2476: The Growth of the Visual Novel

0476_001

When discussing my full writeup on Supipara earlier today, it occurred to me that visual novels are in a much better place here in the West than they were even a few years ago.

When I first encountered visual novels — like, first first encountered them — they were like a hidden gem of the Internet. Gorgeous Japanese pixel art, interesting stories, memorable characters and porn, all in one happy package. Naturally, despite a number of them having been officially translated by the well-established (and still standing) JAST USA, they were mostly distributed through… shall we say, questionable means. (If I remember correctly, this was still the days of KaZaA and Limewire over dial-up, well before BitTorrent became a thing.)

I had a lot of fun with some of these early visual novels but was never quite sure if it was “acceptable” to talk about them, what with them being widely regarded as porn first and foremost. Fortunately, a number of friends and I all discovered Parsley’s wonderful True Love around the same time, and found ourselves thoroughly captivated by its wide variety of different characters, its interesting stat-based gameplay and the various mini-stories each of the game’s heroines got you involved with.

Other memorable early visual novels I encountered included Ring-Out!! which was about a young girl sold into essentially sex slavery dressed up as professional (all-lesbian) wrestling for the gratification of rich, bored playboys with nothing better to do and less-than-progressive attitudes towards women. While this game’s plot was a thinly-veiled excuse to have, well, lots of lesbian wrestling in lingerie, it stuck with me long after I first played it because it presented the protagonist as a very “human” character caught up in events beyond her control, not quite sure how to deal with what was essentially a horrific situation to be caught in. There were a number of different narrative paths through the game, each of which explored what might happen if the protagonist responded to her situation in different ways. Short version, though: if ever you wanted to feel really, really bad about popping a boner over some lesbians doing lesbian things, Ring-Out!! is the game for you.

I also quite vividly remember Three Sisters Story, because although it presented you with the opportunity to bump uglies with all three of the titular sisters over the course of the narrative, doing so would cause you to suffer the indignity of a bad ending where you didn’t end up with any of them after the dramatic finale. This was surprising to me, and confirmed something I already suspected: there was a lot more going on in many of these games than excuses to display lovingly-drawn images of depraved sexual acts.

It would be a good few years before I got back into visual novels, and Japanese games in general. I typically credit Katawa Shoujo with my current interest in Japanese popular media, despite it being largely Western-developed, and by this point, discussion of visual novels — including their lewd bits — had become much more “acceptable” to many, though still not all, people.

After Katawa Shoujo, I decided to catch up on a number of visual novels, primarily from JAST, who were still pumping them out, and a couple from relative newcomer MangaGamer. I had a great time with many of them, and still fondly look back on a number of these titles such as the gloriously silly My Girlfriend is the President and the lengthy, emotional road trip story that is Kira-Kira!

Visual novels still hadn’t quite hit the mainstream, though, and this was disappointing to me, as here was a genre of game — no, I’ve often argued it’s a distinct medium in its own right — that was exploring subjects and themes more traditional games typically shied away from for various reasons, whether it be concerns over the subject matter itself to simply not being sure how to make a game about people just living their life actually fun and interesting to play. I wanted more people to appreciate this fantastic medium and enjoy the stories I’d enjoyed, but it remained difficult to convince many people that they were anything more than just porn, even if I cited specific examples of how they clearly weren’t.

When I look around today, I see a very different landscape. Visual novels are everywhere on Steam, and not just from Japanese developers: these days we have works from English, American, Russian, Korean authors… authors from all over the world who want to tell their story in the distinctive way that the visual novel medium allows them to. And the genre/medium as a whole has, I feel, finally hit the mainstream.

That’s absolutely delightful to see for me, as someone who was around when they were very much an “underground” sort of experience; the growth of the visual novel sector — both adult and all-ages — has been wonderful to observe, and so long as there are great stories that people want to tell, there seems to be no shortage of new experiences to enjoy.

There’s still work to be done — most notably with regard to the distribution of adults-only titles, which can’t be sold on leading digital distribution platform Steam in their uncut forms, and which some companies are selling the sexual content for separately rather than simply providing a free patch or alternative download — but for the most part, we’re in a much better place than we were even a couple of years ago. And, I feel, it’s only going to continue to get better from here.

Also, buy Supipara. (Read more about why you should do this here.) I want to see the other chapters released!

