Apart from a few notable exceptions — Armored Core V, Verdict Day, and 3D Dot Heroes — FromSoftware’s modern releases have been grand occasions. Hype for these releases stretches into the years, with many enclaves across the internet chomping at the bit, speculating over every single kernel — interview and demo footage — they can get their hands on. Everyone racing to be the first to to divine any and all pieces of information.
Even the upcoming Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice will have had a “hype-cycle” of a year and change before it will release on the twenty-second of March 2019. In the course of this initial “hype-cycle,” many videos have sprouted up on YouTube speculating on the nature of the game, turning a 20 second teaser announcement into half hour treatises. After its full announcement at E3 2018, this ‘word of mouth hype’ has only intensified.
Flying in the face of the lengthy “hype-cycles” that most modern FromSoftware games have garnered, is a little game called Déraciné. It only had a quiet announcement at E3 2018, almost completely overlooked, and an equally quiet release in November of the same year. For those who are only familiar with the triumvirate of Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, and Bloodborne, this might be strangely iconoclastic. Even more, some might call this a ‘stepping outside of FromSoftware’s comfort zone’ — a ‘refreshing change.’
While it is a refreshing palate cleanser for a developer that in recent years has been known for its grim and obtuse fantasy settings and Lovecraftian / Ito-esque Horror landscapes; it is actually not a stepping outside of FromSoftware’s comfort zone.
In fact, rather, it is the complete opposite.
FromSoftware, up until this modern era of its gaming prominence, has been comfortable being an experimental, strange, and sometimes bizarre game developer. It has usually been the first to create something for new technology, simply because they wanted to and for the challenge. Further, FromSoftware as a company, has been unafraid to experiment with different formats for its particular methods of storytelling. In so doing, they’ve carved out a rather distinctive mechanical and narrative style that concerns itself with atmosphere and environmental storytelling first and foremost. From this era of experimentation and ‘interesting games’ comes the Echo Night franchise.
The Echo Night franchise is a collection of first-person point and click adventure games. Normally it follows series regular, Richard, as he tries to right wrongs for ghosts trapped on either a ship (after having been transported there via a particular book), manor house, or moon base. To do this, he hops between the ‘present’ and the ghost’s recent past to find the tools to help them move on. Through it all, Richard is trying to unravel a personal mystery of his own, from his Father’s nature as a Demon Hunter in the original Echo Night, to the mystery surrounding himself and his ‘fiancee’ Claudia in Beyond.
This is the narrative tradition that Déraciné is written and played in. In fact, there’s quite a few easter eggs for fans of the Echo Night franchise within Déraciné, signaling it as a spiritual successor. It isn’t a ‘stepping outside of the comfort zone’ for FromSoftware, rather it is a return to form.
Unlike Echo Night which doesn’t ask you to examine the consequences for meddling in a Ghost’s past to ease their souls, Déraciné centers these questions as one of the pillars for its narrative. After all, the characters of Déraciné are by and large still alive and the consequences are very real for them.
They aren’t simply ghosts looking for rest.
As a piece of modern FromSoftware storytelling, Déraciné is an interesting example. This isn’t just because of the immersion offered by Virtual Reality, either. But, because everything is far more present than most of Fromsoft’s current works.
As each layer gently falls open like so much a page of a book, the player realizes that Déraciné isn’t a fairy-tale; it is a fable. A fable that meditates on loss, grief, acceptance, the siren song of nostalgia, and a person’s natural inclination to try to rewrite their own histories. This work will strive to survey the lore and narrative of Déraciné and how successful it is in examining its central meditations on Nostalgia’s pull and Historical Revisionism.
Scarborough Fair
Our lives are a constellation of moments, echos of events that create our memories and in turn our personal narratives. Each event is simply a result of cause and effect, stemming from not just a choice we’ve made but from a multitude of choices. The word ‘since,’ becomes an easily sought after shorthand for ourselves: ‘since’ the death of a loved one, ‘since’ one started work at a new company, and ‘since’ a partner told us that they love us for the first time.
Married to our sense of ‘since’ is our sense of ‘what-could-have-been.’ What if we didn’t take a particular bus that day? What if instead of meeting a particular someone with silence, we asked what we’ve been meaning to ask them? What if we, instead, did something different? How would our lives change?
Regret is normal. It is normal to wonder about the might-have-beens or the what-could-be. To live is to live with these constant questions and thus, we live with a constant sense of regret. However, while each of our singular life-events are easy to see — it’s less easy to discern the cause and effect that lead to them in the first place. The proverbial butterfly effect is far, far more difficult to recognize.
What if we are given the ability, with our understandably myopic vision, to change the past? How would changing the direction the butterfly flaps its wings make things different? What unforeseen consequences will sprout out of the ground due to our own nearsighted recollection of our own histories?
