I liked the game. I felt the story took way too long to actually get going, and that the majority of the revelations and actual philosophical quandaries only just took place in the last 10 minutes, but i liked it as a whole.

My question is about how contradictory Sayuri seems at the end with her little speel. When she learns that the alternative to "rehabilitation" is death for the criminals, she said "I'd rather die than live again as another person"; essentially making the point that she won't be her anymore after the procedure. Valid viewpoint.
But then not long after, she goes on to say that she believes there is something innate in human beings that can never be erased, and that she wouldn't kill Azriel because she believes, despite him having no memory of anyone, that he is the same person he always was. Another valid viewpoint.

But does anyone else find this a complete contradiction? Or have i completely misinterpreted what she was trying to say with her latter point? Those two beliefs being held by the same person seems a bit paradoxical.

You have to remember that Sayuri has seen Delta-Six with erased memory before and despite that they soon became friends again. She believes that she and Delta-Six can still be close friends (he even saved her, despite the fact that he's memory had been just erased) and that he is the same person she knew before. Sayuri means that she is happy to who she and Delta-Six are and doesn't want to get new artificial (or original troubled) personality and memories.

You're wrong, except not where you think you might be.

> But does anyone else find this a complete contradiction?
Yes.

>Or have i completely misinterpreted what she was trying to say with her latter point?
You're correct.

> Those two beliefs being held by the same person seems a bit paradoxical.
No, it's not. People hold contradictory beliefs all the damn time.

> she said "I'd rather die than live again as another person"; essentially making the point that she won't be her anymore after the procedure. Valid viewpoint.
Out of context as a general principle, it's highly debatable. In her particular situation (recapture, brainwashing, and subsequent employment by an evil organization), it could have been valid, except it's proved wrong in the setting.

> she goes on to say that she believes there is something innate in human beings that can never be erased... Another valid viewpoint.
It's true in the setting, but no. 9001 times no. It's a terrible, monstrous, poisonous pop-culture lie. The suggestion that "true character" exists as a fixed, immutable property that people naturally gravitate to despite supposedly superficial layers of social conditioning is incredibly offensive.

I haven't posted this before, because I'm supposed to be the resident WadjetEye fan, but holy fuck. Up to that pile of bullshit flavored bullshit, Gemini Rue is a very good game (except that hallway pixelhunt puzzle - seriously, screw this puzzle with an Ingersoll Rand electric screwdriver). I love the fight scenes, I do not mind deaths (the game is about loss of control, so I don't find it objectionable that there are bad situations where I can't reload and take an alternative option). But the ending hurt. It's even worse than Harry Potter, if only because an otherwise good sci-fi adventure should be held to a higher standard than nonsensical shovelware.

So you agree that it was contradictory. So i was wrong...about people have an inherent defining characteristic?

She was moreso referring to a soul like specimen. Whether or not we contain a soul really can't be proven or disproven, so her believing there is something more to people than their memories and experiences is coming at the whole thing from a religous/spiritual perspective; which i don't find too ridiculous, especially since i feel it fit the storyline well.

But that just makes her previous statement that much more contradictory.

EDIT: Wow. That article is quite ridiculous. While some of what the man said is true, at least in it's fundamentals, he seems to paint people as if they're no more intelligent than sheep. This article would only be apt if we were robots that only responded to command lines.

I find them to be only superficially contradictory. Sayuri doesn't want to kill Azriel out of respect for who he was both before and after (and then after again). Even as an almost completely blank slate, he still saved her life. She's also not personally willing to get mind-wiped again, because even though her core would remain, the rest of her would be destroyed. She's not willing to sacrifice that core for anything other than her *original* self... which is gone now anyway since the director deleted all the files.

Basically, she's opposed to the partial destruction of the self. The self can't be completely destroyed, but it would still be *largely* destroyed. It's a tragedy to get mind-wiped, but it's not a complete loss. I think she's perfectly justified to lament such destruction. First of all, Cracked articles aren't exactly super-reputable sources on anything. This one, like virtually all of them, is just opinions. Secondly, research on twins (especially twins separated at birth) has shown that there are in fact a good number of things that are defined (or at least expressed) genetically, even some minor things like clothing style or food preferences. It's the old nature-vs-nurture debate, and you and the Cracked author seem to be taking the "all nurture all the time" route, which simply isn't likely scientifically.

Actually the Director didn't delete all the files. If you try to search his database after you have killed the Director, Azriel finds his and Sayuri's original personality files, but wounded Sayuri stops him from retrieving those saying that she and Azriel are better without them.

Souls are fictional. Do you change your mind, ever? That's a partial destruction of the self all right. I have been harping about roughly the same since at least 2007. I have a bunch of peer-reviewed articles from Nature and Skeptical Inquirer. The Cracked article, being pop culture itself, has more traction and conveys the overall idea better than scientific articles, even though it's partially wrong (for one, Campbell is a zero-byte spammer). These words do not mean what you think they mean. In fact, they mean nothing at all, and that artificial categorization is not relevant, because I'm working with a black box model here.

Thinking = electricity + chemistry. (Some of it may as well be genetic, but this is irrelevant). We the humanity practice various rehabilitative measures on criminals and the mentally ill. These measures observably work (although not as well as we want) on broad categories of people, including those who are hypothesized to be genetically predisposed to criminal activity. The game posits the existence of an immutable essential and fundamental nature (which we may as well call a "soul") which affects human behavior and cannot be changed by super awesome space-age science, so psychology, social engineering, and basically every force for progress may as well pack it up and go home. This runs contrary to utilitarian humanism, and I cannot approve. On an unrelated note, Primordia is awesome.

Really? Since one of the audiologs earlier talked about how there weren't any memory records anymore, I didn't even bother checking anything in that room other than the bleeding girl. I'll have to do that on my next runthrough. Still, it may simply be that she doesn't want to forget Azriel after everything he's done, and that he is more important to her than her old life. [citation needed] Wut? If you're taking the route of "any time any chemical change occurs in your brain, that's a partial destruction of self," then that's the worst strawman I've seen in ages. In that case, any sensory input of any kind would be the partial destruction of self. Perhaps you should consider redefining your parameters. Firstly, I really don't see how that article applies to my statement. It's just an anecdote about some ignorant students and then a lament about how scientists are all stupid. It doesn't even touch on the topic of instinct or genetic predisposition.

Secondly, the Center 7 program had only been working for a couple of decades, and even then the Director thought he had figured out how to manipulate the conscience (as he calls it). He simply wasn't finished by the time Azriel broke loose. Thirdly, the Director clearly acknowledges that the conscience can be affected by events, it's just the he hasn't figured out how to manipulate it with science... YET. So it's not necessarily immutable, it's simply not adequately researched. Considering how little we truly understand about how our brains function, that's not really an unreasonable position. If there is a soul (however you'd like to define it) it's almost guaranteed to be in the brain. The Director just didn't have enough science-fu (or gene-fu, or whatever) to mess with it.

Of course, there are some neurological processes that are simply not handled by the brain, and so attempting to modify them via the brain would always end in failure. Many of your reflexes are handled by your brain stem or areas further down your spinal cord, for instance. There have been babies born *without brains entirely* that have survived for substantially longer than expected because they still had enough of a central nervous system to sustain themselves. If the conscience is in your spine somewhere, the Director was just looking in the wrong place, that's all.

IIRC the earlier references meant that those files weren't on those computers. The game has two endings (although it just affects to dialogue between Azriel and Sayuri). You'll get one ending if you interact with Sayuri and other if you interact with computer after you have killed the Director.