Background: Retained from its original release, the Mad Father remake sees the player helming the journey of a naïve protagonist, Aya, as she navigates the sullen, capacious halls of her mansion and avoids the many phantasmagoric cadavers that have suddenly reanimated for the purpose of exacting retribution on her eponymous mad father. As a rather stereotypically volatile scientist, Aya’s father mutilates and performs grotesque experiments, assisted by his lover, Maria, on his unwilling subjects with the intention of creating living dolls born from the chimerical combination of severed parts. Aya eventually discovers that her father’s ultimate desire through the perfection of his dolls is to craft a pristine replication of her that will permanently remain beautiful, ageless, and unaffected by the renascent sadistic tendencies that Aya has begun to demonstrate.
***
The doctor’s methods for acquiring his innumerable victims whilst avoiding detection were never explicitly detailed in the original game, if I’m recalling correctly, though it was undoubtedly implied that Maria’s situation was not aberrant and, instead, represented the established precedent for the doctor’s predatory behaviors. The expanded flashback depicting his abduction of an impoverished, abandoned child is therefore confirmatory of his patterned, manipulative tactics designed to lure the most desperate, vulnerable people to his lab with the persuasive promises of a home and family. The legitimacy of his care and veneer of geniality is a bit ambiguous, as his warped mind appears capable of rationalizing acts of both profound gentleness and brutal violence against even those he professes to love most. Regardless, it seems his abuse of the homeless is essentially facilitated through society’s indifference and enmity towards the poor, which allows their disappearances to likely be not only ignored, but welcomed. I suppose it can therefore be said that the addition of this rather evocative flashback sequence further humanized the unfortunate subjects of the doctor’s sanguinary obsessions and embellished the true extent of his fractured, discordant personality.
Though the alterations and additions made to this “pseudo-remake” of sorts were rather minor and predominantly cosmetic, the few instances of slight dialogue reconstruction and inserted scenes evinced a general sense of improvement to the structure and execution of this simplistic, yet enjoyable, adventure. As I alluded to earlier, the sequence involving the manipulation of the solitary child was probably intended to elicit further empathy for the forcibly sequestered test subjects and somewhat encourage the player to view these victims as more than mere gameplay quests or impediments requiring circumvention in order to progress the story. Granted, Mad Father is comparatively less complex and intricate with respect to its overall writing and themes, but these notable attempts at augmenting the emotional depth and investment in the plot and its characters are arguably indicative of Sen’s dedication to the embellishment their earlier works. When the true expanded remake releases, I hope that Sen proceeds with the further inclusion or revision of extant narrative elements while managing to maintain tonal consistency with the campy horror atmosphere, as well as avoiding interruptions to the momentum of the pace due to reliance on excessive exposition or overwhelming backstory and lore.
To somewhat cursorily comment on my interpretation of the intriguing facets and parallels between the Mad Father and Aya, I suppose I could start by discussing the ability of an individual to rationalize the simultaneous demonstration of contradictory behaviors and beliefs. For instance, both the father and Aya (assuming she adopts her father’s legacy) can partake in actions of magnanimity and sympathy towards the poor, beyond what is necessary for their "scientific" purposes, while concurrently persisting in their torturous deeds against these very same people. Essentially, it seems this duo views their discordant intentions through the distorted lens of their own warped logic, which perhaps justifies the continual satiation of their sadistic tendencies by presuming the righteousness of the deaths they caused. The father appears obsessed with ensuring the perpetuity of his bond or togetherness with his beloved family, as well as the preservation of the untarnished beauty and moral purity of his victims. He could convince himself that transferring the corporal parts of these discarded, unloved, or, in Aya’s case, corrupted individuals into perfect dolls is preferable to allowing them to rot in the dregs or periphery of a society that would much rather have them gone. Though he is clearly volatile and thoroughly enamored with the gory brutality involved in killing people, there are potentially still shreds of legitimacy to his claims of forming an ideal, loving “family”, in quite the perverse, twisted sense.
Concerning Aya, it’s possible in the true ending that she accepts her lineal destiny just as Dr. Frederick Frankenstein did in Young Frankenstein after reading his grandfather’s “How I Did It” guide to human experimentation. Perhaps her sympathy for the impoverished, in conjunction with her remembrance of the suffering her father’s sanguinary methods incurred, manifests in her implementation of sedatives to more gently “save” her victims from their dismal social situations or the potentially slow, painful, and inevitable decline of their health. Of course, other interpretations are certainly viable.