Game Theory- Welcome To Your NIGHTMARE! (Garten of Banban Chapter 6)
Game Theory- Welcome To Your NIGHTMARE! (Garten of Banban Chapter 6)
Transcript
00:00 *thunder*
00:02 Yep, friends, you're not seeing things.
00:03 The first video I'm doing as my final round of host on this channel
00:07 is on "Garden of Effin' Banban."
00:09 What sort of darkest timeline are we operating off of here?
00:12 *ding ding ding ding*
00:14 No, no, no, stop it.
00:15 If I have nine theories left before I hand things over to Tom,
00:18 we are bringing back the classic intro.
00:21 *intro music*
00:41 Ah, that's the stuff.
00:43 Hello, Internet! Welcome to Game Theory,
00:46 where in just a couple of weeks, I'm gonna be unburdened of Banban.
00:50 Sorry, Tom, this one's your problem now.
00:52 Yep, I should've seen this coming.
00:53 Though to be fair, Banban is kind of all of our problem.
00:56 At this point, it's kind of inescapable.
00:58 It exploded onto the scene in such a big way last year
01:01 that it was labeled as one of YouTube's top ten trends of 2023.
01:05 Right alongside Peaches from the Mario movie,
01:07 Zelda Tears of the Kingdom,
01:09 and the Grimace Shake.
01:10 Are you kid- God!
01:12 You just got the month wrong!
01:13 Oh, it's not okay!
01:14 This is from a different month!
01:16 Okay, the answer for this round is
01:19 Garten of Banban.
01:21 And yet, here we stand,
01:22 at the one year anniversary of the first Garten of Banban game
01:25 with the latest installment just released.
01:27 So I guess we're just gonna talk about it until Poppy comes out,
01:29 which will probably be a lot better.
01:31 After what feels like an eternity for this franchise,
01:33 let me check my notes,
01:34 four months, the fifth installment of this game series dropped
01:37 and naturally titled Garten of Banban 6.
01:39 And relative to the rest of the series,
01:41 episode 6 is pretty tame.
01:43 Episode 4 ended with a jester named Bitter Giggle
01:46 making Queen Bouncellia laugh,
01:47 causing her giant kangaroo pouch to erupt into a skybeam
01:51 which released the Naughty Ones.
01:52 Episode 6 deals with the fallout of all those words I just said,
01:56 where we have to face the leader of the Naughty Ones,
01:58 Sir Datadu,
01:59 using his mind control powers to take over the other mascots of the kindergarten.
02:03 Oh, and we also get hit by a bus several times.
02:06 Wasn't this a game about looking for our lost kid in a kindergarten?
02:09 Whatever happened to that?
02:10 But here's the thing,
02:11 as much as I joke about this game being "lol so random",
02:14 the Euphoric Brothers are smart.
02:15 As we talked about in a previous theory,
02:17 skipping the fifth installment was actually a big brain move on their part,
02:20 in both the marketing and storytelling departments.
02:22 And it showed me that there's actual thought and attention
02:25 put into the way that this thing's being structured.
02:27 And it was that realization that got me to go back
02:29 and rethink all the insane things that this game throws at us.
02:33 And of all the ridiculous, over-the-top,
02:35 "What the heck were they thinking?" moments in this game,
02:37 none can compare to the dream sequences that we've been getting since chapter three.
02:42 *laughing*
02:46 "Chu-chu Charles!"
02:49 "Yup."
02:49 *laughing*
02:50 "What?!"
02:51 Yeah, these insane fever dreams of storytelling,
02:53 talking about beaches and featuring cameos from other indie franchises,
02:57 these seem to have more method to their madness than any of us gave them credit for.
03:01 I mean, when the Euphoric Brothers' main goal seems to be pumping out as many games as possible,
03:05 as quickly as possible,
03:06 it's weird for them to purposely spend a lot of time putting these things into the games just for the lols.
03:11 Which means that they have to be important for some reason, right?
03:15 So, what are these dream sequences?
03:17 Really, why are we being shown them?
03:19 And can they potentially reveal the solution to the kindergarten's largest mystery?
03:23 I believe the answer is yes.
03:25 And today, I'm gonna prove it to you.
03:27 So, before we figure out what exactly is going on here,
03:29 we first need to remember what exactly these things are.
03:32 In every instance, we're shown these dreams by the giant jellyfish, Stinger Flynn.
