Who is Luchino?

Luchino Diruse is a playable character from a Dead-By-Daylight style game called Identity V. He was introduced in Season 6 of the game's running time and just like how DBD is split into killer/survivor sides, Luchino has two playstyles in both IDV's hunter and survivor factions.

Luchino's fate is what happens when science guides itself into the fog without ethic. He worked as a herpetologist alongside a university prior to his arrival to Oletus and is recognized in group 6, denoted by his third character letter's confirmed serial "6-1-4". He was known to test reptile bites on himself as his field was venom logic and would experience his very own genetic metamorphosis when given captivity of an unknown lizard-snake species. Some might say this was doomed kismet, but Luchino himself would go on to describe this transformation as a gift, or the "presents from his research".

Not to the fault of most IDV fans since it's a common misconception, but Luchino's mutations are not representative of evolution even if he says it is. Maybe in the context of Pokémon it would be, but evolution is nothing but the natural offset of generational traits rather than a person-by-person reaction, and no amount of external stimuli or transformative venom juice will make what Luchino went through evolution. Even in context of evolution, evolution never looks back.

[Retrieving quote, come back later. I just don't want to buy the book].

As much as I like the Ouroboros motifs of Luchino's tale, I like to think that because evolution has no memory or foresight Luchino is essentially a separate classification beyond human or reptile. He does have countless similarities of a reptile — the extra jawbone in his mouth and the scaled composition of his skin most notably — but he's probably more closely related to the biped avemetatarsalia (or something close). A parallel creature outside of the more relevant, modern, reptile. A "negative dinosaur". And I use "related" loosely.

Even though the contexts of evolution don't correctly describe Luchino's metamorphosis, Luchino technically has made it to "the next step" in a series of undiscovered evolutionary staircases as we peek into the genetic potential of whatever-he-is. We don't even know much about the origins of the lizard-snake thing Luchino had been studying to even classify it as either or, so as far as I'm concerned it's "like" a reptile, but has zero ties to any Earthly reptile.

One of my favorite anatomical features about Luchino is definitely his digitigrade hindlegs. When I first saw them in-game, I just sort of found them out of place — offputting but attractive, establishing a kind of disconnect from true reptile anatomy and I chalked it off as an oversight by Netease. Most modern reptiles are plantigrade like bears and humans, but his legs are bird-like where he has a third segment of leg that he stands on rather than his whole sole touching the floor.

I probably would've accepted either approach because some of the best fantastical designs stray away from anatomical accuracy and just work because they look cool. To my thrill his deduction quests and Character Day letters intentionally make the origins of the his reptile specimen obscure, describing it as both a snake and a lizard in multiple instances. It's actually a great testament of Luchino's themes of ambiguity.

To the Identity V players who haven't picked up the game since the last Case Closed Crossover, the game had a 2.0 update and room for a replacement protagonist was made, Alice Deross (The Journalist). Following her debut the game introduced the idea of "Alternate Identities."

Tldr; a character (survivor or a hunter) whose already a playable character can be reintroduced as a whole new playable unit with a completely different kit and playstyle from their original counterpart. The selling point is that this was multi-factional. Norton, Orpheus, Joker, Luchino, Alice, and Mike... and the like have alternate identities in all different factions. In the future, there's always going to be more of these alternate identities for as long as Identity V's servers keep running.

There was a split in the community on whether or not this mechanic was being handled to its potential. In 2024, 3 out of 6 of the characters with confirmed alternate identities only had been presented in dramatic sequences as their hunter forms when everyone's explicitly doped up on Orpheus's drugs.

... For the worst? This "The monsters were actually hallucinations" thing felt lazy on Netease's end. I could've accepted this reveal once in AOM I, but twice is pushing it.

To better gauge the significance of this system, Identity V announces around 6 new characters a year, though the frequency of upcoming character content has slowed down with time. With this new system in order, some SNS character introductions double as an identity switch, and their ingame debuts have all been followed with a fully-animated, cutscene-packed event for their respective lore. Players wait maybe a year or two for established lore to get expanded on. That's fine, that's what we signed up for.

What disappointed me was how little of the internal politics and relationships that occured during or before "AOM II" was shown. It was one of the weaker storyline updates to follow Norton's identity switch ("Fool's Gold"). From Alice's perspective we were able to get an air of tense familiarity with all the guests in her game, but that was something we already knew from the letters. The development between Time of Reunion and "Ashes of Memory I" felt delayed by the bloat of Ashes of Memory II. The cherry on top? "The monsters were actually hallucinations."

Hullabaloo's storyline event exceled where TOR/AOM didn't while also presenting Joker (and Mike for like 4 seconds) as hallucinated monsters, so I do have hope that where the system lacks the story makes up for. Again, TOR/AOM was the very last recorded game that occured at Oletus, so the developers have incentive to milk the AOM cast's likeness without having much to say.

I don't hate AOM/TOR. It's not completely devoid of new information — we learned the origin of Mary's ghost, Melly & Frederick's grounds to attend the manor game, and the Norton fans got a stupid bread scene that IDV Tw*tter couldn't put down. I'm upset that it shot my favorite mystery's foot. It's very likely that when TOR/AOM's storyline wraps up, it'll all be as satisfying as Hullabaloo's sequence.

One of Identity V's strongest points is its ambiguity and openendedness for the same reasons we might enjoy mythology or cryptic beasts. The franchise does take advantage of this using Lovecraftian frameworks, its why they're able to milk their characters every year so that they don't have to write the story in one sitting.

When thinking why the two player factions exist (outside of their roots to DBD's format), it makes you think about why some hunters earned their fate as hunters, and what separates them from the survivors who themselves committed many if not more moral injuries than the hunters. I was pretty disappointed that with the alternate identity system, the developers started its early order by chalking it up to the cousin of "it was all just a dream" when they've already struck gold retaining the mystery of what hunters are.

This is why Luchino is the alternate identity system's saving grace by tapping into the ambiguity of Identity V.

Considering his plot, nobody really knows whether or not we are interpreting Reptilian Luchino as we see it, or if we can really chalk it up to just drugs. Luchino's survivor form (professor) is visibly growing scales and his arms bleed when they fall off. As far as we know, Professor is real and in front of us, the point of reference. Evil Reptilian is who we want to be.

Apparently Professor Luchino was confirmed 30 in the Character Relations tab while Reptilian Luchino was confirmed 35 in the official artbook (and later changed to have an undecided age). It's completely feasible for Luchino to have actually transformed to the final stage of "full reptile" between his first and second game. The trick here is that they don't lift the curtain and explain who Evil Reptilian is to the rest of the cast.

I'd prefer the hunter dynamics to be obscured permanently in the narrative rather than every game having been revealed as a drug plot back to back.