The following contains minor spoilers for ‘Katawa Shoujo’, ‘The Tatami Galaxy’, ‘The Bible’, and my work in progress visual novel, “Herald”.
I. Seitarō Higuchi
Is Jesus Christ a Mary Sue?
The man is impossibly warm. He can beat anyone else with a blink. And he’s always right about everything. He might not be a Mary Sue in the traditional sense (an author’s self-insert fantasy), but the parallels are striking.
Let me ask a different question: is an impossibly warm character doomed to be boring?
I worry, because I’ve written one.
When I was planning my work in progress visual novel, ‘Herald’, I wanted a character that could embody everything good in the world. For me, that meant two things:
1. Warmth. What you get from an archetypal mother. Love, and a certainty you will be helped and held.
2. Joie de vivre (Literally ‘The joy of living’). What you get from a manic pixie dream girl. Freedom, amusement, excitement, and joy.
These moods were embodied well by two characters from the visual novel Katawa Shoujo (Lilly and Emi, respectively). I liked them both and figured that combining their attributes would yield a better character.
Yeah. That was a bad idea.
Alex Jaffe, game designer, once spoke on “cursed problems”. These arise when you try to combine two good things into a greater whole, without knowing they are incompatible. You must compromise on one of your elements, or you will produce something not only less than the sum of its parts, but less than any part alone.
Maximising a character for warmth andjoie de vivre is a cursed problem.
Have you ever told a joke that was slightly mean, behind someone’s back? It can be fun, and funny. A character maximised for joie de vivre can do this and make the audience smile. But a character who is maximally warm cannot, because a joke that is slightly mean is still a cruelty.
It’s fine to have your characters tell these jokes. It’s fine to have others chide them gently. What isn’t fine is having a character tell slightly mean jokes and chide others for doing so. The hypocrisy is blatant and makes your character completely unlikable. Mine was. She only survived two draft scenes before I cast her into oblivion for a dozen similar problems.
Maximising warmth and joie de vivre is a cursed problem. I could only maximise for one.
I decided I would maximise warmth. And that’s when my troubles really began.
In my Katawa Shoujo retrospective, I wrote that Lilly was impossibly kind, patient, and warm – and that some people disliked her for this. Lilly couldn’t be exciting, or funny. Some people found her boring.
I knew my character would face a similar problem. If I wasn’t careful, she would end up boring, too. I had to find a solution. I did:
I decided to ignore the problem.
Okay, it wasn’t quite that dumb. I actually decided to wait for a solution to arise organically. I’d let the character evolve in the writing process, until she wound up interesting.
That didn’t happen. Instead, I wound up with a character who was sweet, thoughtful, kind, and as boring as watching paint grow.
Was this my fault? Or was it another cursed problem: wanting to maximise a character for warmth, and have an engaging story?
Again: is an impossibly warm character doomed to be boring?
There’s a moment in “The Tatami Galaxy” where someone claims that there’s no such thing as a rose-coloured life, but there is every other colour imaginable. You can become a cyclist, a film buff, a tennis player – it doesn’t matter; whichever you pick, your life will have downers, irritants, and scores of dull days. But each will also have its own moments of unique wild colour, where mundanity cracks and magic leaks through. There is no such thing as a perfect life – but there is every other kind you can imagine.
Perhaps the same is true of characters? Perhaps you can make anyone interesting – a middle-aged lawyer watching his marriage fall apart; a teenaged runaway finding her place in the world; a deranged scientist trying to hone a visual novel into the explicit name of God, and so on. The one character you cannot make interesting is one without flaws; the rose-coloured character; the one that is maximised for warmth.
But then what about Jesus Christ?
II. Jesus Christ
HAVE YOU HEARD OF OUR LORD AND SAVIOUR JESUS CHR – WAIT WHERE ARE YOU GOING
The protagonist of bestselling book ‘TheBible’, Jesus Christ is impossibly warm. He never tells jokes about others, because he never tells any jokes at all. If a maximally warm character is doomed to be boring, then Jesus should be doomed. But he isn’t. Somehow, The Bible makes him compelling.
How does it do what I could not?
By not telling a normal story.
In a normal story – a comedy; a romance; a drama – the characters amuse, titillate, and concern. Jesus does not. What Jesus does is grant epiphanies.
Consider:
“But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.
Now early in the morning He came again into the temple, and all the people came to Him; and He sat down and taught them. Then the scribes and Pharisees brought to Him a woman caught in adultery. And when they had set her in the midst, they said to Him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses, in the law, commanded us that such should be stoned. But what do You say?” This they said, testing Him, that they might have something of which to accuse Him. But Jesus stooped down and wrote on the ground with His finger, as though He did not hear.
So when they continued asking Him, He raised Himself up and said to them, “He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first.” And again He stooped down and wrote on the ground. Then those who heard it, being convicted by their conscience, went out one by one, beginning with the oldest even to the last. And Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When Jesus had raised Himself up and saw no one but the woman, He said to her, “Woman, where are those accusers of yours? Has no one condemned you?”
She said, “No one, Lord.”
And Jesus said to her, “Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more.”
Four things just happened.
First: a conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees. More, a conflict where Jesus’ warmth was not tangential, but at the conflict’s very heart.
Second: Jesus channelled his warmth into two moral axioms that were novel: a) Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. b) Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more. (Remember, the novel is always more interesting than the familiar).
Third: We were shownsomething that made the axioms feel right and true.
Fourth: Each axiom resolveda conflict. The first resolved the external conflict of the Pharisees. But the second resolved an internal conflict – that of the woman. Burning with guilt and with shame, perhaps she even believed that she deserved to be stoned. She must have expected it. Instead, she was given something unexpected: an epiphany. You do not have to be punished for your sins. Still, strive to sin no more.
(The woman is you, by the way).
It’s interesting because it opens your eyes to something novel (the axioms and the unexpected behaviour of Jesus). It shows you those things being tested in conflict and makes you believe they are right and true.
A lesser story can titillate, amuse, or concern, but a great one should change how you see the world, and even pull you from despair. The Bible is so ingrained in our culture that it probably won’t do that to you – but it still does, to some. And if shattering a person’s worldview to pull them out of despair isn’t interesting, then I don’t know what is.
Jesus is interesting not in spite of his maximal warm, but because of it. The Bible achieves this by:
1. Making a conflict about warmth, which can be solved by warmth, so it can leverage Jesus’ warmth. 2. Having Jesus say and do novel things which spring from his warmth. 3. Showing us something that makes the words and deeds of Jesus feel right and true. 4. Having the warmth of Jesus catalyse an epiphany in a second character who stands-in for the audience, who may need that epiphany, too.
III. Lilly Satou
Now that we have crystalised why Jesus works, I can explain why I like Lilly during Katawa Shoujo’s first act, but not thereafter.
Act 1 centres on Hisao, a boy who has recently developed a heart condition. Decades have been slashed off his life, and he may just die at any time. He is abandoned at a boarding school for the disabled, and is left disconnected, depressed, and directionless.
Then Hisao meets Lilly.
She is clearly higher status than him. We should expect her to spurn Hisao – but she doesn’t. Instead, she befriends him and spends the whole first act showing Hisao that he doesn’t have to be alone, that he can move forward, and that his life is still worth living, in a way that feels viscerally true (Hisao is you, by the way). He learns these lessons, shifts his worldview, and leaves his past behind.
It works for the same reason that Jesus and the adulterous woman worked:
1. A conflict was presented which warmth could resolve. 2. Lilly channelled her warmth into something novel (unexpected kindness, and experiences – these subliminally communicated what Hisao had to learn). 3. We were shown what Lilly wanted to convey, in a way that felt viscerally true. 4. Lilly’s warmth catalysed an epiphany in Hisao that saved him from further darkness – and perhaps saved the audience, too.
The problems start after Act 1. Hisao’s internal conflicts are resolved, so Lilly can no longer show him an epiphany. Neither does the story introduce an external conflict that would allow Lilly to draw on her warmth. The route isn’t devoid of merit, but it doesn’t leverage Lilly’s warmth, and I find it less compelling than what came before.
IV. Auric Orange
Where does that leave me?
A maximally warm character does not need to be boring, but you must structure your story to leverage their warmth. They should say or do things that are novel, unexpected, and feel real. Ideally, they should transform a character’s worldview to pull them out of darkness, to perhaps do the same for the audience, too.
I scrapped the final third of my own visual novel, ‘Herald’, because it was boring. In retrospect, it was boring because I failed to leverage the heroine’s warmth. I’ve fixed that now – but with a twist, different to what was done in The Bible or Katawa Shoujo. I hope it will be interesting.
As for ‘Herald’ itself, progress has been slow. I’d like to blame burn-out, a recent move, late nights in the lab, and having to deal with the cursed problem. These have been factors, but I’d be lying if I said that laziness wasn’t the bigger culprit.
This blog has also been quiet. The issue here has been different. I learned that writing monthly posts is not for me. It took a ton of time from Herald, and I hated having to put stuff out that I thought was garbage (see: my last piece). It also drained me to the point that I couldn’t stand working on a fourth one and couldn’t respond to any of the comments people kindly left me last time. Um. Sorry.
I actually did draft a longer and more complex piece which was meant to be the fourth dev diary, but I can’t stand to look at it now, and I’ve left it to moulder. I’m planning to polish it up some time, but not yet.
Going forward, I’ll only be putting stuff up here if I have something to say or something I must figure out.
Well. I’m back from the dead, and I guess you can await my next coming.
“You can always amend a big plan, but you can never expand a little one. I don’t believe in little plans. I believe in plans big enough to meet a situation which we can’t possibly foresee now.” – Harry S. Truman?
“Heroes don’t need plans” – Snow, ‘Final Fantasy XIII’
I. Don’t try this at home
The first time I wrote a book, I wrote without a plan.
My story lurched from incident to incident, seeking resonance, like an incel lurches from girl to girl for sex. Alarming plot holes opened under my narrative. Soon, the whole thing crashed in and was buried. There it lies to this day, somewhere in the strata of my hard drive, awaiting a final destruction that will come when I shriek and launch the computer tower out of my balcony window as suitable punctuation during an emotionally charged argument over the best series of Digimon.
I discovered I need to plan.
George R.R. Martin allegedly once compared story planning to planning a holiday. You plan the cities you’ll visit, the hotels you’ll patronise, and some sights you will see. But bits of the trip won’t be planned. The electric gin bar you spontaneously visit one night. The time you inadvertently buy twenty coconuts. The knife-fight your friends have on day three when they need to settle the best series of Digimon.
I have not watched OG Digimon, but identify strongly with this thing.
When I made the Weeb Hajj to Glorious Nippon in 2017, I had plans. I planned to visit Akihabara and strengthen my chastity. I planned to stay in a converted massage parlour in Osaka, with the review “Many spider live here. Whole house has stench of carrion.” I even planned to see that famous broken dome in Hiroshima, which may represent something important; I never bothered to check. These were good things, and I’m glad I did them.
But my favourite parts of the trip were unplanned. Like a morning in Kyoto that was so cold I had to keep buying cans of self-heating coffee from vending machines just to crack them and hold them up to my fingers, to keep the things from freezing off. In this state, I somehow wandered into the garden Shosei-en. Few others were dumb enough to have done so, meaning I had the place almost all to myself.
At the heart of that garden midwintered was a pond so placid it seemed that if it were deep enough, you could see through to the other side of the world. There was a diamond silence. The water reflected the sky for no one in particular. And in that moment, I grasped the thing that artists gesture towards.
The same planning dynamics have been true of my stories. After my Challenger of a first book exploded, I swore off writing without a plan. Hence, my work in progress visual novel, Herald,is blessedly free of plot holes.
But here’s the thing: most of my favourite scenes in Heraldweren’t planned. They arose organically, when it felt right to have the characters step aside, out of their lives, into a sunset to share what they had seen when they stared back at their own reflections inside of themselves.
How do I square that: a) I need to plan, and: b) The best moments of my story are unplanned?
II. And then a skeleton jumped out
“Okay, a plan helps you avoid plot holes and writer’s block – but maybe it also locks you out of spontaneous, passionate creativity, and kneecaps whatever you’re trying to write.”
I don’t buy this.
First: if you have spent six months carefully planning and refining your story, then the odds that a better idea will spontaneously pop into your head seem low.
Second: if you do have a better idea when executing your plan, then you are allowed to indulge it, provided it doesn’t wreck your tone or narrative.
Third: it seems essential to plan if you want to explore a theme. A good exploration of a theme depends on characters, events, discussions, and locations being linked by a common element. It can be hard, or outright impossible, to retroactively insert that into your story.
Fourth: a plan is not a completed story. It is normal to reassess any endeavour as things take shape. That doesn’t mean the planning was worthless – just that a plan is only a sketch, and you can add colour to your sketch as you go.
I’m reminded of a talk given by Jordan Mechner, discussing the development of his 1989 hit video game ‘Prince of Persia.’ Mechner mentioned a moment where a skeleton unexpectedly returned to life and duelled the player. This moment was one of the most popular in the game, and Mechner found it funny that it and other popular moments were only added at the tail end of development. Meanwhile, he’d spent years laboriously setting up bedrock mechanics like jumping puzzles and door-opening mechanisms.
Could Mechner have skipped all that, and just focused on the parts people loved?
You can blame this c*** for every ‘playing dead’ skeleton that stabbed you hereafter.
I don’t think so. The skeleton only works because it is a contrast to the remaining Arabian labyrinth. If the entire game was nothing but dramatic encounters, they would soon become predictable and boring. This moment stands out only because the bedrock mechanics are in place.
To map this analogy to stories: my favourite scenes tend to be intimate, vulnerable moments between two people. But if EVERY scene was like this, they’d get boring very quickly. It’s the contrast to everything else in the story, and the context provided by the story, that makes these moments work. To bring all this back to planning: yes, you can make a successful detour into something beautiful – but you must have something to divert from. A plan gives you a road from which you can branch off.
III. Card games and slavery
I also want to suggest that, counterintuitively, planning may actually make you more creative than just freewheeling.
Our brains suck at being original thanks to one, terrible adaptation: they are very good at solving problems.
When you try to create, your brain will automatically fall back on solutions that have worked before. In storytelling, it will crib from stories that already exist and take elements that have worked. This is fine in small doses, but too much will make your story derivative and boring. So: how do you stop your brain pulling out lazy, tired solutions?
Create problems that need original solutions.
When Orson Welles filmed his adaptation of ‘Othello’, he was screwed when some costumes didn’t arrive. He was haemorrhaging money keeping his cast on set, and now he couldn’t film. What was he to do?
Welles solution was ingenious: he divorced his actors from their clothes and re-set the scene in a Turkish bath house. That not only solved Welles’ problem but yielded something that was probably more interesting than his original plan.
Can we create these limitations artificially? I think that depends on how you plan.
Perhaps you have heard of ‘Magic: the Gathering‘, the popular trading card game. Every week, for twenty years, head designer Mark Rosewater has been publishing a column that explores the game’s design. One concept is the difference between “top-down” and “bottom-up” design. When designing a card set for MtG, top-down design starts with flavour – e.g., what about a set based on Norse mythology? From there, the challenge is to create game mechanics that will capture the feeling of Norse mythology.
Inversely, ‘Bottom-up’ design has you start with card game mechanics, which dictate the flavour of the set. E.g., the cards of MtG are governed by five “colours” which each represent a principal value (white = peace, green = growth, blue = perfection, red = freedom, black = power). Mechanically, Rosewater wanted to create a set where the cards would be governed by combinations of the five colours/philosophies, in their ten possible pairs. Each would need a guild to represent it. Here, the challenge was to create flavour that would capture the set’s mechanics.
Though why you would ever need any colour other than orange is beyond me.
Top-down and bottom-up design start with a different limitation (flavour and mechanics, respectively) which then entails creativity at the other end of the spectrum. For top-down design, you might be lazy with flavour (“Norse mythology,” wow). But when turning that flavour into card game mechanics, you are confronted with an unfamiliar problem. Hopefully, this will push you to create interesting mechanics that could never have occurred to you otherwise. Inversely, if you start with a mechanical idea, it may force you to produce original flavour to match it.
Story planning does not involve card game mechanics (unless you are writing YuGiOh! fanfiction). However, it does have a spectrum like top-down and bottom-up design. Instead of flavour and mechanics, though, our spectrum is story and effect.
Did you know that the second best-selling book of the 19th century (losing out to only THE Bible) was Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Its author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, wanted a story that would promote abolition. Having chosen the desired effect of her novel, Stowe then had heavy constraints on what the story could be. For instance, it seems non-negotiable that any anti-slavery story must feature a sympathetic slave being treated unjustly. In short, Stowe’s story was dictated by the effect she wanted it to have.
At the opposite end, one can start with a story. Maybe you just want a fun yarn about a dude who punches dragons. You can plan this story without considering the effect it might have on your audience. But that means the effect might completely surprise you. Consider Katawa Shoujo, which inadvertently led many readers take up art and writing. If you just focus on telling a story, maybe you’ll produce something that creates a wholly novel effect.
Effect and story are not a rigid dichotomy, of course. Even if you set out to achieve an effect, you will probably include some elements for the sake of the story, and vice versa. As well, these are hardly the only limitations you can place on yourself.
IV. Herald
What of my own work in progress visual novel, Herald? Did I plan for story, or effect?
Both. When I planned Herald, I had effects in mind that I wanted to achieve. At the same time, some elements went in for no reason except that I thought they were cool (these have mostly turned out to be my least favourite parts of the VN).
Has the effect I wanted Herald to have led to creativity? It set the theme, which has led to some novel story elements. It demanded that the first half of the story revolve around a conflict that I actively did not want to explore, and which I never would have done otherwise. I couldn’t get the final third of Herald to work until I ripped up all the EXCITING STORY stuff I had written, stepped back, and asked myself what the story would need to be for it to have the effect I wanted. As a result, the story has become its own thing, and I’m happy about that.
Progress has been decent this month. After re-planning the end of Herald, I redrafted it and, after four years of on-and-off work, am now down to being just five scenes away from the end of the draft.
That said, I’ve paused drafting to go back and edit, for two reasons. First, I’d like to polish the character arcs so I can draft the last scenes properly. Second, I imagine there will be a big psychological boost to finishing the draft, and I’d like to hold off on pulling that trigger until I need it.
Going back through Herald, I was delighted to find that one section I remembered being bad was actually decent – and disheartened to find that another I thought was decent was actually crap. I’m currently working to fix that up.