03:36 This guy's been a bit of a question mark the entire series.
03:39 Is he good? Is he bad? It's not exactly clear.
03:41 When we first meet him in Chapter 3, he basically tells us to give up on our quest to find our lost child,
03:45 because he's cooked up a scheme to get him and all the other children out of the facility safely.
03:49 He tells us he's gonna show us something that's gonna totally convince us to stop looking for our kid,
03:54 and instead he takes us into the first dream sequence where we're on a deserted island alongside him,
03:58 talking about his lack of a tan.
04:00 "I have never had actual sun rays touch my skin."
04:03 "Can you imagine that? And I yearn for the day that they finally do."
04:07 He then goes on to complain about his hyper-intelligence,
04:09 and talk about how he yearns to be just a normal jellyfish.
04:12 Uh, sorry, what does any of this have to do with my missing kid?
04:15 Before we leave, though, he does make one thing clear.
04:17 "Of course, none of this is real. But it all could be."
04:22 Okay, so let's interpret what's going on with this first dream.
04:25 This place, this beach, it isn't real.
04:26 It's where he wishes to be, and where he was destined to be when he was just a bunch of jellyfish DNA.
04:31 That right there might seem obvious, but I don't know, man, I don't expect anyone to retain lore information about this game,
04:36 let alone symbolically dissect what the glowing orange monotone jellyfish is saying
04:40 during his underground dream sequence monologue as a giant sock puppet looms in the distance.
04:45 This is the first dream, and it's showing us what freedom looks like to Flynn.
04:49 Besides him saying that he wants to escape, and then showing us the beach that he wants to be real,
04:52 we also see him standing next to a car.
04:54 The car has always been a representation of freedom, especially when you're talking about kids.
04:58 Finally getting to drive yourself wherever you wanted, whenever you wanted, unrestrained by parents?
05:02 A car equals freedom.
05:04 And Stinger Flynn, in his dream, drove himself to this beach.
05:07 He wants to take control of his destiny and find his personal freedom.
05:11 Easy. Nothing too difficult to parse in this one.
05:13 Still not entirely sure how it applies to my missing kid, but, uh, we'll move on.
05:17 In future dreams, Stinger Flynn isn't the only one who's trying to escape.
05:20 For the second dream, we've got Ban-Ban, Opelabird, Nab-Nab, and Captain Fiddles
05:23 all alongside him going through the desert looking for that proverbial beach.
05:27 Feels kind of like a metaphor for this whole kindergarten facility, right?
05:30 A barren wasteland with no real sense of direction, and most importantly, no end in sight.
05:35 It's also worth noting in this one that Stinger Flynn is the only one to truly be aware of the freedom that could await them.
05:41 "So, Stinger, when are we arriving at this place called 'Beach'?"
05:45 Notice that Ban-Ban uses quotations around the word 'beach' here, because he doesn't understand it.
05:50 He doesn't know what freedom truly is.
05:52 Freedom isn't his goal, but, you know, he's more than willing to go along for the ride.
05:56 Instead, Stinger Flynn is the driver. He's the one leading the charge.
06:00 He's the one literally and figuratively driving them all towards freedom.
06:04 There's, uh, just one problem with that.
06:05 Stinger gets lost. He doesn't actually have any idea where this 'beach' is.
06:10 "I believe we are lost."
06:11 "We've been going in circles for hours."
06:13 Despite wanting freedom and saying he has a plan to get everyone out of the facility,
06:17 Stinger Flynn is clueless. He has no idea how to reach his end goal.
06:21 He's just stuck in the purgatory alongside everyone else.
06:24 And this is where things begin to fall apart.
06:27 Flynn crashes the car, and as we see in the next dream sequence,
06:30 the group end up sitting around the wreckage, sharing whatever food they have left.
06:33 Oh, and, uh, Zolfius is here now, just looming out in the background.
06:36 "He's just standing there. Menacingly!"
06:40 In this scene, we see how desperate the group is getting.
06:42 Specifically, Stinger Flynn.
06:44 "We each have our plans and goals, but at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter."
06:49 He's basically ready to give up.
06:51 That is, until a surprise guest shows up.
06:53 "Choo-choo Charles!"
06:55 And while the Charles cameo itself feels unbelievably random,
06:58 the actions that the other characters take, they don't.
07:00 Stinger decides to capture a rescued Bambam.
