was never married and raised Iris by herself.
  • Adding onto the parental situation is how both Hitomi and Date were able to adopt Iris and Mizuki, respectively. While this might seem a little surprising, but not unusual for western audiences, in Japan it's actually illegal for single men and women to adopt. It's clear that Renju and Boss pulled a lot of strings to make the adoptions possible.
  • The idea that a single policeman becoming a vigilante gunman before being forced into becoming a yakuza assassin would necessitate a major government cover up might seem like overkill to a western player but Japan holds public servants, especially police officers, in incredibly high regard. As Saito pointed out, if what happened became public then there would be such major uproar and distrust in the system that it would result in high level firings, resignations and even shameful suicides.

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