You know, as I've read more mysteries and played more fancases, I've come to different conclusions as to what makes a mystery satisfying. I used to believe that it was the thrill at getting something right and being correct in the end, but I've decided that was more me egotistically wanting to parading about how smart I am than anything else. I think what I've come to really appreciate with mysteries and good fancases, and what I feel really makes them fun, is the sense of intellectual sparring. You typically have the odds stacked up against you in some way, and you have to continually think and puzzle your way towards some kind of solution, trying to figure out some hole that you can exploit, some sort of logical gap that your opponents might have missed, with the intelligent mystery creator then countering and rebutting your points. It's a sort of intellectual duel between the two sides. It can never inherently be a fair match where both sides fight to their full capacity- one side has all the answers and the other side is grasping blindly looking for some kind of solution, something to make sense of everything that is it front of them. But what it can be is fun. And I'd say that TotF is basically the funnest fancase I've ever played.
The thing about most fancases that tend to throw the player into an unwinnable situation and continually shut down any attempts at progress that makes them unfun is that I never really get the feel of a game that I get in a good mystery. A feel of sport. I get the feeling of a creator overly satisfied with their own cleverness continually shutting me down and having me hit into brick wall after brick wall. But that wasn't the case here. In Father, the whole situation was pretty hopeless from the start. The game knows it, and the player knows it. You get thrown into something that seems absolutely impossible to achieve and are told to achieve it. But this game allows you to actually gain momentum without actually damaging the helplessness of the situation. It doesn't require you to pick things that are necessarily logical or make the most sense- just figure out some possible way that you can spin the data so that things look good, and you can get an advantage. And that's exactly the way that something like this needs to be structured- you don't want the player to actually be able to win, that was never the goal. But you want them to succeed and have fun succeeding. And it was a blast figuring out any possible way to make things work in this case, no matter how far-fetched and how big of a stretch it may seem.
The fact is that the player can still get joy from being right, because the expectation isn't "Come up with the solution that is logically airtight and can't get shut down with some thought." Because that would just be setting the player up for a colossal amount of frustration, because there is no such solution. The expectation is "come up with some way to link the evidence that creates some sort of hypothesis, no matter how outlandish it is." And thus can be fun to be had, because there is the illusion that both parties are doing their best to fight, with the solver coming up with hypotheses, and the mystery creator pointing out the inevitable flaws in the logic and forcing the player to rethink things.
But even by itself this might not be much fun. It'd just be the player getting things wrong and the mystery creator correcting them over and over again. But this is why the way this whole case is constructed is so great- it gives the players the perfect illusion of momentum. Even though the player is continually having to stretch the data and come up with various creative and esoteric solutions, that doesn't matter because we aren't expecting to have to do more than that. So we can possess the delusion that yes, we actually are getting somewhere. That maybe all these things will link up at the end, and we'll be able to turn things around. We'll be about to "outsmart" the omniscient mystery deviser, find just the obscure hole and just the right reach to get everything to click together. Which is really what makes the game fun, and just makes the moment when we are inevitably shut down and relearn that, no, this was a rigged game from the start, all the more satisfying, instead of frustrating.
As Ferdie said (or implied), I think that a lot of us here on AAO are conditioned to think about things this way to some extent too. We're used to having to stretch and twist logic to come up with solutions, and this usually serves us well. So we get tricked into thinking that just because everything seems like a stretch, just because this whole house of cards could collapse at any moment, doesn't necessarily mean it will. Maybe this time, it'll all work out. And I think you exploit this mentality brilliantly.
And really the best part of all this is how adequately warned we are. The game tells us over and over again that what we are saying is ridiculous, that things don't really make that much sense, to the point that we are explicitly told by characters if you think like this you are inevitably going to lose. But due to a combination of the supposed win condition rewarding this kind of thought, and on some level it being what many of us are used to, it's easy to not pay it much mind. So we keep on keeping on until the rug is inevitably pulled out from under us and the house of cards falls apart, if I may mix metaphors. But it never feels cheap, because we were warned quite clearly that this was going to happen. So we either cheerfully kick ourselves for being had and getting suckered into believing that there was hope, or (if you catch onto the game being played) smile with satisfaction when the inevitable downfall occurs, knowing that it was coming from the start.
