so i was scrolling through the minos prime page when i saw this Minos Prime says "Useless! after each restart, implying that he knows you have died to him"
Does this mean canonically V1 can rewind time or something? or am i reading too much into this? probably the latter, but if this isn't some throw away line I want to know what the lore implications are? https://ultrakill.fandom.com/wiki/Minos_Prime the quote is in the trivia 5th or 6th bullet point. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Anon132009 (talk) 09:37, 21 July 2023 (UTC); edited 09:40; edited 09:41
- Prime souls (and MDK&O) have unique barks for restarts because all their other recorded voicelines are for either their attacks or their monologues, and they need to do something other than force the player to wait out their full intro again (and having them just silently appear there would be awkward and unimpactful). Gabriel doesn't do this because his taunts already make enough sense as respawn lines, and enemies that don't speak just speed up their intros. The statement in the trivia section is certainly An Interpretation That Can Be Made, but like restarting in general it's strictly a gameplay concession just by the nature of trying to tell a story in a video game.
- Games that can pull off canonizing the player's ability to restart typically have to be written around canonized restarts, and Ultrakill has otherwise made little indication that this is the case. "The machines plunge into Hell out of desperation for survival" doesn't jive very well with "Actually this one little bastard has a magic button that lets it retry over and over again" thematically, and Terminal Data 02 directly states that machine mortality is a problem for the terminals' blood sport ecosystem that The Cyber Grind serves to circumvent.
- Despite these protests, the trivium stays because it appeases the redditors, and I tolerate it until the day I have the energy to replace it with something similar but more useful. Ideally, it would look like all that shit I just said but prettier and more concise and with citations, but it's hard to make "canon restarting conflicts with Ultrakill's story thesis" digestible for a mass audience and it'll save effort to wait until the game's finished and the full version of the story is in our hands before we start arguing about it. DevNode27 (talk) 10:48, 22 July 2023 (UTC)