Thanks a lot for writing the summary, RockJock. I hope people are willing to give the route a shot after reading this and knowing that very little time is spent indulging in the characters wallowing in misery, and more exploring Argos' character and the game's ongoing subplots and mysteries. I'd like to make a couple observations:
1) In "As You Are, I Once Was", yup, it's not intended to be a perfect parallel with the start of the game, you meet the next master that will take over the role after the MC, but you're not the old man at the start of the game. It's not a time loop.
(I named my Ruthless run character with a J so I don't know if they do this for every letter of the alphabet or not, haha)
I hate to disappoint you but that's not the case. That said, it's a pretty kickass idea and I may have to steal it.
(If you're ok with it, of course. Shouldn't take more than adding a python dict with the key being the first character in the MC's name and the values being a list of two or three names.)
2) I don't think you touched on this but for the people who DON'T want to play the routes, the next master in this ending is given a sprite, but it's basically a featureless gray character wearing jeans and a shirt that wouldn't look out of place in a YCH auction. We went with that because even if he's not the main character... you never know, someone might get the idea that it's the canon look for the MC, so we were as vague as possible.
3) In the "Welcome to Minotaur Hotel" ending,
They are still there, but the hearth has gone out, and Asterion apologizes for the delay. We don't hear words from or see sprites of anyone but Asterion at this point, though, who apologizes for keeping everyone waiting.
Don't know if it's clear in the summary but I'd like to emphasize "you don't hear words from or see sprites of anyone but Asterion" here. Everyone left and Asterion's completely lost it. I heard someone got this as their first ruthless ending, and that sucks because it's probably the bleakest and the closest to what people would expect from "bad ending in a visual novel".
4) On the subject of Nikos' religion,
I think just that it's a little blink-and-you'll-miss-it that Argos/Nikos and his family are some flavor of Catholic, since they specifically say grace before they eat.
Catholics are not the only denomination that say grace before dinner. It's more likely that Nikos would be Eastern Orthodox rather than Catholic, being born in Crete and all. Although I'll concede that, considering the majority of the team was raised Catholic, the way the scene plays out may not be the most accurate to how a Greek family would say grace before a meal.
And about Hermes being John the Baptist,
Mama and Bampas... and the priest back at the village, too... they all told me He, the one I should not mention ((Hermes)), even knew the Christ. They said He was John the Baptist. That is had always been Him.
So uhhhh, in this universe Hermes was a very famous preacher and figure in Catholic mythology.
We're not the first to make the connection, scholars have compared the symbology between the two figures for a long time. I'm not the theology expert in the team (that would be Kangarube, who IIRC wrote that line), but the basic gist is that both figures act like messengers to the gods and psychopomps, and there are similarities between rites performed to Hermes/Mercury and the blessing of holy water. It's interesting to read into.
5) To the people who didn't play it, there's a credit sequence at the end of the ruthless route endings, with either Asterion playing the lyre, Argos playing the trumpet, both, or neither, depending on your ending.
There's a song you can play in the music menu, "Seikilos Trumpet", by Jake, which starts playing as the endings are about to wrap up. I tried to time it so the vocals start as the credits begin to roll. It's one of the nicest pieces of music we received for the game and I didn't want a recap of the Ruthless route for people who didn't play it to not acknowledge it. We'll be using it for the main quest's ending, too.
And as a general comment, thank you all for taking the time to dissect a piece of content that we knew wasn't going to be a lot of people's cup of tea but still made the game more enjoyable for the small fraction of people that played it. The game wouldn't be complete without it and I'm happy to see it was effort that didn't go to waste.