These questions gently sneak up on the player in the course of Déraciné. They lurk in the background even as our own understanding, as well as the understanding of the Faerie we play as, grows.
At the beginning of the game, we see the “place where time stands still” a dark abyss where Echoes of past moments fall like snow. All there is in this dark place is a guiding voice coming from a phonograph as our character is newly awakened into their new existence as a Fairie. What is intriguing, is that this may be the clearest visual representation of how Time works in a FromSoftware game. Unlike in the Dark Souls franchise, where time is cyclical and a flat circle, time is simply a collection of events — echos in the night — and is equated to life itself.
But as we find ourselves in one such event at the beginning of the game, one that would in the end prove pivotal, we realize — at least in hindsight — that we can’t see all information. There are beds where the sheets float, skimming over nothing, as though something is occupying it but we cannot see who. The world, as in so many of FromSoftware’s games, is covered in an obscuring fog. This is a obscuring fog in the mind. What we, the player and the character cannot make sense of, we simply refuse to see.
Because of our lack of knowledge, and our lack of our self-awareness, we don’t question the Guiding Voice’s instruction and touch the Golden Wand. Remaining critically unaware of the consequences for the act until the final minutes of the game.
This becomes common through the story, as our myopia — about ourselves, the truth of our abilities, and the surrounding choices leading to events — becomes our greatest weakness.
The Uprooted
Soon after our awakening as a faerie, the world resolves around us and we find ourselves in another epoch. The classroom is lived in, but neat, with items placed in every corner and every desktop, each desktop ready with a small slate chalkboard. A single character sits at one of the desks. Her name is Yuliya and she is one of the uprooted — the déraciné.
Translated from French, ‘déraciné’ is defined as a person who feels or has been displaced. It is a descriptor for those who have been displaced from ‘one’s geographical or social environments.’ To put it another way, déraciné can also mean ‘the alienated.’
Yuliya, as we come to find in the course of the first few epochs, is one of seven characters who reside within an isolated orphanage and school. Each of the orphans and their headmaster have a unique personality that allows them to stand apart. Rosza carries herself with an easy determination. Nils is a scholar. Yuliya, one of the eldest, is a gentle girl.
However, some of them are starting to exhibit signs of wanderlust. Herman naps in a tree and draws falcons and hawks while keeping a key to the outside world underneath his hat. “Neither of us likes to stay still,” Herman is heard saying. Yuliya uses her imagination as a means to escape. She deeply believes in fae and the fairie and even wears a tiny fairie broach upon her lapel. But this broach also shows the image of the fairie and fae that she believes in: the pop culture image of fanciful creatures wreathed in flora and fauna akin to the Cottingley Fairies. And, as we learn, these are not the fairies in the world of Déraciné. However, it is because of Yuliya’s fervent belief and wish for our presence, that our character manifests.
And yet, this isn’t the true beginning of Déraciné. Like in even our own personal histories, we are the result of more than simply the choices and effects of things we are privy to. Our group of orphans are the result of choices from long before they were born and leads to why they are déraciné to begin with. Their story begins with Rohn.
In Rohn, a cabal of interested and learned adult fellows were fascinated by the study of fairies. While there, experiments were had to learn about them — and much of the knowledge of fairies sprinkled about the orphanage comes from the knowledge gained in Rohn. In fact, there was a group of orphans that existed before our current group, but what happened to them is unsaid and is only hinted about in dark tones.
What can be extrapolated, however, is that these experiments went awry and the first group of orphans disappeared along with most of Rohn. Both Margareta, a character who is more specter than a person we ever see, and the Headmaster are riddled with guilt because of their hubris and what their experimentation resulted in. Margareta in her writings, refers to the mistakes made in Rhon. The headmaster mentions the sins he must atone for.
Perhaps it is this lingering fascination of fairies from Margareta and the Headmaster that Yuliya picked up on — even if unconsciously. After all, Margareta and the Headmaster chose a “life close to children” to be near their object of study. Even if, during our time with the children, the Headmaster is no longer actively studying fairies at all.
Even still, one could suppose that each child was an orphan created by the fellowship’s experimentation with fairies. One could suppose that each of these children were survivors and their families did not emerge whole due to the fellowship’s mistakes. Although the children forge a familial bond with one another, each are still uprooted. Each have still been removed from their homes and their biological families who were sacrificed for the cause of understanding the fae. Each of these children are displaced and their emerging wanderlust and need for escapism is perhaps a latent desire to find where they truly belong.
It is this latent wanderlust that is part and parcel of decisions that could cause our children to lose everything.