The other issue is this blog. I’ve kind of made this month’s deadline, but I had to push myself to do it and cut into time that is normally ear-marked for Herald. I’m also not thrilled with the results. I don’t know what that means for this blog going forward. I want to keep up with the monthly pieces for now, but maybe I’ll stop if they keep being too much of a distraction. I told myself they’d be small and unpolished, but I don’t seem capable of accepting them that way.
So: hopefully another post next month.
See you then?
Oh, and I lied about never writing without a plan again. I didn’t plan a single goddamn word of this essay.
Heroes don’t need plans, mother****er.
This is a blog devoted to visual novel development, now chronicling the ongoing development of Project ‘Herald’. For a full list of essays I have written, please click here.
“It’s easy to shit out a plot. But where are the themes?” – Anonymous22, ‘The Answer’
The following contains spoilers for the visual novel Katawa Shoujo (as usual).
I. Connect
Often when reviewing visual novels (see Eisai, Policenauts, Twofold), I’ve found myself making the same two criticisms:
1) None of this means anything.
2) The pieces of this don’t add together to be more than the sum of their parts.
I’ve realised that both criticisms are actually getting at the same thing: theme. Today I want to look at themes – what they are, and why we use them.
Consider this image:
Pretty. Now consider it alongside two other images. Look back and forth between the three of them a number of times:
Now these:
Did the second and third images make you focus on the element they had in common, when you returned to the first?
Flowers and water – each was an example of a theme: an element shared by separate parts of a work.
Now: stop and really consider these two:
What do these images have in common? Almost nothing – which is the point. They are opposite poles on a spectrum, ‘war and peace’. That theme links the images through contrast, rather than harmony, as we saw with the earlier pictures.
Perhaps you can see some advantages to themes. First, they allow you to shine a spotlight on an element, mood, or idea then examine it from multiple angles, in multiple forms (harmony). Second, they allow you to compare two extremes of an element, mood, or idea, making each seem more striking (contrast). Hell seems even worse when you compare it to heaven, and heaven much better when you compare it to hell.
What about if we add a third image to my last example? How do you interpret it in the context of the other pictures?
Perhaps the Mars bar symbolises the everyday pleasures available in times of peace, which we undervalue when caught up in our everyday lives?
Perhaps the Mars bar is a cynical criticism, meant to highlight how the manufacture of sanitised self-indulgent dreck continues beside tragic massacres and human suffering?
Perhaps the Mars bar is a wry joke, highlighting the bizarre fact that an innocuous chocolate bar is named for the bloodstained Roman god of war?
The actual reason for the Mars bar is that I thought of an image randomly and shoved it next to the other two.
This exercise illustrates two more points: first, people find it satisfying to discover a theme that can connect disparate parts of a work. You will understand this if you have ever finished a movie and asked, confused, “What the heck did that mean?”
Second: we can find themes even if an author never meant to put them there.
One last thing. Consider the plain a final time:
This image hasn’t changed since you saw it for the first time – but the way you perceive it probably has. I doubt that you can look at it now without seeing a group of German soldiers in skeletal gas masks. Perhaps that leads you to see this image differently and appreciate its peaceful idyllism all the more.
As well, if you saw this image somewhere else, you might be reminded of this essay. The image has become a symbol of this essay on themes.
We have added something to the image with the things we have placed around it, and made it something more than itself.
So far we have discussed images. But everything I have written applies to words, as well. After all, what are stories but successions of mental pictures placed alongside one another? Stories have themes, just as collections of images do – and we can take control of those themes to give our stories power.
II. Close-up
Let’s now look at a real example of theme in storytelling. We’ll use Rin’s route from the visual novel Katawa Shoujo, partly because my last write up missed key points that I want to address, and partly because it’s the best example of “connecting ideas” that I know.
We can find multiple themes in Rin’s route – disability, art, loneliness, master/student relationships, self-acceptance, and more. However, two of the most prominent themes are ‘change’ and ‘communication.’
Let’s look at how Rin’s route examines change:
1. The story opens with the protagonist, Hisao, undergoing a terrible change. The boy develops a heart condition which could kill him at any time and slashes his life expectancy by decades. Hisao loses everything and is thrust into an unwanted new world – a boarding school for the disabled.
2. Hisao spends his school festival with a girl called Rin. While watching fireworks, Rin says that they make her sad. As bright and beautiful as the fireworks are, they soon disappear, as if they never were. This illustrates the tragedy of change. Everything good and beautiful is fated to fade and disappear.
Hisao counters Rin’s despondency: the fireworks do exist, and their ephemerality means that you should hold onto them all the more tightly while they are.
3. Hisao and Rin often look at the clouds, sky, and rain, all of which undergo constant change.
4. Rin, a skilled painter, is given the chance to do an exhibition. However, she feels that she can’t do it until she changes into a different person. This is a problem as, for Rin, “change is the scariest thing in the world”. To her, change feels like “fading away.” As she changes, the person that she was recedes behind her, and disappears into nothing, like the fireworks did. One reason that Rin paints is to counter this feeling. Her old paintings offer her proof that the person she was did exist, and hasn’t vanished completely.
5. Hisao realises that he is depressed, and that he must change himself, or he will drown.
6. Rin takes medication for a cold and inadvertently gets high on codeine. Delirious, she claims that butterflies “Are the best animal.” While this seems like a throwaway joke meant to illustrate Rin’s weirdness, it is illuminating something deeper. Butterflies can only come about through radical metamorphosis. While Rin claims to be terrified of change, her favourite ‘animal’ could not exist without it. The proof is already in her that change isn’t always bad. She just needs to put the pieces together.
7. Hisao does change:
“After Rin leaves I finally let tears roll down my cheeks and cry for my condition for the first and only time in my life. Then I cast away that hollow person lying on the hospital bed, forever.”
With this change complete, Hisao soon beats depression for good:
“I close my eyes, and give in to the irresistible sensation that has been growing inside me all week long. I float up, towards the surface of my own life. The pressure of being underwater slowly diminishes, the weightless sensation becomes stronger. I break the surface of the water, lifting my head into the sunlight and inhale deeply, breathing in fresh air as if for the first time in a long, long while. My lungs fill with oxygen, and I open my eyes to see Rin’s peaceful, determined face.”
Rin sees only the tragedy of change, but Hisao shows that good can come of it.
8. Rin agrees to do the exhibition. As she departs the school to begin painting, she says ominously “I am going to change”, prompting Hisao to reply “That’s what people must do, sometimes.” He adds to himself: “And even those words drown in the all-encompassing silence, disappearing into the stagnant air as if they were never said.” Like the fireworks, Rin’s words are swallowed up into nothing and lost forever. Change is inevitable, and something will always be lost.
9. When something changes, the thing that it was is removed from the world forever. In a real sense, it is destroyed.
Rin wants to change into someone that can do an art exhibition. That will mean destroying the person that she is. Rin explains this to Hisao, but the boy doesn’t get it. He worriedly asks if Rin is speaking metaphorically or literally. Rin shrugs, implying they are the same. They ARE the same. Should Rin succeed, the person that she is will have been erased from existence forever and, in a meaningful sense, have literally been destroyed.
10. Rin seeks to change and destroy herself through new experiences. She smokes her first cigarettes with Hisao. This feels wistful and sad, because something is being lost. They will never again be the same naïve children who have never smoked. Their old selves vanish and disappear as if they never were. At the same time, their passage into adulthood is inevitable, and the change could not be stopped even if they wanted it to.
11. Seeking further self-destruction, Rin undergoes what might be her first sexual experience. She allows Hisao to bring her to climax with his fingers, whereon he thinks:
“I push Rin over the edge. Her entire body contracts around my fingers in a blinding, deafening, paralyzing spasm. Her voice is incredible. I never thought it could be so violent, so absolute, for a girl. Later I would come to think that this finally was the moment when Rin fully let herself go, and in one single instant destroyed and rebuilt herself, just like she had wanted. Whether it’s the truth or not, I couldn’t say. But that’s how I felt.”
Rin’s self-destruction is successful, and this moment seems as good a symbol of that change as any.
12. Rin gives her exhibition – but for her, it is a failure. Afterwards though, while discussing it with Hisao, Rin concludes “it’s okay to be me after all”, seeming to reject the idea that she ever needed to force the change.
13. As Hisao and Rin depart school on a day soon after, Rin echoes her earlier comment: “I think I have to change.” Her words are now subtly different from her previous “I am going to change”. Those words seemed resigned and ominous. Rin’s new ones seem hopeful – she wants to change and believes it will be positive.
Again, Hisao answers “That is what people must do, sometimes.” Once more, he adds “And even those words drown in the all-encompassing silence, disappearing into the stagnant air as if they were never said.” This does not feel ominous, anymore, but more a statement of fact. Change is inevitable, things will be lost, but that need not always be terrible.
14. In a tender moment, Hisao thinks:
“…for us who can’t foresee the future and who forget the past too easily, present is really the only proof of our existence. Even though existence will go on even if you forget about it for a while, it’s good to seize the day at least every once in a while. That way… you can confirm that you are, in fact… alive.”
Contrary to Rin’s earlier statement that her paintings are the proof of her existence, Hisao concludes that the fact you are experiencing the world, right now is the only proof that you exist. The moment between the past and future, where change does not happen. Things will change and disappear, but that’s all the more reason to grab hold of reality and make the most of it.
15. Hisao and Rin return to the dandelion field from the end of Act 2. The plain yellow flowers and blue sky have changed, transforming into something magical. As Rin stares at the sunset, the reader is invited to compare the change she has undergone to the beautiful change of the sky and dandelions. Rin is no longer afraid of change, and all is well in her heart.
If we had to isolate what Rin’s route says about change, we might choose: Change is inevitable. It is often tragic. If you let that feeling subsume you, then your life will be perfused with an unbearable sadness, and you will never be able to move forward. The only solution is to forget the past, hold tight to the present, and appreciate it as much as you possibly can. Recognise too that change can also produce good and beautiful things, and need not always be feared.
Okay. What does Rin’s route have to say about our second theme, ‘communication’?
1. Your experience of the world is necessarily coloured by your personality, emotions, and memories. In a real sense, the way that you perceive the world is unique, and no one will ever see it in exactly the same way you do. In Rin’s route, this is poetically called “The world only you can see.”
2. Sometimes, if you open up your perceptions and focus on an everyday thing, you will discover an experience that is uncommonly beautiful, important, or profound. Rin’s route opens with such a moment. Hisao joins Rin on the school roof, where they lie down and stare upward:
“Far above, the summer clouds drift soundlessly across the dome of the sky. Neither of us has anything more to say, thus silence covers the rooftop. The subdued noises of students on their lunch break, cicadas in the trees and traffic buzzing past the school are humming pleasantly somewhere in the background.”
[…]
“A cloud passes above us, casting its shadow on the school. A chill surges through me from the sudden change of sunlight to shade. I realize that summer is not in its full bloom quite yet. The only measure of time passing is the slow pace of the clouds moving towards the town. Stray beams of golden sunlight leak through the gaps, blinding me for a moment whenever they hit me directly in the eyes. The blue of the sky looks so unreachable.”
[…]
“A comprehensive sensation of calmness spreads from my sight to my other senses, finally hitting my brain. An airplane zooms by, leaving two thin contrails in its wake like a pair of chalk lines drawn from one end of the sky to the other. I wonder where it is heading to.”
You cannot find moments like this if you drift through life. You must take time to search for them, and seize the day. Indeed, when Hisao returns to his class, he realises that the tiny piece of sky outside the window is obscured by a tree. Hisao could never have had his experience unless he consciously joined Rin.
3. Rin’s art teacher believes that capturing and communicating these beautiful, important, and profound moments is the entire point of art. He expresses that with a quote from William Blake:
“To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour”.
As Hisao later puts it, the teacher believes that the role of an artist is to “draw back the veil of reality and reveal something deeper.”
4. At the end of Rin’s route, Hisao argues that the teacher’s goal is folly. It is impossible to directly transfer an experience from yourself to someone else – even those experiences that feel the most beautiful, important, and profound. You can try to communicate them through a medium – speech, or art, or music – but that will always be imperfect, and none of your attempts will ever feel “as real or true as [they do] inside [your] head.”
5. Hisao loves to read and is heading toward a career in science. Words, logic, and facts are the lenses through which he sees the world. But although words allow him to communicate easily, they limit his perspective. Hisao isn’t comfortable with subjective feelings or ambiguities. This, and his unwillingness to venture outside the patterns of language, limit his perspective and may contribute to him being a lousy artist.
Inversely, is a terrible conversationalist. She often comes out with non-sequiturs and irrelevant questions. People find her weird, off-putting, and confusing. But Rin’s unusual perspective also makes her a brilliant artist. She can see a world unfettered by language, which grants her interesting perspectives that she can communicate through painting.
6. The disconnect between the worlds seen by Hisao and Rin – science/words/logic VS art/imagery/emotion – is manifested in a discussion on clouds. Rin describes them as “thoughts of the sky”, which she compares to her own thoughts – “Fluffy and white and slow.”
Rin’s tactile observation is met with a scientific one from Hisao: “Clouds are water. Evaporated water. You know they say that almost all of the water in the world will at some point of its existence be a part of a cloud. Every drop of tears and blood and sweat that comes out of you, it’ll be a cloud. All the water inside your body too, it goes up there some time after you die. It might take a while though.”
Rin prefers Hisao’s description, which he claims is because it is “true.”
7. Hisao joins the art club, where he and Rin are tasked with drawing one another. But Hisao’s sketch of Rin is terrible. Worse, he discovers that in Rin’s medium, he is as hopeless at communicating as she is in his. Hisao cannot say what he wants to:
“I try to add texture to Rin’s hair, to somehow grasp the way the golden afternoon sun lights her bright red tousle aflame and transfer it to my paper in shades of black and gray. Somehow, this pen and the bottle of ink seem like such lousy, inadequate tools for the task.”
Hisao is having an experience of profound beauty but finds it impossible to communicate.
By contrast, Rin’s drawing is so good that it perfectly captures and communicates the oppressive gloom that she sees in Hisao. This sparks his realisation that he is depressed. Rin cannot communicate well with speech, but she can with art.
Hisao prefers Rin’s picture to his own, because it is true.
8. Rin is offered the chance to do an exhibition and, eventually, agrees. Much later, when she concludes that her exhibition has failed, Hisao asks Rin what she wanted. “That someone wouldn’t have to ask questions from me”, she answers.
Rin cannot communicate the world only she can see with words:
“Talking is hard. I mean, it’s not hard, I’m talking even now. But saying the right things is really hard for me. No matter what, I just can’t say the things I want.”
And:
“I say all kinds of things that I don’t really mean all the time. And sometimes I forget words and then I use the wrong words. I even come up with new words for things that already have some. That’s the worst thing. I get really nervous and everything comes out a mess and even I don’t really understand what I want to say. I think there’s something wrong with me that makes it like this.”
Rin wishes to be freed from the burden of having to explain herself with words. She wants her paintings to communicate the world only she can see, instead. This will finally let her be understood, and will mean she will not “have to be alone.”
But Rin’s plan was doomed. The gallery curator makes this clear when she explains Picasso’s Blue Period. When the great painter lost a great friend, he spent years producing only blue paintings. However, it would be impossible to understand what Picasso meant just by seeing those paintings.
For the same reason, Rin’s exhibition fails. No one understands her when they see her paintings. Rin is bombarded with questions and realises that she will never be free of people asking her to explain herself with words, which she can never do.
9. Rin’s communication difficulties extend to her burgeoning relationship with Hisao. Rin cannot explain herself with words. Hisao lacks the maturity to understand that her internal world is very different from his own. He expects Rin to act like himself and becomes frustrated when she can’t. They are fond of one another, but their relationship is marred by a gulf in perspectives and inability to bridge the gap.
10. Ultimately, Hisao starts to understand where Rin is coming from, and he eventually explains to her that no one can ever see the world exactly as she does. In that sense, she will always be alone.
“But isn’t that terrible?” Rin asks. “It is, a little bit”, Hisao replies. Rin seems to intuit the truth, though – even if no one sees the world in precisely the way that you do, it doesn’t mean that you can’t be understood, or that you are alone.
11. In a tender moment, Hisao begins to understand Rin, and their differences: “Rin is a creature of the moment, of whim and of impulse. I am nothing of the sort.” He worries about this – until Rin tells him to stop. He realises “Maybe she understood what I wanted to say even if I didn’t.” Likewise, Rin reveals that she has understood what Hisao was trying to tell her earlier: having “someone you can come to when you get soaked in a rain” means that you are not alone.
Rin and Hisao may not see the world the same way. They can never perfectly communicate the worlds they see. But that doesn’t mean they can’t understand one another, or that either is alone.
12. Throughout the route, Hisao and Rin are never “in sync”. When things are bad, Hisao thinks: “Often, when you walk with someone else, your steps become synchronized as if through some weird subconscious pact. I noticed that ours never do.” Later, while trying to reconcile the differences between himself and Rin, he thinks “My jagged breathing and her quiet breaths, trying to find a common rhythm that just is not there.”
It is only in the final scene that this ends. Hisao notes: “Slowly, the pain in my heart dies out, and it settles into the same rhythm as Rin’s.”
Finally, they understand one another, and are on the same page, together.
If we had to isolate what Rin’s route says about communication, we might conclude: It is impossible to directly transfer your experience of the world into another person. All methods of communicating your experiences are imperfect and leave something out. Because of this, no one will ever see the world in exactly the way that you do. In that sense, you will always be alone. Ultimately though, this doesn’t matter – you can still make meaningful connections with people, be understood, and accepted for the person you are. In that far more important sense, you do not have to be alone.
And now it is time we ask ourselves a critical question:
What the fuck is the point of all of this?’
III. Theme
Why would you write a story like this? Why connect all these different moments to establish themes?
I told you two major ‘points’ of Rin’s route. It probably took you a combined minute to read my final summary paragraphs. If conveying those ideas was the entire point of Rin’s route, then why did the author waste five years of his life writing it, and why should you waste four hours reading it?
I think the answer comes down to that old axiom: “Show, don’t tell.”
It is one thing for me to tell you that ‘change can be good and beautiful.’ It is another to show it to you, in a way that feels viscerally true. Because once you have seen and felt it is true, then you have no choice but to believe it.
Not all stories are about abstract ideas. Some are just entertainment, some are visions meant to excite, some are attempts to connect with people. Some are written to make money [HA HA HA HA HA HA HA]. For me though, the stories which resonate most strongly are those that relate to finding a purpose and meaning in life – and things that rust and dull them: depression, despair, disconnection, guilt, self-loathing, powerlessness, and adirectionality. Maybe that’s unique to me, and maybe it suggests something unflattering. But maybe not.
