Category: visual novel

Romance, Hold the Choices

Here’s a Homer in Silicon on Don’t Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story — Christine Love’s follow-on (of sorts) to Digital: A Love Story. I had various issues with it, which I discuss in the article, but overall I did like it, especially for the vivid characterization of the anime-obsessed teens. (Also, Love manages to do things with Ren’Py that I wouldn’t have guessed possible and that make it feel much less static than the average visual novel.)

Added bonus: Dirolab has some thoughts on the piece also.

Homer in Silicon on Date/Warp

Date/Warp is a visual novel from Hanako Games, paced out with puzzles. I liked a lot of things about it, but had some issues with the structure; essentially, my discussion is about how to handle situations where you want the player to replay and try most of the alternate versions of a multiple-ending game, where that will mean that late replayings will be mostly the same experience over again. Date/Warp enforces this more than many other games (though in a way I gather is not unusual for visual novels) by having the best ending be completely locked and inaccessible until you have played through almost every possible variation.

It’s a problem that has some bearing on multiple-path IF. I know, for instance, that there are people who did play Alabaster this way and found it exasperating to do so — see TempestDash’s review here — even though the intention was to steer players aggressively towards interesting endings and point out which mysteries were missed, rather than to encourage complete exploration of content. So, though I’m critical of Date/Warp as an experience in that regard, I think it raises some useful questions.

Two From the List

mimic-threatenI’ve been playing with a few things on the enormous to-be-played list from a few days ago, though of course there are so many things on there that it will take quite some time to get through.

Braid: I have now finished. It’s of course a masterpiece in the game-play area, and doesn’t need me to say so. I usually have a really hard time getting through platformers, since I don’t have the right combination of patience and skill. As advertised, Braid minimizes the amount of frustration involved in playing a platformer while offering a diverse range of genuinely interesting puzzles; and while there were still a handful of these that were too finicky and that I would have been happy to skip, nonetheless it was the best time I’ve ever had with the format.

As far as storytelling goes, it’s a bit more confused: there is some really intriguing material in the final level, in which the meaning of events is revised and reinterpreted in a way that naturally connects to the gameplay itself; and even before that point, many elements of the game are framed so that the play is metaphorically significant.

But what I get out of all that is not really a story (good luck finding two people who even agree on what happens in Braid) so much as a series of meditations on some of the common problems in relationships and self-definition. Some of it’s thought-provoking, some a little on the obvious side. Admittedly I usually find this kind of content under ask.metafilter’s human relations tag rather than in a game, and I’m generally encouraged when a game branches out to incorporate new material. So hooray for that.

Nettestadt Troll was recommended to me as an example of good Ren’Py work, and I’m afraid I didn’t get nearly as far with that. The premise is uncomfortable to start with: girl gets abducted and raped but discovers she kind of likes it and/or falls in love with her captor. This is a fantasy to be found in many forms of literature from Menander to a certain genre of 1970s romance novel, but it’s something that would need to be handled with a fair amount of psychological sensitivity in order to be a story I want to read. Otherwise, what you have is basically porn for a specific audience.

I wasn’t crazy about the art or the prose quality, either, and the pacing left me kind of bored during the first few chapters; as for the world-building, it’s extremely vague and careless, featuring both alchemists and telegrams, feudal hierarchies and shops with “receptionists”.

I did stick with it for a while, though, in case this was a case of poor writing craft combined with a strong storytelling sensibility. Unfortunately, once there started to be choices to make, they were often on the level of random and incidental choice: e.g., what dish do I make for my supper while waiting for the troll to come home and rape me again? It’s a bit less inane than Dream Day Wedding, but the choose-your-own whatever aspects display the same lack of significant agency that I complained about there.