07:02 Nab-Nab, meanwhile, confronts the train head-on to protect everyone.
07:06 This is actually a series of events that we see repeat again in the dream sequence from Chapter 6.
07:11 We see the crew all waiting for a bus to take them to the beach,
07:14 only for Captain Fiddles to be kidnapped by a different bus.
07:17 Nab-Nab tries to go after him and is hit by a third bus,
07:20 leaving the rest of the gang stranded, only for us to then be hit by a fourth bus.
07:24 What's important to note in this bizarre sequence is Nab-Nab's action.
07:28 In both dreams, he runs in and tries to protect the other mascots.
07:31 And what do we see at the end of Chapter 6?
07:33 Bambam in trouble at the hands of Sir Datadu, and Nab-Nab stepping in to protect them all.
07:38 Well, I say he stepped in.
07:39 If I'm being thorough, I would say that he was injected with the chemical gyvanium and yeeted away,
07:44 at which point he transforms into a giant Dark Souls boss and tears the naughty ones away,
07:48 only to then lose and fall under the group mind control spell.
07:51 So really, all of that is what we saw in the dream sequence coming true.
07:54 Nab-Nab stepping into hell, but ultimately getting hurt in the process.
07:58 And you see, this is where the pieces started to click into place for me.
08:01 If Nab-Nab's fate from the dream came true, what other clues can we get from these things?
08:05 Well, throughout the game, we've been collecting case reports full of lore.
08:09 Lore that tells us about the experiments done to create these living mascots.
08:13 Almost all of them end up with a very specific goal in mind.
08:16 Is the subject ready for presentation?
08:18 This presentation isn't a presentation for stockholders or investors,
08:21 rather it's a presentation to parents and children.
08:24 The fateful "Bring a Friend Day", where the kindergarten ball pit collapses into the depths under the weight of the visitors.
08:29 Most cases that we read about have been deemed not ready for presentation.
08:33 However, there's one experiment that was considered enough of a success to present to the parents.
08:37 Captain Fiddles, the one who was stolen into the bus.
08:41 These dreams actually mean something.
08:44 According to his case update report, while the captain's incapable of comprehensible speech, he showed exceptional stamina.
08:49 He could perform simple mathematical operations, but most importantly of all, he imitated the behavior of a very obedient toddler.
08:56 He was the best that the scientists had to offer.
08:59 And so, as we see in one of the secret VHS tapes, Captain Fiddles was presented to the children on "Bring a Friend Day".
09:04 Which means that he had to be separated from the rest of the gang, just like we're seeing in the dream.
09:08 Think about all the imagery that we're seeing in this chapter 6 dream.
09:12 We see Captain Fiddles get kidnapped by a bus.
09:14 If a car represents freedom in these dream sequences, then a bus, public transportation, is a symbol of authority and control.
09:21 It's a representation of the kindergarten staff, the scientists, the system that these mascots find themselves trapped in.
09:27 When they couldn't find freedom on their own, when they got lost and crashed their car,
09:31 they instead had to begin playing along with the scientists and their experiments.
09:34 If they did as they were told, maybe they would have a chance to escape, to finally reach that freedom,
09:39 only for them to constantly be told that they weren't ready for presentation.
09:42 But Captain Fiddles, he was.
09:44 And so without warning, he suddenly ripped away from the rest.
09:47 This also explains why we've only ever seen Zolfius from a distance.
09:50 In our previous theory, I spoke about how two scientists working at the facility created this big worm Zolfius,
09:56 in a failed attempt to use a real kid to create the perfect child.
09:59 A child that they would never be able to have naturally.
10:02 But when the experiment was over, his face was deformed.
10:04 His body didn't come together correctly.
10:06 And so he was relegated to becoming one of the rejected mascots alongside Sir Datadu and Bitter Giggle.
10:12 In fact, that's exactly what we see in the teaser for Ban Ban Chapter 7.
10:15 A mural of Zolfius alongside these weird, hybrid, reject characters.
10:19 These are the ones that are marked as permanently not ready for presentation.
10:23 The ones that we learn through a note in Chapter 6 are planning a rebellion against the scientists.
10:27 But Zolfius is in that first dream sequence with Stinger Flynn.
10:30 Apparently all he wants is freedom.
10:32 To be with other children.
10:34 To be accepted.
10:35 But he knows that he can't be.
10:36 He is the reject.
10:38 So he just keeps his distance.
