「アエネーイス」の引用が鍵
“Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.” This quotation from Virgil’s the Aeneid appears half way through the opening movie. It is not difficult to imagine the author of Raggio di Sole Nostalgica constructed the entire game around this quotation.
Aeneas has fled from the burning Troy and has reached the far away shore of Carthage. Then unexpectedly, he finds a mural depicting the heroes who had fallen in the Trojan war. One translation of his sorrowful cry reads: “the world is a world of tears, and the burdens of mortality touch the heart.”
In Nostalgica, the story is set in a distant future. The world is a post-apocalyptic pseudo-utopia governed by super-intelligent artificial humanoids called Methuselahs. Methuselahs have overthrown human dominion in the great war fifty years before, and is now running the world peacefully and wisely. During the great war, all historical records after the dawn of the digital age (early 21st century) had been lost. So, the humans in this age are strangely emasculated, yet mostly happy with the status quo. There are sporadic resistance by dissidents but they cannot pose any real threats except for occasional disruptions in one of the local Methuselah headquarters called the Ark.
In the opening scene,[1] the main characters find a pre-war humanoid called Cinema, whose only function seems to be recalling and recommending ancient movies (c.1970s). This apparently benign function plays the key role in the course of following events, which ultimately leads to the recovery of the entire historical records. Nostalgica is a very fun game to play, with beautifully drawn heroines and well-written scripts. There are some surprisingly engaging battle scenes, even. I am unfortunately not very familiar with the movies discussed in the story, but I can imagine funs of old movies would especially enjoy playing this game.
In the Aeneid, the hero finds respite and comfort in the city of Carthage and the love of Queen Dido. However, eventually he rose again to follow his destiny on to Italy, where more bloody strife and unprecedented glory await him. Similarly, at the end of the saga, the human race is once again starting to go forward. Ultimately, it is mortal humans that drives history on, and it is the memory of the past that gives humanity not only sorrow but also the will to face the future.
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[1] As a further evidence of the author’s erudition, the first utterance by the protagonist is a paraphrase of E. Moore as discussed in Wittgenstein’s “On Certainty”.