Game Theory - Welcome To Your NIGHTMARE (Garten of Banban 6)

Episode Date: January 30, 2024

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he explains the fever dream that is Garten of Banban Chapter 6 *Credits:* Writers: Matthew Patrick, Tom Robinson and Mike Keenan (The Pokémon Biologist) Editors: Dan "Cybert" Seibert, JayskiBean, Tyler Mascola, Warak, Dom Sealion and Shannon (Bomb0i) Sound Designer: Yosi Berman

Yep, friends, you're not seeing things. The first video I'm doing is my final round of host on this channel is on Garten of F-N-Ban-Ban. What sort of darkest timeline are we operating off of here? No, no, no, stop it. If I have nine theories left before I hand things over to Tom, we are bringing back the classic intro. That's the stuff.

Hello, internet. Welcome to game theory, where in just a couple of weeks, I'm going to be unburdened of Ban-Ban. Sorry, Tom, this one's your problem now. Yep, I should have seen this coming. Though to be fair, Ban Ban is kind of all of our problem. At this point, it's kind of inescapable.

It exploded onto the scene in such a big way last year that it was labeled as one of YouTube's top 10 trends of 2023. Right alongside Peaches from the Mario movie, Zelda Tears the Kingdom and the Grimmish Shake. Are you kidding? God! You just got the month wrong! This is from a different month!

Okay, the answer for this round is Garten of Ban Ban. And yet, here we stand. At the one-year anniversary of the first Garten of Ban Ban game with the latest installment just released, so I guess we're just going to talk about it until Poppy comes out, which will probably be a lot better. After what feels like an eternity for this franchise? Let me check my notes.

Four months, the fifth installment of this game series dropped naturally titled, Garten A Ban Ban 6. And relative to the rest of the series, Episode 6 is pretty tame. Episode 4 ended with a jester named Bitter-giggle, making Queen Bounselia laugh, causing her giant kangaroo pouch to erupt into a sky-be which released the Nauty Ones.

Episode 6 deals with the fallout of all those words I just said, where we have to face the leader of the naughty ones, Sir Dadadu, using his mind control powers to take over the other mascots of the kindergarten. Oh, and we also get hit by a bus several times. Wasn't this a game about looking for our lost kid in a kindergarten? Whatever happened to that? But here's the thing. For as much as I joke about this game being lull so random, the Euphoric Brothers are smart.

As we talked about in a previous theory, Skipping the fifth installment was actually a big brain move on their part. in both the marketing and storytelling departments. And it showed me that there's actual thought and attention put into the way that this thing's being structured. And it was that realization that got me to go back and rethink all the insane things that this game throws at us. And of all the ridiculous, over the top, what the heck were they thinking moments in this game?

None can compare to the dream sequences that we've been getting since chapter 3. Yeah, these insane fever dreams of storytelling, talking about beaches and featuring cameos from other indie franchises, these seem to have more method to their madness than any of us gave them credit for. I mean, when the Euphoric Brothers' main goal seems to be pumping out as many games as possible, as quickly as possible, it's weird for them to purposely spend a lot of time putting these things into the games just for the lulls, which means that they have to be important for some reason, right?

So what are these dream sequences? Really? Why are we being shown them? And can they potentially reveal the solution to the kindergarten's largest mystery? I believe the answer is yes. And today, I'm gonna prove it to you. So before we figure out what exactly is going on here, we first need to remember what exactly these things are. In every instance, we're shown these dreams by the giant jellyfish Stinger Flynn. This guy's been a bit of a question mark the entire series. Is he good? Is he bad? It's not exactly clear.

When we first made him in Chapter 3, he basically tells us to give up on our quest to find our lost child because he's cooked up a scheme to get him and all the other children out of the facility safely. He tells us he's going to show us something that's going to totally convince us to stop looking for our kid, And instead he takes us into the first dream sequence where we're on a deserted island alongside him, talking about his lack of a tan. I have never had actual sun rays touch my skin. Can you imagine that? And I year for the day that they finally do.

