Iji

I would say it's because she's a pretty unknown variable. She might be omnicidal rather than specifically against the Tasen. She could also be a saboteur if left alive.

Safer to try and kill her than let her live and watch as your whole plan gets destroyed because of too much trust or apathy.

I took last weekend to finally finish Iji for the first time.

The day after, I finished it as a pacifist.

I ended up thinking about the plot long after I had finished using my computer for the night. It's a very good story, I have to say. It's... Pretty much everything all together that makes it brilliant.

The only thing left to do is to get everything else. Long times ahead...

Edit(20120530): The sentence with 'pacifistic' I noticed was originally going to be part of a longer sentence, but looks like I cut it short. Fixed to read 'pacifist'.

edited 30th May '12 12:35:51 AM by Law

Good points. I still wonder what exactly Dan says to General Tor in his distress call, though.

I think the Komato also have contempt for anything but one of them. They're also trigger-happy, so I guess they shoot at Iji because they see something they're allowed to shoot at.

And they're used to being unstoppable.

What those two said. They don't care about individuals who are not them, and they planned to nuke the planet anyway - it's not like Iji could stop them by force, nor contribute anything meaningful to their inevitable victory over the Tasen. It got personal once they realized she carried a very rare Tasen Nanogun, an interesting nanofield, and if you're a killer, the fact that they really don't like losing their best units.

Most Komato probably didn't even know the human they faced was affiliated with the one who sent the distress call - I could take a lot of liberties here since we never get to see what Dan really told them.

I dunno if this has been suggested, but I was thinking of an idea for melee weapons for an Iji sequel, and then I was reminded of Deus Ex Human Revolution and how its melee works - you have the choice to either knock someone out stealthily or outright kill them. Though, thinking about it, it was always more beneficial to incapacitate with melee rather than kill, because you got more praxis points (in fact, in order to get as much points as possible in a single run, you had to go the entire game incapacitating every enemy), and killing would alert other enemies immediately.

So, I thought about providing a balance between these two. A player character who has no quams with killing would prefer a lethal weapon that was more efficient with dispatching an enemy. A player character who wants to avoid killing would prefer a melee weapon that drains nano from an enemy and then knocks them unconscious. I imagine either of these would have drawbacks - the lethal weapon would result in less nano, but the non-lethal weapon would take time to drain an enemy, meaning the player is exposed to fire from other enemies, and/or the enemy they're draining, if said enemy can't be stunned by the weapon.

Personally, i would have preferred that the Stealth Elements that Daniel wanted originally for the game to actually be in the final product because, lets face it, IJI already has enough firepower already but doesn't have many Pacifistic means to solve a situation. I was kinda disappointed to know that the Resonance Reflector was fixed to actually NOT count the kills done with it (i thought it was pretty realistic to count your kills with it, because after all, YOU pressed fire to return the attack to the sender and kill him) but then again, she doesn't have other means to make the Pacifist route less painful. Unless they add the option to hack a computer to turn turrets against their owned to buy time to pass through (a la Deus Ex)

An interesting idea occurred to me when i played Bastion and observed how the SHRINE works. For those who dont know, that building enables the player to worship a god and in return......they make the game more harder; Basically making your enemies to have certain buffs making them stronger depending on what god you choose (you could have them ALL activated) in exchange of that, you gained more exp.

So i was thinking that, for example, if IJI had this kind of thing it may be a interesting experiment. Lets suppose that we are inside a Sector and we find a console that its subtly different to the others and a few Vlog mentioned it, when you activate it, you discover to your horror that now EVERYONE in the base are permanently alerted of your position and ALSO every once in a while, 2 Komato Berserkers teleport near your position to kill you (i assume that this hypothetical console will appear in Area 5) HOWEVER, in exchange of fucking up, you can now exceed the maximum lvl of this Sector to the point of reaching the maximum that you would have at Sector X (if you play on Easy, you can now kill until you reach lvl 50)

That is just an example of how to change the difficulty a la Bastion by deliberately making things worse in exchange of some form of adventaje.

edited 21st Jul '12 8:39:38 PM by Diabolo

What if instead of reflecting the projectile, you had a variant of the Reflector that absorbs the projectile instead? A weapon-stopping alternative for the hardcore pacifist.

That is, on the assumption that projectiles produced by a nanogun can be converted back into nano.

edited 22nd Jul '12 5:59:24 AM by KylerThatch

Keep in mind that the Resonance Reflector CANT be replaced or else we couldn't defeat the Final Boss without it (at least in a run without weapons to the teeth)

Unless there was ANOTHER set of cracked weapons designed for pacifist purposes......witch is pretty fucking awesome. Having 8 more weapons to choose is mind-melting, isnt it? I suppose that the reason that the Komato never use any of this weapons is because it doesnt fit with their warmongering way of life.

On the idea of accidentally alerting everybody and extending the max lvl for it still needs more refining. It is true that it may seems like you are breaking the game by having more lvls earlier but technically, if you already had the Nano-Reboot, you have enough lvls to visit every place without any problems.

Ehh, who cares about the experience boost. If you turn on those options you're not doing it to make things easier. Just leave it out and have a bunch of toggleable challenges, or make the payoff a multiplier on collected nano.

