madimpossibledreamer

gaaah lost draft! fiiine I'll draft it in Word instead. Take that!
Uhh. I think I said something about not thinking this was very spoilery up here, I think. That is, this is backstory stuff on the world of Innocent Sin Online, how it came to exist apart from the main timeline of the series, but I’m probably not going to ever talk about it specifically in story and in fact it might not end up being a plot point at all. The characters have bigger things to worry about, anyway, and they might just take the surface explanation (which isn’t the whole story but isn’t incorrect either). It does mention a few concepts that don’t explicitly show up until ~chapter four of Part One: Immortals or the CP (Rumor) posting on the board, but given that I mention in EVERYTHING that this is .hack inspired, I kind of don’t really consider that a spoiler. Viewer spoiler discretion advised, I guess. (In other words, proceed or not with your own discretion.) Also, really, really vaguely mentions important events in the Persona series. They’re really vague so hopefully that’s not a problem but if you’re allergic to spoilers, you might want to be elsewhere (perhaps catching up, all the more power to you).

~Dreamer~

One of the protagonists decided that they didn’t want the world to end, and they didn’t want to lose the ties they have. They begged for their wish to be granted, and (unlike in the main series), a power granted that wish.

Demons, Shadows, Personas, the Velvet Room, all the powers that had either protected mankind or sought to destroy it, every last drop of supernatural or otherworldly nature was pulled into the world of the game. Memories of the supernatural were gone. Events had, in a way, happened, but with any effect they might have had on the world taken away and with the disappearance of any memories relating to them, they might as well never have happened at all.

Other events, on the other hand, would never happen. SEBEC, while on the wane compared to the Kirijo group, did not disappear entirely due to the rogue actions of one branch. The Kirijo group didn’t participate in an experiment that might destroy the world. Many characters were able to live normal lives, without the fear of death, without saving the world.

They didn’t have the powers, though. They didn’t get to meet people they otherwise would never have met and become friends. Most felt hollow and ended up drawn to ISO to fill a gap they didn’t understand and couldn’t explain.

The world seemed to twist to accommodate them, to try, it seemed, to recreate the adventures and the lives that would no longer happen in the real world. The people we know to be from the Persona games, for the most part, met the people they’d met in real life in the Other world and had adventures they now could never have in real life, for it was now a world without power. Their personalities would change as they played in order to resemble the person they would have been, in the Other world. Even when the game changed without coding, though, there was only so much it could resemble the reality that had been.

The idea of Innocent Sin Online was put into the minds of a few game designers at Saeki Studios, a division of Saeki Entertainment, which was in turn a division of Saeki Electronics. They brought the idea to a few at Kirijo Entertainment, their sometimes-rivals-sometimes-friends in the corporate world, and Kirijo Entertainment largely funded the enterprise. Unlike our world, where Atlus is the game designer, in this one to make Innocent Sin Online a believable and natural follow-up to other beloved games (in other words, fit into the world in an innocuous, easily accepted way), it was Saeki Studios who put out titles such as Shin Megami Tensei and the Devil Summoner series. There were also a few light novels which were the source of ideas about Personas, but the Persona series idea was discarded (mainly because that would require making fictional a few people that really exist). What is probably unusual is that SEBEC portrayed themselves in the game (rather akin to what it would have been like if there really had been a rogue branch), as well as obtaining permission from the Nanjo Group (now largely defunct after its transition to the Kirijo Group) to show them in the game. Part of this is probably the subtle influence of the game, since most game studios include only fake corporations in their games, but ISO is highly unusual in many ways.

Inspiration came not only from the rich world abandoned by the timeline shift, but also from the natural creativity of the developers. It was a small, slowly growing group that actually cared about its fans and listened to input. It was a group passionately working for a world that they loved, and inspiration would come from the world of the game to the developer and back again in an intricate dance.

Yet for most, the game, Innocent Sin Online, is merely that—a game.

For some, the lucky (or unlucky!) few…well, it’s far more than that, and not all of them may even realize.