He then goes on to complain about his hyper-intelligence and talk about how he yearns to be just a normal jellyfish. Sorry, what does any of this have to do with my missing kid? Before we leave, though, he does make one thing clear. Of course. None of this is real, but it all could be. Okay, so let's interpret what's going on with this. first dream. This place, this beach, it isn't real. It's where he wishes to be and where he was destined to be when he was just a bunch of jellyfish DNA. That right there might seem obvious, but I don't know man, I don't expect anyone to retain lore information about this game, let alone symbolically dissect what the glowing orange monotone jellyfish is saying during his underground dream sequence monologue as a giant sock puppet looms in the distance. This is the first dream and it's showing us what freedom looks like to Flynn. Besides him saying that he wants to escape and then showing us the beach that he wants to be real, we also see him standing next to a car.

The car has always been a representation of freedom, especially when you're talking about kids. Finally getting to drive yourself wherever you wanted, whenever you wanted, unrestrained by parents, A car equals freedom. And Stinger Flynn, in his dream, drove himself to this speech. He wants to take control of his destiny and find his personal freedom. Easy, nothing too difficult to parse in this one. Still not entirely sure how it applies to my missing kid, but, uh, we'll move on. In future dreams, Stinger Flynn isn't the only one who's trying to escape.

For the second dream, we've got Ban, Bela, Opila Bird, Nab, and Captain Fiddles, all alongside him going through the desert looking for that proverbial beach. Feels kind of like a metaphor for this whole kindergarten facility, right? A barren wasteland with no real sense of direction, and most importantly, no end in sight. 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. So, Stinger, when are we arriving at this place called beach? Notice that Banban uses quotations around the word beach here, because he doesn't understand it. He doesn't know what freedom truly is.

Freedom isn't his goal, but, you know, he's more than willing to go along for the ride. Instead, Stinger Flynn is the driver. He's the one leading the charge. He's the one literally and figuratively driving them all towards freedom. There's just one problem with that. Stinger gets lost. He doesn't actually have any idea where this beach is. I believe we are lost.

We've been going in circles for hours. Despite wanting freedom and saying he has a plan to get everyone out of the facility, Stinger Flynn is clueless. He has no idea how to reach his end goal. He's just stuck in the purgatory alongside everyone else. And this is where things begin to fall apart. Flynn crashes the car and as we see in the next stream sequence, the group end up sitting around the wreckage sharing whatever food they have left.

Oh, and Zulfius is here now just looming out in the background. He's just standing there, menacingly! In this scene, we see how desperate the group is getting. Specifically, Stinger Flynn. We each have our plans and goals, but at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter. He's basically ready to give up. That is, until a surprise guest shows up, Chew Chu Charles.

And while the Charles' cameo itself feels unbelievably random, the actions that the other characters take, they don't. Stinger decides to capture a rescued Bamban. NabN meanwhile confronts the train head-on to protect everyone. This is actually a series of events that we see repeat again in the dream sequence from Chapter 6. We see the crew all waiting for a bus to take him to the beach, only for Captain Fiddle's to be kidnapped by a different bus. Nab-Nab tries to go after him and is hit by a third bus, leaving the rest of the rest of the

the gang stranded only for us to then be hit by a fourth bus. What's important to note in this bizarre sequence is Nab Nab's action. In both dreams, he runs in and tries to protect the other mascots. And what do we see at the end of Chapter 6? Ban Ban in trouble at the hands of Sir Dadadu and Nab Nab stepping in to protect him all. Well, I say he stepped in. If I'm being thorough, I would say that he was injected with the chemical gyvanium and yeated away, at which point he transforms into a giant Dark Souls boss and tears the naughty

ones away, only to then lose and fall under the group mind control spell. So really, all of that is what we saw in the dream sequence coming true, Nab Nab, stepping into hell, but ultimately getting hurt in the process. And you see, this is where the pieces started to click into place for me. If Nab Nab's fate from the Dream came true, what other clues can we get from these things? Well, throughout the game, we've been collecting case reports full of lore, lore that tells us about the experiments done to create these living mascots. Almost all of them end up with a very specific goal in mind.

Is the subject ready for presentation? This presentation isn't a presentation for stockholders or investors, rather it's a presentation to parents and children. The fateful Bring a Friend Day, where the kindergarten ball pit collapses into the depths under the weight of the visitors. Most cases that we read about have been deemed not ready for presentation. However, there's one experiment that was considered enough of a success to present to the parents. Captain Fiddles, the one who was stolen into the bus.