2295: You Should Play Aselia the Eternal

0295_001

JAST USA recently released Aselia the Eternal on Steam. The game’s been around for a good few years now — its original Japanese version for even longer — but its release on Steam will doubtless allow a whole new audience to (hopefully) enjoy it. I will now attempt to explain why it is worth giving it a go.

Aselia the Eternal is a combination of a visual novel and a strategy game. The overall balance is very much in favour of the story side of things — it’s a good six hours of reading before you get to the game’s first strategy battle sequence — but when you do get to the strategic aspect, it’s a game that puts up a good fight.

The narrative concerns the player-protagonist Yuuto, who finds himself drawn into another world populated by people who speak a completely different language to him. Unable to find his way home, he gradually learns to communicate with these people — the ones with whom he’s staying known as “Spirits” — and finds himself recruited into the army as an “Etranger”, a wielder of a powerful, sentient sword that regularly threatens to eat his soul.

Gradually, as Yuuto becomes more and more involved in the lives of the Spirits, he starts to worry less and less about trying to find his way back home and more about helping to resolve the conflict that threatens to tear this fantasy world apart. As such, the narrative becomes very much a high fantasy sort of affair — war on a grand scale, magic and mayhem around every corner, transcendence of humanity not at all out of the question — and builds to a thoroughly exciting conclusion that I won’t spoil here.

The story is compelling, interesting, well-written and well-translated, but it’s the gameplay part that is perhaps the most interesting thing about it, since it’s one of the most original takes on strategic RPG-style combat I’ve seen. Virtually eliminating all luck from the equation, combat in Aselia the Eternal is actually about putting units together in small squads to perform most effectively according to what type of unit they are — and by doing this correctly you can effectively guarantee that you’ll win a conflict before you reach it. The tricky part is in finding those suitable combinations in the first place.

The basic rules of engagement have each of your squads made up of three ranks — a frontline fighter, a mid-range tank and a support fighter bringing up the rear. Each of the different types of Spirits perform best in a particular slot: Blue Spirits (such as the eponymous heroine) do their best work as speedy damage dealers in the front row; Green Spirits tend to have the highest defense and HP, so sit in the middle; Red Spirits often have support abilities that can damage an entire enemy squad or provide suitable benefits to your own, so sit at the back. You’re not limited to this arrangement — and indeed, with Yuuto in the mix, who is none of those things, you’ll have at least one squad with an unconventional lineup — but there are clearly optimal ways to do things, making each of the battles in the game as much of a puzzle as a strategic RPG experience.

Aselia the Eternal comes together so nicely because everything it does is in service to its narrative and worldbuilding. Despite not having an open world you can freely explore, its excellent storytelling and descriptive narration builds a wonderfully convincing setting that gives the strategic sequences genuine meaning and drama. And, as a result of that worldbuilding, your units in the strategic sequences become more than just sets of stats and abilities; they become people. People who you don’t want to see die, because yes, this game has permadeath.

The question of being “more than just a soldier” is one of the main narrative themes explored in the game, and it’s a rather wonderful moment when you realise that you, the player, are having the same epiphany that the characters in the game are. There are some wonderfully touching sequences with Yuuto and the Spirits as they get to know one another, and you’re right there with them. And, as the narrative ramps up and you bring more and more allies with you, the tension becomes palpable as you take them into battles that you really don’t want to see them lose.

I don’t want to say too much more because part of the wonder of Aselia the Eternal is exploring the experience for yourself and discovering everything this remarkable work has to offer. Suffice to say if you enjoy in-depth storytelling — and lots of if — and aren’t averse to a bit of red-hot strategy action, you should most certainly check it out. And then strongly consider supporting JAST’s recent release of the sequel Seinarukana, which I’ll be investigating for myself in the near future!

1535: El Psy Kongroo

I’ve already written on the subject at some length over on USgamer, but on the offchance you haven’t paid us a visit recently, I thought I’d wax lyrical about my initial experiences with Steins;Gate here, too.

