Intention

I enjoy playing video games, especially indie games that have a deep story and make me think. One such game I’ve played in the past is called Gemini Rue, which, in a nutshell, is about two people named Azriel and Sayuri who have their memories wiped and are given new memories. When they have the chance to retrieve their old memories, Sayuri chooses not to in the end, because she believes that memories aren’t the only things that make a person. She also convinces Azriel not to because she believes she knows who Azriel really is, even if he doesn’t know his past.

Before I played this game, I thought people were shaped by their memories and their experiences, so the conclusion of this game made me think about what really made people who they were. The game has fascinated me since then, so I thought it would be interesting to change the ending, by stating the question: “What if Azriel had forced Sayuri to leave, and Sayuri really wanted to know her past?”

Context

It was simple enough to mimic the actual game, because during the ending scene, the player does not actually do anything other than click through and read the dialogue that appears. The player does not have control over the characters. Therefore, I could make the characters talk for as long as they wanted and say what they wanted. I made sure to pause some of the dialogue at some points for longer than others so it would seem more dramatic and like the original game.

Process

I watched the ending scene of the game multiple times as well as some earlier scenes to identify different pieces of dialogue that I could cut and paste into the ending scene. I decided to remove the voice acting because some of the dialogue I took came from different characters, so Sayuri was not the one who was actually saying some of the lines.

It was difficult to get the images to retain the same size, because I took screenshots from the game and cut certain parts of the dialogue from certain images to place into others. However, I also used some footage of the original game to retain the movements of the characters, so some parts of the video are jumpy, especially when the image sizes change. For the audio, I used part of a song from the original soundtrack because I thought the soundtrack fit with the theme of the video, even if the dialogue had been changed.

Reflection

I enjoyed watching the product after it was done, because I could see all the images I had edited flow together with the movements of the characters that were already in the ending scene in the game. I also thought that their actions and dialogue made sense when put together. I learned that characters in video games really do have their own personalities. It felt odd to change Sayuri’s goals and intentions, because I knew that her original character was not like that. After playing Gemini Rue and seeing her for who she was, it almost didn’t feel right to change the ending. If possible, I would try to add some of the voice acting into the video and make the image transitions more smooth by making the sizes more uniform. I had to remove the voice acting because only some of the original dialogue went with what the characters were saying, but if I had spent more time looking into other scenes of the game, maybe I could have found pieces of the voice acting that could go together to form the sentences I needed. I also would have added more complex dialogue by piecing words together than simply taking whole phrases from other scenes of the game.

Attribution

Gemini Rue. Joshua Nuernberger. Wadjet Eye Games. February 24, 2011. Video game.

Nathan Allen Pinard. "Bonus - Credits." Gemini Rue: Original Soundtrack. 2011.