These dreams actually mean something. According to his case update report, while the captain's incapable of comprehensible speech, he showed exceptional stamina. He could perform simple mathematical operations, but most importantly of all, he imitated the behavior of a very obedient toddler. He was the best that the scientists had to offer. And so, as we see in one of the secret VHS tapes, Captain Fiddles was presented to the children on Bring a Friend Day, which means that he had to be separated from the rest of the gang, just like we're seeing in the dream. Think about all the imagery that we're seeing in this Chapter 6 dream. We see Captain Fiddles get kidnapped by a bus.

If a car represents freedom in these dream sequences, then a bus, public transportation, is a symbol of authority and control. It's a representation of the kindergarten staff, the scientists, the system that these mascots find themselves trapped in. When they couldn't find freedom on their own, when they got lost and crashed their car, they instead had to begin playing along with the scientists and their experiments.

If they did as they were told, maybe they would have a chance to escape, to finally reach that freedom, only for them to constantly be told that they weren't ready for president But Captain Fiddles, he was. And so without warning, he suddenly ripped away from the rest. This also explains why we've only ever seen Zulfius from a distance. In our previous theory, I spoke about how two scientists working at the facility created this big worm Zulfius in a failed attempt to use a real kid to create the perfect child, a child that they would never be able to have naturally. But when the experiment was over, his face was deformed. His body didn't come together correctly. And so he was relegated to becoming one of the rejected mascots alongside Sir Dadadu and Bitter Giggle. In fact, that's exactly what we see in the teaser for Ban-Ban Chapter 7, a mural of Zulfius alongside these weird, hybrid, reject characters. These are the ones that are marked as permanently not ready for presentation. The ones that we learn through a note in Chapter 6 are planning a rebellion against the scientists.

But Zulfius is in that first dream sequence with Stinger Flynn. Apparently all he wants is freedom, to be with other children, to be accepted, but he knows that he can't be. He is the reject, so he just keeps his distance, watching and hoping that maybe he can find to freedom, but never really feeling comfortable enough to really get to know anyone else. So the big question now is, why is Stinger Flynn showing us this? And also, why do we just get hit by a boss? Well, remember, in the game, we're playing as a parent that's trying to recover our lost child. And yet, at every turn, Stinger Flynn is quick to remind us that we're making a bad decision, that we should probably go home.

I wanted to let you know that this is all happening because of you. I would be free of my shackles, and everyone you hurt would not have been hurt. Because of your foolish decisions, we are even less likely now to ever get back to the children. Our stubbornness, our ceaseless quest to find our child, it's hurting everyone around us, and in Stinger's mind, will ultimately be futile. It's the exact same thing that we're seeing in the dream sequences. Stinger Flynn has a goal of freedom that he's relentlessly pursuing, and it looks like he's hurting his friends.

Ban-Bans in trouble. They're getting kidnapped. They're getting hit by buses. It's also clear that trying to recover the kidnapped Captain Fiddles immediately gets Nab-Nab-Nab injured. Apparently, those who try to recover others in this world are ultimately struck down. Basically, we're on a collision course with ourselves. We're destroying everyone and everything around us in this relentless pursuit of this one thing, hence why this bus hits us at the end of the dream.

The dream also shows us the evolution of Ban-Ban and Stinger-Flynn's relationship. Throughout the series, it's clear that Ban-Ban and Stinger aren't exactly friends. In fact, during Chapter 3, Stinger-Flynn gets mad at us for even working with Ban-Ban to find our missing kid. But as Flynn keeps showing us more and more of these visions of past events, it's clear that that he and Ban Ban, used to be friends. At least friendly enough for Flynn to have brought Ban Ban on his little escape plan in the first place. But as things get worse and worse,

we see the deterioration of their relationship. They are arguing non-stop. You had one job, and you messed that up somehow. If Shabu Josh was here, he would have loved those vegetables. I am pretty content that he's not grazing this with his irritating presence. Why do you hate him so much?

It gets so bad that Ban Ban Ban decides that he doesn't even want the freedom that Flynn is offering anymore. Why are we even doing all of it? I don't want to go to the beach anymore. I just want to go back. And to really nail home this connection, the Euphoric Brothers had a song commission

specifically for the Dream Car sequence, a song titled Rivals. In that song's music video, created by the Nerdcore Channel Rocket Music, the titular rivals are none other than Flynn and Ban Ban, a song that Ban Ban Ban seems to really like. That's what I'm talking about. The lyrics of the song

seemed to be pointing at the moment that their relationship truly began to fall apart. 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. Considering the song is from the perspective of Ban-Ban, it would seem that Stinger Flynn took a life from him. But what life is that?

