some not!character propaganda: Mary from Ib for the Stranger. (spoilers for the game and it's endings)
She's a living painting trapped in a parallel world of a living gallery, the "Fabricated World", and wants nothing more than to escape into the real world. However, in order to do that, she needs someone to take her place and become a painting themselves, which would wipe the original person from existence. During the game, she pretends to be a real person that had fallen in like Ib and Garry. She plays at being human in an attempt to gain their trust and eventually to get one get one of them killed, which would allow her to take their place in reality. She even carries around a fake rose (which acts as the person's health in the gallery, both in terms of game mechanics and the story). The only way she's able to killed is if her painting is burned.
In the ending she is able to escape (if Garry dies and Ib is able to return to reality), "Together Forever", she appears in reality as Ib's sister. Ib cannot remember anything from the Fabricated World and now only remembers Mary as her sister, with Garry having been entirely erased from the real world. Even then, her shadow is noticeable more off than Ib's, which implies even if she replaced Garry in reality, she's still not entirely human.
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I played the Ib remake last night! I wanted to give my thoughts on it. Spoilers ahead if you haven’t played it yet!
To start, the few things I didn’t like about it.
I think I prefer the original character portraits compared to the new ones. The original had an art style that was reminiscent of a children’s picture book which I really loved. The new ones, while not bad at all, seem like exactly what you’d expect from a pixel horror game and it makes them a bit less unique.
They changed Mary’s theme, which I’m guessing had to do with copyright. I can’t think of another reason why they would change it, and while I do like the new theme a lot, it’s strange to hear a different song for her and takes a bit of the nostalgia factor away during the scenes where it plays. Assuming it was a copyright issue, that would mean this is at no fault of the developers, but I’d be lying if I said I prefer it this way.
Now, for the things I loved!
The game is beautiful. The game always has been ever since it released 10 years ago, but the remake just adds onto the beauty. Because it’s pixel art if you haven’t played the original game for a long time, you may not even notice a difference, but if you’ve played it recently or have played it multiple times, you will definitely notice that it looks even prettier than before. There’s a button they added that lets you zoom in, which lets you get a closer look at the art, which I used a lot!
The new puzzles were great. They were integrated into the other puzzles incredibly well, and the puzzles that were changed to fit the new ones were made even better in my opinion. If you hadn’t played the original, you wouldn’t be able to guess which were from the original and which were added for the remake.
You can talk to Garry whenever you want! There’s a button alongside the zoom and menu buttons that lets you talk to your current companions, and the dialogue changes very frequently. Every time you enter a new room and almost every time you interact with anything, Garry and Mary will have something new to say. I love those characters so much, so seeing so much new dialogue from them made me very happy, and I would talk to them every chance I got.
I’ve only played through it once so far, getting the Promise of Reunion ending, but just like last time there’s still lots of endings to get you to play it again. They may have added more puzzles in the extra dungeon you get on the second playthrough, but I haven’t played it yet so I can’t say. You get an achievement for viewing every piece of art in the game, and it looks like you might get a new portrait in the gallery for it as well. There’s lots of reasons to go back to it and do multiple playthroughs.
The story is the same, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I absolutely adore the three main characters and the beautiful story, and even though I have played the original many times before, seeing it again in a different way made me emotional for so many different reasons. The story itself is very moving on its own, but seeing it play out again in a new way for the first time after so long hit me kinda hard. I first played this game in the summer of 2012, which means that it’s been right around 10 years since I played it for the first time. So much has changed in my life in those 10 years. I completely grew up and am now an adult with a full time job and my childhood so far behind me. There hasn’t been many constants in my life throughout those 10 years, but one of them was my love for Ib. I would always find myself coming back and playing it at least every year or two, and would always keep up with the little bit of fan art I could find of it. Playing the remake for the first time brought me back to 10 years ago, playing the original for the first time, being completely enraptured in the story and falling in love with the characters, not being able to stop, needing to see where the story would go next. There is a good chance this is the last piece of official new media related to Ib we will ever get, so maybe when I finished the game it should have felt like goodbye, but as Garry said goodbye to Ib, he promised her they would meet again. I still have to get all the different endings and collect all of the artworks to get the achievement, but even when I do 100% the game, that doesn’t mean I will be done. Just like before, I think I will always return to this game, starting over from scratch and doing it all over again. I truly believe that 10 years from now, even though I will once again be a different person than I am now, I will look back fondly on both the first time I played the remake and the first time I played the original, and Ib will, in some way, still be a part of my life.
I love this game, and I always will. Thank you so much, Kouri.
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