Rin’s route deliberately tackles sources of despair and offers compelling antidotes. Moments connect together to show that those antidotes are true. Now when I feel down about things changing, I need only think of dandelions and fireworks. And when I start to feel like nobody values the things I do, I can remind myself that this is inevitable, and doesn’t mean that I’m alone.
This is the strength of a theme: it can let you convince your audience of something you see as important.
I’ve also written before about the three ‘traditional’ routes of Katawa Shoujo. Thematically, each seems designed to illustrate and deliver a simple lesson about romantic relationships: be honest with your partner, and don’t infantilise them when you seek to support them. But I’ve realised that while these themes drive the plots, they are orthogonal to why the routes resonate.
The elements of the three ‘traditional’ routes of Katawa Shoujo are instead connected by a subtextual theme: “Life can be wonderful, and worth living.” Again and again, they show that you do not have to be alone, that you can improve yourself, and that there is a kind of beautiful and meaningful life which can be yours if you work for it, in a way that feels viscerally true.
Showing people that these things are true requires that you construct your story in a certain way, and link moments together using the thread which you wish to illustrate. Do this right, and you can rescue people from the jaws of despair.
THAT is the power of a theme.
IV. ‘Herald’
What of my own work in progress visual novel, ‘Herald’?
In my last blog post, I wrote that I was burning the final third of Herald’s script. It was terrible. Nothing in it added to anything else, and none of it meant anything. After all my criticism of other VNs, I had made exactly the same mistake with my own. Stuff happened in the final third of Herald, sure. There were dramatic revelations, confrontations, and so on. But it all felt boring, hollow, and pointless. I’d failed to explore an idea and illustrate something that mattered.
This was especially damnable because I had a fucking point that I wanted Herald to make. I had DELIBERATELY designed its cast and setting to explore and illustrate a theme. Then, when it came time to design its story, I managed to completely forget to plan something that would bring out the theme.
I’ve thrown out some pretty callous criticism before, so let me turn it around on myself and say that the way I planned the end of Herald was fucking imbecilic.
I’ve since re-planned it, so that it will properly illustrate its theme.
The themes of Herald are somewhat different to Katawa Shoujo. As I alluded to last time, one of my goals with Herald was to convey the same thing as the three traditional routes of Katawa Shoujo – that life can be worth living. I don’t know if this will succeed, but I’ve consciously tried to weave that into my writing, to make it come through.
But Herald also has a more explicit point that I want it to make, and this is very different to any theme in KS. I’m glad for this. I don’t want to make something derivative. I want to find my own voice as a writer. That way, even if Herald doesn’t turn out as well as Rin’s route, it will at least have a reason to exist.
Over the last month, I’ve returned to drafting Herald. The final third is already feeling better. I’m about halfway through re-drafting (though admittedly, I’ve salvaged a lot of the old stuff, and these drafts are pretty rough for now). I’m hopeful that I can get a completed rough draft by the end of the year. There’ll be a LOT of polishing afterwards, but the basic structure of the story should be done.
As for this blog: this post is what’s become of the one I alluded to scrapping last time. I finally found what I wanted it to say.
There’s still a lot I could say about Aura’s work on Rin’s route, and it’s the kind of writing I want to emulate, so I’ll probably wind up writing about it again. That said, I don’t want this blog to just descend into endless Katawa Shoujo analysis. I’ll have to reconcile that going forward.
I’m also trying to stick to a schedule of at least one post a month for now, so I’ll aim to have something else up here before the end of November (emphasis on aim).
See you then?
Oh, and because I can’t figure out how to design my WordPress properly, I’m just going to end every article with this from now on: “To see a complete list of articles I have written, please click here.”
Images credits: 1. ‘VoodooChild4201’ 2. Otto Dix 3. ‘Mars Incorporated’ (Manufacturers of the Delicious Mars BarsTM, Pls Giv Sponsor)
In 2012, 4 Leaf Studios released the visual novel Katawa Shoujo, and something went horribly right. Readers reported being so emotionally affected that for weeks afterward, they physically couldn’t masturbate. Many changed their lives for the better. They took up running, writing, tea drinking, painting and more. One even took up smoking.
I myself did a more normal thing: I waited seven years, then wrote a book length analytical retrospective on Katawa Shoujo, which attempted to discern exactly how the VN affected so many people in the way that it did. If I didn’t solve the problem, then I’m confident that I at least gestured pretty hard in the right direction.
It has always struck me as weird that I was the only person to do that (so far as I know).
Imagine that you are a writer, who can produce one of the following stories:
1) Your story is immensely important to your audience. It has them make profound, positive changes to their lives, pulls some back from the brink of suicide, and leaves many striving to be better people.
2) Your story makes your audience say “yeah, that was okay.” They then return to watching anime and masturbating.
All else being equal, you would have to be deranged to not pick the first option. And knowing that Katawa Shoujo achieved that effect, how could any writer not wonder:
How?
II. So then why was Katawa Shoujo good?
Aura, an author of KS, once said that writers inspired by the project tended to take only its most superficial elements for their own work (There are girls! Cute ones! Who are romanceable! Potentially in an educational setting! With disabilities! In Japan!). But clearly, those elements were never enough to explain how KS worked. After all, plenty of VNs feature them.
In my retrospective, I argued that Katawa’s effect came down to more abstract elements, particularly its evocation of an atypical emotion, elevation (AKA kama muta):
“This is [what you] feel when you see a relationship suddenly intensify – like when two people finally become a couple; or are reunited after years apart. It often feels like warmth in the chest, moist eyes, tears, a lump in your throat, ‘the chills,’ or feelings of buoyancy. But the most powerful form of elevation comes from watching somebody selflessly reach down to pick up someone in the absolute depth of self-loathing, or despair.”
Retrospectively looking at my retrospective, I think I missed the mark. Yes, elevation is important – crucial, even – for KS. But that’s only one part of what the VN was subtly and subliminally doing: communicating that ‘Life can be wonderful.’
It’s one thing to say those words. It’s another to show that life can be wonderful, in a way that feels viscerally true. Because then your audience must believe it.
Each of Katawa’s four most popular routes does show it, in a different way. Hanako’s route maximises the ‘meaningfulness’ of its central relationship. Lilly’s presents an archetypal fairytale romance that is maximally beautiful and wonderful. Emi’s route is hilarious, and subliminally shows you that it is possible to better yourself. And Rin’s draws out the magic of the everyday and presents an overwhelming counter to nihilism.
The result is that Katawa Shoujo makes a shining, unblockable strike against cynicism and despair. At the same time, it shows the audience how to escape those feelings. That is the secret of the VN’s effect.
III. Why do we care? Why would any writer want to do what KS did, when KS already exists?
A good question, with two answers:
1. Chocolate tastes good. Ice cream also tastes good. Even though they fill the same niche, your life is enriched by having two similar, but different flavours. If you doubt that this logic applies to stories, ask yourself: why does Katawa Shoujo benefit from having more than one route? The different tones and approaches resonate more with different people, and allow for the presentation of different messages in the same tonal space.
2. There are many kinds of despair. Katawa Shoujo counters some – perhaps many. But certain kinds may benefit from a more targeted message, delivered with the impact of a KS route. Katawa Shoujo fails to do that.
The second point interests me.
IV. Originality and Polish
Recently, my partner said that I approach writing like a scientist. I treat stories as things that can be quantified, dissected, broken down, and distilled into a formula. ‘Autism’ is the uncharitable word for my approach, but it has its merits. I don’t think it’s possible to reproduce the effect of Katawa Shoujo without understanding how the effect was achieved, for instance.
But as I began to write more analyses on this blog (e.g., Panzer Dragoon Saga and Kojima’s VNs), I began to appreciate the limitations of analysis. Again and again, I found myself singling out two elements for praise:
1. Originality
2. Polish
It should be obvious why these matter. An original joke is funnier than one you have heard before. Likewise, an original idea is more interesting than the alternative. As for polish: a first draft is probably worse than a second, and a second likely worse than a third. Did you know that some early scripts of The Simpsons went through thirty drafts? That may be a big part of why that show had so much cultural impact and remains enduringly popular.
My problem is this: analysis is not a shortcut. It can’t help you come up with original ideas, jokes, characters, and observations. It can help with polish; by allowing you to identify when and why your story isn’t working. But you still need to do the hard work of coming up with original ideas to fix it, then polishing them so they land. There is no shortcut to many revisions, and no substitute for a ton of hard work.
Consider the VNs Eisaiand Twofold. Both are superficially similar to Katawa Shoujo. But neither has original ideas that are especially compelling – jokes, observations, descriptions, and so on. Likewise, both scripts lack polish. The characters aren’t sufficiently compelling, the narrative structures mean that big moments lack power, images never feel as beautiful as they should, and so on.
A phrase we use in research is ‘necessary, but not sufficient.’ Some of the macroscopic elements of KS are probably necessary to show that life can be worth living – beautiful scenes, people helping one another, and so on. However, that is not sufficient for the effect of the VN. You need the vision to be powerful and compelling, and polish and originality are the keys to that.
V. Chesterton’s Fence
There is another problem, which Scott Alexander illustrates:
“G.K. Chesterton gave the example of a fence in the middle of nowhere. A traveller comes across it, thinks “I can’t think of any reason to have a fence out here, it sure was dumb to build one” and so takes it down. She is then gored by an angry bull who was being kept on the other side of the fence.”
Chesterton’s point is that “I can’t think of any reason to have a fence out here” is the worst reason to remove a fence. Someone had a reason to put a fence up here, and if you can’t even imagine what it was, it probably means there’s something you’re missing about the situation and that you’re meddling in things you don’t understand. None of this precludes the traveller who knows that this was historically a cattle farming area but is now abandoned – ie the traveller who understands what’s going on – from taking down the fence.”
But you should take care when taking down fences.
This presents a problem.
If you stick too close to Katawa Shoujo, you’ll produce something unoriginal which won’t have the same effect. But if you deviate too much, you may jettison something which you didn’t realise was critical.
Would Katawa still work if the VN wasn’t set in a school? In Japan? If it used a more realistic artstyle? If the soundtrack was entirely piano? If it was told in a fantasy setting? If all the choices were removed? If the romantic elements were removed entirely, and it became a platonic story of warmth and healing?
We do have some insight into these questions. Shizune’s route infamously fails to impact people as strongly as the other four. Hence, something absent from Shizune’s route is presumably critical for the effect of KS (kama muta, I’d guess).
We also have a version of KS which lacks the more libidinous scenes. I read that version the first time I went through the VN and had the same strong response as everyone else. So that material, at least, is likely dispensable.
Still, a dilemma. Without enough change, our story won’t be original and won’t have any effect. Too much change and we might inadvertently lose something essential.
VI – ‘Herald’ Dev
I am writing a visual novel.
I have been writing the visual novel for four years.
Development is slow. Partly because I am lazy, partly because the VN is big (much bigger than a KS route, and partly because my approach to writing makes it a miserable, soul-crushing slog.
But I am writing a visual novel.
It is fully drafted. The first third is almost worth reading. The second third will be worth reading after some more revisions. As for the last third, I am presently destroying it utterly and removing all traces from existence, before I draft it again (hopefully with more success).
The VN has a name. But I feel that sharing that name would constitute an announcement, and an announcement should be accompanied by stunning artwork and tilde-ridden exclamations like ***~EXCITING NEW VISUAL NOVEL~*** and SO GOOD YOU WILL NEVER NEED DRUGS AGAIN!!!~ and such.
So for now, I shall refer to the project as ‘Herald’.
The last time I wrote on this blog, I said that I had one more piece to write. But that piece turned out to be very boring, and I’m rather embarrassed about finishing on that note. So rather than leave this place to gather dust, I’m transforming it into a dev diary for Herald.
Herald has some superficial similarities to KS. It is, fundamentally, a story of healing, and of people helping one another. It is, I hope, a compelling vision which shows that life can be worth living. But it is, in places, much darker than Katawa. The setting is different. It’s also more plot-heavy, though the plot only exists to draw out development from the characters.
I also have an explicit aim.
Down in the deepest depths of the darkest parts of the human heart, there sits a black god atop a blacker throne. He has sat there since a time before the first man learned the first word. He is indomitable. Beneath his feet lie trampled a horde of human bones, forgotten and stamped uncaring into oblivion.
My visual novel is a weapon which I intend to use to murder that god.
Disclosures: 1) I once worked with someone who helped make it, and don’t hate them. 2) The protagonist’s favourite colour is orange, which is rad.
Twofold entered development eleven years ago, when English visual novels were infamous for being cheap, short, and ugly, particularly beside their Japanese counterparts.
Reading Twofold in 2023, those concerns seem antiquated. The VN is over eight hours long, its visual design may be the best I’ve seen, and every line is voice acted. On many levels, Twofold is a triumph, and vindication of western VN development.
On the other hand, though Twofold oozes passion, it puts its energies in the wrong places, fails to draw out the power of its assets, and lacks the power it should have had.
For those of us who’ve followed this project for eleven years, and those who’ve only just heard of it now, it’s time to ask:
What kind of VN did Twofold turn out to be?
I. To paint an olive
Ah yes; glasses, the shoes of the face.
Things have gone poorly for Olive.
Their GPA is in ruins, and they’re going to be kicked out of college unless they can pass a supplementary class, in either art or writing.
Problem: Olive is awful at both.
Good news! Their college has clubs for writing and art, and Olive can go to be tutored!
Problem: The club heads are feuding over something mysterious, which threatens to swallow up Olive.
Good news! This is a cute romantic VN, full of otters, cacti, DRINKS, and heartwarming fluff as Olive falls in first love, reconciles the club heads, and maybe – just maybe – scrapes a pass.
And before I say a word just fuckinglook at this thing:
Jesus CHRIST, look at the LIGHT, look at the SHADOWS, look at the DETAIL!
Twofold is (ostensibly) about creative work, and its visuals reflect that. The sprites are like paper cutouts, and the UI is arts-and-craftsy. Every scene is filtered through the lens of that theme, which helps Twofold feel cohesive. Some backgrounds are even deliberately beige to evoke the feeling of an empty page or blank canvass. The lack of colour makes these less vibrant, but the use of light keeps them from feeling boring, and maintains a warm, comfortable tone.
Jesus CHRIST; Look at the BEIGE; look at the BEIGE; look at the BEIGE!
It feels like the devs stepped back to consider every visual element. Choices aren’t uniform boxes; they’re personalised for clarification and impact. Time transitions aren’t fadeouts, they’re marked with a sketchy looking sun- or moonrise. The VN isn’t too serious, so sprites are vivified with cartoon cliches – lightbulbs for ideas, rotating scribbles for irritation, and more. The white outlines of the sprites vibrate to indicate the speaker; a neat flourish which soon becomes a highly intuitive visual language.
The cartoons react as you mouse over the options; maximising your guilt
And like, the VN is packed with custom art that strengthens small moments – like an imagined confetti ball which bursts open when someone exclaims “Congratulations!” Many are used only once. Speaking of, I do NOT envy whichever poor soul(s) had to handle the sprite movements, with their endless shivers, pans, leans, recoils, and more. Visually, this VN is polished like the glass of a window store.
“Yeah; draw that for the twelve seconds it’ll be onscreen. Then add a simple shape behind it, like a trapeze.”
But a good looking VN is like a good looking person: it draws you in, but eventually, the looks become background noise, and how you feel becomes more important. With a person, that comes mostly from personality. With a VN, it comes mostly from script.
So Olive is choosing between the art and writing clubs – and the art club is great! It’s fun and encouraging; full of talented folk who like what they do. On the other hand, the writing club is miserable. Almost no one wants to be there, no one likes writing, and it would be a mercy if someone dragged the thing out behind a shed and shot it in the back of the head.
Twofold makes the avant-garde decision to reinforce this dynamic by making its own art shiningly radiant, and its writing…
…Less so.
Here are some direct quotes from my notebook, written as I went through Twofold’s first act:
1. CAN SOMETHING FUCKING HAPPEN ALREADY
2. The perpetual negativity is REALLY IRRITATING
3. I am REALLY disliking Olive. Like… fucking… lean into this and have some fucking fun?
4. Yeah, this feels like a chore.
These aren’t a fair summation of Twofold! But we should start with the part that made me feel that way.
II. A million things wrong
At the end of Twofold’s prologue, you’re given the VN’s only big choice: which club do you want to join?
It’s tough. The art club is better, and its leader, Caprice, has a hat.
On the other hand: the writing club has Millie.
BRING ME MY BOW OF BURNING GOLD; BRING ME MY ARROWS OF DESIRE
So that isn’t much of a choice.
Unfortunately, Millie’s first act is Twofold‘s nadir; somewhere between boring and actively unpleasant. The problem is the writing club. It’s soul-sucking. Member Heather derides it at every opportunity, Darren flakes constantly, and Tanya’s just there to make up the numbers. It’s like no one CARES about writing – including Olive, who’s just there to pass their exam. Millie is often sad about how everything it does is so depressing.
This isn’t leveraged for anything.
In one scene, Millie shares a theory of storytelling, claiming that every story needs an introduction, conflict, and resolution.
But this section lacks a functional conflict. There are two that might have worked:
1) Olive must pass their exams or be kicked out.
2) The writing club is miserable, and Millie wants it to improve.
Conflict 1 doesn’t work because Millie’s route doesn’t focus on Olive’s exams. This has benefits! It keeps Act 1 from feeling suffused with imminent doom. But it also means that Olive’s struggles can’t keep us engaged.
Conflict 2 doesn’t work because we don’t care about the club. It sucks and we don’t want to be there. Olive makes some halfhearted efforts to improve it for Millie’s sake, but they are half-hearted, and we aren’t invested.
This needn’t be a death sentence! You can still sell people on humour, engaging conversation, and cute shenanigans, even without a conflict. But line by line, Twofold doesn’t deliver them, and that problem plagues it.
It’s not that nothing funny happens. I laughed when a scene contextlessly opened with Olive bleating “Deeeeath”. I laughed when Caprice and Millie’s roommate described their kitchen arrangement:
Can confirm this works brilliantly.
In Caprice’s route, I laughed when Olive said of an aquarium “I haven’t been here since middle school,” prompting an unenthusiastic Eileen to reply “And it already feels too soon, right?”
It’s not like nothing interesting gets said. In Caprice’s route, Allison claims that she finds zoos much better in summer (because the animals are out) but she likes them in winter too (because that reminds her of her first date with here GF, Eileen).
Moments like these are the exception, though. The dialogue is often flat – like in the introduction, where conversations are peppered with lines like “Hey, I’m X, nice to meet you,” which is a boring way to introduce characters.
