Omori: Quick Thoughts on Part of the Ending

The following blog post contains spoilers for Omori. Specifically, as the title says, it will talk about the ending, so you have been warned. It is a companion piece to my previous post which talked all about Omori, so it’s best to read that first if you haven’t. Unlike my previous blog post, this one won’t take days to read, so you’re spared from that, heh heh.

The past four weeks, my friend Rayven invited me to talk about Omori for one week, as a spoiler discussion live on Twitch in front of friends and anyone else who may have been passing by. I felt unprepared the longer I talked and I also got stage fright, so I cut our session short, though “short” in this case was almost 2 hours long. That, and I realized that as much as I loved Omori, it’s much better to have your thoughts organized and collected. The next three weeks (sorry again, Rayven, you only ever planned for one week), I brought an outline to each Friday night spoiler discussion, marked with copious notes and frames of reference for any viewers who were treating the Twitch stream like the audio-only podcast we planned it as.

I’m not going to go over everything we talked about, I only bring this up because, in the process of organizing my thoughts for the Friday of each week, I ended up accidentally figuring out my thoughts on the big emotional climax of the final battle against the titular Omori.

On my previous post, I mentioned:

Wow I really typed “heppens” and not “happens”, oof

It is no longer beyond me. It is time to finally talk about it.

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The “Duet” cutscene is one of the biggest emotional moments in the whole game, if not the biggest. I certainly thought it was very powerful when the fight with Omori drew to its end. However, in the months since, I had wondered why, exactly, Sunny wins the fight against Omori by playing the recital with his late sister.

The game itself definitely foreshadows it earlier, with Mari’s spirit in the piano room remarking that she and Sunny never did go to the recital, asking him if he wanted to play it after all, before Hero unintentionally ends their discussion. The game also remarks quite often that Sunny used to play the violin, with a photo in Basil’s album showing Sunny getting one for Christmas.

That said, the fight against Omori symbolizes Sunny fighting against the guilt of what he did to unintentionally end Mari’s life. With that in mind, I wasn’t quite able to pin down why exactly Sunny playing his part of the recital was his method of confronting that. However, it turns out I had overlooked a few key details that, when examined, fully put the duet into place as Sunny’s personal anchor of strength. I talked about my interpretation of the duet on me and my friend Rayven’s final Omori spoiler livestream, but I felt like it was worth writing down and recording.

I apologize in advance if all of this was already obvious and you end up rolling your eyes. To me, however, it is a revelation, because everything finally fell into place upon realizing all of this, so I had to write it all down. In no particular order:

1) Sunny receiving his violin is, chronologically, the first thing that is detailed in Basil’s photo album. I somehow missed that, even though the photo is from December, it takes place before the year everything bad went down and split the friend group apart. On a narrative level, this is a bookend, where the first thing that happens is brought back for the ending, as a way of bringing things full circle. Definitely smart, though that’s not all of it.

2) Sunny was gifted a new violin in part because Mari told the others that Sunny would “always sit in the room with her when she’s practicing the piano,” as Basil said in the final memory Sunny revisits on Memory Lane. As we know from Mari’s spirit visiting Sunny after the Black Space segment, Sunny was eager to play with her, but since Mari is a perfectionist, she would also lock herself away to practice the song over and over. She also says that keeping up with something isn’t so easy, most likely speaking for Sunny as he’s a silent protagonist. As a result, to contrast the first photo in Basil’s album, the last photo is of Mari and Sunny practicing together for their recital the next month. The description mentions that only “after some begging” did Sunny practice with Mari that night, heavily implying that by that point he resented it. Sunny’s frustration with the violin is tragic because...

3) The violin was a gift from all of his friends pitching in together. It was even Basil’s idea, to hammer in once again that Basil can’t seem to stop doing things for Sunny that seem nice at first but only end up hurting him. But despite that, ultimately, all of them worked very hard to get Sunny the violin because they all sincerely and wholeheartedly care about him. Sunny receiving his violin for Christmas is the last memory he basks in before going to the recital in Memory Lane because it contextualizes why he had to lock away the violin in the first place. It wasn’t just because Mari’s blood and hair was mixed in with it when she fell down the stairs, meaning it was evidence Sunny had to lock away. The other important thing is that that day was when Sunny began to stop seeing his friends, gradually, until he even stopped going to school. In his frustration that day, when he destroyed his violin, he also destroyed a symbol of his friends’ love for him.