What does need fleshing out is a list of challenges (mostly just aping the ones Bastion used):

• Enemies always know where you are and berserkers occasionally teleport in (possibly at setpoints?).
• There are more enemies (this one's ironically a bit work-intensive since you'd probably have to hand-pick every place where there's extra guys; Bastion didn't use it but it feels more appropriate in the context of this game).
• Your armor is reduced by 75%.
• Enemies are faster and attack more often, like Ultimortal mode. Stacks with difficulty-level based increases, if that's even possible.
• Enemies with defensive abilities (ie duck, reflect and teleport) use them almost always; enemies all have 300% of their normal armor.
• Resource starvation. Every ammo pickup grants only 25% ammo rounding up. Weapons which already come in packs of 1 or 2 (rockets, komato rocket-equivalent, devastator) cost twice as much to fire. Health pickups only grant 1 health if you're at full armor or full armor if you aren't; armor pickups grant a quarter as much.
• All health damage you take is doubled.
• You are stuck at Health 1 for the whole game; enemies are not. Does NOT cause sudden death from melee attacks and armor running out unless you also use the previous one.

There should not be any that directly affect enemy "health"; since those would be harmful or beneficial depending on whether you were a pacifist (ie you could safely knock people off their feet and off ledges if they had extra health). And I don't think it makes much sense for you to not be able to turn them all on on level 1, even if they have to be unlocked. They'd appear as options in the pause menu but require a sector restart.

EDIT: That all said, this wouldn't really do as much for Iji as it does for Bastion because Iji already has difficulty levels, while for Bastion the idols ARE your difficulty slider. And of course it's all hypothetical unless a modder wants to do it, which is kind of a lot of work.

edited 22nd Jul '12 9:41:44 AM by Brickman

The point of the "sacrificing something and gain an adventaje in another area" fits the idea and tone of the RPG that IJI is about.

Not gaining something by doing those "challenges" is the same as learning the skill of swimming in Deus Ex 1, totally useless and a waste of time.

edited 22nd Jul '12 1:34:33 PM by Diabolo

Adding options like that might be ok, but it would be difficult to do that without destroying the game balance.

Lets be honest: if I'm doing a killing spree run, then all the enemies are going to know where I am all the time anyway (guns are loud), and it should be easy enough to run away from a couple of berserkers. If enemies could move further, then your idea would be interesting.

Well, the game's "moddable" since the source was released :)

edited 24th Jul '12 2:10:38 PM by Ulti

Well, to make it playable for both runs, you should be ambushed by Assasinss rather than Bersekers. You can defeat the way you want and not get punished for the kill score.

Another way is that the console makes the enemies AS powerful as the Really Joel's Dad (was that the name?) so you at least have a taste of what would be like to have the best equipment to deal with enemies that are super fast, more resistant and they can even RESIST PAIN like the Annihilators (not sure what would be the story based context of these "upgrades" tough)

And now, a question for Ultimortal : What was the reason for the Komato to NOT use the.....shall we say "Unlimited Resonance Reflector Works" that the Komato Bersekers had for the higher ups on the chain of command? I can understand someone like Asha not using it because its a hardass but how about the more "pragmatic" Komatos?

edited 24th Jul '12 6:33:56 PM by Diabolo

At no point in the game do you see that weapon used by something larger than a berserker, which is (being generous) twice the size of a very buff human. The only Komato higher-ups you fight who aren't Asha fight you in room-filling giant robot exoskeletons. There's no reason to assume that the reflector scales up that far. Just think of the Square-Cube Law!

OK, why the Komato didnt design it to just protect the front of the user? or to have several small reflectors on the parts of the exoskeleton that the user can trigger at will if he knows where the impact is coming.

I was about to put a clip from the Anime "Macross" showing how would technically work but i couldnt find it. So here is the text from the main page:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Anime/SuperDimensionFortressMacross?from=Main.Macross

"The whole concept of the "Pinpoint Barrier" system (the Macross first shield system) is remarkably similar to the 1980 arcade game Missile Command. That game played with a trackball and three buttons. "

This is the Komato, after all. The best shield is making your enemies dead faster.

There's no reason, I just didn't think about it. :) There are bigger technological plot holes than that in the game, like why Iji considers Iosa a threat without her nanofield (she'd be as useless as an ordinary human against Iji), or why weapons owned by an interplanetary species are handheld and aimed manually.

Also why Assassins aren't telefragged by the air itself when they teleport, if Asha could lose his arm in a wall.

edited 25th Jul '12 9:43:52 AM by Ulti

I just fell in love with the entire concept. The "innocent" ending was so great.. beautiful, really, that I'm actually having second thoughts about going back to do the "psychopath let loose with a gun" run.

I think the limited options for pacifism works for the game really. Somehow having to frantically dash past enemies instead of fighting them makes it feel all the more like you've earned that "pacifist" badge; you really won't fight unless there is no way out.

edited 29th Jul '12 7:25:55 PM by GameChainsaw

There's much more I wanted to add for the pacifist ending, I'm glad it "worked" for you anyway. Surviving as a pacifist was indeed meant to be harder.

The music's also remarkable. Listening to the tail end of 3 Cans Later as this post is typed.

I was thinking of what to do with all the beta songs for Iji - there's a lot, and only a few (like 3 Cans Later) were actually remade into final songs for the game. There's one called Officially Destroyed that was used in the old demos. Chris Geehan made most of these on his own.

Odd, pacifism just came to me more easily when I first played. Maybe I'm just subversive or something. I dunno.

Pacifism isn't hard once you get used to doing it, but if a new player was to start in Sector 7 (or something else similarly late) with the aim of pacifism, it wouldn't be so simple.

Then again, part of the difficulty is maintaining pacifism over all ten sectors, especially in places like Sector 3, where - while enemies for the most part don't shoot you - you have to dodge even touching a single foe. Except for the ones who shoot you, of course.