And like, there’s an argument that Act 1 SHOULD be unpleasant! Millie’s character development sees her internalise that sometimes, you need to let a thing go when holding onto it is only making you miserable. We feel the writing club sucks, so we know it should be let go.
But that story beat wasn’t worth tanking an act, especially when there were other ways to convey it. Millie could have been working on an unseen group project (say, an indie visual novel) which was crashing and burning and needed to die. We could have seen it impact her – the stress, the unhappiness – and when she finally admitted that she needed to let it go, we would have felt it was true, without having sat through an hour of misery.
But all this is circling the actual problem I have with Act 1:
WE’RE IN A FUCKING WRITING CLUB! This is a VN where creative art and writing are allegedly so integral that the ONLY MAJOR DECISION you make is which you’ll pursue. These things inform the ENTIRE AESTHETIC.
Why would you centre creative writing, put me in a creative writing club, and then do nothing to make me care about creative writing?
Twofold’s original dev team were inspired by another VN, Katawa Shoujo. One route centres on a girl called Emi, and it made many readers (myself included) take up distance running. That’s because it features running at its best! You do it with someone fun and encouraging; you feel the protagonist improve; you do it on warm, sunny mornings when the world is the best of itself and you’re totally free and it feels goddamn magical.
You didn’t think you were getting a post here without a KS comparison, did you?
Millie’s route doesn’t make writing feel like magic. Where are the warm afternoons where the writers sit around and share short, funny stories they’ve written in response to some prompt, and they laugh with each other, console one another, share their dreams with each other, and work towards something? Where are the moments of triumph, and beauty? Where is Olive’s passion for writing?
Where is the sense that writing is magic? We all go around in armour; hiding the vulnerable parts of ourselves. You can barely reach them with the people closest to you – unless you write. Writing is a sword of white fire against which no armour can hope to defend. You can reach out to strangers and carve them straight to the heart, you can givethem hope, you can givethem courage, you can givethem self-respect; enough to last a lifetime and face down the world.
That’s why I write. Here’s why Millie wants to write children’s books:
“To see a parent reading my books to their child, and see their face light up as they learn about the world… It might not be the most glamorous or well-paying career, but I wouldn’t care if I knew I’d achieved that.”
It’s limp. It’s really, really limp. And with that level of energy, is it any wonder that Twofold doesn’t inculcate an atom of passion for writing?
And part of the problem here is Olive. I’m sorry, but WHY would you put a character into this story, who NEVER CARES ABOUT WRITING?
And I anticipate a response here: “Auric, the VN isn’t about art or creative writing; those things are merely motifs.”
Then why the visual style? Why the major choice? Why devote an entire act to the writing club? And if writing isn’t the point, then why does act 1 even exist?
For me, it didn’t do anything.
Then Millie’s route “pulls a Suriko,” introduces a conflict, and begins to improve.
III. Love, in all Her forms
Each Twofold route is composed of three elements:
1) Exploring the relevant club;
2) A romance between Olive and Millie/Caprice;
3) The club heads reconciling their feud.
And if you wanted to pander to me as hard as possible, you could show me Millie’s design. I am primed to buy into the romance of this route, and it didn’t work for me at all. Part of the problem is the flat dialogue, but I also never felt like Olive was falling in love. Here’s Emi’s route again, from Katawa Shoujo:
NARRATOR: “There’s a blur as Emi sprints by me. Watching her run is absolutely fascinating. It’s not just because she’s on prosthetics, though that is interesting. The really interesting thing is the way her face changes. I can only catch glimpses of it as she runs by, but her eyes seem to come alive with a sort of fierce joy. It’s as if there’s nothing else in the world but her and the track.”
And:
NARRATOR: “Emi’s got her hands behind her head now as well, which makes her seem very relaxed. The positioning of her arms also pulls her shirt upwards ever-so-slightly so that I can see a small strip of her belly. I do my best to act the gentleman and not look, but the contrast of her skin against her red running shorts is rather arresting.”
These paragraphs build Emi’s character – we see she cares about running and isn’t self-conscious. We feel the protagonist falling for her; both with descriptions that make her seem beautiful, and an erotically charged observation (both also help us to share in his feelings).
Compare to Twofold’s description of Millie:
THAT’S how you want to leverage this CG?
It’s limp. Olive never sees Millie in a way that feels deeper, magical, or beautiful. We never feel her patience, or see the unique way her expression softens when she thinks of a story she likes. We don’t see the little things that make Olive fall for her, in the way that make Olive fall for her. So when romance happened, it felt perfunctory, and I couldn’t believe or share in it.
With two story elements floundering, there only remains the reconciliation of Millie and Caprice – which, fortunately, is the strongest of Twofold’s arcs.
Caprice and Millie are feuding because their parents are planning to marry. Millie’s mum died when the girl was young. She now feels her mother is being forgotten, which hurts. Caprice, by contrast, is thrilled that her best friend will soon be her sister, and that their families will get to unite. She’s frustrated Millie can’t feel the same.
This is a real conflict – and it’s great! Millie’s feelings are believable and sympathetic. She knows on some level that she isn’t being fair, but can’t help feeling what she feels, and resents Caprice not giving her the space she needs. Caprice’s frustrations are also sympathetic – Millie does need to move on and stop making life hard for the people that care about her.
The VN’s best moment comes when the families get together for Christmas. Caprice gives Millie a present – and it’s a beautiful painting of Millie’s mum. You feel the thought and effort Caprice has put into it so she can reach her oldest friend, acknowledge her fears, convey that her mother will not be forgotten, and finally bridge the gap between them.
But looking at the painting, Millie replies, in a tiny voice:
I literally applauded when I read this line.
It’s devastating. Instantly it’s clear Caprice’s efforts have all been for naught. Millie can’t help reading the painting in a way it wasn’t meant to be read, and Caprice’s efforts to smooth her concerns over (“It’s just a ring!”) lead to a compelling, emotional, and believable blow-up. That’s a conflict for you!
The rest of the arc and its conclusion are fine – but they weren’t as moving as they could have been. And to understand why, we need to step back again.
IV. Structure your tower, or it will lean.
Twofold joins the pantheon of Christmas classics; alongside Lethal Weapon and Die Hard.
Twofold’s arcs of romance and reconciliation don’t tie together; leaving each weaker than they might have been.
To explain what I mean, consider Katawa Shoujo’s routes:
-Emi fears losing people. That causes her to push people away, including her partner, which almost breaks them apart.
-Rin struggles to communicate the world inside her. That brings misunderstandings with the protagonist, which almost breaks them apart.
-Hanako lacks so much self-confidence that her love interest can’t even ask her out without feeling like he’s taking advantage. This keeps them apart.
-Lilly puts others before herself. This causes her to do something she doesn’t want to do, which will breaks herself and her partner apart.
-Shizune… um. Anyway.
In the four most popular routes, the romance and character development are linked, so the success of one depends on the other. They become more than the sum of their parts, so they’re more impactful.
Twofold doesn’t work like this. Millie and Caprice’s feud is separate from their romance with Olive. Sure, Olive sympathises with what they’re going through, and endures some occasional venting. But even if Caprice and Millie never reconciled, Olive’s relationships would still be fine. Olive lacks a personal investment in the conflict, which reduces its weight.
And again, I hear a reply: “Auric, Twofold is a comfy VN that isn’t meant to be stressful.” Fine. But the price of that way is that the feelings it clearly wants to convey don’t come through with the force they should.
These arcs have another problem: all the conflicts lack weight. People use the term without explaining it, so here we go: weight is the sum of effort and emotions, experienced by the reader, which lie behind an event.
Take the scene where Millie ritually slaughters disbands the writing club. It’s meant to show her accepting that she needs to let things go, which is good. But there’s no weight to it. We don’t care about the writing club, so it isn’t sad to see it go. If we had seen the club when it was a happy, vibrant place, then we would have felt what Millie was letting go, which would have been sad and meaningful.
This applies to the reconciliation as well. We never knew Millie and Caprice when they were close, so we don’t feel how much the feud is hurting them. Likewise, we never knew Millie’s mum, so we don’t feel Millie’s pain at losing her.
In other words: we don’t feel the most important feelings in Twofold.
This had a clear solution: tell the story through Millie and Caprice’s eyes. Let us feel what Millie feels whenever she looks at Caprice; every interaction coloured by memories of them as children, memories of Millie’s mum, how much she loves Caprice but hates the way she is pushing her; the guilt, the anger, the sadness, the joy… Twofold’s reconciliation arc is its strongest piece and clearly the one the devs cared about most. Letting us feel the emotions involved, directly, would have been infinitely more powerful than what is in the VN.
There is even material that could have been used for this! Twofold has a bonus section, ‘Perfect Circle,’ which shows snippets of Olive, Millie, and Caprice’s parents, with additional scenes of the trio’s childhoods. These could have been woven into the narrative, to make the present seem sadder by comparison.
Further criticism of Perfect Circle would be profane.
Anyway, that’s all I have to say about Millie’s route. What about Caprice’s?
V. The otter heroine
In some Japanese folklore, otters shapeshift into women to kill and eat men.
Caprice isn’t as beautiful as Millie, the Goddess whose right eye is the sun and left eye is the moon; queen of heavens that were and are and are to come. She also prefers the base and primitive “discipline” of art to the sacred craft of writing. But she does have a hat, which is rad.
Caprice’s route revolves around the reconciliation too, so you know the major beats from the start – which is okay! Caprice’s scenes are mostly unique, and the reconciliation is handled differently. It’s a bit perfunctory, but it isn’t boring.
In an ideal world, though, each route would have added context to the other, so that what you found out in one changed how you viewed the other. There are some tidbits (e.g., Caprice was high school valedictorian, not Millie), but nothing of any real substance. Again, if we’d seen the story through Caprice and Millie’s eyes, we’d have felt the emotions on either side, which would have added massive weight to each read.
I found Caprice’s route less grating than Millie’s, mostly thanks to the art club being way more likable than the writing one. Each member seems like they want to be there, and there’s more chemistry. Allision and Eileen benefit from having previously starred in First Snow, while Wallace and Eileen get the best banter, again – not great, but decent.
I didn’t come away from Caprice’s route with a passion for art, but it does leverage the club better than Millie’s route. Olive must submit a final art project for their class. They spend several scenes thinking they’ll just draw their pet cactus. However, they ultimately produce this:
Thank God it’s a left hand, or certain activities would be VERY uncomfortable.
It seems to capture how much Caprice has helped Olive, and ties the art together with romance, in a memorable and heartwarming way.
(A sidenote: Millie’s route does tie creative writing to the reconciliation arc. Millie keeps a journal that was written by her mother before she passed. Parts are left blank because there wasn’t enough time to fill them, meaning Millie has to write them herself. While that fits the ‘writing’ angle, it doesn’t leverage the writing club).
Given it’s focused on art, maybe it’s fitting that Caprice’s route has better imagery than Millie’s. Take the scene where Caprice and Olive catch the trolley. Conceptually it’s bland, but the direction sells it. The play of the light, the trees rolling by as the trolley moves, Caprice at her cutest – it all sells a bright, peaceful mood, and it’s a rare instance where you can feel Olive and Caprice working as a couple; the former a ball of boundless undirected energy, and the latter a patient sponge that can check and direct it.
We have public transport where I live, except someone is screaming and there are swear words carved in the seats.
There’s another visually compelling scene. After Caprice’s Christmas gift is rejected, she takes Olive to a winter lake, with a megaphone. There, she tearfully shouts over the lake about how much she cares about Millie and how much their divide has upset her. It’s original and beautiful. Once again though, it doesn’t have enough power.
It’s too heartfelt. Can’t make snarky quips.
Like Millie’s route, Caprice’s suffers from a lack of weight, especially in her development arc. After Millie rejects her painting, Caprice organises an art club outing, where Wallace and Eileen joke about not wanting to be there. Caprice takes it to heart, though, and runs out. Afterwards, she starts to worry she’s a bad person; pushing others into things without regard for their feelings (e.g., Millie). Trouble is, this isn’t a crisis that’s been brewing naturally over the story, which has finally reached a climax – it comes out of nowhere and is swiftly resolved. There’s no weight.
VI. The awkward misc section that I couldn’t fit anywhere else
I have only a few more things to comment on.
First: the art/writing divide is the only binary to which Olive conforms. I was actually looking forward to reading a non-binary protagonist – not because I relate, but because I don’t know any NB people and was curious. Unfortunately, Twofold never acknowledges Olive’s non-binary status. And yeah, sure, I imagine this “normalises non-binary identities, and is validating for a historically under-represented minority group,” but from my perspective, you can’t normalise an identity if your audience don’t know what it is. This seemed like a chance to do some outreach and, uncharitably, I think Twofold took the easy way out.
Also, the music? It’s fine. Really, aggressively fine. It sees par and makes it. It turns up at 9, does the job it’s paid to do, and departs at 5. It cooks a steak, considers a parsley garnish, then decides that would be overkill. When choosing a car colour, it considers the resale value, then picks grey regardless.
That’s unkind. Maybe the music fits the ‘comfy’ vibe, but it doesn’t add to the VN’s power which contributes to its issues there. YMMV, but I wasn’t a fan (except for the vocal theme, Tracing Footsteps, which is on-point).
I also feel like I should comment on the voice acting.
I don’t know anything about voice acting.
It was… good? I think?
I have now commented on the voice acting.
VII. Putting down the book
Behold; orange!
This is the first time I’ve felt bad writing a review.
Yes, Twofold is a commercial project, but you can feel the passion and effort that went into it. And… it’s fine. It just isn’t strong enough. Almost every issue I had with its prequel, First Snow, is still here. Yes, the visuals are brilliant, yes, the staging is great, yes, the voice acting is tremendous, but when the script can’t convey the thing it’s about, there’s only so much everything else can do.
“I was hoping for more, but I expected as much” is the grim phrase that sums up my feelings.
…
A question, then:
Why, when I woke up the morning after finishing Twofold, did I feel… great? Like some of my faith in humanity was restored?
For a couple of days, I went around looking at people and feeling a surge of warmth whenever I did. Like I could see the good in them, believe they were nice, and wish the best for them.
Looking back, I think it’s thanks to Twofold’s family scenes, where Millie, Caprice, and their parents are just… nice. Kind, warm, caring, patient, and loving. It’s rare to feel that genuinely in adult media, and… it had an effect.
It also got me thinking about some words from a Katawa Shoujo developer that I’ve been turning over for the better part of a decade:
“This doesn’t mean that emotional value in writing is inherently cheap or bad. There’s nothing wrong with playing with a reader’s emotions and evoking feeling […] But what is catharsis without intellectual engagement?”
Let me answer that question now with a question:
What is the point of intellectual engagement if you lose hope, give up on life, and shoot yourself in the head?
Life grinds you down. You get barraged by rudeness, cruelty, and apathy, and it’s easy to grow cold, bitter, and distant.
But most people are mostly good. They are warm and they do want to help you. And maybe it’s good to be reminded of that every once in a while, in a way you can’t ignore, so you don’t stop caring, as well.
Katawa Shoujo conveyed much the same thing, albeit much more strongly. The release of that VN actually gave rise to a whole community of warm people looking to better themselves – which is where Twofold’s original development staff coalesced. There are flickers of that feeling in Twofold; embers it never quite manages to coax into flame.
And… okay. I said earlier that writing is ‘a sword of white fire.’ Let me now turn that sword on myself.
I was there when Twofold’s original dev team came together, and I wanted to be involved more than anything. But I didn’t know how to write, so I stood back to watch them work from afar.
I read their blog posts and learned about art direction. I read their demo and was driven to work harder. I read their April Fools’ release, where they claimed to have changed engine, and just put out the old demo as a 6000 slide powerpoint, and laughed my behind off.
For a long time, whenever I began a new document, the first thing I’d write was “HELLS YEAH MOTHERFUCKER LET’S GO,” a line taken from a very early piece of Twofold art. And I still listen to its beautiful old scrapped soundtrack, with its criminally low number of views.
Over the last eleven years, Twofold has been humming somewhere in the background of my life, as a final link to a wonderful time and place.
…
Closing the book and turning over Twofold, I feel like a chapter of my life has finally ended.
Twofold didn’t give me the slightest enthusiasm for art or writing – but its development did. Everything I wanted from Millie’s route was there. People came together to make something, lots of it got scrapped, people fell off the bandwagon – but I felt their passion for art, writing, music, and direction, and admired it, and that’s what I’m going to take away from this project.
And you know: reading it now, seeing it done after so long, feels… kind of inspirational?
It took me eleven years, but I did learn to write. And for the last three of those years, I‘ve been working on my own Secret VN project – also far too ambitious. Twofold made it, though, and that’s given me some hope that I can make it, too – ideally in less than eleven years.
Looking back to that long ago summer when all this began, and all the years in between, there’s a lot more I could say. But I’ve got work to do, so I’ll just say one last thing, in the way someone would once have said it:
[KENICHIRO IMAIZUMI, Japanese game producer, sits writing at a desk. He is interrupted by the arrival of HIDEO KOJIMA, famed game director. Both have heavy Japanese accents].
KOJIMA: “Imaizumi-san! I know what we must do for our next game!”
IMAIZUMI: “Yes, Kojima-san?”
KOJIMA: “The player shall carry a foetus while delivering mail to people obsessed with loss and connection. It will cost fifty million dollars!”
IMAIZUMI: “Brilliant, Kojima-san!”
~
It was brilliant. ‘Death Stranding’ went on to sell over ten million copies. Given its hilariously uncommercial premise, we can only attribute its success to Kojima’s reputation for innovation, attention to detail, and disdain for convention, which he famously honed on the ‘Metal Gear’ series.
But before Kojima had his own studio; before Hollywood A-listers were ready to jump at his call; before even Solid Snake had heard of Shadow Moses – Kojima was nobody; directing unknown titles in the lurid world of visual novels.
Back in the 80’s and 90’s, Kojima directed just two VNs – Snatcher, and Policenauts – which even his most ardent fans have likely never read.
So – what can we learn from those years when gaming’s (arguably) most famous director ventured into this artform?
What can we take from Kojima’s VNs?
I. SNATCHER
It’s 2044. Cars can fly. Crime is rampant – and *anyone* you know might have been murdered and replaced by a robot doppelganger; a ‘snatcher,’ looking to do the same to you.
Welcome: to Neo Kobe.
Where you don’t talk about religion, politics, or elecriticity bills.
YOU are Gillian Seed, amnesiac and newly assigned ‘Junker,’ an elite operative tasked with hunting down snatchers to end their menace once and for all.
