Anne wrote:You do agree that art, music etc adds to your enjoyment, right? (otherwise what makes you interested in VNs?) Still, if done poorly they instead detract from it, same goes for choices.
Of course, yes. That's what I've been saying all along. And that routing is fine (and necessary do timeline/character routing), but that it becomes an issue when it's done poorly and tones down the overall quality of the work. If you're introducing a new route into the story but you know that it's not up to snuff with the other existing routes, then it's better if you don't include it at all.
A big case of this for me was with Grisaia no Kajitsu. I really liked the common route, Michiru's route, and even with their shortcoming I found that Amane and Sacchi's routes had some cool things about them. And if the game had been just that, it would have been one of my favorites, and I'd be telling everyone to buy the localized version ASAP. But there were 2 other major routes in that game, one of which - Makina's - was especially poor. Playing those routes sunk the experience for me. It left such a sour taste in my mouth that it diminished the enjoyment I had with the other routes.
An example where choices at a more micro level can also impact a work negatively is with Cinders (the character) from Cinders, which I played recently so it's fairly fresh in my mind. There's several instances for example where you're being asked things that you, as a player/reader, don't yet know about. They're things that Cinders would know, because she has the backstory, but that backstory hasn't been relayed to you yet, so you can't know what your stance on those matters is, but you're nonetheless being inquired on them.
That, plus I was constantly getting prompted with choices that made Cinders an increasingly broken character. The Cinders from the timeline I got based on the choices I made was a completely irrational and nonsensical character who behaved like a person with some sort of serious mental disability. She wasn't her own character and she wasn't an avatar of myself. She was just broken, allowed to exist because of the poor use of branching as a plot device.
In the initial post I quoted, where RotGtIE says that if you're going the kinetic route then "it damn well better be good", I felt that there was a strange bias there. A double-standard where the bar for a "good" kinetic novel is higher than the bar for a branching novel. That the level of expectation of quality is higher in one than the other. That's what I don't agree with.
trooper6 wrote:In some ways this is the difference between a symphony and a jazz jam session. Some people want to go to the symphony and hear Beethoven's 5th played the same way every single time. Big, powerful, comforting in it repeatability. Also, feeding into the cult of genius and the veneration of "great men" and accomplishments as singular. The jazz jam session? They are improvising off of each other and reacting to the audience. The experience is something that could only happen in that one moment. It is communally created and everyone has a part in the building of it. There may be a band leader (or in a tabletop RPG a Gamemaster) but that person is still responsive to the people around them and the work of art is created together. I am fundamentally more interested in a multidirecitonal relationship between the maker and the player than I am in one where the author tells the reader a story and the reader just listens.
I think that music analogy doesn't work too well here. For one, you're putting a big emphasis on the symphony playing non-original or repeat material/ material you've seen before. In a kinetic novel you're not reading the same thing you've read before. Unless you're reading it for the second time, but a linear work presupposes that the entirety of the experience is to be felt in a single playthrough.
A more accurate version of this analogy would be to be listening to a concert from a band you've never heard before. They're going to be playing the same songs in every show of that tour, carefully crafted and rehearsed to bring you the best listening experience they feel they're capable of giving you of their music, and you're supposed to only go to one of those concerts.
I hope this made my standpoint on the subject clearer. Though even this analogy isn't that great, because usually the people who go to concerts are folks who already know the bands and the songs they'll be playing.
Though reading your paragraph about D&D, it seems that we just fundamentally have two different outlooks on the medium, where you seem to place most value on the agency of a player being able to express himself within this universe and stretching its possibilities, and I place more value in learning about characters and their predicaments and seeing their carefully crafted stories unfold and take me through a roller coaster of tightly planned emotions.
Lastly, all of my favorite visual novels are branching, so I have absolutely no agenda against the concept. But in all of them every character is their own self, and in all of the timelines that the authors have allowed me to experience the universe and its characters are cohesive. I feel like I'm looking at a great painting from different angles, instead of painting on top of it. That's the sort of visual novel experience I enjoy the most through the use of choice.
