1560: Paradoxes and Worldlines

Time-travel fiction is notoriously difficult to get “right” (for want of a better term) because it brings all sorts of baggage with it, both from established (or at least popular) science as well as conventions of fiction. It can be interesting to see how different works of fiction tackle these aspects — if at all.

The visual novel Steins;Gate jumps in head-first and attempts to spin a plausible example of how time travel might actually work were we to invent it in our lifetime. But despite the heavy science component — Steins;Gate really doesn’t hold back on the science side of things, which will delight those who are particularly interested in the “sci” part of “sci-fi” — it is, at heart, a story about people and how they’re affected by the strange, unnatural phenomenon of moving through time in a non-linear fashion.

SPOILERS AHEAD for the Suzuha and Faris endings of Steins;Gate — if you’re on the front page, hit Continue Reading (or whatever it actually says) to, err, continue reading.

Continue reading “1560: Paradoxes and Worldlines” →

1549: HOUOUIN KYOUMA

Still not finished Steins;Gate — it’s long! — but I wanted to talk about it a bit more, as I played it a whole bunch this evening and think I may be closing in on one of the games several endings.

Like most good visual novels, Steins;Gate does an excellent job of drawing you into its world and helping you understand its protagonist. Despite being entirely composed of static images, character portraits and very occasional “event” images — much like every other visual novel — it manages to craft an extremely convincing setting. Or perhaps, given the game’s focus on manipulation of time, the many-worlds interpretation and all manner of other goodness (this isn’t a spoiler, by the way; it’s a core theme of the whole thing), it would be more accurate to say “settings”.

One of the most interesting things about the game is the effort to which Nitroplus (and, by extension, the translators) has gone to ensure that all the background detail in the world is consistent, detailed and, in many instances, based rather obviously on reality. An extensive in-game glossary allows you to look up information on a variety of different keywords that appear throughout the course of the narrative and dialogue — and these cover a range of subjects from real-life scientific theory to popular hypotheses put forward by science fiction, snippets of otaku culture, online culture, and “chuunibyou” conspiracy theories. Although the game takes obvious pains to twist things slightly from their real-life counterparts — IBM becomes IBN, for example; CERN becomes SERN; names of popular anime and manga get similarly bastardised — it’s obvious that a lot is based on things from the actual, real world, and consequently it’s hard not to feel like the game is subtly sneaking some genuine knowledge into your brain as you play it.

Okay, a lot of it may not be all that useful unless you have an otaku friend who constantly drops references you don’t understand (Hi!) or are acquainted with a conspiracy theorist nutjob, but it’s interesting that it’s in there nonetheless — plus it helps provide a lot of the narrative with an interesting degree of context. It’s also just plain cool for a narrative to be based on real-life urban legends such as John Titor and the question of what CERN are really up to with their Large Hadron Collider.

Aside from all that, though, Steins;Gate is simply a phenomenally well-written visual novel. It’s long and wordy, sure, but all the exposition in the game’s early chapters really pays off with some wonderfully strong character development. The protagonist in particular is a fascinating individual; being a “chuunibyou” conspiracy theorist himself with delusions of being a mad scientist named Hououin Kyouma — a name his voice actor takes considerable delight in bellowing every time it comes up in the script — makes him far more interesting to inhabit the head of than many other “blank slate” protagonist characters seen in other visual novels. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with those — they often fit well with more “dating sim”-style stories in which the protagonist is usually intended to be a self-insert for the player — but, well, yes. Steins;Gate makes a convincing case for the protagonist being a strong character in their own right.

Anyway, three solid hours of reading earlier have driven my eyes a bit squiffy so I’m off to bed. Further thoughts will doubtless follow when I’ve finished the damn thing.

1547: Reading Steiner

A lengthy Steins;Gate session this evening coupled with a chat about Saya no Uta (aka Song of Saya, a game I haven’t played but am looking forward to trying) with my friend Mark has reminded me both how and why I love the visual novel medium.

