So I've finished Pragmata after seeing countless praises for it. And while the gameplay is good, the story just absolutely made me cringe so much that I feel like I was playing a different game from everyone calling this a "heart-warming, emotionally deep" story.
Since I don't know where to start, I'll start with my biggest problem by far:
Hugh and Diana's relationship is one of the corniest, most try-hard attempt at this whole dad/child story I've seen in a long while.
Let's focus on Diana. Everything about her is so transparently engineered to be as kawaii uwu as possible, to the point where I can't help but cringe at her antics. It actually gets to a point where I find her kinda annoying. It doesn't help that I find her english voice acting annoying, compared to her japanese one. I can't remember the last time a character banked this hard on being cutesy as pretty much their sole character purpose. Normally, I like cutesy, kawaii characters, but when you try to force them to me this hard, without much else to compliment it, I start to find it annoying.
There's one article I've read that summed it up well, "she feels more like a pet than a child, wide-eyed and beaming in every interaction".
This is made worse by her relationship with Hugh. Many outlets I've heard describe them as gradually forming a bond. Yeah, NO! They are pretty much father-child, best buddies from the get go (and this is from the guy whose only characterisation so far at that point is that he didn't trust the bots, and also that his friend just got killed by one and he's been attacked by one. There's no build up to their relationship. No friction they have to come through. No development whatsover. Hugh instantly opens up to Diana in the first few minutes, and throughout he opens up way too much that feels so unnatural, almost comedic.
For example, there's where they find a dinner table and Diana comments on how inefficient human's eating habit are. But then Hugh, out of nowhere, goes casually drops a bomb that he's an orphan and goes on this tangent about how talking to someone is a nourishment to the soul and I'm like "what?! what's with this conversation?" It just feels so unnatural, like the writers are forcing some esoteric bonding moment with this two. This repeats again later on when they find some holographic deer Hugh commented "must be a family", where Diana say something about them having 50% DNA, but then Hugh starts off another esoteric tangent about how he's adopted and family isn't about DNA, and I'm like "what the precedent for these esoteric lectures out of nowhere??". Moments like these are scattered throughout the game.
Hugh and Diana's dynamic fails to get that heart-warming fuzzy feeling that these kinds of relationship does because I can't get past how transparently forced the game is pushing them to me. Their relationship feels unauthentic and unearned. Honestly, I probably would have liked Diana a little bit more if the writers didn't try wayyy tooo hard on forcing this dynamic to me and just dialed down a bit on it.
Not only that, but the game tries to pull out emotional moments that it didn't really earn. For instances, early on in the game, they find themselves in a beach where Hugh promised to take Diana to earth. The scene is setup as this big emotional moment, atmosphere and fuzzy music and all that, kinda akin to that giraffe scene in The Last of Us. Only problem is that the game hasn't earned the level of bond progression and emotional pathos that a moment like this needed.
In another egregious example, midway through the game, Diana was injured and Hugh had to repair her. While injured, Diana has this whole lopsided delirium about how she's useless because she failed her purpose as a pragmata. The goal here clearly is to portray her as deep scarred child. But again, it comes off as unauthentic and unearned because the game has not done enough proper setup for this. Earlier on, she occasionally ask Hugh whether or not she's useful, and glee with that usual kawaii tee-hee thing she's engineered to do. But almost none of this were enough to make me buy into the idea that this is such a conflict and flaw in her character that she needed to overcome. Let's ask some questions:
How did this affect how she interacts with the world? Nothing...
How did this affect how she acts? Nothing... She's the same jolly child from beginning to end.
How did this affect her relationship with Hugh? Nothing... Like I said before, there's pretty much zero friction between them whatsoever.
So why would I buy such a character flaw if said flaw never manifest in anything meaningful in the story?
Their relationship boils down to basically Diana being overly kawaii and Hugh going "good job kiddo, you're so perfect" and pretty much nothing else. Like, I'm not looking for anything particularly dark but I mean come on. Everything about their relationship just scream "isn't she just the cuteesst, most perfect little thing? Like her, please.." to an absurd degree.
Now for the other 2 characters. There's nothing to talk about Hugh because he's way too much of a wet-fart of a character that he's just a few jokes away from being ethan winters level of boring. As for the antagonist: Eight, with her frankly terrible english voice acting (that sounded like she is theatrically narrating instead of talking) and lousy motivation, is another insipid character. Her shtick is that she's obssessed with purpose and misinterpreted Higgins dying words as kill everyone on Earth. Problem being that the game never delves into this further to make it a compelling character trait. Come to think of it, they play this whole "purpose" thing with Diana too, but just like with Eight, this never manifests in Diana in any meaningful way that makes it a compelling character confilt between the two. As such, the scene before the final boss just comes off as, again, cringe and unearned.
Funny that there's only 3 characters in this game, and I couldn't give a crap about any of them. Normally, the fewer the characters are in the story, the more leeway the writers have in fleshing it out.
In fact, same goes for a lot of the themes of the world in this game. Through collectible logs, it would occasionally drop themes of the dangers in automation, or how corporate over-survillance affect people. But again, the game never actually explores any of this beyond occasionally mentioning it and as such the world feels as hollow as it's main characters are.
So all-in-all, I'm just confused about the reception to the game's story. I can understand the gameplay reception, I've seen people call this story "compelling" or "deep". Some say it's kinda mid. Honestly, it's not even mid. It's just plain terrible and cringe, and I feel like I just had to get this off my chest. So there...