SANABI Playthrough: A Former Soldier's Revenge for His Stolen Daughter, and the Truth Behind It

The story begins in the yard in front of the protagonist's home. His daughter wants to play adventure, so the player works through the tutorial as a member of an expedition squad led by "Captain Daughter." Once the adventure game winds down, the daughter still hasn't had enough, so next they play at talking over walkie-talkies.

He successfully makes contact with his daughter, who is inside the house, but Captain Daughter reports that "there's a really big clock in the house." The protagonist has no memory of putting anything like that there. The word written on the clock is "SANABI." The panicked father rushes toward the house. The player cuts the scene there without saying outright what the clock really was, and explains that this is where the man's tale of revenge begins.

The protagonist chases information on the mysterious entity SANABI and sets out to crush the organization that sold SANABI its bombs. After he goes on a rampage, a boss with a turret attached to its head appears.

The player cites wire action using the protagonist's mechanized arm as one of the game's main attractions. Nearly every action involves the wire: hooking onto ceilings and walls to move around, or firing it into enemies to deal damage. The first boss is essentially a tutorial: you dodge beams, close in with the wire, and drive the wire into the boss. The player says that "it's pretty tough until you get used to it, but when you pull off a move exactly the way you pictured it, it feels incredibly satisfying."

The Turret is defeated, but no useful information is gained. Then a subordinate from his military days shows up and offers him a mission involving SANABI. The protagonist, who had once left the military behind, ends up returning to service.

The setting moves to the special city of Mago, owned by the colossal conglomerate the Mago Group. Three million residents of this city have vanished, and SANABI is presumed to most likely be at the center of it all. The investigation team that arrived first has been almost entirely wiped out, and the protagonist joins up with Mari, a hacker and the sole survivor.

Right after that, the two are attacked by a worm-shaped crusher. This crusher devours every structure in the city, periodically recharging as it continues its destruction. You might assume it's sabotage by SANABI, but it apparently is a machine built by the Mago Group itself, and why they made such a thing remains a mystery.

The fight progresses in stages. First you chip away at the point on its snout, then Mari finds a set of explosives in a container and goes with a plan to feed them to the crusher to weaken it. According to the player, however, this didn't work very well. The crusher activates its auxiliary power and shifts into its second form. Even so, the way to fight it is simple: you leap up using floating containers, apparently being moved remotely by Mari, as footholds, and attack its weak point from the air. Repeating this while dodging attacks brings it to a halt, and finally you strike near the fishhook Mari has put out to reel the crusher in. The original plan was to finish by hoisting it up, but the crane apparently can't take the strain. The player jokingly relates that they "half-listened to Mari's nagging and shut her up."

Having made their way to the center of the city, the two come across a huge number of crushers in the factory district. Here the player speculates that the destruction of the city might also be happening within Mago's own plans. As for Mago's CEO, the player remarks that he has a face they feel they've seen somewhere, but that he gives the impression of someone who has made many people suffer.

SANABI is most likely in the city's upper levels, and the two planned to ascend on a train that moves vertically through the city. But enemies emerge from the cars, and it becomes clear they were being lain in wait for. Separated from Mari, the protagonist fights while receiving remote support.

The opponent in this battle is protected by a shield, so ordinary wire attacks don't get through. The enemy fires homing missiles, and the strategy is to lure those missiles into the enemy's shield. The fight is divided into several phases, and more minor enemies appear with each phase. The player praises it as a battle you can enjoy as it gradually heats up.

At this point the player explains the controls for the PC version. You aim the wire with the mouse and fire it with a click. It will stick to pretty much anything except surfaces where wires are prohibited. During wire action, WASD adds a bit of acceleration, Shift gives a burst of speed in the direction you're moving, and Space retracts the wire. After latching onto an enemy, you can launch off in any direction you like. That's about all you can do, and the player sums it up by saying that "basically, all you need to think about is where to grab and how long to hold on," adding that you can enjoy wire action with simple controls and that it turns out to be surprisingly nimble once you try it.

Once the shielded enemy is defeated, a Heavy Turret appears next. Luring missiles into this one doesn't do any damage, and it keeps firing missiles endlessly. Mari comes up with a way to break the deadlock: use the "Neo Data Blade," a dubious sword Mari picked up on the black market, to stop the Heavy Turret. But a hidden security robot appears and the protagonist is restrained. In the end, he destroys the security robot too and makes it through this situation.

Giving up on traveling by train, the two head to a car factory in search of a flying car, but most of the cars have been scrapped. Then an invisible enemy attacks: a sword-wielding piloted robot known as "Justice."

Justice is a machine with advanced stealth capabilities that stays hidden until the moment you come within its striking range. The player says that since you really can't see it at all, it's quite a formidable opponent. Its main body has a defense system, so simple direct attacks with the wire don't work, but destroying the three cores around it makes it possible to attack. The flow of the fight is to repeat this procedure and wear it down.

Justice was apparently originally something like an "invisible hero" who quietly solved problems without anyone knowing. But investigating after the battle reveals that the Justice fought here was a fake created by copying a personality, and that Mago had been researching illegal technology. A scene in which Justice appeared to take his own life was actually a disposal carried out by another Justice. Justice seems to be based on clones or something similar, and can apparently be mass-produced as disposable units. The player speculates that it may have been research intended for military use, explaining that it was confidential technology that could potentially allow a single company to overthrow the state, and an illegal technology that would get them shut down if the government found out.

After whittling down Justice's durability completely, the player views Justice as something like a test subject produced during the research process. Perhaps because they pushed too hard on correcting the personality, only a faint residue of the original personality remained, and controlling its thoughts apparently didn't go well. Based on this result, Mago would go on to pursue research into installing personalities in machines rather than correcting the personalities of enhanced humans.