I use the word “medium” when referring to visual novels rather than “genre” because in many cases, it’s not entirely accurate to call them “games”, despite the fact that they tend to be festooned in the trappings of video games. Most tend to include some sort of metagame element, be it a simple checklist of endings, a CG gallery with a completion percentage or, in the case of more complex games like Steins;Gate, even achievements. Most of them are presented in a distinctly game-like fashion, with console-style main menus that make pleasing noises when you click on them, colourful but clear text boxes with a little spinny thing in the corner that tells you when you’ve reached the end of the current paragraph, and all manner of other things.

And yet they’re not games. Not really. They’re interactive stories — some having no more than one or two meaningful choices over the course of the entire narrative, and some even eschewing the element of choice whatsoever — that make use of multimedia presentation to distinguish themselves from, you know, reading a book. The combination of static background images, static or lightly animated characters, music, voice acting, sound effects and text all combine to create a very distinctive effect — and one that can be a powerful poke to the imagination.

Books, of course, are the poster childs for stoking the fires of the imagination, but visual novels also do this, albeit in a different way. Whereas in a book it’s left largely up to you how you picture the scene unfolding in front of you, in visual novels you tend to get a bit more in the way of audio-visual cues. You can hear the characters’ voices (at least you can in recent releases; earlier VNs were text-only), you can see the characters, you can hear the music giving you an idea of the overall mood and, if the scene is a particularly important one, there’ll be an “event” image depicting a dramatic moment from whatever is happening.

Far from being an inferior means of stirring the imagination, this approach works in a different way. While books provide the stimulus for mental pictures through descriptive text, visual novels simply use their multimedia element to do so, which allows them to cut back a little on the descriptive text and instead explore the protagonist’s innermost thoughts, or engage in some snappy dialogue between characters.

Visual novels present a particularly good means of expressing a first-person narrative. While in first-person perspective books you tend to feel like you’re just along for the ride, in visual novels it feels like you’re taking a much more active role — even if your influence on the overall story is minimal. You’re sitting inside the main character’s mind looking out through their eyes and listening to their innermost thoughts — and even if the main character is some sort of awful jerk (as they often are in visual novels) this provides a very good means of exploring that character, why they are an awful jerk and how they may or may not go about changing themselves. Character growth! How about that.

This isn’t to say visual novels have to be confined to first-person narratives, however. No; in fact, it can be very effective for a visual novel to “cut away” to another character, or even a complete shift in perspective to third-person. Nitroplus’ visual novel Deus Machina Demonbane is a particularly good example of this being used effectively; during its first-person sections, it’s something of a film noir tale about a down-on-his-luck detective and how he becomes embroiled in a series of increasingly ridiculous events. During its third-person sections, however, the true scale of what Kujou is involved in becomes apparent thanks to being able to get an overall picture of what is going on — coupled with the authentically overblown and distinctly Lovecraftian narration that accompanies these scenes.

Steins;Gate, also from Nitroplus, is a little more traditional than Demonbane in that it remains firmly stuck inside the protagonist’s mind, but my gosh what an interesting head to be stuck inside, for Rintaro Okabe is a strange individual indeed — seemingly convinced he’s a mad scientist named Hououin Kyouma (which his voice actor bellows with admirable aplomb every time it comes up in the script) who is being pursued by “The Organisation”, it’s not entirely clear for a lot of the game whether Okabe genuinely has a screw loose or if he’s just playing up for the people around him. The sheer ridiculousness of his statements would seem to suggest the latter, but then he does something so outrageous that you have to wonder about his mental state. And when Steins;Gate‘s overarching narrative threads start to get moving, things become even more murky.

The upshot of this is that Okabe becomes something of an unreliable narrator. And this is something that visual novels are particularly good at exploring. Saya no Uta is another particularly good example from what little I know of it, but there are countless others, too; when you’re observing a narrative from a first-person perspective, after all, you’re only getting one person’s perspective on it — and how can you be sure that person is telling the truth?

That’s the question, huh? Anyway. That’s that for now. Check out Steins;Gate if you’ve got a yawning chasm in your life that can only be filled by utterly fascinating sci-fi; full review coming soon on USgamer.

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.