A Golden Wand:
“Fairies bring nothing but bad luck, think of Yuliya…” (Nils)
As Déraciné is concerned with fairies, then now is a good time to discuss fairies in the world of Déraciné. Fairies live in the space between moments, outside of time, and are only able to enter into the epochs of time surrounding a single important moment. Without the ability to live within the stream of time, anchored to time that is their own, fairies are just as uprooted as the orphans who call the school home. Indeed, as the game hints that time is the very same as life and light, then the fairies are also alienated from these concepts as well. Because of their alienation from linear time, however, Fairies are able to manipulate it in a very limited manner.
Time, for instance, cannot be created. It is merely passed from one creature to a similar creature: flora to flora, animals to animals, and human to human. It is also an all or nothing proposition. Those familiar with FromSoftware’s past work might note the similarities between this and the Curse of Dark Souls. When a fairie takes time, they take all of the remaining time the person, plant, or animal has and not simply some of it.
“Every New Fairie, gets a little gift…”
“Did you know? All good fairies need two rings, find the other one and you will see how life and time are beholden to the rings.” — A Guiding Voice
To work their magic, Fairies are equipped with two rings. The first is the red ring of life. As an interesting aside, the ring itself is a multi-reference to a few of FromSoftware’s past works. In the Echo Night franchise, the red stone was a dubious thing that promised power to those that held it. In Dark Souls, the life ring was fitted with a red-stone. In Déraciné it takes the time a being has to live on this earth and stores it within the stone. However, with humans it must work with the most mysterious of Fairie Tools: the Golden Wand.
The second ring is the blue ring of time. Activating it reveals the chronometer, showing how close one is to aligning the ripples of time in a particular epoch. Again as an aside, the blue ring — the partner ring — and its chronometer are references to the Echo Night franchise. As in that game, the antithesis crystal to the red crystal was the blue one, which protected against the red crystal’s influences. Further, the chronometer itself was featured in the Echo Night franchise as its small development team used it as their symbol in splash screens. The hands of it, also, come together to look like the Moonlight Greatsword, the signature of FromSoftware. The Chronometer is fueled by the Red Ring allowing one to move backwards in time, should the individual the time was taken from was “consumed by the past” to “enshroud the chronometer in a dim light.” If one simply resolves the ripples, the hands on the chronometer will move towards zero, allowing you to move forward in time.
The third item, is a bit more mystery. The Golden Wand. As already mentioned it is the catalyst by which the Fairy can interact with people and touching it allows the red-ring of life to take the time a person has left.
In essence, life allows the fairie to move backwards into the past. Facilitating life allows the fairy to move forward. All else a fairy does is through their own decisions, forever veiled from the world the fairy cannot ever be apart of. With a notable exception: that which is close to the realm of a fairy — touching an animal, or even Rosza’s injured legs elicits a very slight response.
The power of a fairy is a monkey’s paw. Being with the children and showing them our existence, leads to their doom as they try to save Yuliya. As we try to help the children avoid that certain doom at the hands of another fairy, we find that the children’s desire to resurrect Yuliya is too strong and the children find another way outside, going around the obstacles we place in their path like water. Indeed, as it turns out, being given the time of others does not soothe the soul that knows its own time is missing from it. Life and Time are one and the same, and to not have their own time creates a terrible greed to fill a void one knows one has.
The Headmaster and Margareta have also conjectured that those people who are made fairies later in life have a terrible desire to revise their own histories and erase regret. The pull of what could have been is too strong in those that have lived and cannot ignore this pull. It is because of this, that Margareta’s newborn Alexis is sacrificed in the name of scholarly research.
Alexis, the Alienated
One of the greatest sins committed by the Headmaster, Margareta, and the rest of the scholars might also be one of its greatest triumphs: Alexis. The player becomes aware of Alexis early in the game, should they make their way to the River of Prayer. At first, Alexis is simply a name, a small footnote, or just another of the mysteries at the orphanage to unravel later. One wouldn’t be blamed for thinking, at first, that she is simply another orphan who died at an earlier time.
Like most things in the orphanage, even Alexis’ tombstone is unassuming. Placed beneath a tree it is inscribed with a simple epitaph: ‘Taken like a leaf on the wind.’ It can be assumed that she died loved and cared for.
Yet, the player assumes a sort of distance between themselves and the story happening around them. The player assures themselves that there is still a division between gameplay and narrative. The player further assumes that Ludonarrative Dissonance is still firmly in place and that the player is separated from the story although it is our hands that interact with the game.
In a brilliant narrative stroke, Déraciné attempts to subvert a player’s notions of Ludonarrative Dissonance.
As the narrative falls in place around the player, you realize that the truth has been beneath your spectral left hand the whole time. In retrospect, the clues were always there. For instance, in one photo featuring Margareta and the orphan children when they first arrived, Alexis is nowhere to be found. This should eliminate one line of speculation off the bat. In truth, the twist (a FromSoftware specialty), is that we are Alexis. In that moment, we realize that the game has written the player as character and written us into the story.
As this realization falls into place, we realize another important fact: We are Déraciné. We are alienated from the world that would have, could have been our home.