Steins;Gate, for the unfamiliar, is a visual novel from popular developer Nitroplus, whose name you may remember from the excellent “giant robots fight Cthulhu” visual novel Deus Machina Demonbane that I played a while back. Unlike Demonbane, it’s not an eroge — though Demonbane’s sex scenes were, for the most part, more horrifying and uncomfortable than anything else — but it’s still an unabashedly adult affair, just one without any graphic uglies-bumping. It’s an enormously well-respected title, known better to most people in the West through its apparently excellent anime adaptation, and an official English localisation has been a long time coming. But come it finally has, thanks to localisation and visual novel specialists JAST USA — one of my favourite publishers in the world for the last few years — and finally everyone can get in on the action.

Steins;Gate is a science fiction tale that, for the few hours I’ve played so far, centres largely around the concept of time travel and parallel worlds. The main character is a gloriously chaotic individual afflicted with chuunibyou (“middle school second-grade syndrome”) — he’s utterly convinced that he’s a mad scientist and that he’s being pursued by a shadowy group called The Organization. Whether or not his delusions turn out to be true or not remains to be seen, but it’s certainly an interesting setup; much like Demonbane put the player in the shoes of a protagonist that was a character in their own right rather than an obvious blank-slate cipher, so too does Steins;Gate.

This time around, the narrative influences aren’t drawn from Lovecraft, but instead from popular science and science fiction, both Eastern and Western. The game makes frequent references to real-life concepts, particularly with regard to topics like time travel and parallel world theories as well as the real-life modern-day myth of time traveller John Titor. The game makes unsubtle changes to things it mentions throughout (Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure becomes Juju’s Bizarre Adventure, for example, while the IBM 5100 computer Titor supposedly travelled back in time to retrieve becomes an IBN 5100), presumably to avoid breaching about a bajillion copyrights, but it’s always clear what it really means. There’s a constantly updated glossary you can refer to as you play, too, that gradually fills up with a wealth of information ranging from Japanese cultural tidbits to scientific and technology history.

It’s clearly a setting that has had a lot of thought poured into it. In many ways, although the premise, style and genre are completely different, Steins;Gate reminds me of Aselia the Eternal in the sense that the writers obviously had a very clear vision of how their version of the world worked and how the various characters fit into it all. This was very true in the case of Aselia the Eternal, which I maintain has one of the most well-realised, well-depicted fantasy worlds of any game I’ve ever played, despite the inherent restrictiveness of the visual novel genre, and is already shaping up to be very true in the case of Steins;Gate. Nitroplus’ title goes a step further with all the supplementary information you can refer to as you play — not to mention the fact that clicking the “Internet” option on your in-game phone opens an actual website for the main character’s “Future Gadget Lab”.

And speaking of the phone, the means through which you interact with Steins;Gate is bizarre and intriguing. Rather than making the usual binary choices that visual novels tend to present you with, Steins;Gate instead makes use of the protagonist’s phone as its main means of interaction. As you progress, you’ll receive email messages from characters and have the option to respond to them or not; you’ll also receive phone calls and have the option of answering them or not answering them, and various other things will happen in and around your phone. The choices you make as to whether or not you engage with these various distractions determine the paths down which the plot proceeds, giving the flow of the story a much more “natural” feel than some visual novels with extremely obvious decision points. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!)

Anyway. I’m but a short way into the overall plot as a whole as I type this and thus there’s not a lot more I can say thus far save for the fact that I’m really enjoying it and looking forward to seeing where it goes. It’s an immediately intriguing, compelling tale with some fascinating, unconventional characters and an utterly gorgeous art style, so if you’re looking for a new interactive story to delve into, I’d encourage you to check it out and grab a copy as soon as you can.

1014: Aselia the Exceedingly Lengthy but Still Well Worth Playing

Back in early October, I did an initial blog on my impressions regaring a Japanese-developed visual novel known as Aselia the Eternal. Since that time, I’ve written two columns on the subject for Games Are Evil — one about the game itself, the other about how it creates a convincing, coherent-feeling game world mostly through words — and there’s still a huge amount more to say about it. So I’ll brain-dump it all here and you can sift through at your leisure.

The first thing I want to say is that it’s a pity more people won’t play this. I can shout its name from the rooftops all I like, but I know for a fact that most of you reading this are not even considering picking it up and trying it out. This is the one failing of the video games medium becoming so broad and wide-ranging in recent years — no-one has time to play everything, so the vast majority of people concentrate on the recognisable names, the new releases, the triple-A blockbusters and the “indie darlings” of the moment, leaving titles like Aselia to — relatively speaking — flounder. Take a look at this great article by Rowan Kaiser, for example, in which he suggests a variety of games to give a gaming newbie a “crash course” in what the medium is all about. Everything on that list is, I’d argue, mainstream or at least “well-known”, and yes, I include titles like Journey and Papo and Yo in that description. They’re all “safe” options — and that’s not a particularly bad thing, especially when trying to introduce someone new to the medium — but a lot of people don’t ever step out of this comfort zone because there’s no real need to.