10:39 Watching and hoping that maybe he can follow him to freedom.
10:42 But never really feeling comfortable enough to really get to know anyone else.
10:46 So the big question now is, why is Stinger Flynn showing us this?
10:49 And also, why do we just get hit by a boss?
10:51 Well, remember, in the game we're playing as a parent that's trying to recover our lost child.
10:55 And yet, at every turn, Stinger Flynn is quick to remind us that we're making a bad decision,
10:59 and that we should probably go home.
11:01 "I wanted to let you know that this is all happening because of you."
11:05 "I would be free of my shackles, and everyone you hurt would not have been hurt."
11:11 "Because of your foolish decisions, we are even less likely now to ever get back to the children."
11:18 Our stubbornness, our ceaseless quest to find our child, it's hurting everyone around us.
11:22 And in Stinger's mind, will ultimately be futile.
11:24 It's the exact same thing that we're seeing in the dream sequences.
11:27 Stinger Flynn has a goal of freedom that he's relentlessly pursuing,
11:30 and it looks like he's hurting his friends.
11:32 Ban-Ban's in trouble. They're getting kidnapped. They're getting hit by buses.
11:36 It's also clear that trying to recover the kidnapped Captain Fiddles immediately gets Nab-Nab injured.
11:41 Apparently, those who try to recover others in this world are ultimately struck down.
11:45 Basically, we're on a collision course with ourselves.
11:48 We're destroying everyone and everything around us in this relentless pursuit of this one thing,
11:52 hence why this bus hits us at the end of the dream.
11:55 The dream also shows us the evolution of Ban-Ban and Stinger Flynn's relationship.
11:59 Throughout the series, it's clear that Ban-Ban and Stinger aren't exactly friends.
12:02 In fact, during Chapter 3, Stinger Flynn gets mad at us for even working with Ban-Ban to find our missing kid.
12:07 But as Flynn keeps showing us more and more of these visions of past events,
12:10 it's clear that he and Ban-Ban used to be friends.
12:13 At least, friendly enough for Flynn to have brought Ban-Ban along on his little escape plan in the first place.
12:17 But as things get worse and worse, we see the deterioration of their relationship.
12:21 They are arguing non-stop.
12:23 It gets so bad that Ban-Ban decides that he doesn't even want the freedom that Flynn is offering anymore.
12:39 And to really nail home this connection,
12:46 the Euphoric Brothers had a song commissioned specifically for the dream car sequence,
12:49 a song titled "Rivals".
12:51 In that song's music video, created by the nerdcore channel Rocket Music,
12:54 the titular rivals are none other than Flynn and Ban-Ban.
12:58 A song that Ban-Ban seems to really like.
13:00 The lyrics of the song seem to be pointing at the moment that their relationship truly began to fall apart.
13:06 In it, we have lyrics like, "Don't tell me I got time for an eye for an eye. Don't take another life from me."
13:11 Considering the song is from the perspective of Ban-Ban,
13:14 it would seem that Stinger Flynn took a life from him.
13:16 But what life is that? What could that be meaning?
13:19 Well, it's important to remember that most of the monsters in this game are a mix of human genome and gyvanium.
13:24 For Ban-Ban, we know his human genome came from Dr. Uthman Adam,
13:28 the head researcher at Ban-Ban's kindergarten.
13:30 This is also the scientist who, alongside Dr. Weverly Mason,
13:33 tried to create the child that they would never be able to have,
13:36 only for it to turn into a monster.
13:38 Meanwhile, Stinger Flynn, we still don't know much about, honestly.
13:42 We don't know who his human genome donor was.
13:44 We don't know what they did.
13:46 What we do know is that, according to this little kid drawing found in Chapter 2,
13:50 Stinger helped to save kids from a rampaging Ban-Ban on the loose during Bring Your Friend Day.
13:55 So really, this line about stolen lives can boil down to one of three things.
13:59 One, Stinger Flynn was the human who put Uthman Adam's genome into Ban-Ban in the first place,
14:04 stealing his human life, and he's mad about it.
14:06 Option two is that Stinger stole or harmed the child that Uthman created.
14:10 And then there's option number three.
14:11 On Bring a Friend Day, we know Ban-Ban went on a rampage.
14:14 We also see hints of this in Chapter 5's preview images.