Perhaps we as the player will resonate with her as the character. Alexis died in her infancy, too young to have developed her own self-awareness and her own sense of self. She is a cipher, allowing the player to inform who she is as we play. She is just like the small chalkboard at her desk in Classroom 2 (should the player choose that location for the Fairy Chair): a pristine blank slate.
The orphaned children likewise do not know who we are, or our connection to them, but welcome us into their world just the same. As naturally as turning the page, we are connected to them: we play, we worry for our new friends, and in the end we sing with them through the music box at the recital. We become a family and Margareta posthumously agrees, leaving our own pinky ring — a symbol of the familial bond between the children — in the treasure box.
How wonderful is it for us, as Alexis, to finally be included instead of isolated, lonely, in between the moments of time?
How wonderful is it for our hands, stuck in mid-grasp as though trying to grab hold of something or anything, to have that solid bond to hold?
It makes the emotional gut-punches of the second half of Déraciné even more visceral. It makes the final choice we as Alexis have to make at the end even more bittersweet. To willingly sacrifice that feeling, that inclusion, that bond, and to uproot ourselves entirely from the children’s lives to protect them and to prevent the effect of the Twisted Flower. It is a sacrifice borne out of love for our family instead of the selfishness to exist.
How brilliant is this play on the player’s notion of ludonarrative dissonance?
The Twisted Flower
How destructive is it to cling to something — nostalgia, life — instead of letting go? To what end and to what cost would we endure to rewrite the past if you could? Is something like that worth it? How much worse would it be if we simply didn’t move on and live in the present and appreciate the time that we have in front of us rather than what came before? We can’t have our cake and eat it too, we only have the hand that we are given. Unfortunately for Alexis, and ourselves, there’s no place for us in our family’s lives. We never had it, having accidentally stolen Yuliya’s time to exist in the first place.
To try to have it in a way that allows us that place in our family’s lives twists the timeline, just as it twists the flower over the course of the game.
Without our own time, we greedily devour the time of everyone else’s. Perhaps, in a desire to find what it is we lost. When we, as Alexis, attempt a solution — to bring Yuliya into our Fairy world, it ends poorly. This event serves as a mirror for what may have happened to thousands of others. She loses herself and ravages the time of her brothers and sisters until she stands in the middle of the Music hall, poignantly telling us that “I only have memories of them.”
As we witness the other Evil Fairy in the world do the same to our brothers and sisters in the frozen world outside, we come to the realization that this is something that has been happening across the known world. Living creatures are rare now, as Lorinc is surprised by the existence of a snake at all. Nils has never seen the bird that Herman draws as Herman dreams of the sky.
The world has suffered. Suffered from something that at the outset started so innocently but began without understanding the consequences. The Scholars lamented that those made Fairies after they gained self-awareness of themselves, wanted to remain rooted to their homes and want to revise their own histories, to have their cake and eat it too.
In the end, this desire to revise history and to live within memories, leaves everyone without a present.
The ghostly phantoms and echoes of the people we love, in the end, are not them.
Yuliya, as a fairy, sacrifices herself to us; returning that time she has stolen to the time-stream. As the final realization comes to us, as our myopia is finally dismissed, that it is her time we initially stole to even exist, our own act of sacrifice follows soon after. We, as Alexis then, sacrifice ourselves and the time we have and give that time back to the one who should have it. After all, there has never been a place for us and with our own clarity — as both Player Character and as Alexis, a girl who never rooted to the world to begin with — give up our chance to exist.
For whatever time Yuliya has left, with a future edged in dim light, she vows to live within it, to not waste it, and live within the moment.
In this Déraciné is less of a fairy tale and more of an allegory warning us of the siren call of nostalgia and regret. The fairy’s ability to meddle with time is little more than a monkey’s paw and the more we use it the more time becomes twisted, a Gordian knot that traps us all in a loop with no exit. History is more than our choices and it is formed from a multitude of causes and effects that is as fragile as a painting. Attempting to revise history by changing a single choice, misses this fact and could do far more harm than good in the long run.
In Déraciné this is emblematic in the flower. At the start, it is brought back to vitality but by the end, because of our mucking about, it becomes grotesque, twisted, and unrecognizable.
The only true ending is to sacrifice of ourselves and return the time we have taken to its true owner. To sacrifice the intoxicating inclusion by our family, of the bond we formed through the game — to fade into nothing and into the abyss. The only way our family can move on is to do so without us and we make the difficult decision to cause our own déraciné; to truly alienate ourselves from existence.
In the end, Parsley saved Rosemary in Thyme.
- To See More, take a look at my play-through of Déraciné here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZZ6Fjbo6KNDhEUItM2np8OHj0Vpa9eiy
- Thanks to AssaulterBob and Vodkafolie for glancing over the essay.