What could that be meaning? Well, it's important to remember that most of the monsters in this game are a mix of human genome and gyvanium. For Ban-Ban, we know his human genome came from Dr. Uthman-Adam, the head researcher at Ban-Ban's kindergarten. This is also the scientist who, alongside Dr. Weberly Mason, tried to create the child that they would never be able to have, only for it to turn into a monster.

Meanwhile, Stinger Flynn, we still don't know much about, honestly. We don't know who his human genome donor was. We don't know what they did. What we do know is that according to this little kid drawing found in Chapter 2, Stinger helped to save kids from a rampaging Ban Ban on the loose during Bring Your Friend Day. So really, this line about stolen lives can boil down to one of three things. One, Stinger Flynn was the human who put Uthman Adams genome into Ban Ban in the first place, stealing his human life, and he's mad about it.

Option two is that Stinger stole or harmed the child that Uthman created, and then there's option number three. On Bring a Friend Day, we know Ban Ban went on a rampage. We also see hints of this in Chapter 5's preview images. Maybe Stinger, by saving that group of kids for his own unclear and suspicious motivations, literally took those lives away from Ban Ban. Regardless the reason, I suspect that the next few chapters are going to give us some more dream sequences that will start depicting these events, leading to the realization that Ban Ban, the mascot that we thought we could trust,

was the one that caused the ball pit to collapse on Bring a Friend Date, that he was the one that caused our child to disappear and sent us into the abyss trying to find them. But you know what? That's not the only mystery that we have left. During the dream cut scenes, whose perspective are we playing through? 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.

Or maybe we're not any character at all, that were just some random floating camera observing these things happening. But that doesn't make a whole lot of sense within the scenes themselves. First off, Ban-Ban, Stinger Flynn, and the rest of the gang, They talk directly to our character. Hey, you. You're finally awake. You sure are a sleepy fellow.

A great. Morning, sleepy fellow. We are a part of these dreams. We're watching this from the perspective of someone in the gang. So then, who are we? My first thought was that perhaps were Jumbo Josh, but I was able to rule that one out pretty quickly thanks to this line from the Campfire dream.

Man, if Jumbo Josh was here, he would have loved those vegetables. The next possibility was Bambalina, but that one was also quickly shot down. You're waking up. I was getting really bored, and that fellow over there isn't much of a talker. If Bambalina was really part of Stinger Flynn's escape crew, then you would obviously know that Nab Nab is not a talker.

Ban wouldn't be needing to give her this sort of information, which means that whoever we are, or someone new, or someone who doesn't know this group all that well. And that's shockingly rare to come by. I mean, almost all the characters that we've met so far have known each other, or at least have known about each other in some form. Toadster in Chapter 4 even has a poster of every character, including the chapter 7 character Syringian, who we still haven't met in the games yet.

Everyone knows everyone, except for maybe one. There is one character that has been kept a secret this whole time. The one we also suspect was at Bring a Friend Day with Ban-Ban, the perfect child. This child was purposely kept hidden, not just from the experiments, but from everyone. Quote from one of the lore documents, we have to turn it back around if we want our little secret down in the basement to stay a secret. Eventually, the child was thrown into the mix with the other mascots, because a follow-up note says, not to mention how dangerous it is to keep him around all those other monstrosities. This child has been with Ban Ban and his crew for a while,

which is why it makes sense for him to be traveling with the rest of the group in these dream sequences. And this then seems to point to the crux of this whole game franchise. At its core, it isn't about purple kangaroos or spider blobs or pancreas, pancreas, pancrii, whatever, the plural is. It's about family. The love of two scientists desperate for a child. The love of one parent searching for her lost kid. And it's about the tragedy that comes when you're separated from those children.

Stinger Flynn potentially takes away Ban Ban's kid on Bring a Friend Day, sending him into a rampage. This then prompts the overstuffed ball pit to collapse, leading to the catastrophic situation in which our character finds herself. So laugh all you want about the weird, vainy mascots with dumb names and stiff animations. At its core, this is a human story told through weird, esoteric dream sequences, poorly written text documents, and monotone monologues. But if you manage to get through all of that and the strange and often boring gameplay, underneath you have something beautiful. Or, you know, maybe not beautiful, but at the very least it's interesting. Or if not interesting, at the very least, you have yourself a theory. A game theory.

Thanks for watching.