On the plus side, however, this means that the fans of these particularly niche games are almost infinitely more passionate and willing to discuss them than someone who has completed, say, Assassin’s Creed III. (There are exceptions, of course — I know I follow several people on Twitter who are obsessed with Ezio di whateverhisfullnameis and the overly-complicated lore of the Assassin’s Creed series to an unhealthy degree — but I’d argue the people who care that much are in the relative minority.) And, of course, there’s the fact that titles like Aselia represent “mainstream PC gaming” in Japan, so if you can actually speak Japanese (I’m working on it… slowly!) you’ll find like-minded people out there.

But anyway. If you have played Aselia the Eternal (or indeed any other visual novels) and want to enthuse about them with me, please feel free to do so at any time.

Now. To business. Indulge me a moment while I explain what it is that makes Aselia the Eternal particularly noteworthy or at least “interesting” to look at.

First of all, a little history. Aselia the Eternal was originally released in 2003 on PC as an 18+ eroge called Eien no Aselia – The Spirit of Eternity Sword. In 2005, it was stripped of its erotic content and released on PlayStation 2 as Eien no Aselia – Kono Daichi no Hate De (Aselia the Eternal: At the Ends of this Earth). Rather than the excision of the erotic content making it a “gutted” experience, however, the game was rewritten to make it more friendly to a wider audience. This “all-ages” version was later backported to PC in 2010, and translated into English by JAST USA in 2011, leaving us with the version we have today. JAST took the decision to translate the “all-ages” version rather than the 18+ original due to content which would have proven “problematic” to get around the censors — specifically, there are a number of characters who look very young (despite, as with most eroge, character ages not being made explicit anywhere), which makes erotic content involving said characters out of the question to Western audiences; and also, the original carried an “evil path” through the story which featured graphic scenes of violence and sexual assault — also deemed unpalatable to Western players.

The upshot of all that is that the version of Aselia the Eternal you can buy legally today is not compromised in any way from the vision of its writers, but equally it does not feature any content that you might not want anyone viewing over your shoulder. In other words, this is not a hentai game; rather, it is simply a Japanese visual novel/strategy game/RPG type thing sans bonking.

It’s the peculiar blend of genres in its gameplay that makes Aselia the Eternal an interesting one, though. Initially appearing to be a fairly conventional visual novel involving a cast of high school students, a pair of (foster) siblings with a mildly questionable relationship and the occasional innocuous-seeming choice that you just know will have surprisingly far-reaching ramifications, the game gets truly interesting after about 5-6 hours of pure exposition — 5-6 hours that will determine whether or not you’re in it for the long haul. The game’s player-protagonist Yuuto as well as several other characters get spirited away to a mysterious fantasy world, and a battle for survival begins. From this point on, you’ll be splitting your time between the number-crunching of a strategy RPG and the plot-heavy relationship manipulation of a visual novel. The two aren’t necessarily clearly demarcated, either — the game frequently breaks in mid-mission for 30-60 minutes of plot advancement — but this actually works in the game’s favour as it tries to tell its story, and stops story feeling like a “reward” and instead like everything you do is part of the ongoing narrative.

It helps, of course, that the actual gameplay in the strategic side of things is extremely solid. Here’s how it works.

As you progress through the game, you gain control of a wide variety of female “spirits” of different colours, as well as the protagonist. Differently-coloured spirits have different specialisms — blue spirits are good at direct attacks, for example, while green spirits tend to have higher HP and defense. Red spirits, meanwhile, are good at magic, while black spirits are a bit of a “jack of all trades, master of none” class, with good HP and defense, decent attack power and some useful enemy-crippling abilities.

