Takuya decides, yeah, I was enslaved and beaten and then tortured for days by your subordinate, Ayumi. Thanks, Mom. But Takuya gets over it, and Amanda also apparently gets over her years-long resistance to the brutal dictatorship since, eh, who cares. Despite being a spineless, ultra-submissive and indecisive coward whom powerful men trample over and over, Ayumi has somehow managed to overthrow the Ryuuzouji from the Prologue (!) by knowing how to use Grandmother, Dela Grante’s supercomputer (!). The big twist is that this computer is the actual god the theocracy worships, rather like in “The Return of the Archons.” Before the appearance of humans on Earth, a different civilization (whose people are clearly humans) used interdimensional travel to flee the “Tears of God,” probably a meteor shower. They built a new world and new sun in this other dimension, naming their new land mass Dela Grante after their leader, Grantia. With this intel, to kick off the finale, Takuya fucks his daughter already.
Recall the major driving mysteries established in the Prologue:
1. Who is the naked disappearing woman?
2. What is Triangle Mountain?
3. Where did the Reflector come from?
4. Why is Ryuuzouji prepared to kill over the Reflector?
5. Is Koudai alive, and if so, where is he?
6. Why did Koudai send Takuya the Reflector?
The Epilogue and ADMS section answer most of the questions:
1. The daughter you fuck (I wonder how many players would drop YU-NO if they realized the opening is the hero snogging his daughter?)
2. Stone surrounding an automated lightning-generating machine called a Gazel Tower, now guarding a deposit of Dela Grante land and Hypersense Stone, that the Dela Grante theocracy used to kill prisoners who fled their slave camps
3. From the Dela Grante theocracy that worships technology built by the ancient universe-hopping scientists
4. The alien imposter Ryuuzouji wants to use the Reflector to move freely between universes to continue his nefarious deeds
The Epilogue does not answer mystery 5. Koudai never reappears. On every single route in the ADMS section, Takuya’s explicit mission statement—an initially fun scene that loses its impact the seventh time—is to find Koudai and punch him in the face, but then Takuya never does. In this goofy sci-fi incest porn, the lack of a resolution to the mystery does not seem meaningful—it seems like a slap in the face. With the addition of Koudai’s final message including him talking about having watched every single thing Takuya and Yu-no did and fully approving, it also makes me go, “Hold up.”
The answer to mystery 6. is convoluted: based on his research, Koudai needs Takuya to use the Reflector with a machine under Triangle Mountain, which is a part of Japan that used to be part of Dela Grante due to an impact 8000 years ago, so that Takuya can be warped to Dela Grante in the past (also a parallel universe) to sire Yu-no so that she can complete the rite of the priestess so that the spirit of Grantia can possess her temporarily to somehow move the Dela Grante universe so that, instead of Dela Grante and Earth’s whole universes colliding and destroying each other in an event collision, the island of Dela Grante itself will physically fall onto Japan 8000 years ago (a disaster to rival the Cretaceous–Paleogene mass extinction, a point Kanno skillfully ignores). Instead of allowing the protagonist to grow as a person—instead of explaining where Koudai is—instead of letting Takuya and the player finally, finally confront Koudai—the Epilogue instead focuses on out-of-nowhere fantasy worldbuilding, a naïve rugged individualist Edenic fantasy, and Takuya’s pedophiliac relationship with his Saltine-bland bimbo daughter. Then the Epilogue promptly resolves the mystery with a lengthy exposition dump and pew-pews the bad guy to death. In creating this fantastical scenario utterly divorced from the semi-realistic setting and cast the rest of the story cultivates, it is as if Kanno wanted to invent the least emotionally satisfying way to resolve the plot possible. I recall seeing a review on Steam that describes the Epilogue as ten hours of terrible fanfiction crammed onto the end of what had previously been an okay story. Exactly.
