I’ve never been so emotionally toyed with by a fish sandwich.

When I saw Uva made that stupid sandwich for John, with twenty signs pointing to her dying by the end of the chapter, I just knew I could never use it like any other consumable item. Look, maybe this is just one of my unhinged tendencies. Whenever I play through Pokemon’s Unova region, no matter the context, I never use any of those Fresh Waters, each a punchline the gym guide’s silly little jokes, or even buy extras that would meld into the “canonical” stash. But that sandwich, representing the blissful life John will never have, the woman who couldn’t profess her love to him until it was too late, was a memory that felt too powerful to wipe away like any other health item.

On that note, I initially wrote off those save quotes as intentionally indulgent filler, like “oh what if your memories were someone else’s really makes you think”. But even without any explicit story presence, they hint at the overall discussion of memories and the journeys we take to make them. You never get to stay in one place forever, so eventually the little events along the way, no matter how silly, are all that will be left of the characters cast aside by the story. The game’s own quirky side mode RPG, narratively, starts as a promise to interact more with the kids of Potcrock Isle until Sam is exiled, but after a while meets more kids because of their shared interest in the game.

I mention this because games and this sort of self reflection around them come up in this game’s narrative a lot more than I expected going in. The side mode RPG classes are echoed both by the New Dam City leaders’ knight and princess relationship, and the elders of Ester City having nerdy alter egos they don as they help you. I didn’t think much of it until the end, where due to some time loop shenanigans, everyone in Ester City fades away, as they would have if not for their one day in the city always repeating. The mainish antagonist Professor Solomon questions Sam on whether it’s worth anything to take the advice of what were basically illusions in her repeated effort to defy his end plan. And for fairly obvious reasons, those inhabitants of the city, and everyone in this game are just illusions to me too. Considering most people take it as a given that media can influence you, I wasn’t expecting to be asked across the screen whether any of that even matters when it’ll inevitably slip out of my mind for the last time.

But, well, behind the digital puppet show, a bunch of 0’s and 1’s remained unperturbed once two characters shared a fish sandwich. So my answer’s been laid bare.