Your forces are split into four “squads” of up to three units each. The unit in the first position of the squad is the Attacker, the second is the Defender and the third is the Supporter. The Attacker’s job is to… well, attack… the Defender’s job is to soak up damage and prevent critical hits, and the Supporter’s job usually involves casting spells of some description, which might be direct attacks, buffs or debuffs. Each unit has up to three equipped skills for each of the three different squad positions, for a total of nine skills at any one time. I say “at any one time” because as they level up, abilities get overwritten — sometimes this is your choice, other times, “Limited Skills” mean that you must overwrite a previous level of a skill when you earn a new one. Only one skill from each category may be “set” at once — this is the one which will be used in battle — and each skill only has a limited number of uses before the unit needs to return to a friendly town to rest and recharge.

You move around the “campaign map” via preset pathways, one “space” per turn. If you move onto an enemy, you attack them. Before the battle resolves itself, you can see the lineup of the enemy squad (including HP and abilities), and you then have the opportunity to rearrange your squad members and set the abilities you would like them to use in the upcoming battle — this is an immensely important step that can mean the difference between life and death — and then it’s into combat.

Battle unfolds in several phases. First of all, the attacking side’s Supporter casts an “Attack Support” spell if it has one set — these include buffs or some healing spells. Then the other side gets to do the same. Then the attacking side’s Attacker gets to make an attack, which is usually intercepted by the Defender if there is one, then the Supporter, then the Attacker finally. Certain skills allow units to target specific units other than the Defender — this can be particularly useful if the Supporter has a nasty spell ready, but not many HP left.

Following the first attack, the Supporter gets to cast a Divine Magic spell if they didn’t already case an Attack Support spell. These are mostly offensive in nature. Then the defending side gets to attack, then Divine Magic. This then repeats until all the units involved in the battle have expended the number of “actions” for the skills they have set. Certain skills may be used more than once per battle, and this can be used to your advantage — if, for example, the enemy Defender can only use their damage reduction skill once per battle and you have a powerful attack that can be used twice, that second attack will connect and do “critical” damage.

There’s an added twist with the Attack Support and Divine Magic spells — blue spirits have the special “Ice Banisher” ability when in the Supporter role, which can interrupt certain spells. Naturally, there’s a trade-off — blue spirits are also the strongest Attackers, so having one in the Supporter slot means that they’re not doing damage, but making effective use of Ice Banisher is essential to survival as the enemy gains access to stronger spells.

It’s a system that initially appears rather complex and confusing, but becomes second nature after no time. It’s actually a very elegant system that forces you to think carefully about which characters would be most useful in dealing with the situation in front of you, and requires that you manage your army carefully to ensure they’re strong enough to take on the challenges ahead of them. It also means that there are often a number of ways of getting past seemingly insurmountable challenges — that boss who is giving you grief may hit hard, but he only has two uses of his attack skill before he’s left unable to damage you, so if you can just keep your green spirit alive for two turns, you can then exact bloody revenge at your leisure.

Pleasingly, there’s no grinding in Aselia the Eternal. While you’re wandering the game world, your captured towns are converting their stored “mana” to “ether” at a rate dependent on how many Ether Refinery buildings you’ve constructed. The more towns you have, the more mana in your pool, but mana can’t be used in its raw state — it has to be converted to ether first. Once you have ether, however, this can be spent on constructing new buildings or, most importantly, levelling up spirits and the protagonist. To do this, they must be located in a town which has a Training Facility constructed, and their entire squad must rest while the individual unit trains. You gain access to various different trainers with different specialisms as the story progresses, putting an effective “cap” on your progress as you go through — but sometimes you hear rumours of trainers in far-off locations, and can enlist their services if you send a squad to go and pick them up.

So Aselia the Eternal would be an interesting strategy game even if it didn’t have the plot attached to it. What makes it a remarkable experience, however, is how the plot makes you feel about those units scampering around the world map. Because you get to know all the people in your squads in various story scenes, not just the main characters, you care about them and you don’t want them to die. Letting a unit die means that you’ll never see them again in the story, because there are no revive skills until very late in the game. When you see how many little subplots involving these seemingly “unimportant characters” are weaved into the overall narrative, you’ll very much want to be “that guy” and reload every time someone kicks the bucket. After all, Halion promised you that she’d bake some special treats for you in her shop when the war is over… you can’t let her die, now, can you?