Snatcher is a VN nearly devoid of artistic ambition. It has nothing to say and no interest in saying it. But what it does, better than any other VN I know, is excite. And Kojima’s best tool for that is his direction of Snatcher’s best character – Neo Kobe City itself.
Take one of its most mundane scenes – the office of Gillian’s boss:
Whose moustache is the story’s real horror.
This should be a boring image, but it’s made interesting in four ways:
1) Novel designs. Have you ever seen a desk like this? Or couch? Or chair? The unfamiliar is always more exciting.
2) Visual intricacy. Consider the wall at the back. It could easily have been plain. Instead, it’s covered with intricate panels, electronics, and a window overlooking the complex city. More intricacy means more to take in and keeps an image engaging for longer.
3) Variation. Almost every part of this image looks different from every other part; further enhancing its visual complexity.
4) Vibrancy. The image uses bright colours, which make it seem exciting and cheerful.
If you’re not sure how much these things matter, consider:
“Just so long as they don’t take my moustache.”
Note where your eyes are drawn. It’s not to the plain blue walls.
We can go further:
“Damn.”
Now your eyes are drawn to the couch, chair, and paperwork.
And this is to go even further beyond:
“Subordinates! Do you have any furnishings? Or hair?”
Your eyes are drawn to… well, nothing, really. You lose interest instantly.
We can also see the impact of desaturation:
“Why yes, I have stopped dusting. How could you tell?”
There’s lots to keep us visually engaged, but the mood has changed from exciting to depressing and sombre.
We can combine these – strip the extraneous detail, desaturate, and zoom in:
“I’ve called you in for a serious discussion on whether my chair looks phallic from the side.”
The scene now feels cold, tense, and serious. Keep in mind that the centre of the artwork hasn’t changed – it’s still a man sitting at a desk. But the colour, background and details all alter its mood.
Almost every image in Snatcher uses these same visual tricks. Vibrancy is further dialled up through contrast, which also highlights key elements. Think opposites on the colour wheel – blue and orange:
Yellow and purple:
Red and green:
Light and shadow are also key tools for dialling up contrast. Shadows create fear, while light draws your eye to points of interest:
Elsewhere, Snatcher drenches entire images in one colour (usually red) to intensify mood:
Defund the Junkers.
The importance of these tricks is exemplified by a rare scene that ignores almost all of them:
Little colour, little contrast, no original designs, little complexity.
Hopefully, after seeing all this, you can appreciate how novelty, complexity, dynamism, vibrancy, and contrast combine in the following image to capture the mood of Neo Kobe City:
Bright colours and high contrast are also features of gemstones and precious metals. Humans find them attractive.
There’s so much to see, and everything looks enticing.
The visual style of fun, intrigue, and excitement is perfect for Snatcher, because those are the principal things it tries to evoke. Naturally, not every VN can benefit. Take a random scene from Katawa Shoujo:
God forbid we go one post here without mentioning KS.
Here, background colours are muted, and contrast deliberately minimised. Those colours KS does use are notvibrant – they’re naturalistic. And this works! KS is a realistic, peaceful story.Snatcher’s visuals would have killed its mood, just as Katawa Shoujo’s would have murdered Snatcher’s. Distilled down, the lesson here is simple: pick an artstyle that complements and enhances the mood of your work. Given how often that doesn’t happen, though, it seems worth stating aloud.
The Introduction
Visual direction is used to great effect in Snatcher’s introduction, which I’d encourage you to watch. If these seven and a half minutes don’t convince you to read it, there’s little I can say that will:
After the opening dialogue about snatchers (so forgettable I’d forgotten it), Kojima harnesses the opening credits to pull us into Neo Kobe, and uses the aforementioned visual tricks to bring it to life:
Neo Kobe City, looking like an Australian Friday night.
Look how much stuff there is! Look at the masked man on the left, with his forehead dot and black eyes. The old man on the right, with his cybernetic-seeming headband and pipes. The strange car. The knife fight, where one man is a punk, and the other seems to be Robocop.
Note the visual complexity: the Chinese-style window on the left. The flying car above. The blazing searchlights. The imperial Japanese flag. The signs in various languages. And the city extending far beyond what we can see; creating an illusion that in Neo Kobe, every street is as packed with excitement as this one.
Consider the vibrant colours. Consider the use of contrast (purple foreground VS yellow background). Consider the contrasts of light and dark (white lights in the foreground VS black sky). Consider the dynamism – few parts of the image look like any other part.
The introduction flips between scenes like this, and it makes Neo Kobe City seem like a real place that you want to check out. Images are kept from feeling static by the credits onscreen, flickers of animation, and the real MVP – the VN’s opening theme, “Welcome to Neo Kobe City.” It’s perfect – grungy synths at the bottom rise to shining trumpets at the top; pristinely evoking the city’s rundown alleys and bright searchlights. Dynamic swells and sharp staccatos build excitement, while the main sax line bleeds coolness and mystery.
The sequence ends by introducing us to Gillian and his ex-wife. Their dialogue is hilariously artificial, and obviously just filling the audience in on their backstory. The amateurish voice acting further fails to smooth cliché-ridden travesties like:
“Yes, but I can sense that there is something terrible hidden in our past, and if we remember it, it will destroy us!”
It’s only the confidence of the music and visuals that rescue the scene – but they do. It’s like the storyteller has a giant grin on his face, and as a rocket car blasts down to pick up Gillian Seed, you’re grinning too, and can’t resist jumping in for the ride.
As you get in, the music assures you that this is the coolestshit ever. The visuals concur that this is, indeed, the coolest shit ever. And as if the opening needed to go any further over the top, a narrator then delivers the following in a reverberating voice with unshakable faith that what he’s saying is the coolest shit ever:
“GILLAIN SEED. ESTIMATED AGE: THIRTY-ONE. THREE YEARS AGO, HIM AND HIS WIFE, JAMIE SEED, ARE TAKEN INTO CUSTODY IN THE SIBERIAN NEUTRAL ZONE BY THE 17TH SIBERIAN INVESTIGATION FORCE. BOTH GILLIAN AND JAMIE SUFFER FROM SEVERE AMNESIA – THEIR MEMORIES PRIOR TO BEING PICKED UP IN SIBERIA LOST IN A MYSTERIOUS MENTAL FOG. TWO YEARS AGO, AFTER A VAIN ATTEMPT TO REBUILD THEIR MARRIAGE, JAMIE AND GILLIAN SEPARATE. FOLLOWING EXTENSIVE MILITARY TRAINING, GILLIAN IS ORDERED TO REPORT TO NEO KOBE CITY AS A JUNKER – EFFECTIVE TODAY.”
It’s too much; too ridiculous; too unforgivably sincere, and the unironic delivery of this ludicrous backstory is likely to have you in stitches.
But: it works. God help me, the opening works. There’s so much energy that it’s impossible not to be swept up and pulled in. It’s not the writing that does that, it’s all in the presentation.
Immersion
Once it begins, Snatcher uses other tricks to pull you into the role of Gillian. Take your first mission. You’re meant to rendezvous with a senior Junker, Jean, at an abandoned factory, but when you find him, uh…
“…Are you alright?”
The gore might seem gratuitous, but it isn’t. This image won’t leave you for the rest of the VN, and viscerally establishes the dangers of being a Junker AND the fact that snatchers are brutal and cruel. Those things could have been said to you, but now you feel and believe them. That’s a lot to convey with one CG.
Snatcher uses a trick afterwards to make a shootout seem more real. If you screw up and get hit, Gillian will have to patch himself up – and, for a while afterwards, characters will express concern about your injury. Fights in games are normally forgotten about the moment they’re done. By giving one lasting consequences, it feels like it matters more, and is more real.
Snatcher’s shooting minigame is actually one of its best features – not because it’s good, but because its inclusion affects you mentally. At any time during your investigation, you could have two seconds to pull out your gun, aim, and shoot an enemy before you’re killed. Younever know when this could happen. Your hand constantly hovers over the ‘draw weapon’ button, just like Gillian’s hand would constantly hover over his gun; pulling you into his headspace and role.
Hurr hurr gun
Snatcher pulls you further into Gillian’s role by having you act like a real investigator. Clues and information aren’t always recorded for you. You’ll have to take your own notes, just as Gillian does. And when it comes time to solve mysteries, you’ll have to pull out those notes and puzzle things out – just like Gillian. You feel like a Junker.
As an aside, solving these mysteries could have been excruciating. Some are highly obscure and demand an exact answer. Luckily, the VN gives you clues if you keep getting them wrong. The clues start vague but grow increasingly clear as you keep failing. This eventually lowers the challenge to a level you can deal with, without removing the satisfying “eureka” of finally solving something.
Excellent detective work.
It’s an unfortunate design choice that no decisions in Snatcher actually matter. There’s only a single ending, and no meaningful branches. This pulls you out of Gillian’s role and reduces the tension. For instance, you’re told early on to avoid flashing Gillian’s Junker ID – people, and especially snatchers, might get violent. This adds an interesting dynamic – do you show your ID to open doors and intimidate people, or keep it on the downlow? Unfortunately, you eventually realise that you’re on rails, and it doesn’t matter – you can flash the ID whenever you want; it won’t make any difference. A cool and tense decision is ruined. Every decision in the VN suffers similarly.
Snatcher’s linearity has benefits – you’re never screwed out of getting a good ending because you did one thing wrong two hours ago, and your immersion never gets ruined by having to reload a sudden game over (with one exception). But killing satisfaction in the VN’s choices is a heavy price to pay for that, and I’m not sure Snatcher made the right call.
An 8 act story in 3 acts
Speaking of awkward tradeoffs: Snatcher’s final act.
Originally, Snatcher was meant to be told over eight instalments. Unfortunately, it was cancelled after only two, leaving the VN incomplete. When Snatcher was re-released on the PC Engine,Kojima finally had a chance to finish it. Trouble was, he’d have to do it in just one act.
What follows is, predictably, a hasty mess. If the alternative was an eternally unresolved cliff-hanger, then I’m glad that Snatcher has an Act 3, but it’s a disappointment, nonetheless. Some of the most egregious problems are:
1) In Act 3, you don’t solve mysteries – the characters solve them for you. This pulls you out of Gillian’s role and ruins one of the VN’s most satisfying aspects.
2) Neo Kobe was Snatcher’s star. However, Act 3 takes place almost entirely in an underground bunker with about 4 rooms. It’s dull.
3) Act 3 consists almost entirely of a dry, Galt-length monologue/explanation delivered by a single antagonist. We’re talking literally half an hour. Things that should have been uncovered slowly, with great excitement, are instead thrown out with little fanfare.
4) Act 3 leans heavily on the lightgun minigame, which was never very good on its own.
5) Kojima tries to add a *message* to Snatcher at the eleventh hour – the need for people to trust one another. It’s clumsy. If he’d had eight acts, maybe he could have pulled it off. As is, it’s in direct conflict with the VN’s actual narrative. For Gillian, trusting people has only gotten one of his closest allies killed. You cannot bolt a message onto your story that runs counter to its narrative and expect it to land. It’s worse because Snatcher never NEEDED to be more than a fun adventure. The hamfisted attempt to make it so only weakens it.
6) The truth behind the snatchers is really, really dumb.
Again, I’m happy we got an ending. I just wish it was better than it is.
Gillian and Mika prepare themselves for the Act 3 experience
Conclusions
Despite being almost forty years old, Snatcher feels like it could have been made yesterday. The pixelated artstyle seems like a deliberate choice to evoke cyperpunk vibes, as does the chiptune music – the grungy, electronic sounds perfectly evoke the grungy, electronic Neo Kobe.
I described Snatcher’s designs as original, but it’s infamous that the VN steals egregiously DRAWS CONSIDERABLE INSPIRATION from 1980s films such as Blade Runner, Terminator, and Dune. ‘Foreverjung’ has compiled the most egregious examples, from which I’ve also stolen egregiously APPROPRIATED UNDER FAIR USE the images I’ve used today. You can see them here for yourself here (warning, major spoilers):
Snatcher might share visual similarities with Blade Runner, but it could scarcely be more different in tone. Blade Runner is a grim, serious look at what it means to be a human being. By contrast, Snatcher is a cartoon. Fights are fun, good and evil are clear, and Gillian has no psychological hangups.
It’s interesting because Snatchercould have been played very seriously. Gillianwakes up, aged about thirty, with no memories. He soon breaks up with his apparent wife and starts a dangerous job, exposing him to humanity’s worst. Now and forever, he’ll have to be paranoid that anyone close to him could be a murderous killer robot. He could easily have been miserable, jaded, and alcoholic, and that could have been leveraged for emotional resonance.
But – for maybe the first time ever here – I’m glad that Snatcher doesn’t take itself seriously. I’m glad it has no pretensions towards being anything more than it is – a schlocky, vibrant, electric adventure. Sure, it’s all flash and no thunder. But holy shit – what a fucking flash.
II. POLICENAUTS
Karen Hojo, Jonathan Ingram, and Ed Brown. Guess which one’s Ed Brown.
Some have said that Policenauts is the worst thing Kojima ever made, and I don’t disagree.
There’s no reason it should be. The art and music are skilfully done. The (Japanese) voice acting is streets ahead of Snatcher’s English dub. Kojima demonstrably knows how to direct. But a few small design choices ruin Policenauts, and I’m only writing about it because it helps to illustrate what makes Snatcher so great.
So, the premise: in 2013, Jonathan Ingram was one of five cops chosen to become the first police astronauts (“policenauts”) tasked with upholding the law on Earth’s first low-orbit space colony, ‘Beyond’. But, during a routine spacewalk, Jonathan was hurled from the station, and survived only by cryogenically freezing himself, before disappearing into the darkness of space.
Thirty years later, Jonathan has been recovered – but the elation is short-lived. The world has moved on. Jonathan’s love has remarried, his friends have aged, and his skills are obsolete. Jonathan struggles to put his life back together – until, one day, he’s drawn into the investigation of a personal crime. Which will take him back to Beyond, and a confrontation with humanity’s future – and his own past.
The remainder of this piece will use the cel-shaded art from the Sega Saturn re-release. Suffer like I did.
Snatcher excelled at being one thing: exciting. By contrast, Policenauts wants to be four things at once:
1. A police drama.
2. A detailed look at life in low Earth orbit.
3. The tragedy of a man finding a place in a world that has moved on without him.
4. A sexy comedy.
Policenauts fails at all of these aims – not because it’s bad at them, but because they’re fundamentally incompatible. Each gets in the way of another, leaving Policenauts less than the sum of its parts.
Policenauts wants to be an exciting police drama AND a technical look at life in space. Okay. Consider the visual design of Beyond:
Despite being set in space, the designs are down to earth.
Gone are the exotic colours and contrast. Gone is the striking design work. Gone is visual complexity. Policenauts is visually dull, and Beyond is the most ordinary space station I’ve ever seen.
And, on one level – it’s great! If humanity ever DOES build a space colony, we won’t want it to look strange and alien – we’lll want it to look like Earth. Pristine greenery, open spaces, comfortable homes. In that sense, Beyond is an excellent commentary on what life in space might really be like.
But for an exciting adventure? These designs are poison. Nothing on Beyond is interesting to look at or discover.
These aims come into conflict elsewhere. For instance, the basic ‘gameplay’ of Policenauts has you search each area for clues. As you do, The VN delivers huge information dumps on the intricacies of everything you examine. How chairs work in space. How flowers are grown. How soil is handled, and so on. And again, on one level, it’s great. The writers have clearly researched the setting, and some observations are legitimately interesting.
No, you will not remember any of this. No, none of it is relevant to the case.
But this stuff is the real murder of Policenauts, and the victim is its pacing. The exciting police drama moves GLACIALLY because every scene is full of irrelevant lectures. Inversely, the interesting lectures are CONSTANTLY interrupted by an irrelevant police drama. Neither is bad, but each detracts from the other. In the worst instance, characters stop midway through a chase/shootout to discuss the intricacies of how a train station functions.
Kojima has a habit of dumping masses of technical info on his audience. It’s most noticeable in his Metal Gear series, where you can call up your team for trivia on things relevant to the mission. The difference is, in Metal Gear, these conversations are optional breaks from the gameplay. But in Policenauts, you can’t advance the plot until you’ve triggered a specific prompt, which could be hiding behind any object in your vicinity. As such, you have no option but to sit through every information dump.
Even so, it still could have worked. Imagine that Policenauts was about someone deeply involved with life on Beyond – a maintenance worker who has to keep the station running. A doctor, treating the station’s high rate of skin cancers. A bartender, listening to people talk about life. In each case, the intricacies of life on Beyond would have MATTERED to the protagonist, so discussing them could have been natural, and key to the story.
Imagine VA11-Hall-A, but with a setting that’s deep and thought out.
Jonathan might seem like he fits the bill – cops talk to diverse people, about many things. But they don’t care about the trivial intricacies of their environment. It’s especially telling that with a few tweaks, the story of Policenauts could have been set on Earth (and essentially has been, given that the whole thing is a rip off of WAS INSPIRED BY Lethal Weapon). Beyond is a motif in Policenauts’ story, not an irreplaceable part of it.
The sexy part
Policenauts’ remaining two aims – presenting a moving story of a man out of his time, and a sexy comedy – are likewise at odds.
Like Gillian Seed, Jonathan Ingram could have been played seriously. The trouble is that he nearly is. We open in Jonathan’s office, and Policenauts spends its first twenty minutes bringing us into his head. HIs rent and bills are late. He’s broke. His last job went to hell. He’s surrounded by mementos of better times – triumphant newspaper clippings of him and Ed pulling heroic drug busts; glamorous pieces about the policenauts; pictures of his beautiful ex. It manages to build up a weighty sense of loss, and the cruel and inexorable passage of time.
Client’s first impression: Ingram is an alcoholic who is lax about gun safety.
When Jonathan’s last client arrives, it’s his ex-wife, Lorraine. She’s now thirty years older than him and has remarried. They’re wordlessly caught up in sadness over what should have been, but now never can.
Shortly afterwards, Lorraine is murdered outside Jonathan’s office – and he swears to solve the case.
This sets up the groundwork for a serious story – one about coping with loss, broken dreams, and dashed expectations. Of picking yourself up after a hard fall. Of finding your place in a world where you don’t belong. It should be good.
Ten minutes later, Jonathan is cheerily perving on his hot stewardess as he flies into space.
Over the next three hours, Jonathan:
1) Perves on a hospital receptionist;
2) Slaps the tits of said receptionist’s manager (yes, really);
3) Slaps the tits of a different receptionist;
4) Asks a hot waitress her three sizes.
