LTSV - Lost & Found 4 (Patreon)

The game didn’t really get into how Violet felt about her marriage since she wasn’t an emotive person, at least not where the player could see, and it was impossible for the heroine to have a conversation with her without a male lead showing up to interfere. Still, she wasn’t a stereotypical outspoken bully. The game’s POV made it hard to see into any of the player’s motivations, but Violet’s thoughts and motivation were especially hard to interpret.  

The first ‘Lost Daughter’ was an indie game that took place in a fantasy high school setting with an overworld map and a few locations that the player could move between, although it took time to ‘go’ places and you only got sixteen hours in each game day.

Unlike most Otome games, where the player can direct the heroine’s responses in conversation, ‘Lost Daughter’ players had very little control over what Cecily, the main character, said and did. It was almost more of a visual novel game than a classic dating sim. Players could choose her class schedule, where she went in her off-time, and how she leveled her skills, but that was it—aside from a few fashion and cooking mini-games. Like the capture targets, Cecily had her own relationship meters and the challenge of the game was to make both halves of the target pair fall for each other at the same time, while keeping the other relationships platonic enough that they didn’t interfere with your target romance. The game was more about directing her experiences, as opposed to being her. 

Violet was not an aggressive antagonist. She didn’t confront anyone or instigate bizarre competitions like most antagonists in her genre might do, but she didn’t defend herself whenever someone pointed a finger at her either. The only really compelling reason for her to be Cecily’s bully was the fact that she was really the only person who had a clear motive to hurt the heroine and the fact that she always seemed to be conspicuously present as a slow escalation of terrible things happened to Cecily, which culminated in a mini-mystery game when the heroine finally got pushed down the stairs in a crowded hall. 

That said, the mini-game was hardly conclusive evidence. Cecily gets caught at the bottom of the stairs by either the male lead who has the highest affection with her or by Prince Andrei and his bodyguard, Bryn, who will show up by default. They only appear together if there is no male lead who has an affection level higher than ‘school friend.’ Whoever helps her will ask “Who pushed you?” and the player gets the option to select someone at the top of the stairs for her to look at. Worse still, the entire cast of named female characters is standing at the top landing because Cecily gets pushed during a passing period. The player could choose to have Cecily look at anyone standing at the top of the stairs and they’d wind up getting blamed by her savior. 

The game never confirms who the guilty party was because there’s no evidence, one way or the other. Cecily was facing away from her attacker when it happened and will insist that she isn’t even sure that she’d been pushed at all. You can’t question anyone because there were no witnesses. This is a situation where the player knows something that Cecily doesn’t because the player could see a hand reach out and push her in the cut scene where she fell. Sadly, the hand had no distinguishing features. All the girls have the same manicures and uniform sleeves. None of them wear distinctive jewelry because it’s against the dress code. There is really nothing for the player to go off of.

If the player doesn’t look at anyone, or takes too long to choose, then Violet gets blamed by default because Andrei will come out of nowhere (if he isn’t already present), see Violet among the girls at the top of the stairs, and make the accusation over Cecily’s objections. If he was the one who saved Cecily from falling then he’ll accuse Violet no matter what Cecily says or does. As a result, Violet almost always ends up being sent to in-school suspension for the rest of the academic year and subsequently does not show up for the School Fete, where side conversations hint that she’s already been quietly expelled. 

In the ‘canon’ route (which, according to the wiki, is Andrei’s ‘Good’ end) Violet gets accused of pushing Cecily down the stairs, but spends the rest of her senior year in ‘supervised study’ rather than a suspension so she can appear at the School Fete for graduating seniors and their guests where Andrei will publicly break up with her in front of everyone's parents in an attempt to pressure his sister, the Crown Princess, to help him officially annul the engagement. 

The annulment can only occur in a route where Violet is both accused by Andrei (but not Cecily) in the stairwell incident and the player made choices that resulted in the Crown Princess attending her brother’s Graduation Fete in place of their father. The Prince Regent refuses to entertain his son’s objections to the marriage, but the Crown Princess seemed willing to listen if Andrei made enough of a scene she also had a say in her half-brother’s marriage. If she’s the one present at the School Fete to represent the Royal Family then the annulment takes place and Andrei gets his Good End for the first game and you see a cutscene of him dancing with the heroine at the Fete, wearing a real smile for the first time in the whole game. 

