Idealistic and a semi-transcendentalist piece. Disliked the messaging and weird ideological conception - obviously rife with anti-vanguardist policy, but the conclusion cuts off it's nose to spite the face; fundamentally it re-inscribes the passivity of revolutionary liberalism back onto what it itself acknowledges as a violent process. It feels as if it cannot reckon with tools necessitated in a struggle, and is therefore always in a process of deferring responsibility/violence (both in alterity and futurity, to the other, to the space beyond). Caught in this contradiction - at once acknowledging the revolutionary nature of struggle and denying the struggle of revolution - it becomes a self effacing process; a bloodless revolution, a tenth of capitalism already killed - by what? what wounds were necessitated by such a process? The text cannot interrogate it - mysticising it into an ordinariness of mythical nature, a messianism that has already happened and yet is still to come - by whom? why not you, the nukes at your fingertips? In a certain sense, then, it forgets what cannot be forgotten - that which must be forgot in order for anything novel - the violence of forgetting that must be expelled and held. The ordinary is valourised without ever being encountered, the process left open, undetermined (idealised) and therefore endlessly critical, without any idea of what itself can do.
sorry this is gibberish. i just didn't like this very much.
the art is cute tho ^x^

Idealistic, to a fault.

I'd like to go completely up my own ass for a second and quote myself in a review I wrote for Citizen Sleeper:

It’s a curious little foible I’ve noticed in a lot of these smaller-scale games with gestures towards socialist thought; pragmatism is dedicated exclusively towards villains, and idealism is dedicated exclusively towards the (virtuous) player character and their (morally unobjectionable) allies.

Given how often this keeps cropping up, I'm thinking of making it something of a hard, observed rule, like Start-to-Crate. It really is everywhere, and The Good Weapon is no exception. It's revealed right at the end of the narrative that the twenty nerve clusters that need to be nuked to defeat the capitalism allegory (here named VIGIL) are actually only eighteen in number; regular people have already destroyed two of them without the help of nuclear ordinance. Wake, being a pragmatist — doubtless why she turns heel — had planned to use two hundred-thousand nukes to carpet bomb the entire planet in the hopes of probably eradicating VIGIL. You, however, manage not to fall into a bloodlust once you gain control of the titular weapon. Instead, you uncover the option to identify and precision strike the remaining eighteen clusters in order to liberate the planet. It would, effectively, be a bloodless revolution that could be over and done with in under forty minutes. However, the player character notices that two of the clusters were killed by "ordinary people". They didn't need nukes. Since the conflict started, these ordinary people have managed to take out about ten percent of the capitalist allegory; 10% of communism has been built. The player character comes to the conclusion that because two clusters have been already killed without nukes, none of the nukes should be fired. Ordinary people should continue to fight VIGIL on their own, and kill off the remaining eighteen clusters by themselves. As for you, you're going to go practice self-care. You and your hot girlfriend named Sleep are gonna go hang out and let the other people fix the planet for you. You could say alongside you, if you're feeling generous.

This is a total resignation, not a triumph. VIGIL still exists. VIGIL is still actively hurting people. VIGIL is still the number one cause of just about every single problem in the world. I cannot think of a single fucking reason why you wouldn't launch the eighteen nukes into the exact spots that they needed to go. Sure, launching the entire stockpile is going to end up murdering the world, and the game even says that it's not guaranteed to work — it actually would have, given the later reveals, but that's besides the point — but there's no presented downside for only using a couple of them on the spots where the clusters are guaranteed to be. If it was specified that the clusters were tucked away under major city hubs, and blowing them up would cause untold civilian casualties in the name of "liberating" them, that'd be a different argument. But we're ultimately given no reason to expect that these surgical strikes wouldn't work, and even further that they wouldn't be the best possible option.

Mark Twain once wrote about how there were two Reigns of Terror in France. The first, and most commonly known, was as swift as it was brutal. It was a terror fueled by passion, by rage, where the downtrodden killed and killed and killed in retaliation for all they had suffered. Heads rolled, the streets ran with blood, and while their goals of abolishing the monarchy were met, it was at an incalculable cost of innocent lives. But the suffering of the revolutionaries that brought them to that point, Twain argued, was the second terror: the slow death, the burning at the stake, the starvation, the cold, the humiliation. To fire two hundred-thousand nukes in the name of overthrowing VIGIL would be the first terror. To walk away from it all and allow VIGIL to continue in its harvest of humanity would be the second. To fire exactly eighteen nukes at the nerve clusters without any named consequence would not so much be a terror as it would be a complete and utter victory for humanity without a single string attached.

I'm harping on this hard, but that's largely because I think it's standing on the line between an oversight and a fundamental disagreement between myself and the author. If the point to get across is that slaughtering innocents in the name of the greater good is indefensible, that's a good argument; if the point to get across is that other people will eventually beat capitalism for you, so just chill out and you won't have to get your hands dirty, I think that's a terrible argument. Whichever way it falls turns this from a piece I'd recommend to an ideological dumpster. Ultimately, I don't know. I'll have to let it hang over my review like the Sword of Damocles.

It's unfortunate, because I do dig a lot of the individual elements of this. I liked the prose; the parenthetical sentence fragments that keep interrupting other sentences seem to be acting as intrusive thoughts, which was a little annoying, but mostly interesting. The little bloop sound effect that played whenever VIGIL talked served as a pretty good way to make it feel voiced and otherworldly without actually having voice acting. The art is mostly good, as well — certainly head and shoulders above a lot of its contemporaries.

But, this being a visual novel, the writing is always going to be a sticking point. I can't say with any real degree of confidence that what's written here works. I'd like for it to. It's certainly in need of a second draft, if nothing else. If the goal really was just to push the idea that you ought to discard revolutionary power and zeal and hope that the world sorts itself out, then The Good Weapon is bad. If it's just a sloppy way of saying that the ends don't justify the means, then The Good Weapon is pretty alright. Which one you believe will depend on how fair you feel like being towards the author.

Considering how the plot is about using nukes to bring about communism, this might be the first Posadist video game.