I recently picked up some visual novels in a Humble Bundle, in an effort to learn more about the genre / scope out the competition / get ideas for how others are using RenPy / etc. But I have to admit… after playing a bit of each of them, none of them really clicked with me.
Most had little to no choices to make. Generally you’d be sitting there watching action unfold with no say in the matter, often enduring massive exposition dumps or overly elaborate descriptions of some really mundane actions. (Brushing your teeth could take 5-7 text boxes, it felt like.) I saw little to no opportunity for customization or roleplaying. Instead of playing a game, I was being dragged by the nose through someone else’s story being told “Isn’t this awesome?!”.
Maybe I just don’t get this genre. Maybe it’s not my cup of tea. I love the idea of it — of marrying character-driven narrative to beautiful art to good music and allowing the reader to participate actively — but I haven’t found a VN yet that really works for me. I’m not doubting they exist, but so far, no luck.
Let me tell you what Arcade Spirits already has, which these novels didn’t. Then you make the call if you like what I’m serving up.
First off, your protagonist. Pick your pronouns, pick your hair style, pick your skin tone, pick your name. As the game goes along, your responses — which are frequent, at least 2-3 per scene — are personality-driven. You express yourself the way you want to, within the limitations of a choice-powered visual novel, and the world responds.
Second, your ability to influence the world. (A lot of this is smoke and mirrors, I’ll admit, if only because I’m not frickin’ Sierra On-Line and I don’t want to arbitrarily Game Over you.) Quite often you’ll be called on to deal with a situation, some conflict or crisis or difficulty, and how you choose to approach that problem is your call. I mean, it’s not an open world RPG, you have a menu of options… but you have a MENU, period. You can make a choice.
All of that sounds good, I’m hoping, but there’s another key difference and I’m a little more worried about this one: romance and melodrama. ’cause I’ve seen PILES of each in these games, sometimes explicitly saying up front YOU CAN BANG THESE SPECIFICALLY THEMED GIRLS WHOA. Pigeon dating simulator! Dad dating simulator! A death game / dating simulator! And so on. And… Arcade Spirits is not that.
For the first arc of the game, there’s some flirting, but you’re primarily in a workplace comedy and dealing with the day-to-day affairs that come with that. You’re not saving the world, you don’t have superpowers, and we aren’t getting right to the banging. In fact, there isn’t any banging. There’s DATING to be sure, and relationships, and love… but it’s not a hentai game. There won’t be some sly patch you download off the website to turn on the nudity.
So, this leaves me mildly anxious. A visual novel is a niche of a niche of a genre, not a moneymaker by any means. And now I’m saying “All these conventions of VNs? I’m not doing those, I’m doing something different.” Will VN fans eschew Arcade Spirits? Will it stumble out of the gate and flop? Am I freaking out over nothing?
Ultimately, time will tell. But you know how you can help? Join the Patreon, get monthly demos, and give us feedback. (The July demo is coming up soon! If you join July 1st, you’ll get two full episodes of the game!) Let us know if this is the direction you want to go. And together, we’ll make something grand.
There’s quite a variety in VNs and the amount of choice you’re given. Some give you more, some none at all. Too much choice can only be a problem if you need to see everything to consider it “finished”, though, so don’t worry too much about it. An example with a lot of interactivity, especially for a western release, might be Cinders, I guess, and it did sell reasonably well.
In the end, though, I guess you would in most cases be better off looking at VNs as (usually interactive) books, not games. An illustrated story that could have different outcomes depending on your choices, but not necessarily a fully interactive experience you’d be used to in games.
I’d guess AS will be a hybrid, then. I’m using TellTale as my model — where you read the story, but often / occasionally can interact with it. Even if it’s just to throw out a response before going back on the main story track, I like to give the player/reader a chance to be a part of things rather than a passive observer.
I don’t think that will be a problem. There are others that do this, and other kind of hybrids with gameplay elements from other genres. If the story is as good as your other works, I’m sure it’ll do well.
Ah, and something else I thought I might mention, even if I myself only know of the project due to it making the local news as it’s being developed here in Estonia. No Truce With The Furies seems to be doing something similar from the opposite direction, with the presentation of a traditional isometric RPG, but with even the few possible fights taking place in the conversations, with the writing branching to such a degree that according to their devblog the software used to track all the branches had trouble keeping up with it.
Branching is tricky business. I’m trying to limit the branching in Arcade Spirits, maintaining an expand/collapse structure (you get three options to react, a few lines of dialogue each, then back to the main flow) or allowing a few mutually exclusive expand/collapses (you pick who to spend time with, then once that scene is done, it’s back to the main flow). But even then I have to be careful how information is revealed and track it, so if you know about X due to a branch you picked, it doesn’t feel like new information if it’s also announced later on down the road.
For example, Gavin has a phone app like yours, but he doesn’t like it and you do. So each time Gavin pulls out his phone I need to check if you know that he uses the app already, and if not, have Gavin comment on his dislike before setting the flag of “knows Gavin uses the app.” It’s a small thing but it’s critical to avoid breaking immersion by introducing continuity errors.
I guess a lot of their more extensive branching has to do with the different game types. A VN lets you direct the story much more closely, while in their game you could talk to the characters in any order you want, so it also has to account for much more possible information you may or may not have in any conversation.
I’m an adventure fan (Lucas, Sierra, all the ancients ones more o less) not a VN fan, for that there are books/web serial/etc, and I’m really interested in A.S. once it is complete.
And weird as I can be I want not spoiler myself with the demos.
Anyway you’ll sell a least one.
I’d say AS is Lucasarts by way of Telltale — it’s narratively driven with forward momentum, but has Lucasart’s design mentality of never totally screwing over the player. So you should be right at home, even if there are no object puzzles.