Full-comp'd!!

Hey guys. I finished full comp'ing sweet pool just now, so here's a post in case any of you guys want to ask spoilery questions. Not to hype it up unnecessarily, but on a purely personal level, this is def. my favorite Chiral game so far. My suspicion is that it's going to be a love or hate it thing, though.



There are six main endings, each with a different ED theme. This is the order I played them in (I'm labeling them with the song names for now, but feel free to come up with more interesting ways of identifying them, haha.) While the credits roll, the screen displays either the symbol for instinct or the symbol for reason, so I've also labeled them accordingly.

"the red road" [instinct] - This is what you get if you mostly pick instinct. Explaining it in detail would require going into all of the story's (startlingly well explicated!!) mythology etc., so for now, suffice it to say that Youji chooses to fulfill his destiny as something... other than human. He and Tetsuo procreate--after the last time they have sex, their flesh starts to literally melt together. They die as they fuse, and their bodies disappear, but in their place appears a "newborn" child who looks rather like Youji, except with red eyes, and who is supposed to serve as a new messiah of sorts for the flesh lump parasite-monsters that have been pestering people throughout the game. Kitani finds the child and decides to watch over it for now, and kill it with his own hands later, if that proves necessary.

"diving deep" [reason] - Not sure on the exact requirements, but one way to get this is by picking a wishy-washy mix of instinct and reason. For instance, I got it by picking mostly instinct throughout the game, and then reason in the final series of choices. In this one, Youji wavers between whether he wants to remain human or embrace being a monster. It generally follows the same arc as the aforementioned ending, but at the very end, he's unable to fully accept Tetsuo. Kitani kills both of them.

"The Hunger" [reason] - Hinges on a single choice. There's a scene where Makoto goes full-blown yandere and holds a box-cutter to Youji's neck, demanding that Youji choose either him (by nodding) or Tetsuo (by staying silent). Pick instinct, and Youji calls out to Tetsuo in his head, and the game proceeds. Pick reason, and Youji tries to appease Makoto by nodding, which ends up having the opposite effect. Makoto rapes him and eats him. All of him. But, weeks after cannibalizing Youji, Makoto is still plagued by an insatiable hunger that drives him to begin eating away at his own arm. In the final scene, he toys with Youji's bones and starts crying.

"Miracles may (Violin Version)" [reason] - The ending you get if you consistently pick reason (the above Makoto-related choice is the only one where you have to pick instinct). Youji wants to keep living with Tetsuo as a human being. Kitani shoots both of them on the school roof, and they fall off the roof into the pool below. Youji sacrifices his human existence to save Tetsuo's life (this does make sense in the context of the backstory). In the last scene, a few years later, they're living together, but Youji doesn't seem to leave the house, and his dialogue is all done with dashes instead of quotation marks. I think it's sort of left up to your imagination what exactly has happened to him, but they do make it clear that he shouldn't have lingered on like this, and he's going to vanish/die for good soon.

"VLG" [instinct] - Pick instinct for the Zenya choices (three or four in total) that come up once in a while.... you probably also have to pick instinct in the very first choice, before the OP, but that's just a guess. Zenya kidnaps Youji and holds him prisoner, and uses him as a sex slave while simultaneously videotaping him and and making him watch himself on the creepy TV that shows up in the official site's Unknown section (yeah, it's *that* room). It's implied that this will continue indefinitely, unless Youji manages to starve himself to death.

"Miracles may" [instinct & reason] - Presumably the true (?) ending. Once you complete the other endings, follow the same path used to get the violin ver. ending, and a final choice appears after Tetsuo and Youji fall into the pool. Pick reason, and Youji still decides to sacrifice himself to save Tetsuo, but he can't silence his longing to keep on living with Tetsuo as a human being, either. He desperately wants to live. Afterward--this is the only part of the whole game from Tetsuo's POV, I think--Tetsuo wakes up in the hospital and finds out that he's been comatose for several months. He doesn't remember what happened on the day he fell in the pool, and he doesn't remember Youji.

Five years later, Tetsuo is commuting back from college when something prompts him to get off at the train station one stop away from his--which is the station Youji always used to get off at. For a second, standing on the platform, he starts to remember his school days, and he's on the verge of remembering Youji... but the moment passes, leaving behind only a vague pain, and he gets back on the train and goes on with his life.

After the credits, the final CG appears: a shot of Youji in his student uniform, his old school bag on his shoulder, standing on the opposite side of the now-empty train platform. No text. I guess you could see it as a challenge to the player to decide what it means; I think it's simply a representation of what Tetsuo has lost and left behind.

The red road ending is probably my favorite. LOVED it. I'm not gonna lie, I had some waterworks going during that one and the final ending, among others. Oh, and in case you're wondering why Kitani keeps insisting on shooting Tetsuo and Youji, it's because (in everything aside from the Zenya and Makoto bad ends), the climax involves both Zenya and Kunihito dying. Zenya kills Kunihito, and Tetsuo gets provoked into killing Zenya, but Kitani sees the carnage without knowing what happened. On a side note, Kitani/Zenya is strongly implied in the game, but never quite stated outright.

One interesting note: almost none of the few CGs that got revealed very early on (including some that were used in the first promo video) appear in the actual game. Maybe they were concept art?