Writing bad decisions

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RotGtIE
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Re: Writing bad decisions

#16 Post by RotGtIE »

My stance on decision making in VNs is that, rather than providing "right" or "wrong" choices, a story which places an option before the player should do so only to allow the player an opportunity to communicate to the author what kind of story they would like to see.

I know I bang on about it a lot, but I have to refer back to Saya no Uta as an example of how to pull off the "no wrong choice" philosophy of reader choices in a VN. SnU has a grand total of two choices, and in one of those, the player is not even choosing the action of the protagonist, but of the character who directly opposes him. All of SnU's endings are powerful and stand on their own merit apart from one another, so there is no real "bad end" or wrong choice - the reader is doing nothing more than telling the story what kind of tale they would like to see, or how they would like to see it play out. The story simply acquiesces to these indications of the reader's desired direction for the narrative.

I find that VNs are much more satisfying when big choices lead to one route or the other, not to either a good end or a dead/bad end, and players tend to enjoy the content of the routes that the story pursues in this way. That doesn't mean there can only be big, route-selecting choices, though; there can be many minor choices which only affect the current snippet of dialogue or other little detail in one scene.

All that said, I loved the "hint" corner of Tsukihime and the Taiga dojo of Fate/Stay Night - they served as such enjoyable breaks from the serious tones of their respective stories that even non-completionists tend to seek them out just to see what silly things Ciel, Taiga, and Ilya are going to say. There's a strange sort of fun in that which is not possible without "bad" or "dead" ends, but it's primarily because there is more content available for the player to enjoy, and it involves the off-stage development of characters who otherwise would not get as much development in the main story.

As always, this stems from my view that Visual Novels are Novels before being anything else. The most important thing is to bring a good quality story, or multiple stories of good quality, to the audience. Every other feature is there to enhance the delivery of that story to the audience, including player choices.

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