1573: Open Book

Finished Steins;Gate completely this evening (apart from one “Tip” which remains at large, but as far as the game is concerned, I have all the achievements and all the CG images, so I’m happy with that) so expect some more in-depth commentary on that next week over on MoeGamer.

For now, I wanted to wax lyrical about the visual novel medium once again, since sitting down and “playing” Steins;Gate for most of today has been an enjoyable, enriching experience — and the majority of the time I’ve spent with it has been spent reading, unable to influence what’s happening on-screen.

Those of us who grew up with video games in the ’80s and ’90s had the mantra “gameplay is everything” drilled into us from an early age. As technology improved and the CD-ROM era dawned, we started to see more and more reviews pointing this out; more and more reviews highlighting the fact that beautiful presentation counts for jack shit if your game isn’t up to snuff.

And for a while, this was actually kind of true. The games that sacrificed “gameplay” in favour of impressive presentation — usually of the prerendered cutscenes or full-motion video variety — tended to suffer in two regards. Firstly, they weren’t very fun to play. Secondly, the only other potential redeeming feature they might have had — telling an interesting, enjoyable story — tended to crash and burn due to the low budgets of games at the time. It’s all very well having real, live actors in your game, but if they can’t act for shit then it doesn’t make for much of an interactive movie.

Here’s where visual novels contrast with the early ’90s interactive movie craze somewhat, even though they started to grow in popularity around the same time. Visual novels embrace the fact that they don’t have any “gameplay” — and by that I mean moving a character around a screen, having perceived “freedom” to do what you want and so on — and present themselves as nothing more than interactive stories; effectively little more than multimedia takes on Choose Your Own Adventure books. In fact, in many cases, visual novels are even simpler than Choose Your Own Adventure books in that the vast majority of the narrative is prescribed for you, and you’ll make only a few choices over the course of the complete story, rather than one at the end of every page.

And yet this doesn’t matter. Not having to deal with the consequences for every possible tiny little thing the player might decide to do in a more “sandboxy” environment frees up visual novel authors to concentrate on the story and the characters who help to tell it. It’s perhaps for this reason that so many visual novels tend to go down the romance route; because the virtual relationships you build with visual novel characters are much more intense and intimate than in most other types of game — character-driven RPGs excepted, perhaps — many authors allow the reader a degree of wish-fulfilment through virtual dating. (Of course, at present the vast majority of visual novels are designed to cater to male heterosexual players, but there is an established marked for other players in Japan that is gradually starting to make its way over here; Sweet Fuse on PSP and the Hakuoki series for 3DS and PS3 are good examples of “otome games” designed for heterosexual female players, for example — let’s see a few more of these in the future.)

Not every visual novel necessarily revolves around love, though. At one end of the spectrum, we have the phenomenon of the nukige, which are games that deliberately focus on being sexually provocative or exciting, but which tend to still include considerably more characterisation and story (and better acting!) than you’d see in your average Western porn film; at the other, we have visual novels like Steins;Gate, where love might perhaps enter into the narrative at some points, but in which the main point is a different theme or piece of subject matter. (In the case of Steins;Gate it’s several different interpretations of time travel and parallel worlds, for example.)

What I find most enjoyable about these games is that there’s no “gatekeeping” based on skill or dexterity. You sit down to play a visual novel, you know you’ll be able to “finish” it, assuming you set aside the time to do so. Reading a walkthrough doesn’t feel like cheating, either, since all you’re effectively doing is looking up how to explore the alternative narrative paths. Good visual novels make effective use of multiple endings and narrative paths to further flesh out the story, too; the best ones can even leverage their “bad” endings into a meaningful narrative context, as I touched on yesterday.

What I think I’m saying is that I’d actually be perfectly happy if, for whatever reason, the only games I was able to play were visual novels. There’s diverse enough subject matter in them to keep them consistently interesting, and in most cases they’re just “gamey” enough in terms of presentation to sate that hunger for multimedia content that most of us have in the modern age.

Am I only going to play visual novels from now on? Of course not; but as a means of enjoying an interactive story, they’re hard to beat.