Of course, Mira could attest that getting all that to happen was easier said than done. Andrei might have been the ‘easiest’ romance target, but his Good End required a very specific playthrough that was too easy to screw up. It was so hard to manage that, for the longest time, people thought he might not have a ‘Good End’, but then someone got into the game files and verified online that cutscenes for it did exist. Mira herself had gone through fourteen save files and had to play with the game wiki open on her phone by the computer just to get there. Normally, she would have just read the wiki to find out what happened in the hard routes, but the Lost Daughter wiki was notoriously light on spoilers for the cutscenes and epilogues so she had to play the whole thing through to make sure she hadn’t missed anything. 

The epilogue in Andrei’s Good End shows a conversation between Andrei and Bryn talking about how Violet’s family has married her off to the ugliest man in the Capitol and even disowned her because no one else in polite society wanted her around.

Even so, Violet appears again in the sequel as ‘Violet Priestly’ if you continue to play the Andrei route. ‘Lost Daughter 2’ follows Cecily’s time in university after she graduates early in the same format as the first except with a much better production budget and more mini-games thanks to the runaway success of the first game. 

At first, the game lets the players think ‘Priestly’ is the name of the family Violet married into over the summer break, but you can unlock special Violet-specific cutscenes in the sequel if you enter the same major as her, which reveal that ‘Priestly’ was Violet’s mother’s maiden name and that she didn’t get married, despite the rumors going around school, and which lends credence to the rumors going around about her being disowned by her family, but Violet neither confirms nor denies it. She won’t talk to the heroine unless she has to and it’s hard to blame her for that.

If you didn’t play the Andrei route then Violet doesn’t appear again after the first game and, if asked about her, Andrei will make a bitter offhand comment that Violet has a private apprenticeship somewhere or is otherwise occupied at the palace supporting her future sister-in-law. 

‘I must be in the timeskip between the first game and the sequel,’ Mira realized. If she had just narrowly avoided marriage into the Fenby family then she had to be in a world where the first game followed the canon route. Violet was on her own, either cast out by her family or close enough for outsiders to think so. 

Fortunately for Mira, she now knew that the main cast’s peer group had a major misunderstanding about Violet’s financial situation in the Annulment Route, one that even Violet herself seemed to have shared before her death. The game implied that her dowry was a one-time cash settlement, but that wasn’t the case. Violet was independently wealthy and had multiple incomes. 

In the game, if Cecily reveals to the others that Violet was not married then the rest of the cast assumes that she got the money as a severance payment from her father and then foolishly blew the entire sum on her college tuition at the most elite university in the nation rather than compromise her standards by attending a cheaper school somewhere else where no one knew her.

If the game ever got into the reality of Violet’s circumstances then Mira had never unlocked that path nor had she seen anything about it on the wiki, but this did serve as a reminder that she should not rely solely on what she remembered of the game to plan her next steps.

The books she read, the plays she watched, and the games she played didn’t always tell Mira the entire truth about her future. There was no such thing as a reliable narrator, after all. Every author had their own biases and motivations in storytelling so not even the main character’s strongest opinions could be relied on as fact. Mira could only really trust the broadest strokes of the narrative as it pertained to herself–which was good because Violet died in many, many of the possible endings of ‘Lost Daughter 2’ that she appeared in.

Death by itself was more of an annoyance than a threat for Mira and she wasn’t attached enough to this world or the people in it yet to give the possibility more than a passing thought. The things that happened immediately before death were the things she needed to worry about. Dying in bed of old age was one thing. Being murdered by slave traders, falling overboard in the middle of a storm-tossed sea, or being locked in a dungeon to starve was quite another and Mira didn’t plan on doing any of that. 

Mira’s most pressing problem, currently, was that she hadn’t played the third game. 

‘Lost Daughter 3’ was still in closed beta at the time she died and she hadn’t managed to snag an invite code, despite having contributed to the Kickstarter! 

“Fuck me,” she groaned and covered her face with a pillow.