14:17 Maybe Stinger, by saving that group of kids for his own unclear and suspicious motivations,
14:22 literally took those lives away from Ban-Ban.
14:25 Regardless the reason, I suspect that the next few chapters are gonna give us some more dream sequences
14:29 that'll start depicting these events, leading to the realization that Ban-Ban,
14:33 the mascot that we thought we could trust,
14:35 was the one that caused the ball pit to collapse on Bring a Friend Day.
14:38 That he was the one that caused our child to disappear
14:41 and sent us into the abyss trying to find them.
14:44 But you know what? That's not the only mystery that we have left.
14:46 During the dream cutscenes, whose perspective are we playing through?
14:50 Naturally, you might assume that we're still in the perspective of the parent that we're playing as throughout the rest of the game.
14:54 Or maybe we're not any character at all, that we're just some random floating camera observing these things happening.
14:59 But that doesn't make a whole lot of sense within the scenes themselves.
15:02 First off, Ban-Ban, Stinger Flynn, and the rest of the gang, they talk directly to our character.
15:07 "Hey you, you're finally awake."
15:10 "You sure are a sleepy fellow."
15:12 "A dream."
15:13 "Morning, sleepy fellow."
15:14 We are a part of these dreams.
15:16 We're watching this from the perspective of someone in the gang.
15:19 So then, who are we?
15:20 My first thought was that perhaps we're Jumbo Josh,
15:23 but I was able to rule that one out pretty quickly thanks to this line from the campfire dream.
15:26 "Man, if Jumbo Josh was here, he would've loved those vegetables."
15:31 The next possibility was Bambelina, but that one was also quickly shot down.
15:34 "Finally, you're waking up."
15:36 "I was getting really bored, and that fellow over there isn't much of a talker."
15:40 If Bambelina was really part of Stinger Flynn's escape crew,
15:43 then she would obviously know that Nab-Nab is not a talker.
15:46 Ban-Ban wouldn't be needing to give her this sort of information,
15:49 which means that whoever we are, we're someone new.
15:51 We're someone who doesn't know this group all that well,
15:53 and that's shockingly rare to come by.
15:55 I mean, almost all the characters that we've met so far have known each other,
15:58 or at least have known about each other in some form.
16:01 Toadster in Chapter 4 even has a poster of every character,
16:04 including the Chapter 7 character, Syringian,
16:07 who we still haven't met in the games yet.
16:09 Everyone knows everyone, except for maybe one.
16:12 There is one character that has been kept a secret this whole time.
16:15 The one we also suspect was at Bring-A-Friend Day with Ban-Ban,
16:19 the Perfect Child.
16:20 This child was purposely kept hidden, not just from the experiments,
16:23 but from everyone, quote from one of the lore documents.
16:26 We have to turn it back around if we want our little secret down in the basement
16:29 to stay a secret.
16:30 Eventually, the child was thrown into the mix with the other mascots,
16:33 because a follow-up note says,
16:34 "Not to mention how dangerous it is to keep him around all those other monstrosities."
16:38 This child has been with Ban-Ban and his crew for a while,
16:41 which is why it makes sense for him to be traveling with the rest of the group
16:43 in these dream sequences.
16:45 And this, then, seems to point to the crux of this whole game franchise.
16:48 At its core, it isn't about purple kangaroos, or spider blobs, or pancreases,
16:52 "pancreai", whatever the plural is.
16:54 It's about family.
16:55 The love of two scientists desperate for a child.
16:58 The love of one parent searching for her lost kid.
17:01 And it's about the tragedy that comes when you're separated from those children.
17:04 Stinger Flynn potentially takes away Ban-Ban's kid on Bring-A-Friend Day,
17:07 sending him into a rampage.
17:09 This, then, prompts the overstuffed ball pit to collapse,
17:11 leading to the catastrophic situation in which our character finds herself.
17:15 So laugh all you want about the weird, veiny mascots with dumb names and stiff animations.
17:20 At its core, this is a human story told through weird, esoteric dream sequences,
17:24 poorly written text documents, and monotone monologues.
17:27 But if you manage to get through all of that,
17:29 and the strange and often boring gameplay,
17:32 underneath you have something beautiful.
17:34 Or, you know, maybe not beautiful, but at the very least it's interesting.
17:38 Or if not interesting, at the very least you have yourself
17:41 A THEORY!
17:42 A GAME THEORY!
17:44 Thanks for watching.
17:46 [outro music]