But I've talked so much about this game and I haven't even really talked about the story. And it's a great story. It's the story of a sad man that is, in fact, operating under the logic that we are so used to. That AA characters are typically used to, as Ferdie points out. That there is no way the basic, logical conclusion could just be the correct one. That there must be some complex solution to something that seems so simple. But instead of portraying them as a clever, heroic figure, as is typically the case in AA or in AA fancases, you portray him as a broken man. A desperate man. Somebody who is very clearly chasing phantoms in order to fill the voids in his life and in order to avoid having to admit his own faults. Which is really what this kind of mentality typically stems from in reality. In reality the conspiracy theorists aren't the heroes, they aren't the brilliant minds that just get it, while the rest of us sheeple flounder about in ignorance. They're people like Ares. People that so desperately want to be right that they'll concoct basically any scenario that they can think of, anything that might be logically possible, to not have to face the reality in front of them.
Area is just a fantastic character and he's fantastically written. It's a dark portrayal but a really realistic one, and Ares feels genuinely real and human. Apollo's interactions with him are equally completely understandable and sympathetic, and the dynamic between the two is very emotional and continually interesting to read. Apollo doesn't really feel like the Apollo in canon but he doesn't have to. He's a really entertaining character to read, and the way that his mentality essentially mirrors what is likely to be the player's own is phenomenal. Like the player, he goes in knowing that the odds are stacked against him, and maybe a bit skeptical that its winnable at all. But as he keeps making stretches he slowly (like the player, most likely) becomes convinced that there must be something else there. That maybe there is hope here after all, and maybe "third grade mystery solutions" will win the day in the long run. Only to get the realization, around the same time as the player does, that it really isn't that kind of game at all. The sort of self-delusion that Apollo ends up engaging in, only for it to be crushed at the climax, is on one level tragic but on another perfectly understandable, and one that the player can probably relate too very well.
And von Karma acts as a fantastic foil. She continually remains a firm voice of reason, and mostly avoids getting sucked into the leaps of logic and fantasy that Apollo (and the player) engage in. But she isn't villainized for this. She has her honor, sense of fair play, and remains a perfectly reasonable opponent. She is just operating on a completely different wavelength than Apollo is or the type of wavelength the game encourages us to be on- one more attuned with the real world and one where logic applies instead of just-so stories and hypotheticals.
I would say that the suspects kind of feel like they belong in a different game, however. They aren't bad characters per se- they entertained me and had some neat lines. But they clearly feel like they're from the AA/AA-fancase world, and really don't have the realistic touch that the members of the main cast have. This may have been by design, but it still kind of feels awkward and out-of-place. I'm not really sure how to feel about Thalassa- she had her human moments and was an interesting character all around, but I don't really feel like I spent enough time with her to connect on the same level that I connected with the rest of the cast.
Overall, I loved the way the story ended. It wasn't a happy ending- this kind of story is probably not going to have a happy ending per se. But it's a satisfying one- one that lets us know that perhaps things will, to some degree, end up working out. There might not be a happy-ever-after, but there could be a new beginning. And in this case, that's satisfying enough.
The final interlude just kind of feels awkward though. I feel like the Franziska scene wrapped things up so beautifully and had just the right tone that this last pretty tongue-in-cheek bit feels disruptive and kind of ruins the perfect concluding feel the story was going out on. Not to mention, it kind of feels a bit contrary to the main themes of the story. I feel like so much of the story was about how all these stretches in logic and arguments are simply the products of people deluding themselves and thinking that they are seeing things that are simply not there, and yet the story concludes with Phoenix and co. saying that nope, all those stretches were totally right and the conclusion that is basically impossible to prove and was a pretty huge logical stretch was correct all along! It just feels really awkward and I'd have preferred ambiguity in this case to a scene that I feel both takes a lot of the shine from the ending and really seems contrary to what the rest of the story was going for.
So, aside from some complaints that are minor in the long run, I really really loved this case. It's easily one of my favorites on AAO, and I think that its feature status and any awards it ends up getting are most certainly deserved.