And even here, you cannot escape the info dumps.
You cannot take Jonathan seriously when he’s acting like he’s forgotten about Lorraine ten minutes after she’s dead. Policenauts spends half an hour establishing Jonathan’s tragic circumstances, only to throw it into the trash. The sexy hijinks of Policenauts render its long, tragic opening pointless, while the tragic stuff makes the sexy stuff feel tainted and dumb.
Snatcher also had ‘sexy’ moments, like one where Gillian walked in on a 14 EIGHTEEN year old girl having a shower. While I won’t say it was fantastic, it at least it fit Snatcher’s tone and Gillian’s circumstances. Policenauts’ scenes don’t, and they’re more frequent, prominent, and egregious.
You CANNOT escape the info dumps.
Conclusions
Next to Katawa Shoujo, Snatcher is one of only two visual novels I’d recommend you go out of your way to read. All the elements were there for its spiritual sequel to be even better, but in reaching for the sun, it flew too close and burned up.
At this point, I usually lament about the fact that something as good as Snatcher has been almost forgotten. I’d never have read it if a friend with an interest in old games hadn’t urged me. If the older gems of someone as famous as Kojima have slipped through the cracks, what else have I missed?
Kojima seems to revel in subverting expectations, so I won’t put it past him to up and release another VN at this stage of his career. That said, it seems unlikely. But I’m glad that he contributed to a storytelling format I’m fond of, and that there are legitimate lessons to take from his work.
The real world of the 21st century may not be as exciting as Neo Kobe, or Beyond. But it has both those worlds in it and is better for it.
And who knows. If Kojima’s work argues anything, it’s that the world is full of surprises, and you’d be a fool to write something off as past its time without seeing what it still can do.
Back then, people were hailing Final Fantasy VII as the greatest game ever made – and Sega, console manufacturer, were going to die.
It would not be without a fight.
Sega charged their champions, Team Andromeda, with forging their own answer to Final Fantasy VII – another ambitious JRPG, of environmentalism and revenge.
This would be Panzer Dragoon Saga. It would also be hailed as one of the greatest games of all time.
Final Fantasy VII would go on to sell millions of copies, become one of the most beloved and influential games of all time, and would eventually be lavished with an expensive remake.
Panzer Dragoon Saga sold 20,000 copies in North America. It sold 2000 in Europe. No one has heard of it, and the source code is allegedly lost, so it can never be re-released.
If you want to play Panzer Dragoon Saga, you will need to shell out $300 for a Sega Saturn console that’s likely older than you. You will then need $900 for a copy of PDS – or, you could spend the next few hours crawling through websites infested with more viruses than a Wuhan prostitute; tracking down the four ROMs that comprise the game, before assembling them into a whole like the mythical fragments of an ancient sword.
Surely, this cannot be worth it. Surely, a niche 1996 RPG is outdated trash overhyped only by contrarian hipsters.
But, alas – it is not.
Mono no aware
Stop, for a minute, and imagine – really imagine – a desert. A flat, featureless stretch of sand that extends in every direction, past the horizon. Imagine too that a thousand years ago, this was a city, where a million people lived and died. Now all is gone, leaving just the sands and you.
The vast emptiness this image presents evokes a feeling called mono no aware – that sense you get when contemplating the transience of all things. It infuses Panzer Dragoon Saga. On dragonback, you travel a ruined world whose cities are vanished under desert sands and empty seas.
Mono no aware here comes principally from Panzer Dragoon Saga’s environments. If these were bright or cheery, they’d evoke adventure and fresh excitement. Instead, PDS areas are vast, faded, and empty – washed out wastelands, oceans, and deserts. Because you’re flying over them, they feel even bigger and emptier; enhancing the sense that all is gone.
Combat occurs in random encounters on a separate screen, which leaves exploration distraction-free, and you free to take in your surroundings. This is well – it’s hard to feel quietly reflective when you’re ducking gunfire to electric guitars.
The way your dragon handles is also essential. In other games, you often fly by moving forward automatically. It might be realistic, but it makes navigation horrendously painful, and stops you from stopping to take things in. In Panzer Dragoon Saga, your dragon hovers stationary until you ask it to move.
No Man’s Sky: no mono no aware. Too bright, no sense of vanished people, and too much stress on flying and fighting.
Panzer Dragoon Saga: mono no aware. Washed out, ancient ruins, no overworld enemies.
The Sacred Flame
Images can also birth mono no aware, which PDS leverages in an early scene.
The protagonist, Edge, has set out on dragonback to avenge his friends; murdered at the hands of a man called Craymen, the commander of the empire’s infamous Black Fleet. But Edge is distracted. After saving the life of a man named Gash, Edge agrees to escort him back to a village of his friends. But when the pair arrive, they find that everyone has been slaughtered by monsters.
Afterwards, Edge and Gash sit up, in darkness, staring into a fire’s flames. It’s as if the world has vanished. Around them, cinders are born and die, like human lives, or dreams.
There’s a reason fire is tied up in so much religious imagery.
Fire is a metaphor for dualities central to the human experience – destruction and creation, light and dark, heat and cold, and life and death. And watching one burn, fated to fade, brings on mono no aware.
And what’s the point of that?
When you feel that everything you value will inevitably fade, forever, as it has for everyone that has ever been, you either fall to despair, or are driven to think of your purpose.
Why are you here? Why do you continue? What is the thing you serve that is larger than yourself? What is the thing for which you’d die?
Here, as darkness threatens to swallow Edge and Gash, the transient fire holds it back, just as each man burns with a purpose that keeps them back from despair. And Gash asks Edge – what will you do now? A question which, if considered properly, asks you to consider your purpose. And here, Edge puts his into words for the first time: he will revenge himself upon Craymen.
It is this sense that is the strength of PDS, and what it does better than any other game that I know, released before or in the decades since. But the game has other strengths as well, and it’s well worth taking a look at those.
Music
PDS uses many tools to build its mood. One of the best is music.
The OSTs of Chronos Cross and Trigger are often hailed as two of the best in games. I’d agree. I also wouldn’t feel comfortable saying that either is better than Panzer Dragoon Saga’s.
The game’s instrumentation is brilliant. Natural-sounding instruments, like drums and acoustic guitars, are juxtaposed against synths; evoking a mix of futuristic technology and tribalism that fits the ruined world to a tee.
My favourite track is “Rest;” a wistful piece that inspires yearning for what is passed; perfectly fitting the game:
A second standout is “Seekers Stronghold”. An organ-like synth creates a sense of something majestic and ancient, while a sitar conjures something mystic and dream-like:
The first boss theme is also excellent. “Giant Creature” opens with ominous drums; reminiscent of a pumping heart or approaching stampede. Broad, low, and dissonant chords build up dread as they grow in power, before erupting in sharp, dissonant chords like slashing knives.
Other areas use no music at all, like the barren Garril desert, where the wind alone conveys an ancient emptiness.
It’s telling that an updated re-release soundtrack produced by the original composer, Saori Kobayashi, 20 years after the game’s release, is an almost unilateral downgrade. While it uses cleaner samples and real instruments, stripping the organic synths leaves it less evocative of its setting, and more sterile. Kobayashi alluded to this herself, saying:
“When implementing [sound samples] into the Saturn, we ran into data size limitations, which restricted how we could use the sounds in the game. […] Nowadays, I can totally control the kind of sound I want in the game, so that is quite fun and convenient, but if that were true back in the 90s, then perhaps the unique sound attributed to that era may never have been created”.
Design
“Unique” could almost be a byword for Panzer Dragoon Saga. All else being equal, it’s straightforwardly true that original things are more likely to catch your attention and stick in your mind – and original designs were a goal for Team Andromeda. Enemy Designer, Takashi Iwade, said:
“When we were making Panzer Dragoon, our focus was trying to create something that nobody had seen before. I remember the artists on the battle team were especially conscious about this, and constantly competing against each other to try to come up with something more unique and more unfamiliar than their peers.”
I noted this about the game before I even read the quote, so I’m confident that they succeeded. The world of PDS feels more original than anything I’ve played in recent memory.
The stand-out designs are the game’s monsters, especially those termed “mutants.” These look thoroughly alien: insects mixed with grotesque tumours, fleshy pipes, and pulsing organs. They feel distinct from what you’d even think of as life; built of everything hideous, twisted, and loathsome – murderous, hideous, oozing, reeking, pulsating, emotionless things whose purpose is the wholesale slaughter of human beings. These are the mutant descendants of monsters bioengineered to be the planet’s immune system and, as such, are almost literally a living cancer; grown out of control and choking everything. Thus, while the environments of PDS do contain living things, they don’t feel alive; contributing to that sense of everything being dead and empty.
An Arachnoth; like sentient cancer.
Environments
The same is true of the game’s environments. Even its vast, barren plains are filled with original sights. Take the Garril Desert, where giant azure worm creatures, fifty metres long, leap from the sands and revolve through the air. Or the land of Gorgius; where a vast, ancient white airship hovers placidly, hundreds of metres above a serene blue sea. These images linger long after you’ve finished the game.
The calm of Gorgius; building awe through size and sky.
Character designs
PDS also has top notch character designs, on which the Director and Chief Designer, Manabu Kusunoki, said:
“I believe the most important thing in designing the characters is to create a believable world on the other side of the monitor. If there’s even a small inconsistency or a lie in the design, I’m afraid the players will no longer be able to immerse themselves in the game. For example, a warrior who fights in battles but wearing a dress or hardly wearing anything at all. That’s fine as a design if that’s the kind of world you’re creating. But that’s not the kind of world we were creating in Panzer Dragoon. A warrior would be wearing armour to protect their bodies, and wear clothes that wouldn’t get in the way of moving around. I tried to design the characters to be as believable as possible so that the player wouldn’t find themselves saying, ‘There’s no one who would dress like that in that circumstance.’”
FFVII: “A months-long walking trip? Time for a crop-top and miniskirt.”
PDS: “Fashion? The fuck is that?”
Edge’s ugly red jumpsuit is exactly the kind of thing you might wear as a wasteland soldier-come-dragon rider exposed to strong winds. And while his short, unkempt hair isn’t cool or attractive, it’s how yours would probably look if you were posted to an isolated military base for too long.
The Black Fleet’s commander, Craymen, wears a spartan military uniform. Even Edge’s love interest, Azel, wears a hideous and unflattering combat jacket for most of the game – because it’s what would have been available when she woke up on board a military vessel.
Clockwise from far right: Paet, Gash, Azel, Craymen, the Emperor and his minions.
“Realistic” designs can be boring, but Team Andromeda kept theirs original and distinct. They also adhered to a school of design which argues that every part of a character’s appearance should help to tell you who they are.
The standout, then, is Azel. She is a character of dichotomy and contradiction; an artificial being created in the Ancient Age, who looks and acts *almost* human. Her arc sees her reconcile those essential contradictions of her nature – real and artificial; ancient and modern; kind and cold. Her design captures those dichotomies perfectly. She looks almost cute, but her inhuman elements keep her somewhat alien, and creepy, with her tendril hair, body made of plastic or metal, doll-joints, and skeletal pattern. Her divided nature is also conveyed by the stark split of her body into black and white halves.
Original: Introducing your love interest like a horror monster.
Gash’s design is equally brilliant: a tiny, unassuming man with a half-masked face; foreshadowing that he’s not being wholly open with Edge. It’s a late game revelation that Gash is the leader of an organisation called the Seekers. After explaining this, Gash finally reveals his entire face to Edge – prompting a horrified reaction, implying that the mask hides a hideous, disfiguring injury. Gash wrily comments “No one would expect a man like me to lead anything. Deception is [the Seekers] way of life.” Thus, his design serves as a metaphor for his organisation– seemingly small, apparently weak, yet deceptively wise and capable.
Gash and his Seekers. Their unique jackets convey that they have their own culture. The white helmets are made from the distinctive armour plates of pure-type monsters; implying that the Seekers hunt them. All this adds depth to them without a single written word.
Edge’s dragon is also good – again, memorable and engaging purely because it’s so different from every other dragon I’ve seen. A sort of metal helmet is fused to its head, ending in a giant spike-like horn. The dragon doesn’t breathe fire. Instead, it creates an orb of light in its mouth, from which it fires multiple homing lasers. It’s also weirdly cute; letting out kittenish mewls of affection when petted, and of pain when harmed, helping you to bond with it.
“HELLO, FRIEND”
Combat:
That desire for originality may have also led to the game’s combat system. Broadly an active-time, turn-based RPG, PDS feels fresh even in 2022, thanks to its critical twists.
RPG characters typically stand about flaccidly while waiting to attack. But in PDS, battles are fought in the air. Your dragon races enemies, conveying instant dynamism. You must also maneuver around your foes; avoiding their armoured sides, or those where they’ve pointed guns. At its best, this incentivises risky play. You fly in, fire into an enemy’s weak point, then fly out again before it can retaliate and rip you to shreds. As enemies also reposition, there’s a rapid back and forth to combat that immerses you in Edge’s stressed and desperate perspective.
The PDS system is not without flaws, however, and the biggest stem from Edge being the only party member. He does have many actions, what with his gun and command of the dragon’s lasers and magic. But there’s little scope for complex strategies. Random encounters quickly become repetitive, and sadly, most find the game too easy, which leaves the intensity less than it might have been. It makes some key encounters less gripping, reducing immersion.
Wonderfully, enemy airships often issue audible dialogue – crews fearfully report your approach or boldly swear to shoot you down. They announce when weapons come online, or key repairs are complete. This helps to humanise enemies, builds realism, and differentiates otherwise identical encounters by giving each a personality.
The battle menu, as Edge races a train carrying a pseudo-nuclear bomb.
Script
So, PDS has an original, engrossing world, is suffused with potent mood, and is set with engaging gameplay.
It’s unfortunate, then, that its script is mediocre on almost every level.
The arachnoth in the room is its translation, which frequently bears no relation to the Japanese words the characters speak. This was partly deliberate. Producer Yukio Futatsugi said:
“I remember that we were advised by the marketing team to make Edge and Azel’s romantic relationship more obvious for the U.S. market. We discussed this at the beginning, how to approach the U.S. localisation. A round-about expression of their relationship was appropriate for the Japanese market, but because emotions are expressed more directly in English, we thought their romantic relationship wouldn’t come across unless the dialogue between them was more direct. As an example, in Japanese, it would be inferred that if the guy said something like “the moon is beautiful” to a woman, the woman would take that to mean he loves her. But that nuance would probably be lost on the Western audience. I remember discussing with the localisation department about making the script more direct.”
This is defensible. If I told a Western woman “The moon is beautiful,” I expect that she’d ask me what drugs I’d been taking, before covertly reaching for mace.
But every time music is moving, the voice acting gripping, and the onscreen words a mess, you think the translators must have screwed up. However, even this may even serve Panzer Dragoon Saga. It creates an illusion that the Japanese dialogue is actually profound. I don’t think it is, though, and my evidence is that the story structure is also jank. It lurches from arbitrary plot device to plot device – go infiltrate this enemy base for some reason. Go fetch this machine part. Go destroy this ancient battleship that appeared unforeshadowed and which we’ll never mention again. Long sections add nothing to the larger narrative.
But the most crippling issue is that we never gain access to Edge’s head. PDS is full of mono no aware. It’s set up to tell a moving story about Edge pursuing his purpose in life. But that pursuit is a wholly internal thing. We don’t get Edge’s reflections and agonies – so when he does abandon his purpose, for a better one (twice!) it has no weight or power. All that mood, instead of fuelling something profound, instead is leveraged for nothing.
The Tower this plot revolves around. A forgotten monolith, like most of my essays.
Direction – Gaining Control
But while its writing is mediocre, PDS’s direction manages to create compelling moments all on its own.
Take the first time you ever fly the dragon. It’s excellent, thanks to a contrast – PDS spends its first twenty minutes having Edge seem wholly pathetic.
When a monster appears in the mine Edge guards, the boy can’t hurt it, is almost killed twice, and can only narrowly escape with his life. As Edge drags his injured friends to the exit, the pair are shot dead in a Black Fleet ambush. Edge is also shot, and falls deep, into the mines. You are given control – and almost immediately cornered by dozens of the nigh-invulnerable monsters that Edge encountered above. They advance like a wall of red-eyed doom, and your hopelessness is rammed home as Edge attempts a futile final stand – and can’t. His gun jams.
Then – the dragon arrives. Heralded by a fire of shining light, it annihilates every seemingly invincible monster in a single, brilliant instant.
Edge rises from the mine a dragon rider – and after twenty minutes of weakly crawling through the dark, it’s like you’ve awakened as superman; almighty, fast, and free to fly at mach five. The whole area just lets you learn and enjoy your newfound sense of power and freedom. It would not have felt even half as good without the things that came before.
Direction – Linking Combat to Narrative
PDS also manages to flawlessly feed its gameplay into, at least, one cutscene.
It’s a fight against Azel and her dragon, Atolm, which might be the best in the game. Intensity hits its max when Azel commands “Nerae.” (“Take aim.”) The battle compass flashes “mortal peril” in every position except one. You have two seconds to get there before a storm of three dozen white lasers shreds everything else. The game even slows as these spawn; making it seem so overwhelming that the console itself can’t handle it.
You’re so hyped and immersed after the fight, that those emotions carry into the cutscene – and the immersion remains because it’s yourdragon doing all the work. Sitting on your ass makes you exactly like Edge.
Atolm shakes off the damage and ascends to the top of a structure. From his position of command, Azel issues Edge a final warning. The boy ignores it. Water cannons up under his dragon as he thunders forward on hammering wings. He starts so far from the camera as to be invisible, before blasting past and shrinking to nothing again in an instant; creating a terrific illusion of speed.
Atolm answers by deploying its largest blast of lasers yet. Edge’s dragon weaves between them and in two great wingbeats launches itself up and smashes hard into Atolm – before both dragons are blasted back, and their riders fall, alone, into an ominous portal which closes behind them.
Shorn of the fight beforehand, this cutscene is low budget jank. It’s the intense immersiveness of the fight before that draws you in and sells you the scene.
A crash of low-poly dragons
Conclusions
“This is pretty good,” I said to my friend, once an hour while playing PDS. “But it’s not the best game of all time.”
I meant it. And yet, three years on, if you asked me to pick that best game… there would be Panzer Dragoon Saga, right on the shortlist. It’s superbly directed. It looks and feels like nothing else. Its soundtrack is GOAT tier. And the sense its environments carry has stayed with me long since.