And goodness me. The Feels. Aselia the Eternal has them by the bucketload, particularly when it comes to chapter finales. This is a game that doesn’t hold back on the emotional manipulation at all, and does its very best to make you feel terrible about every virtual life you take. The overarching story is at once both epic in scale and very personal to the protagonist, and the romantic subplots are expertly weaved into the narrative as a whole rather than serving as the sole focus as in some other visual novels.

I have one more chapter of the story to go, and I’m very interested to see how it concludes. Hopefully that will happen sometime this week.

But I feel I should probably stop there, as I’ve wittered on for over two thousand words. I won’t tell you to buy and play Aselia the Eternal because I know that probably 95% of you aren’t going to, but if, on the off-chance, you do, be sure to come and enthuse about it with me sometime.

#oneaday Day 990: Aselia the Eternal, Early Impressions

For an upcoming READ.ME column over on Games Are Evil, I’m going to be covering a game called Aselia the Eternal. Depending on how much progress I make before Sunday, said column will either be this week or, more realistically, next week. But I thought I’d take a bit of time to share some less formal initial impressions on the game for those who are interested, or simply curious.

Aselia the Eternal is a visual novel for PC (and PSP in Japan, I believe). There are actually two versions available — an 18+ edition with H-scenes and a 15+ version without. Only the 15+ version has officially made it to Western-speaking territories due to some of said H-scenes supposedly being in questionable taste — and also because of Western publisher/localiser JAST USA’s desire to start putting out a few “all ages” titles as well as their myriad 18+ shag-happy offerings.

The basic premise of Aselia the Eternal is thus: Protagonist Yuuto lives alone with his little sister Kaori. Their parents died a while back in an accident, but Kaori was spared thanks to Yuuto imploring anyone who would listen to give him a miracle and save his sister. It turns out someone was listening — the spirit of the sword “Desire,” which, as these things tend to do, claims ownership over Yuuto’s soul in exchange for his sister’s life and, at an unexpected point after several hours of fairly typical high school drama, sucks Yuuto into another world where All Is Not Well. War is brewing, and Yuuto is about to become embroiled in it as part of a force of “spirits” — seemingly human creatures with strong bonds to their swords who are treated as nothing but weapons by the actual humans. Since humans make spirits (and “Etrangers” from another world such as Yuuto) do all their fighting, most places have little hesitation in going to war because there’s actually very little risk to the “real” people, and as such Yuuto arrives just as It Is All Kicking Off, as it were.

The interesting thing about Aselia the Eternal is that rather than representing the conflicts and battles that Yuuto and his spirit companions get into purely through narrative text, there’s actually a very competent strategy game built in alongside all the visual novel stuff. When it’s time for Yuuto and his allies to saddle up and hit the road to complete a mission, gameplay switches from the usual “read, read, read, read, read, make a choice” to a tactical map view, at which point you need to put your strategic hat well and truly on if you’re going to survive.

The world map of Aselia the Eternal’s battles is node-based in nature. Player units, each of which may contain up to three members, may move one space per turn, as may the enemy. If a unit enters a contested space occupied by an enemy unit, a battle begins, at which point the makeup of the teams becomes important.

Each unit has an attacker, a defender and a supporter. The attacker makes use of direct-damage skills. The defender tends to mitigate damage. The supporter either casts damage spells or adds useful effects. Each individual character has their own set of skills that changes according to what slot they’re in — the eponymous Aselia, for example, may attack with her sword twice in a battle if she is in the attacking position, whereas if she is in the supporter position she is able to block enemy spells and prevent them from causing damage. The “colour” of each unit also has an impact on their effectiveness — green spirits are best in defensive positions, blue spirits are best in attacking and red ones are best in support, though according to the enemy’s abilities (which can be previewed before battle is resolved) you may wish to switch them around a bit. Each character only has a set number of uses of each of their skills before they either need to switch them around or go back to a friendly-occupied town or base to refresh themselves.

It’s an unusual, original, simple and elegant system that works extremely well, offering a degree of tactical flexibility while rewarding those who think carefully about the best way to approach a particular situation. The node-based nature of the world map means that it’s relatively accessible to strategic newcomers, but still offers the potential for pulling off clever tactics, particularly later in the game when you get access to additional characters and, by extension, units. It’s surprisingly tough and unforgiving, too — lose a main character in battle and it’s an immediate game over. No Phoenix Downs here. (Also, SAVE!)

