Barbara's Hangout Event Made Me Feel Philosophical

The Scenario Branching Is (Way More Complex Than I Expected)#

I had only cleared two hangout quests so far, both Noelle’s (the Genshin Impact character), so Barbara’s branching complexity floored me.

For example, here’s the scenario branching chart for Noelle’s first hangout.

Noelle’s second one.

A very pretty tree.

Now, Barbara.

↓ Continued.

It’s not a tree anymore.

Does this come down to implementation order or something? Since Barbara’s hangout was implemented after Noelle’s, did they get to try more complicated things?

The Mystery I Couldn’t Solve#

But in this quest, I used a forbidden technique. I looked at a walkthrough.

Right before the ending, at the very bottom, there’s a choice that says “What’s the Barbara Fan Club? (Unlock Criteria Not Met),” and I couldn’t figure out how to unlock it.

I looked it up, and it turns out you have to take the upper route at the first branch, ask “What’s the Barbara Fan Club?” during “Albert Is Amenable to Reason,” and then proceed to “Deaconess’s Time Off” (and if you load a save partway through, it won’t unlock).

I never imagined there’d be hidden internal conditions that aren’t shown on the official branching chart. I ended up brute-forcing every choice, and when even that didn’t work, I got paranoid and wondered, “Could it have been accessible only during a certain period in the past?” So I had no choice but to rely on a walkthrough.

”Love” and “Knowledge”#

Here’s where the main topic begins. Through this experience, I felt my love for Barbara transform into knowledge.

According to Nishida Kitaro:

Ordinary knowledge is knowledge of an impersonal object. Even if the object is personal, it is knowledge of it viewed as impersonal. Love, on the other hand, is knowledge of a personal object. Even if the object is impersonal, it is knowledge of it viewed as personal. The difference between the two lies not in the mental activity itself, but rather in the kind of object.

In other words, love and knowledge are both just the same chishiki (知識, knowledge: understanding with both the head and the body, where 知 means the head and 識 means the whole body), but when you view the object as personal it becomes love, and when you view it as impersonal it becomes knowledge (知).

Applied to my case, I had been knowing Barbara personally, but before I knew it, that had transformed into gamer-style, impersonal knowledge.

I’m not trying to argue that therefore the event was lackluster (I enjoyed it just fine). I just found it interesting, and I was actually happy to feel, “So this is what Nishida Kitaro was talking about!” Of course, I still like Barbara. Enough that I’m agonizing over whether to put her in my party.

An Unrelated Story#

At this point I suddenly remembered Flowey from Undertale. When he realized the power of SAVE, the whole world must have stopped being a personal object and become an impersonal one to him. Thinking about it that way, Flowey’s feelings make total sense in Nishida Kitaro terms, and conversely, the worst case of what Nishida Kitaro was getting at must be us, the ones who went down this route.

It all started because I was curious.

Curious what would happen if I killed them.

“I don’t like this,” I told myself.

“I’m just doing this because I HAVE to know what happens.”

Ha ha ha… What an excuse!

You of all people must know how liberating it is to act this way.

Taking it further, you could say the whole game of Undertale deals with the problem of “love” and “knowledge.” Do you treat monsters as personal objects, or as impersonal ones? Treat them personally and you go down the route of love; treat them as impersonal sources of EXP and you go down the route of knowledge. Maybe.

Conclusion (If You Can Even Call It That)#

It’s really interesting that Flowey’s line above contains the word “curious.”

For the past few years, I’d believed that “curiosity” was unconditionally good. But I could never come up with a good answer to the objection, “Doesn’t curiosity sometimes lead to terrible results?”

I feel like I can answer that nicely by taking in Nishida Kitaro’s argument. Namely, knowledge alone (knowledge of an object viewed as impersonal) isn’t enough; unless you also have love (knowledge of an object viewed as personal), you can’t reach the “pinnacle of knowledge.”

I don’t know how much Toby Fox thought it through, but if he consciously built this way of thinking into the game, he’s way too much of a genius, and if the game just ended up that way unconsciously, he’s still way too much of a genius.

And while we’re at it, how well did ZUN (the creator of Touhou Project) know Nishida Kitaro? The fact that An Inquiry into the Good quotes a poem by the monk Saigyo, and that Nishida lost his second daughter, “Yuko” (幽子), four years before its publication, really snags on something in my mind.

I’m lost now. I don’t get it anymore.

Future work#

• So what on earth is Bondrewd from Made in Abyss?
• Maybe the time has come to answer the homework left behind by Kemonomyth.

Kemono Friends might be understood more accurately through Eastern philosophy and the metaphors related to it, but since my knowledge of those is limited, I’ll make do with the monomyth and its equivalents in the Western world. We are Westerners, and that is how we take it.

The philosophical principles at work here are Western interpretations. But if there were an Eastern way of thinking that explained all of this apart from the principle of virtue, that would be astonishing.