Is PDS worth nine hundred dollars? Of course not. What game could be? It is excellent, though. And if you can’t play it, perhaps it’s still worth checking out a longplay on Youtube. Here’s one active at the time of writing. It’s twelve hours long – but hey: you’ve wasted time on worse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Txks9hG21qs
I’ve paraphrased Auden on this blog before: “No works are unjustly remembered. Many are unjustly forgotten.” It’s easy to say – but it’s somewhat sad to see one of those unjustly forgotten works up close. If my friend wasn’t obsessed with vintage video games, I’d have never even heard of Panzer Dragoon Saga. Some of that can be put down to the infamous failure of the Sega Saturn. Some might be due to the game’s stratospherically abysmal marketing…
Yeah.
…And maybe games magazines deserve some blame too. There are “X/10”s for graphics, story, and gameplay, but not for “Capacity to evoke a sense of the transience of all things.” It’s a shame. PDS would have scored at least 8.
Still. Even Panzer Dragoon Saga’s obscurity has ultimately served it, by turning the game itself into one final source of mono no aware.
I’ll leave you with an image from PDS which really captures what it’s become. Flying your dragon around a gale-force hurricane a mile wide and fifteen tall, you finally shoot down the last machine maintaining the storm – and the whole thing evaporates, giving way to calm, and an awesome sight: a vast, floating white airship, hidden for hundreds of years; whose forgotten technology now seems like magic, still patiently hovering above a serene blue sea.
If you can field the hurricane surrounding Panzer Dragoon Saga – find a Sega Saturn; pay the nine hundred dollars or burn the ROMs – then you’ll burst through into a beautiful forgotten world, where a wondrous piece of ancient technology; whose methods of development are lost to time, still waits patiently, as beautifully empty and transient as that day long ago when first it took to the skies.
My old man is, quite literally, a chess master. It’s the second highest rank you can get.
When I’ve asked why he’s not a Grandmaster, he’s told me that he doesn’t have… It: Something in the way Grandmasters think, that is profound, alien, and insurmountable.
It cannot be taught. It cannot be reached.
It is Genius. And you are born with it – or you are not.
Shun Takamine is a genius, or at least, is supposed to be. He is the protagonist of “Eisai”; debut VN of Shotglass Studios, released January 4, 2022; ten years to the day after the thunderclap of Katawa Shoujo.
Shun is a last year high school student afflicted by profound apathy. His home life is terrible, and though he’s a genius, his parents can’t afford to send him to college.
One day, Shun’s teacher tells him about the Eisai Club; a program for gifted students at Inou University. Members get a free ride – and, as a former member himself, Shun’s teacher can open the door for the boy. All he has to do is step through.
Shun travels to Inou, and Eisai becomes a slice of life. We see Shun’s everyday endeavours and eventual romances.
I think.
I dropped Eisai at the start of its second act, because it felt like a chore to read.
Damnable for a critic, I know, but I’d seen enough. Even if Eisai becomes Shakespeare in Act 2, it wouldn’t make up for the beginning.
I checked the later scripts, to make sure. They did not become Shakespeare.
So where did it go wrong?
Polish isn’t just for boots
Shotglass Studios released Eisai ten years to the day after Katawa Shoujo; a sensible choice that would have helped bring much-needed publicity to their critically underexposed VN.
“4 Leaf Studios seemed to think that “Good enough,” was never good enough. If there was an easy road to something good, and a hard road to something great, they took the hard road, almost every time. When the choice was an easy or hard classroom CG, they made the hard one. When the choice was cut-in CGs or no cut-in CGs, they made them. All the sprites were redone multiple times. The music was redone at least once. 4 Leaf Studios threw out their entire complete script for act 1 more than once, because what they’d made could be better. They excised every reference, because although they wouldn’t hurt immersion much, they would hurt immersion. There were no jokes about giving Rin “A big hand,” because while they wouldn’t have cheapened the VN much, they would have cheapened it. And when it came time to add polish, no one said “Just release the damn thing.” They polished, and they polished, until it was done. And that’s why people loved Katawa Shoujo, why they still talk about it eight years on, and why I’ve written an analysis longer and more complex than my actual PhD thesis to talk about it. Why do people care about KS? Because the developers cared. And you can feel it when a developer doesn’t.”
You feel it before Eisai even begins. The program’s logo is the default Ren’py symbol. In my experience, that’s the sign of a team running up against an arbitrary deadline, realising they’re not actually finished, and releasing the VN anyway. It’s indicative of the lack of polish endemic to Eisai. Typos abound. On one occasion, the music just stops, for no reason. In another scene, we read “The school has provided a bed, a desk, a small wardrobe, and two bookshelves, but nothing else.” But there’s a laptop on the desk in the background. And a lamp. And a bunch of books.
And DVDs. And photographs. And pens. And a chair. And a laundry basket. And
The main menu is shockingly plain. The textbox either uses the default Ren’py font or might as well. It feels like no care was put into presentation. Alone, none of these things are the end of the world, but they’re a constant abrasion, like sand rubbing up on your heel.
The music is inescapably bland. Eisai has eight tracks. For comparison, KS had about thirty-five. I could maybe forgive it if the music was good, but it isn’t. Every track fails to create mood. The music broadly fits scenes, but never adds to them. It’s as if it’s only there to be ticked off a checklist. Music: present.
Eisai’s art assets are shocking inconsistent. The VN interchangeably uses 3D rendered backgrounds, 2D drawn images, and filtered photographs. I can appreciate that sourcing custom backgrounds for a free VN is like trying to convince Miss World to sleep with you, but the results are still a mess. Some of the backgrounds do look legitimately fantastic:
The cleanest student apartment ever
Others don’t, and the VN does itself no favours with them. In one scene, a character wants to convey the overwhelming beauty of the surroundings. And… well…
It’s… okay?
It ISN’T beautiful, and the attempt to convince us otherwise feels farcical.
Compare that to a filtered, edited photograph from KS:
Such a beautiful background
That background deserves to be called beautiful.
Eisai presents a powerful argument for using filtered photographs. Compare the following:
Note that we appear to be above the clouds.
Could be worse?
The painfully artificial 3D room is a distraction. By contrast, while the filtered photo isn’t a standout, it conveys what it needs to without intruding, and I suspect was easier to make, as well.
Sprites in Eisai are a varied mix. The heroines were designed and drawn by Rtil. I’ve never been a fan of his style, but the heroines are visually interesting and distinct, so their designs eventually grew on me:
Check out all those red flags.
Some girls look good in hats. Just saying.
Unfortunately, most characters have few sprite variants. Ai up there has just 6 expressions, and only a single pose. She isn’t a major character, but shows up often enough it gets noticeable.
A more central character, Maryanne, has about 14 expressions, though still only one pose.
Other character designs are less compelling and – I suspect – produced by a different artist:
This is a character that exists.
CGs are almost non-existent. The VN has four, which all show up in its first few scenes. If they had to be put somewhere, then frontloading them to draw people in was the right move. But their absence becomes noticeable. The worst case is Shione’s introduction, which describes a very complex series of events while we just look at a blank background and wonder if the VN has glitched out. Not good.
Shun; looking like I did for the next two hours
Writing
I’d be perfectly happy to overlook bland music and crude art if the underlying script was good. But it isn’t. Eisai’s first act goes nowhere, says nothing, and is poorly executed on almost every level.
Events take place. Shun meets his roommates. He meets girls. They go to classes, get dinner, get drunk, and go on an island holiday.
Why?
Anonymous22, Katawa Shoujo writer, once said “Anyone can shit out a plot. But where are the themes?”
Katawa Shoujo’s first act argued that disabled people are normal human beings, who can be treated like normal people. It spoke pertinently on a fraught issue.
Eisai’s first act says nothing; even on themes it could have addressed. Shun is sent to Inou because he’s intelligent. Did he earn his intelligence? No mainstream psychologist believes it isn’t partly genetic. Shun, like the rich kids at Inou, got there because of something he inherited but did not earn. That’s a fraught and interesting topic. It’s never discussed.
The first act of KS also conveyed something more ephemeral: that yourlife can be worth living. You are introduced to art, exercise, and student council work; activities that feel beautiful, exciting, and satisfying. You feel those emotions because the VN’s jokes are hilarious, its thoughts profound, and its backgrounds beautiful.
Eisai wants to convey the same lust for life, but can’t; because few of its jokes are funny, none of its thoughts are interesting, and its backgrounds are surpassingly bland.
Here’s an example of an Eisai character trying to be profound:
“Most of what we do in school will never be seen by anyone. But I try to do my best. Trying is important, because one day I will have to look back on what I did. I don’t want to be disappointed.”
This is trite, yet the script acts like something profound has been said. For comparison, here’s Katawa Shoujo actually being profound:
“Clouds are water. Evaporated water. You know they say that almost all of the water in the world will at some point of its existence be a part of a cloud. Every drop of tears and blood and sweat that comes out of you, it’ll be a cloud. All the water inside your body too, it goes up there some time after you die. It might take a while though.”
This transforms evaporation into something magical. You cannot fake this. It has to be done for real – and Eisai doesn’t. When scenes aren’t actually funny, or interesting, then the drive to get out and live just isn’t conferred.
The worst, most frustrating thing about Eisai is that sometimes, occasionally, a joke does land. Kevin, Shun’s room-mate says “I have two gifts. One of them I can’t show you cause it would be a bit gay, but…” Another time, their off-putting roommate Hideki is talking to girls about Schrodinger’s cat, and how it gets fried by radiation, prompting Kevin to remark “Speaking of the pussy drying up…”
These jokes are funny. But they only make you wonder, why can’t the whole VN be like this?
Again and again, little things just grate. Characters speak in hopelessly artificial ways. When Shun arrives at Inou, his bus driver says “Best of luck young man. You’re lucky to be attending such a prestigious school.” Does anyone actually speak like this?
When we reach Inou, and see this BG:
Generic Anime University
We read:
“A white marble gate marks the entrance, a brick wall on both sides.”
But we can see that. Why waste the line, instead of focusing immediately on Shun’s thoughts and feelings as he enters his new world?
These complaints might seem pedantic. Individually, many are. But they’re indicative of the crude, bland writing that mars Eisai; again and again and again.
Characterisation
Shotglass know that strong emotions are compelling, but consistently fail to justify them. During a party at Shione’s apartment, her roommate Maryanne approaches Shun and makes an extremely emotional confession: she didn’t want to do the party, and only agreed to keep the peace. But she regrets it, feels impossibly overwhelmed, and is on the verge of a mental breakdown.
It doesn’t work, for three reasons. One: Maryanne isn’t believable as a character. Two: Maryanne isn’t interesting or funny, so we don’t really care about her. Three: we hardly know Maryanne. It’s like, the fifth time we’ve met her, and are simply not that invested.
All these things mean that the scene doesn’t feel emotional, even though the script and sad violin music indicate it should be.
By the end of act 1, this sloppy character writing crosses a line and becomes downright insulting. Maryanne comes to Shun beside herself; having lost a necklace that means a lot to her. Shun suggests they go back to the last place she remembers having it. They find the necklace, and Maryanne is enormously grateful.
Fuck you.
Maryanne has two master’s degrees at the age of 19, but collapses into a crying ball when she hits a problem? Fuck off. Not only does this profoundly weaken her character’s believability, it feels like an insult; with the implied assumption that the reader will enjoy feeling like they’ve saved a helpless damsel by having done the pathetically obvious thing that she herself should have done.
Katawa Shoujo respected you enough to give you heroines that were their own people. They didn’t fawn over how amazing you were, didn’t treat you like a special person, and their problems could not be solved with a trite platitude. This meant that everything involving them had more weight. The problem with the necklace does not.
Structure
I could go on. Look at the narrative structure. Eisai opens by introducing Shun’s life in normalcy, then disrupts it. Fine; good storytelling. But you’re meant to introduce the character at a compellingmoment of their everyday life. Instead, Eisai opens with Shun having an angsty whinge about how every school day is the same, and he has no friends because doing well academically only wins you friends that want to cheat off you. This asinine bullshit is accompanied by a sad piano track; indicating that we’re meant to take it seriously. I just wanted to hit Shun.
It’s only in scene 2 that we’re introduced to Shun’s parents having a screaming match. It’s compelling, interesting, and justifies Shun’s attitude. Why was it not the opening scene?
There’s more. Back in my KS retrospective, I wrote of its opening:
“Lesser visual novelists might have expanded Hisao’s time in the hospital; shown him waking up on his first day of Yamaku; his nerves over breakfast; his parents’ attitudes; his lingering resentment; or his feelings as he approached the Yamaku region. That all could have been yoked for emotional power, but again, it would have sucked oxygen from the VN’s actual point: It’s disabled girls, NOT disabled Hisao. 4 Leaf Studios knew that and put your attention where it matters.”
Shotglass are those lesser writers. When Shun leaves for Inou, we’re treated to a scene of him getting on the bus and saying goodbye to his parents. It just reiterates what we already know: Shun has a bad relationship with his parents, difficult home life, is apathetic, and has mixed feelings on attending Inou. It adds nothing and delays us getting to where the real story is meant to be. It also chews up two CGs; a giant waste.
Other decisions show a failure to learn from KS. In that VN, each heroine was introduced with an original and memorable scene that immediately captured their personality. In Eisai, we meet heroines randomly and strike up inane conversations. More realistic? Sure; but who cares when it just makes things boring and forgettable?
What about characters? Consider Shione. She’s introduced as a weird girl. Fine; Katawa Shoujo had a weird girl, Rin. But even from act 1, it was clear that Rin wasn’t just weird for the sake of it. She was designed to deliberately provoke an artistic mindset from you, to challenge your preconceptions, and to ultimately symbolise that some aspects of the human condition are essentially impossible to communicate. Rin was brilliant.
A lesser writer might have just made their weird girl funny. Shotglass can’t even accomplish that.
Conclusions
I want to acknowledge that developing and releasing even a mediocre visual novel is quite an achievement; more than most people can manage. Shotglass should be proud of what they’ve done – but not too proud. Eisai’s deficiencies are many. I’d like to see Shotglass go away, learn some lessons, and try again. I know it’s painful to have your work shredded, but it’s even worse to put years of your life into a release only to be met with utter disinterest.
If there’s a takeaway here, it’s that the lessons of Katawa Shoujo’s success are not superficial ones like “Write a story about dating one of several attractive girls.” Instead, they’re more abstract and harder to copy, like “Structure your story well,” “Find insightful, pertinent things to say, on fraught topics,” “Make characters interesting and likeable,” “Write sentences that convey what you want them to convey,” and “Polish like hell.”
Now, at the end, here is a fraught and pertinent question from me: did Katawa Shoujo’s success require It; some kind of innate genius? I don’t know. But after a decade of seeing VNs fail to match it, I am really starting to wonder.
The VN “First Snow” released last November; the debut work of Salty Salty Studios (SSS), otherwise known for the salty tears shed over them taking a decade to finish their other work in progress VN, “Twofold.”
First Snow is a short, comfy romance. It features two young lesbians who fall in love on a snowy Utah college campus. I’ve never gone out of my way to read yuri and, frankly, have always viewed the genre with suspicion; expecting that at any time, the usually male writers will have things devolve things into “Wet Shaved Lesbian Teens 4: Cumming Out.”
First Snow never does. In fact, it’s a perfectly charming and wholesome love story. Given it only costs a few hours of your time, I’d also say it’s an excellent deal.
But while I liked First Snow, I didn’t LOVE it. And because SSS have always struck me as having set a very high bar for themselves, I thought it’d be interesting to sit down and dissect why some of it didn’t work for me.
Writing
Everything comes down to the script.
First Snow was written by Suriko; best known for his work on Katawa Shoujo. In my retrospective on that VN, I compared Suriko’s work to a pretty sunset: nice, but nothing more. I’ll levy that same faint praise against First Snow.
Maddeningly, the exact same issues I had with Suriko’s decade-old scripts are still here in First Snow. They are:
1) Clumsy narrative
2) A lack of humour
3) Bland prose
Damnably, all three are at their nadir in the VN’s opening scenes. Right as you’re meant to be getting hooked, I found myself being pushed away.
Let’s start with the beginning. We’re introduced to Allison, the protagonist; a college girl who’s recently moved out of home. Allison is standing up on her apartment’s balcony, contemplating how much she misses her family. CONCEPTUALLY, it’s a perfect introduction to First Snow; immediately centring family; an important theme here. Allison’s woes are also relatable, as almost everyone will eventually leave home. Even better, this should set up the conflict of Act 1: Allison misses having people with whom she is close, and needs a surrogate “family” of close friends.
But while the CONCEPT is great, the execution really isn’t. These three lines comprise the entire scene:
“The first snow of the year should be a comforting sight, yet this carries a different feeling when so far from home.”
“Winter has always been my favorite time of the year, but the joy of warm fires and upcoming holidays is missing. There’s only a month left to go until the season begins in earnest, but I can’t feel any of the usual excitement.”
“The coming Winter will be the first I’ve spent away from my family, after all. It’s just me now, standing alone on a concrete balcony and looking out onto a gray sky.”
Why make this CG if you aren’t going to build a mood?
It’s too short, and the language far too flat. None of it shows WHY Allison misses her family, so we the audience don’t FEEL the pang of their absence. That would have required Suriko to draw tangible and evocative comparisons between Allison’s happy home life, and the shittiness of being alone on a cold grey balcony. We’re not made to care about the problem that Allison faces, so we don’t share her desire for a new pseudo-family. That deficiency robs the VN’s first act of meaning and cripples its ultimate payoff.
Without us invested in Allison’s conflict, the next few scenes feel like random, purposeless noise. After her reverie on the balcony, Allison is called downstairs by her roommate, Rose. Problem number two becomes apparent. I wrote in my Katawa Shoujo retrospective that humour is one of the best tools for slice of life, because it transforms even inane conversations into something joyous. There is no humour here – nor are other emotions evoked. The conversation between Rose and Allison is bland and nigh on pointless. I found myself unimpressed and with my good will rapidly bleeding away.
Next, Allison heads to college, where she meets the VN’s love interest, Eileen. In my KS retrospective, I criticised Suriko for writing two safe, idealised heroines. Eileen is anything but. While she’s attractive, Eileen’s personality is not immediately endearing. She’s abrupt, aloof, and dour. Her introduction even has her angrily beating a vending machine; a definitive subversion of how a romantic heroine is “meant” to be introduced.
But while I liked the originality, this scene’s execution left me cold. Eileen and Allison eventually develop great chemistry, but none of that comes through here. Eileen’s unfriendliness, set against Allison’s shyness, yields a bland and unrewarding conversation. It conjures no real emotions; again, not helped by its lack of humour. And while Allison feels awkward, the audience aren’t made to feel that. Subversion is nice, but you have to follow it up by taking things somewhere interesting. This scene doesn’t, meaning we’re now quite a way in with nothing compelling going on.