What’s surprising about the inclusion of this aspect of gameplay is not that it’s in there at all — there are a number of visual novels that incorporate minigames — it’s that despite it being there, the game is still a storytelling vehicle first and foremost. It’s not a strategy game/RPG with lengthy story sequences, it’s a visual novel with occasional strategic battles. This might not sound like a big difference, but it’s the difference between playing something like, say, Final Fantasy Tactics, where the story sequences sometimes feel like they’re just rushing you through towards the next battle as soon as possible, and what we have here, which is an unfolding story in which you occasionally have to fight. The “pace”, for want of a better word, is a lot slower — though that’s not necessarily a bad thing, as it gives you plenty of time to get to know and become attached to these characters before walking into battle with them.

In fact, what the experience really feels like is the developers sitting down and thinking “this is the story we want to tell. There are battles at this point, this point and this point because they serve the story.” rather than “we are making a strategy RPG. We need gameplay to be 75% strategic battles, 25% story.” It feels very much like something that has been designed primarily as a narrative, in short, rather than a game — and that’s rather interesting, because I can’t imagine any Western publisher greenlighting a game with such a seemingly skewed ratio of traditional gameplay to sitting back and just reading. (Of course, I can’t imagine any Western publisher greenlighting a visual novel full stop, but that’s beside the point.)

I like what I’ve seen so far. The story is quite slow to get going but it already has some interesting characters involved, and I’m intrigued to see where it goes next. Watch out for further thoughts when I’ve played a little further.

#oneaday Day 947: Further Enthusing Regarding School Days HQ

When I picked up School Days HQ, it was largely out of a combination of curiosity at why the game (or, more specifically, its 2005 original incarnation) was such a fondly-regarded game that J-List and JAST USA were pushing so hard, and a general enthusiasm for any kind of story set in a school. Seriously, I’m loco for anything set in a school. Persona, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, even crappy teen “coming of age” movies. (Fortunate, then, that Andie enjoys such works also.)

Regardless of the reasons for my fascination with school in general, I was expecting to be done with School Days relatively quickly and to be moving on to other things.

I was wrong.

After a single playthrough, the game helpfully informed me that I had seen just 12% of what it had to offer. After a second playthrough, that was largely similar throughout but had a very different ending, I was at 17%. Third time around, I’m starting the third episode of six and I’m somewhere around the 20% mark.

What’s keeping me coming back and playing this rather simple game over and over and over again?

Story. Characters. Simple as that. Each playthrough has followed a different narrative path and has taught me something new about the characters and their relationships with one another.

In my first playthrough, I played it “straight”. I always do this with visual novels or titles such as Catherine that are clearly inspired by them — all choices I make are the ones that I — or possibly the person I would like to be — would make. In School Days, you have the added pressure of having to make decisions in a relatively short space of time, with refusing to act at all also being taken as a valid choice, so I had to go with first impulses. I ended up with an ending that was somewhat bittersweet.

Spoilers follow.

School Days’ setup is that protagonist Makoto likes pretty but shy girl Kotonoha. Sekai, the confident girl he’s been forced to sit next to when his class changed seats, immediately latches on to Makoto and discovers that he likes Kotonoha thanks to the picture on his phone that he surreptitiously (and slightly creepily) snapped on the train. She agrees to help him get together with Kotonoha, and one of twenty different endings ensues.

In my first playthrough, as I say, I played it straight, or as if I was Makoto and genuinely in love with Kotonoha. I maxed out Kotonoha’s “affection bar” pretty quickly by saying the right things and being supportive of things like her phobia of being touched. Makoto dropped everything to do things with her. He let her be alone when she wanted to be alone, and was there when she needed him. This all went terribly well, culminating in her opening up to Makoto (in more ways than one, fnarr) and accepting him as her boyfriend. Eventually, the pair made plans to spend Christmas Eve together in an expensive hotel paid for by Kotonoha’s family, where they proceeded to, not to put too fine a point on it, bang each other senseless.

Unfortunately, all this happened without any consideration whatsoever for Sekai’s feelings. Early in the game, we get an indication that Sekai might, in fact, like Makoto when she steals a kiss from him as “payment” for her help with Kotonoha. She denies this, however, giving the couple space and dealing with her own issues by herself. This doesn’t stop rumours circulating that she and Makoto are together, however, which doesn’t make her feel any better. She enters a cycle of depression, ending up so wrapped up in her own sorrow that she is almost unable to function. Her friends intervene and rescue her, but whatever there once was between her and Makoto is gone forever. Makoto himself says to Kotonoha in this ending that he doesn’t care who he has to hurt, as long as he’s with Kotonoha. She seems quite happy with this situation.