The reason Sunny uses his violin against Omori in the final battle is because Sunny finally remembered, in full clarity, after suppressing it for so long, how much his friends loved him, and how much he loves his friends. He has been living in a fantasy the past four years, with shallow, faintly remembered caricatures of his friends, but now he recalls, and treasures, the real deal. So Sunny faces the personification of his temptation to die armed with his newfound will to live.

Sunny can’t do the recital by himself, because he is trying to remind himself that Mari is gone and is never coming back. After Omori, the personification of Sunny’s suicidal depression and guilt, tries to dare him to kill himself because it’s what he thinks he deserves, Sunny rises back up and the “play” option finally reveals itself. This time, the duet works, because Mari is there to play the piano with him. This is because while it is important for Sunny to see things as they truly are, there is no shame in the very real memory of someone giving you strength.

With all of this in mind, the duet cutscene is emotional because it is Sunny treasuring how much his friends meant to him, and how much he means to his friends. The duet they play isn’t actually the important part. What’s important is the memories we see unfold as the song plays, the song played with a gift bought with not just money but also the love of his friends. Sunny sleeping with Mari in her bed when they were little, him meeting Aubrey for the first time when his sister and neighbors find her crying on the sidewalk, Aubrey introducing Basil into the friend group, Sunny trying to play piano with Mari, hanging out with his friends at the park and at his house... Sunny, despite eventually becoming frustrated with the violin and having to practice for the recital, now fully remembers that he got the violin in the first place because to his friends, he means the world to them.

So Sunny plays at the recital he never attended in real life as one last tribute to them. Because they mean the world to him, too.

See, the way I interpret it, this scene isn’t merely Sunny reassuring himself of the mutual love between him and his friends. He is also preparing himself for the very, very real possibility that coming forward with the truth of how Mari died will permanently break apart the friend group he so dearly loves. He needs to give himself the strength to confess, and that strength can only come from his memories of the times they all spent together, memories he will always treasure forever.

A big part of the duet cutscene is Sunny, once again, saying goodbye to his sister. It’s implied, after the trauma of causing her death and staging it as a suicide, that Sunny never properly grieved for her. Mari is gone, and never coming back. He plays at this recital in his head, in part, to come to terms with this, but also to reassure himself that his memory of her will stay with him forever. I think Sunny is also coming to terms with how he not only has to say goodbye to his sister, but also, possibly, his friends. Grieving for Mari helps give himself the strength he needs to also prepare to maybe say goodbye to Aubrey, Kel, and Hero (I would say Basil, but a hidden post-credits scene implies that at least he and Sunny will remain on good terms).

In other words: Sunny is going to tell his friends the truth, something that will almost certainly shatter their friendship forever… because the truth is what they deserve. They deserve to hear the truth because of how much they mean to him. Whether or not they stay friends with him or not is beside the point--they have all suffered the past four years because none of them know what really happened. Giving them clarity on arguably the worst day of their lives is the single best thing he can do for all of them, even if it means they no longer want anything to do with him. If that really does happen, then like with his sister Mari's memory, he can still carry the memory of the good times he spent with his friends for the rest of his life. They inform why Sunny feels like he owed it to them.

The final moments of the game are Sunny coming forth with the truth to his friends in the hospital. The recital and the duet cutscene are Sunny giving himself the strength he needs to do this, by reminding himself how much he loved his time with them… and using that reminder to prepare for the possibility of having to end his time with them. That’s why it’s the biggest emotional climax in Omori, why the first thing Sunny does when he finally wakes up is cry, and why the game doesn't show us his friends' reaction to the truth. He knows it will be hard, but he needs to do this, and he knows it, regardless of how they will react. He’s never been more certain of anything else: 

These are the first and last words we hear from Sunny in the whole game for a very good reason.

And with that, I’m finally getting properly emotional over the duet cutscene for the very first time. Took me long enough.

(I started writing this yesterday in celebration of Sunny / Omori's birthday, July 20th, but had to do some touch-ups, so it only finished a day later. Oh well.)