Allison next heads to class, where she meets Caprice; her upbeat friend. Caprice’s energy is lowkey charming, but again, that’s a weak emotional payoff for an entire scene. Why isn’t Caprice funny? She’s unhinged and upbeat; perfect for comic relief. Again, the scene is fine conceptually: Caprice is an important side character and introducing her makes sense. But again, the EXECUTION here yields little, and the scene is dull.
I mean, I liked the top hat…
After class, Caprice makes an announcement: she wants to start an art club. That SHOULD be an excellent story beat: it gives the characters something to work towards that will address Allison’s loneliness. It SHOULD be exciting; something we want to invest in and watch succeed. It’s therefore inexplicable why Suriko leaves Allison uninterested in the whole idea. It is a golden rule of storytelling that if your character doesn’t care about something, neither will your audience. Preventing us from developing an active interest in the ongoing plot seems to me a ridiculous move.
A big part of the problem with Act 1 is that Allison is the protagonist. Her shyness leaves her reserved, which makes scenes stiff, slow, and awkward. Realistic? Yes. Enjoyable? No. During one early scene, Allison has dinner with Eileen and her friend, Wallace. The man has some hilarious lines, and I found myself wishing that I was reading a romance between Eileen and Wallace instead, because their interactions were so much more enjoyable than the rest of First Snow had been. I get that relationships take time to build; particularly when one heroine is shy, and the other a dour loner. But if that’s so, there MUST be something to keep us hooked. Honestly, I found Act 1 so monotonous that by its end, I was disappointed to learn First Snow has multiple acts, because I was about ready for it to be done.
Bizarrely, Suriko then pulls off the exact trick he used twice in Katawa Shoujo: he suddenly makes things enjoyable in the story’s second act. As Allison and Eileen grow closer, they start to develop real chemistry. Allison’s sunny optimism becomes a charming foil for Eileen’s dourness, while Eileen’s maturity becomes a foil for Allison’s naivety. While I’ve complained about everything so far, Suriko really does excel at writing things that are HEARTWARMING, and once that comes to the fore, there are significant emotional payoffs to First Snow, which becomes infinitely more likeable and engaging.
Again, like he did in Katawa Shoujo, Suriko uses the story’s middle act to finally add some stakes. In one scene, we find Eileen grumbling about her lack of a (nude) live model for art practice – so, Allison volunteers.
The strongest way to build a relationship is to have one character expose a vulnerability, before another helps them to overcome it, or else accepts the weakness without judgement. Here, Allison has selflessly offered to do something very embarrassing for Eileen’s sake; leaving her intensely vulnerable. Eileen repays her kindness by making Allison feel comfortable, and painting her as very beautiful. Without a word, Eileen tells Allison “Even with all of your defences gone, you are a beautiful person to me, and I will not hurt you.” I found this scene original, intimate, sweet, and one of the best of the whole VN.
Better than Titanic’s painting scene IMO
It’s around this time that Allison realises she has a crush on Eileen. Straight away (or gay away, hurr hurr hurr), this gives us some much-needed stakes: Allison might have her heart broken. Because Suriko has built up Eileen and Allison into a likeable duo, we are now INVESTED in proceedings and willing Allison to succeed.
This leads up to a scene where Allison comes out as a lesbian to her roommate Rose and admits that she has feelings for Eileen – again, making herself vulnerable. Rose accepts Allison; again, deepening their relationship in a heart-warming way. I’ll reiterate: these exchanges of vulnerability and acceptance are Suriko’s forte and, in my opinion, his saving grace as a writer.
Because this is a yuri story, we now have the obligatory “Oh woe, is the girl I like even a lesbian” part. I’ve been informed that these happen in just about every yuri story ever, and that connoisseurs are sick of them. Sure sucks to be those fuckers, because I enjoyed the sequence wholeheartedly. It’s easy to see WHY they’re so ubiquitous; not only are the events realistic, they make for compelling drama. There are already huge stakes when a straight person asks someone out; for a gay person, the anxiety is magnified tenfold. The odds of reciprocation are infinitesimally lower, and there’s a painful risk of being cruelly demeaned for being homosexual.
All this means that when Eileen finally admits she feels the same way Allison does and kisses her, it’s enormously heartwarming. Cliché and obvious as hell, but you know what? I didn’t even care.
Altogether, I found this romantic build-up to be the strongest part of First Snow. Unfortunately, the narrative next enters a slow decline.
In Act 3, Eileen and Allison go to visit the former’s family. Again, Suriko builds up his stakes and tension well. It’s hinted that Eileen doesn’t get on well with her family, so we’re primed for a blow-up we don’t want to see. Once we arrive though, we learn that the problem is really just that Eileen’s mom gets on her case too much. This keeps the atmosphere comfy while maintaining some friction. There’s also a particularly good moment where Eileen’s mum notes that her daughter and Allison will have to have separate rooms. Is it homophobia, or is she just an uptight parent who would have done the same if her daughter was straight? It’s a rare moment of ambiguity, and interesting food for thought in the otherwise face value First Snow.
In the morning, Eileen’s family decide to go out, and the two heroines choose to have sex – I think. I discovered here that Steam still doesn’t allow sex scenes in The Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-One, and that I needed to download a separate patch. I was miffed. At no point did any part of First Snow feel the slightest bit seedy, despite my misgivings, and I was honestly looking forward to another moment I was expecting would be thoroughly heartwarming. That’s a far cry from what I was feeling back in Act 1.
This is from a completely different scene, BTW
In my Katawa Shoujo retrospective, I argued that a specific and intense heartwarming emotion is evoked by the sudden intensification of relationships. Until now, First Snow has been coasting on a steady wave of them – Allison models for Eileen; feels first love; asks Eileen out; gets closer to her; literally sleeps with her, and now “sleeps” with her. But once that final threshold is crossed, there’s nowhere really left for their relationship to GO, short of the girls getting married or having kids (which would be ridiculous). That leaves Suriko with a dilemma: how to give the VN a big finale? And while his solution isn’t THEORETICALLY bad, once again, the execution is clumsy as hell.
Here’s a trick to generate drama, say something meaningful, AND intensify a relationship: have one character behave in a fashion that slowly poisons their relationship; for reasons that are somewhat sympathetic. In the process of confronting the behaviour, you can push the characters apart, convey some deep truth about life, then bring the characters back together with their relationship stronger than ever.
Suriko shoots for this, but the drama is clumsy as hell. In just a handful of scenes, there’s a massive flaring of tensions, and Allison suddenly feels like Eileen is shutting her out. It happens much too fast to be believable, and NEEDED to be set up. If, back in Act 2, there’d been little moments where Allison felt worried or frustrated at Eileen keeping her at arms-length, but Allison ignored or buried those feelings, then their final eruption here would have felt natural and believable.
Instead, the whole argument feels clumsy, artificial, and forced. I could practically SEE the developers’ hand inserting conflict into the story. It’s so transparent that I felt nothing but irritation, and was practically rolling my eyes when the heroines finally reconciled.
Not as good as it could have been/10
Art, Music, and all that
That’s it for the script. And while I have no valuable insights outside of writing (“Or in it,” hurr hurr hurr), I feel like some other aspects of First Snow deserve singling out for praise:
First, the presentation of the VN is exceptional, and not just for a free VN. The sprites, backgrounds, and UI are all gorgeous. Much of the aesthetic relates to paper – which probably has more thematic resonance in Twofold, where I believe some assets will be reused – but they’re still nice here. Everything feels like care and consideration went into it.
The VN’s animations are also great; characters jump, bounce, and move around in fun ways. In particular, while I’ve always heard directors caution against placing sprites in the backgrounds as if they’re part of them, SSS do it several times, and it works great. I’ll be dumping that old nugget of wisdom.
Look at that. Look at how natural that looks.
The weak link here is, unfortunately, the CGs. For obvious reasons, these were not something that could be reused in Twofold, which might explain why they look less polished than the rest of the VN. Unfortunately, there’s also a distinct gap in the styles used for the sprites and the CGs. It’s understandable; matching art styles is notoriously challenging, and – on a free VN – a huge ask. However, it creates a disconnect whenever a CG comes on screen, which is never ideal.
Spot the difference.
I also have to say that I found the soundtrack to be surprisingly… okay? None of the pieces felt like they could really push a mood on their own. Maybe that was a conscious directorial choice, to fit the comfy and lowkey mood? If so, I think it was a mistake. I found the original soundtrack of Twofold’s demo to be a standout, with pieces that could paint strong moods without a word being spoken. I believe that SSS have changed composer since then. However, I’m still hoping that Twofold’s final soundtrack will be able to conjure stronger emotions – which, in fact, is something where I’m hoping the whole VN will depart from First Snow.
Summing Up
Probably the best comment I can make is that First Snow feels like a victim of its own design document. The project’s UI designer, Tophat CAPS, has written that he wanted the VN to feel comfy. It does. But “comfy” comes at a cost – First Snow never allows itself to get UNCOMFORTABLE. The lack of strong, true emotions castrates the VN’s impact and weakens its message profoundly. While it’s trying to convey the importance of family, it simply isn’t powerful enough to leave a lasting impression, and less than a week after I finished it, much of it has already left me.
I’ve been extremely harsh on First Snow, and want to be clear that the balance of this piece is very unfairly negative. There are dozens of excellent moments in the VN I have not acknowledged, and many directorial choices that deserve praise they’ll never get.
I want to say it again: after Act 1, I liked First Snow, even when it frustrated me. I also want to highlight what an accomplishment it is. Salty Salty Studios were at this for almost ten years before they released a full VN. No one was paid, and they can’t have been expecting more than a few hundred downloads. To do what they have done is completely commendable. That they seem to be pushing ahead and developing Twofold, despite what must be apocalyptic levels of burnout, is incredible. Top hats off to them all.
It would be understandable if SSS fell apart and abandoned Twofold. It would be admirable if they didn’t and released it with as much polish as First Snow. But I must confess: I’d be disappointed if that’s all they did. They’re a talented team, and after ten years, I want Twofold to blow me away. If and when it releases, I want to be able to write that I really love the thing they’ve made.
After publishing my previous piece; an essay on Katawa Shoujo, I was asked by one of that project’s developers why I’d bothered to write it. I didn’t have a good answer for him, and as I’d been planning to do an analysis of video essays for some time, I wound up putting this together. I wanted to clarify what kinds of video essays on video games there are, and why some seem to work and some do not. This was the result, and I think I’ve answered most of it.
The first Golden Rule of any piece of writing is that your audience must find it interesting.
The more that something diverts from your everyday life, the more interesting it will be. “Jim got a haircut” is a boring anecdote because it’s completely unexceptional. But “Musician Mitsuda worked so hard on the beloved game Chrono Trigger that he wound up shitting blood” IS interesting, because it’s an enormous diversion from the everyday. It’s novel.
That Mitsuda anecdote highlights the second reason that we find things interesting: they evoke strong emotions. Mitsuda’s story evokes horror, disgust, amusement, and awe, while the haircut anecdote evokes no feelings at all.
Taken together: a video essay should introduce its audience to novel facts and ideas, or else give them a strong emotional response.
With video essays, there are five broad aims that people take to achieve that:
1. Review.
2. Exegesis.
3. Post-mortem.
4. Meta discussion.
5. Travelogue.
A single video essay is not restricted to just one aim and can examine all five. With all that noted, let’s dive in and take a look at them.
1. The Review
There are more games than you will ever be able to afford or play. The only way you can navigate their vast sea to its handful of worthwhile islands is through reviews.
When undertaking a review, you are asking “Is this thing fit for its purpose?” That purpose is something that you subjectively assign to it. It’s then your duty to undertake an objective assessment of how the thing meets its purpose.
In video game reviews, the subjective purpose we invariably assign is: “Did this game appeal to me?” If the answer is “yes,” then we say that the game is good. Of course, because we’re all so different, two people can ask “Do I like this game?” undertake their reviews objectively, and reach opposite conclusions.
Accusations of “Bias” are often hurled at reviews as if that were some dirty, shameful thing, and not an inescapable part of being a human being. If you like any one thing over anything else, then you have a bias. Your bias may be shared by most people on the planet, but so what? It’s still a bias. And it’s only a profound narcissist that can claim their biases represent an eternal and objective standard, from which deviation is proof of a corrupt and defective mind.
The worst reviewers will simply tell you whether they liked a game or not. It’s better than nothing, but not by much. Someone can hate a game for the very reasons that make you love it. Without knowing why they feel the way they do, you could be misled. Thus, a good reviewer will explore what they liked – or didn’t.
Of all the aims I’ll discuss today, only reviews are equally appropriate for all games. The one caveat is that as games age, they tend to pick up a lot of reviews. At some point, adding yours to the pile becomes almost redundant. It can be worth going back to an older game to reassess it with fresh eyes, but in general, you’re best off sticking to new titles.
2. The Exegesis
An exegesis tries to interpret its target game by drawing out its subtext, themes, allusions, symbols, and by speculating on its characters’ motivations. This kind of analysis is less common for video games than for books; as video game narratives tend to have all the subtlety of a nuclear bomb. Still, there are exceptions, and the millions of views on dedicated analysis channels indicate that there’s a call for this thing.
When done well, an exegesis can drag out interesting things that you might have missed on a more casual read. A great exegesis radically changes your interpretation of a work so that you can see it in a new and much more powerful way.
In principle, there’s an infinite number of ways that you can interpret a given work. In practice, only a few are ever interesting and supported by the text. Hence, unless a video game is very ambiguous, narratively complex, or filled with subtext, there won’t be very much to say, and it likely isn’t worth your time.
3. The Post-mortem
The post-mortem is strongly tied to the exegesis and review. Once you’ve established how it feels to play a game, the post-mortem asks “Why did playing it feel like that?” or “Why did they design it that way?” It then asks, “How could it have been made better?” and “What can we take away from it?”
For video games, post-mortems typically involve dissecting mechanics, art, and narratives. A good post-mortem on a work that you’re familiar with leaves you with the sense that you finally have words for something you’ve always felt but have never been able to explain. That sense of being able to see something clearly for the first time can be enormously satisfying and validating. Of course, a post-mortem can also just give you more appreciation for a game, be interesting in its own right, and provide valuable lessons if you want to become a game maker yourself.
Which games are best for post-mortems? If you want to be saying novel things, then it helps if a game has many uncommon or novel mechanics. That means that whatever you say in your dissection will also be novel. Alternatively, games which have so much going on that it’s tough to unravel how they work are ripe for post-mortems. For those, it’s unlikely that anyone in your audience will have had the time or insight to pick apart how they work.
4. The Meta Discussion
Meta discussions encompass all the things that surround a game but are not part of the game itself. This includes development history, impact on the public, and legacy in what has followed.
Looks “Behind the scenes” are a common form of meta-discussion. By exploring a game’s development history, and what happened in its creator’s heads, you can gain insight into some otherwise inexplicable decisions. At the same time, game development contains stories that are interesting in their own right, which can also be worth the telling, as can stories of a game’s reception, and how it went on to influence future work.
Most of the information for these videos is available online, which is a double-edged sword: with readily available information, all you need to do is compile it. On the downside, that means that nothing you say will be original, and you risk making a boring video that summarises things which your audience already knows. Ideally, you can go out and do some original research; either by translating obscure interviews or undertaking your own interviews with former development staff.
Altogether, then, games most suitable for meta-discussions are those whose development, reception, or impact was very unusual, and/or those for whom you can undertake some valuable original research; which is probably going to have to be for niche indie games if we’re honest.
5. The Travelogue
Finally, we come to the travelogue. Essentially, a travelogue is the story of your experiences in a foreign land: who you met, what you saw, and all that you did. If you’ve ever heard of Marco Polo’s writings on China, this is that. If you think about it, playing a video game is much like adventuring in a foreign land. But, more than any other kind of video essay, there are compelling reasons to think that travelogues are a waste of time.
The first argument is this: in a travelogue, you are spoiling everything about a game; and potentially robbing people of the chance to experience it with fresh eyes. Why should they do so?
When Marco Polo wrote of his time in China, none of his Italian countrymen would have been able to make that journey. The danger, the cost, and the enormity of the time involved were just prohibitive. Thus, while Polo “spoiled” China for his audience, he didn’t actually rob them of anything.
To some extent, this applies to modern games. Oh sure; they’re easier to get, cheaper, and take far less time to get through. But remember: there’s an enormous number of games out there, and more are being made every year. When each can cost over sixty bucks and run for over a hundred hours, how can you find the time and money to play them all? The answer is: you can’t. There will always be games thatyou simply, physically, will never be able to play.
Here’s where travelogues come in: They’re free; typically take less than two hours, and while they’re rarely as good as actually playing a game, you can still get a good story out of something that would otherwise give you nothing at all.
This isn’t the whole answer, though. If it was just about making games more accessible and digestible, I could point you to “Let’s play” videos instead. They’re not perfect – you don’t get to feel what it’s like to play a game – but how much does that really matter?
Given that the whole point of video games is that they are interactive, I’d say that it matters a hell of a lot. Simply watching a recording of a Starcraft Brood War grand final is only going to give you a shadow of the full, blistering experience of the person playing it.
That’s where travelogues come in, and do what Let’s Plays rarely can: you’re put right in the head of the person that played the game, and you get to feel, as much as you can, what the thing was like.
Most of the time, that’s nothing special, because most of our experiences with games aren’t special. But not always. Sometimes, your particular history and hang-ups mean that a moment in gaming can become far more intense to you than it is for anyone else.
I’ve never been a father, and so while seeing a character lose a child has an emotional impact on me, I imagine it’s not as big as, say, someone whose own child actually died. Hearing them describe that experience, and how it coloured their experience with the game, is something that could add a sobering degree of context to a scene that could make it more resonant, and much more powerful. It is these powerful moments of context and intersection that are the real strength of travelogues.
Travelogues therefore have one, enormous pitfall: their strength is strongly tied to your experience with a game. If the game was interesting, and moved you powerfully? Your travelogue will be interesting and powerful. If the game was dull, and your experience with it was bland? Don’t waste your god damn time.
I should add, too: nothing I’ve said changes the fact that travelogues are robbing people of experiences. So here’s what I think: if a game is ever truly outstanding; something you’d say that you should not miss before you die – then I think you owe it to your audience to encourage them, as hard as you can, to play that game, blind, for themselves. To do otherwise would be to selfishly rob them of that experience for your own self-aggrandisement and that, I think, would be wrong.
auricorange 