My second playthrough followed an initially similar path. Despite my attempts to get Makoto and Sekai together instead, I still found myself on the “Kotonoha” plot branch — the story diverges quite wildly at the end of the second episode and proceeds down either the “Sekai” or “Kotonoha” route according to the choices made at the beginning, splitting into about a bajillion other branches along the way.

This time around, however, Makoto was clearly confused, and more than a little miserable. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to be with Kotonoha, and missed Sekai, who was deliberately distancing herself from the couple in order to let them be together. Makoto tried to confess his love to Sekai, but she told him to stop being such an idiot and focus on his girlfriend. And rightly so.

But things continued to decline. Makoto’s heart really wasn’t in the time he spent with Kotonoha, and things came to a head at the school festival. In my first playthrough, Kotonoha takes the bold step of inviting Makoto to the hidden “break room” behind her class’s display to, uh, get over her phobia of being touched; this time around, however, the same situation arose and Kotonoha said nothing, largely because Makoto made his excuses and pretty much ran away before they could talk about anything.

Instead, Makoto made a choice: he went and found Sekai, who was waiting by the bonfire at the end of the festival. The school’s traditions and legends dictate that a couple who dances together by the bonfire will stay together for at least the next year, and knowing this full well, Makoto and Sekai dance together, and they both seem genuinely happy for the first time. The two enter a curious “friends with benefits” relationship, where Sekai agrees to be Makoto’s “practice girlfriend” with whom he can do all the stuff that Kotonoha won’t let him do, but it is abundantly clear that both of them actually like each other.

To cut a long story short, Kotonoha shows her latent bunny-boiler tendencies, forcing herself on Makoto and snapping a compromising picture of him in order to try and convince Sekai to give up. Sekai is understandably devastated and refuses to talk to anyone, let alone Makoto, but when he spends the entire night sitting on her doorstep looking completely and utterly defeated and is found by her mother, her heart melts and the two share the genuine couple’s embrace that they’ve been craving, while Kotonoha is left to stew and Think Very Hard About What She’s Done.

In my third playthrough, which I haven’t finished yet, I made a specific effort to woo Sekai from the beginning. It’s tough to do this — firstly because Sekai is seemingly resistant to Makoto’s advances and secondly because it genuinely makes me feel like absolute shit to treat Kotonoha like crap — but if you keep pushing enough in the right direction, the plot takes a wildly divergent path in a different direction. Rather than focusing on Makoto and Kotonoha, Sekai takes centre stage. It seems that she’s been avoiding both Makoto and her own friends — the former because she doesn’t want to get in the way of the relationship she helped build, and the latter because they believe her to already be together with Makoto and keep asking questions. It was impressive how much of a change some slight tweaks to remarks and context made to the plot, and I’ll be interested to see how this particular path develops.

End spoilers.

As that lengthy explanation probably demonstrated fairly aptly, this is a title with a considerable degree of depth — not in gameplay terms, but in a narrative sense. Both Kotonoha and Sekai (and Makoto, for that matter) are very complex characters with a variety of facets to their personality — only some of which you appear to see on any one given playthrough. Three times around and I’m still learning new and interesting things about these characters, which will hopefully help me to make the “right” choices in the end.

But that then begs the question: with 20 different endings, what is the “right” one? School Days certainly has its fair share of bad endings (though I haven’t seen any yet) but who’s to say these are “wrong”? Similarly, the first ending I got with Kotonoha was technically a “good” ending, I guess, but I was still left feeling distinctly shitty about how I’d treated Sekai in the process.

This is genuine emotional engagement right here. The Feels, if you will. And along with that comes a real sense of your choices having real consequences. This combination of factors, it turns out, is enough to keep me coming back time after time to see what happens next. I don’t need beautifully-rendered guns, I don’t need slick platforming, or creative mechanics; all I need for a game to keep me compelled is three strong characters and some increasingly fucked-up relationships between them.

Further posts on this subject will undoubtedly follow, especially if I come across any particularly noteworthy endings along the way.