But it inspired me... because now i want to do the kinda story that Remember 11 COULD have been if the ending wouldn't have sucked so much.
Of course i am not talking about copying the story, just that Remember 11 inspired me to try a story that goes somewhat like this:
Everyone uses the choices in a Visual Novel as a means of controlling the protagonist. Of course KID's Infinity games already toy with this by incorporating the reader and his choices into the story itself. But there is another way to toy with the choices that nobody seems to have used yet.
Normally the choice you make determines the actions or thoughts of the protagonist and therefore influences the outcome of the story. But it only influences the story in so far as that if you make the "right" decisions you get a good end and if you make the wrong decisions you get a bad end.
So for example you might have the choice of saying that the murderer is either the cook or the gardener. If you say the murderer is the cook it leads to a bad end because you where wrong and the murderer was of course the gardener and if you then go back and say the murderer is the gardener it leads to the good end.
But i am talking about a story where if you say that it was the gardener, then it was the gardener and if you say it was the cook then the story changes so that it was the cook. Or you could even totally fuck with the reader by making his first choice correct. So that if he says it was the cook, it was the gardener, but if then goes back and plays it again this time choosing the gardener it changes and was suddenly the cook.
Now this might be stupid as it makes the story inconsistent and implausible - but not if you use psychotic characters like in Remember 11 or better yet like in Higurashi.
Because we always assume that what we see through our eyes is the reality - but it's not - the picture we see with our eyes is not the reality, but only a picture that is generated in our brain - the "real" reality might look very different and other people might perceive the same reality very different than others. And similarly we always assume that there is an objective truth in a story. If the story tells us the murder was the gardener, then the murder was the gardener and if you think otherwise you guessed wrong and get the bend ending. But Visual Novels are told via a protagonist. So everything is told from the protagonists point of view. Now if the protagonist where psychotic - he might convince himself that he was the killer even though he was innocent or that he is innocent even though he is the killer. And if he believes it enough -since he is psychotic- it might alter his perception and since the story is told from the protagonists point of view that is what the story is gonna look like.
So if you think that you are the murderer, than you ARE the murderer and if you think you are innocent, then you ARE innocent. So i am talking about a Visual Novel where your choices influence the thoughts of the protagonist and therefore his perception of the story which is of course the readers perception as well. So you can have two conflicting choices both be right and wrong at the same time and you can pretty much fuck with the reader and totally mess up everything he thought was true.
Games like Ever 17, Remember 11 and Higurashi already do that. But they use an unrealistic plot device (a Deus Ex Machina) like an omnipotent Alien being, a time and space altering supercomputer or a conspiracy or just plainly God to later explain the discrepancies.
So i wanna make a story similar to Ever 17, Remember 11 and Higurashi. It will also involve murder, psychotic Yandere girls and maybe even time jumps but will have a more realistic plot device to explain it all - being that the protagonist himself is psychotic and therefore his perception of what's going on changes to whatever the player THINKS what is going on. And since the player doesn't know any of that it can make for a pretty nice revelation at the end.
Hmm... okay so now i still have to work on a story like that... but hmm... anyone wanna work WITH me on a story like that?
