wow, so they are clones

Not exactly...Balin's thread gives the most direct answer

even if it's still veiled

Perfect replicas who became self-aware?

I think Touko has the right idea, more or less. Riki, I already mentioned my theory to you, and it's pretty much spot-on here.

Consider that Mayfield' the Vault's way of persisting a utopia against the hazards of the real world. It's not at all unlikely that our residency here can be tailored to suit our desires and imagination...

It's almost as if Mayfield is meta about rp in general. XD

or a sim game

This is really disappointing unless there's a twist.

It kind of is. But I'm working with it when I make my game transfer to Wonderful Worlds

I've always really hated the "you're clones/you're data/you're not real" twist (not least because in this case not being Lithuania would completely break my character).

It would render Lithuania more or less unplayable. Though I don't generally do game transplants anyway.

I insist on playing countries whose sense of self is built around being who they are, it's a problem

Yeah. Minato...had heard of Mayfield being a simulation. But he didn't really believe that he himself was one. Finding out he is one has...kind of been a big blow for him.

Since what kept him going for so long was the fact that his bonds from back home still affected him, which is how he could still summon Personas in the first place.

Even ones that arose from Arcana still back at home.

That and now the lessons he learned from home don't apply anymore because that wasn't him.

He's still going on because he's stubborn like that, and if his self-awareness is the only thing that's real about him, then he's going to make sure not to lose it.

/nods

with Liet it's get back to actual real home sanity of that desire be damned or nothing

Minato will come to terms with it eventually.

At least his bonds in Mayfield are real.

nation life is hard true facts

this should be helpful as well to figuring out all this

I still think there's something left to be said, it's practically on the tip of the game's tongue

if you can copy personalities you should be able to paste them back in this is my theory it is called the basic keyboard shortcuts theory

haha, well let me ask you a question. If after you paste the data over, and it becomes changed over time after either you or something else wrote over it, how many undos would be safe to restore it?

Of course, I'm not really asking for a literal answer

well you could copy the data from Mayfield and paste it back in at the moment it was copied from its original destination

it would change everything after it but not things before

Except...we've already lived our lives as these "people" we've become to represent. We can't really change what's already happened unless we bring it back to zero. If we do, what's really left of us?

Well if we assume Mayfield was made via making a copy of the character in their own world and pasting it in Mayfield

if you make a copy of the Mayfield version and paste it in their own world it's essentially the same as transferring the Mayfield one back home

though presumably it would overwrite the original version but since the versions are the same just with extra Mayfield memories it's fine right!!!

yes we could also call it the higurashi solution

I think for me to really say anything more about all this I'd need to mention a different aspect of this whole mess...

Wouldn't you need someone like Zemekis (or Hanyuu) to do the pasting though?

And Zemekis is dead now

Consider that when a vessel in Mayfield (otherwise known as a drone) is not inhabited by anyone, Zemekis controls all of them. Every single one of them that we interacted with. Also note the drones are gone.

there must be machines to figure out we will self-paste!!!

Otherwise, our "minds" control the vessels.

The one thing he can't change, even if he transplants an entire personality foreign to us.

If it's so easy to alter the data, why can't he touch that one thing about us, that makes us able to percieve this world?

if we assume the copy thing then he copied so perfectly he actually created life

But he couldn't...he had to compensate for the drones' lack of will/soul by controlling them himself. Unless we're to call it an inconsistent process...

well he had to copy from something outside of what he could make himself

There is that "dark place" that all the "vanished" people got sent to. It seemed to be the great recycle bin of Mayfield.

And yet, some people DID insist on persisting...

...and hey, you can recover a file in the recycle bin. And possibly even copy it back. If he reached out to copy, possibly someone else can reach out to paste.

Mayfield as a desktop computer

Well, going with that, you could think of bringing characters as downloading a program. You could reupload the program later if you had the skill even if you couldn't build the program yourself.

Well, I guess for now it's more about how the characters will interpret the information if it comes to them, than how we perceive what's going on

Either way this is going to be a problem for a lot of people x.x

I personally think rather... godlike for Zemekis to have grafted entire personalities onto this data, it almost sounds like we didn't have a choice what we wanted to be.