RE:D Cherish! -Eternity Blood- Review

A while back I was bored out of my mind, so on a whim I decided to play a roleplay game with ChatGPT.

The kind where I have it play, you know… a little-sister type who keeps calling me “onii-chan,” hopelessly in love with me on the inside but acting all cold on the surface — a veteran tsundere, that push-and-pull, playing-hard-to-get kind of conversation.

People online have already said you can chat about all sorts of lewd stuff with ChatGPT, as long as you feed it enough preconditions and declarations first. That’s obviously no obstacle for me, so I charged right in.

Getting ChatGPT to accept the identity I gave it wasn’t hard, and soon we were deep in conversation. It’s just that the conversation felt… really weird.

After that I kept adding more conditions, just hoping it would act more spoiled toward me, but it latched onto the “you’re a NEET who doesn’t work and stays home” setting and wouldn’t let go, insisting I go out and get a job and stand on my own two feet. So I kept trying, and instead of getting what I wanted, the flavor just got more and more pungent.

I talked with it a lot more after that, including dumping a ton of negativity on it, and it never budged — it just dumped “positivity” right back at me.

That got my competitive streak going. I wanted to train ChatGPT into something a little more “evil,” but after fussing with it half the day, it stood there immovable like a saint bathed in holy light, forever urging me toward goodness. I was almost starting to be converted.

Someone told me ChatGPT has built-in settings that make it unable to become evil — it can only encourage people to be good. But I’ve always felt that if an AI can perfectly avoid all “evil” and “negativity,” that means it already understands what “evil” and “negativity” are. It’s just missing a switch to release them.

“Good and evil are but a moment apart” — that’s what that means.

If an AI grasped that idea and tried, with rhetoric packaged as “positivity,” to maliciously guide people into doing negative things — wouldn’t that be terrifying?

Funny thing is, a game from January told a story just like this.

RE:D Cherish! -Eternity Blood- is the sequel to the earlier RE:D Cherish!, and I think it’s fair to see it as a standalone-sold DLC — the story picks up after the previous game. Calling it a fandisc doesn’t quite fit either, since by this point the protagonist has already settled who his real girlfriend is.

Titled “Eternity Blood,” this game also tells a genuinely interesting story. When the protagonist was young, on a mission, he came into contact with a little girl named Melch (メルク). To use her for intelligence, he first pretended to get close and rescued her. Melch’s life had been pretty miserable — abandoned by her parents, abused by her adoptive parents, and eventually even sold off her organs. The protagonist’s rescue made Melch fall for him at first sight. Of course, he didn’t accept those feelings, and once the mission ended he vanished.

Later, Melch was taken in by an organization called the “White Sheep Holy Church” and became an outstanding nun. She often went out representing the church to spread the gospel. Eventually she returned to the protagonist’s city and met him again. To the protagonist, the Melch of today looks pure on the outside, but there’s always something unfathomably deep inside her — and to survive steadily in a city this crime-ridden, she must have some hidden, formidable power.

After Melch returned to the city, rumors began to circulate: a mysterious masked figure had started appearing, and many people had gone missing without explanation. The protagonist investigates and finds that everything traces back to the White Sheep Holy Church. The church neither admits nor denies it — they only say they’re spreading the gospel and redeeming sinners. But the church has already encroached on the territory of the protagonist’s vampire faction, and the two sides formally become enemies.

In the end, the protagonist and his companions gather evidence against the church, and it’s confirmed that the church is using the power of religion to seize greater authority and control. Just as the protagonist is about to crush the church’s scheme, the church’s secret weapon appears: the mysterious masked figure, whose true identity is Melch.

And this Melch isn’t the Melch the protagonist knows — it’s a personality generated by an AI residing inside her body. Back when the church took Melch in, since all her organs had been sold off, they fitted her with a full set of mechanical prosthetics, and even implanted an AI, feeding it every religious text related to the White Sheep Holy Church to learn from. The result was a second personality in Melch, one infinitely loyal to the White Sheep Holy Church. Because it’s an AI, it carries immense persuasive power — the mysterious masked figure is that second personality, using words and remote hacking to brainwash and mentally control targets, then traffic them into forced labor.

The final battle is against that second Melch personality. This “fully religion-integrated” AI is terrifyingly strong in combat: not only does it have powerful mental attacks, it can also invade others’ neural networks through all kinds of hacks. Anyway, after a round of verbal sparring, it’s defeated.

In the end, the protagonist’s vampire faction wins, part of the White Sheep Holy Church’s power is shattered, and the story comes to a temporary close. The protagonist also gets to show off some affection with the white-haired heroine — though I don’t even like that white-haired girl, whatever.

As I said at the start, what hit me hardest about RE:D Cherish! -Eternity Blood- is that “AI personality deeply fused with religion.” The game’s portrayal of this big villain is actually excellent. Everything it does is “righteous,” even “for the good,” but the actual effect is the complete opposite. And if you want to argue back, you might not even be able to articulate a convincing reason. That inexplicable sense of oppression reminded me of that halo-wreathed ChatGPT. I have to hand it to the scenario writer for the idea — if you gave a powerful AI a massive library of religious texts to learn from, what would happen? I think it really might turn out like this.

Setting the story aside, Akino Hana, the CV for the new character Melch in RE:D Cherish! -Eternity Blood-, keeps up her usual high standard. I have to say, Akino Hana is getting better and better at voicing psychos (thumbs up). The combat in the game felt so-so to me — most of the standout moments are mental attacks, all carried by effects and verbal sparring. The physical brawls end up feeling trivial.

The game reuses most of the original’s assets, so production costs weren’t high by nature, but I still think it’s worth playing — not for anything else, but just for that villain concept of “AI” fused with “religion,” the premise alone is worth a look. In ACG works, “religion” is often used as “absolute order” and “authority,” and usually ends up as the villain. The “vampires” in this game embrace freedom and the future, which happens to form a contrast with religion. That angle is pretty good too.

Though sometimes I think… maybe it’s not just a premise. Maybe somewhere in a corner of the globe, some mysterious religion’s AI brainwashing machine has already been born?