At this point, Mago had issued a "Final Solution Protocol" across the city. Because information about a certain project may have leaked outside, the protocol had reached the stage of ordering all staff in the city to promptly kill themselves, and then melting down the nuclear reactor to erase all traces. The player describes this as "nicely deranged." Though afraid of the reactor meltdown, the protagonists head for the upper levels in pursuit of SANABI.

Here the player shares their thoughts on the game as a whole. They started it thinking it was a game whose appeal was the action, but once they got into it, the story turned out to be surprisingly interesting. With its appealing portrayal of the characters and an abundance of foreshadowing scattered throughout, they say it gets richer the more you play. Sci-fi works often leave their foreshadowing hanging, but the player praises this one for carefully paying it off. On the other hand, they add that it would be perfect if only the quality of the translation improved.

While steadily climbing the central factory district, the protagonist is addressed by a mysterious machine with the number "17287" and, for some reason, treated as hostile. Afterward Mari finds a flying car, and they force their way through a collapsing disposal shaft, punching straight up into the upper levels in one go. They go so fast they're sent flying. Riding a flying cargo train toward the main stronghold, the two are granted a brief respite.

Having detected the risk of a reactor meltdown, the military finally mobilizes its forces. What appears is the military's giant weapon, "Firebird," and although the protagonist is supposed to be a member of the military too, it attacks him regardless.

In the battle, you flee using the scattered pieces of the cargo train as footholds. The enemy's attacks destroy the footholds, but the cargo contains flying bombs, and the general flow is to catch them and hurl them into Firebird. The footholds regenerate periodically, but the player says it's quite nerve-racking, since it feels like the foothold might be gone the moment you try to land on it, or that you might collide with a returning foothold while moving on your wire. When Firebird is in bombing mode, it's hard to land hits unless you get the timing right, which they say is a hassle. As you keep hitting it with bombs, Firebird, perhaps growing wary, rarely shows itself, but by dodging its telegraphed attacks and landing two bombs, they manage to destroy it.

They finally reach the building at the summit, but there's no sign of SANABI. When the protagonist approaches an accessible device in the control room, he is identified as "17287" and it recommends executing a shutdown. Suddenly the surroundings have changed completely, and the bodies of staff members are strewn all around.

Unable to grasp the situation, he heads outside, where Major Song, a subordinate from his military days, appears. But Song doesn't recognize him as the protagonist, and they end up fighting. According to the player, this is effectively the final boss fight.

Major Song sets out spinning discs of fire while attacking with bullets and melee weapons. The charged tackle attack is effective, but attacking while Song's barrier is up gets you countered, which the player says is extremely annoying. Since it's hard to read the barrier, the player recommends starting your charge attack as soon as you see Song teleport and landing it without giving Song a chance to put up the barrier. Major Song was once someone who often played with his daughter, but now there's no way to communicate, only hostility, and the only option is to neutralize Song. When Song is staggered, it turns into a button-mashing grapple. The player says they loved the effect where the gears in the background gradually slow down and the sense of time shifts.

Major Song is defeated, but military reinforcements arrive and the protagonist is restrained.

An analysis is performed on the restrained protagonist, and from here the truth comes to light. At this point, Song and the others still see this unit as nothing more than a combat robot. But watching how the protagonist fought, they begin to wonder whether it might be a unit with the same personality as their former superior, the General, who was supposed to have died long ago.

The analysis reveals that a filter had been planted in this personality, greatly distorting his self-perception, and that an encryption filter had been planted in his voice, restricting him so he couldn't hold a proper conversation with others. The player speculates that since Mari is a genius hacker, conversation itself was probably possible through the headset. The filter's security can be removed, but after that the protagonist himself has to correct his distorted self-perception from within his own mind. This process is painful, but the two keep waiting, believing in the General.

In a sea of memories, the protagonist confirms his true memories one by one. What becomes clear there is that a project existed to use the personality of the protagonist, an outstanding soldier, for military purposes; that the concept of revenge was used as a driving force to create a robot that acts toward an objective; that they tried to strengthen his desire for revenge by replacing the memory of his wife's death with the memory of his daughter's death; and that at the root of his personality lay the concept of "SANABI," a mysterious concept that was interfering with his desire for revenge.

The project ultimately worked around this problem by making him mistakenly believe that SANABI was the one who had killed his daughter. They further implemented it so that SANABI could be swapped out for any target, completing an ideal virtual personality capable of attacking anything. Install this into robots mass-produced for labor, and you get the ultimate controllable army. The player explains that this was the linchpin of Mago's plan to overthrow the state, in other words, the true identity of "SANABI."

Regaining consciousness, the protagonist realizes that he is a machine with a copy of a personality installed, and recovers his true self-perception. He also learns that his perception had merely been distorted all along, and that the three million residents really were there in Mago. To stop the reactor's nuclear fusion, someone has to destroy the inner core while being exposed to radiation, and Mari was still at the reactor for that purpose.

What's revealed next is that Mari was in fact the protagonist's daughter. Wanting to make her father happy after he lost her mother, Mari began researching copies of her father's personality. That was the beginning of all the calamity.

Reaching the reactor, the protagonist is reunited with Mari. From here on is the ending, but the player says it would be tactless to say anything at this point, stays silent until the staff credits, and simply lets the scenes play.

Having finished the game, the player looks back on it as a tough adventure, but one where both the game and the story were extremely well made, and says they enjoyed every moment of playing it. Although the video ended up long, they say it showed only a small fraction of the scenes. On that note, calling it "a game where meaning comes from striving to see it through," they recommend that anyone who's curious actually try playing it for themselves.