There’s a book I really like called Shadows in the Vineyard by Maximillian Potter.
It’s a book that details a case where someone tried to poison vineyards of one of the world’s premier wines, but it also goes back and explains a lot of history that shows how even things from the 1800s and back resulted in the case happening.
The relevant part and what stuck with me the most is the epilogue.
The author recounts his first encounter with the owner of said vineyard during an event and confessed that he was skeptic of why wine would be so prized and overpriced, but then he had a taste of it and he describes it in such magical ways, even comparing it to pop rocks and all the memories that brought up.
It stuck with me because while, make no mistake, there’s 100% overpriced stuff out there; I’ve had the opportunity to splurge on the more expensive version of some things (from food to tools) and you do get those moments of “oh, I get it now…..”.
Most recent example I can think of was splurging on a kitchen knife that was over 10.000 yen instead of the 3000~ yen ones I’d been using for years and the moment metal hit an onion I went “FUCK, this is a game changer…”.
And this is all relevant to the current series of posts because I truly believe that Visual Novels are a genre that so many people would love if only they tried the right one. An opinion that I hold close to my chest even as it continues to somehow be… not even the butt of jokes but the medium for some of the lamest jokes by non-fans.
What’s “the right one”? I don’t really have that answer because quality is worth nothing if the story doesn’t connect with you, but Still In Love’s scenario and especially her kizuna episodes are very good samples of what a good Visual Novel can do.
Like every genre with a compound name, it’s all about balance. A good Action RPG should still scratch the math nerd itch while being a test of action and reflexes. And a Visual Novel should balance the fact that it’s a novel and the fact that it has Audiovisual elements.
So for starters, if you ever take ANY advice from this whole blog outside of “go read Slam Dunk, you uncultured swine” make it this: When you get Still In Love’s scenario (be it in Global or finally pulling her in another version) get headphones, set it to Auto-advance and watch it all unfold.
This scenario was made like some of the best VNs out there. Not only is there audio that doesn’t match the text on screen (from Still saying “I still love you” while the screen shows her name to a cacophony of Stills from different angles whispering “COME HERE”), but everything is tied to the smallest beat and the effect is lost when you’re the one that has to press the button to continue (I’ll show an example of this in a little bit).
THAT IS NOT TO SAY, HOWEVER, that they don’t take advantage of that element and okay I need to make a brief tangent.
One of the most important things for me in any piece of media, from songs to illustrations to even jokes is Flow. Flow is my version of Vibes in the sense that it’s a vague factor that I feel and I can explain when and why it feels off but fuck me if I try to explain it in a vacuum.
I don’t know how well it reflects, but for example, when I write these blogs I try my best to make sure to make the act of reading itself pleasant. Not just dump a lot of information but make it so going from word to word and digesting each paragraph is a pleasant experience unto itself. As an example, I try to use images as much as mental breaks to separate the posts into chunks as they’re there for illustrative purposes.
I like for the reading to Flow smoothly.
For a Visual Novel, the Flow usually entails the way that dialog has to be broken in smaller chunks, or how you can build suspense that grows as you move towards the next dialog.
My favorite example to illustrate what this latter point entails is this one scene during the Takarazuka Kinen where it LOOKS like Still is the one in command but then she talks about eating the competition which prompts the trainer to ask who she is right now.
As a reminder: Crimson (what I’ve been calling Still’s inner self) refers to herself as ワタシ, the dialog here is building suspense from one “screen” to the next by building it up with “私は。”.
And this isn’t the only case, it’s just the best example that came to mind to illustrate this specific point.
The point on the whole being that while I recommend playing Still’s scenario in auto and enjoying the spectacle, it was made by people that understood their medium perfectly and how its own mechanical necessities can dictate the pace of everything and then exploit said pace.
It’s really wild to talk about this because while sure, I’ve talked in the past about how some characters feel like love letters to subgenres, archetypes and whatnot, this is the first time where I feel the VN-loving nerd inside me shouting YEAH THAT’S IT THESE PEOPLE GET IT with regards to the medium itself.
Which leads me to the second point I wanted to make in this entry which is that a lot of this became possible because holy shit they revamped how they work with their own text framework.
A while back I wrote about Uma Musume’s use of stock animations, and one thing I kinda mention but it’s worth isolating here is that this is a game where, through repetition and a recurrent format you become intimately familiar with what “tricks” they can pull. New backgrounds immediately stand out, for example, because you’re like HOLY COW I’VE NEVER SEEN THIS ONE BEFORE; new props (eg: cheerleader pom poms, a shell) also immediately stand out like this. You don’t even have to try and be a archivist, simple natural play and the fact that the training scenarios will sometimes add events from cards you don’t have does this naturally.
At the start it just looks like something well-executed with what’s already there but then… that’s a funky use of the letters…
Then huh… I’ve never seen them do a side close up like that…
WAIT what’s a close up like that doing outside of the main story?!
But even then at this point it’s like okay, that’s all fancy work but nothing we couldn’t see happening in the Main Story.
Then you play the actually training scenario.
Is that allowed????
What fucking sorcery is that with the letters?! They’re even deployed in the right zig zagging order.
Oh so that’s why the scenario has a warning and toggle about screen effects, gotcha…
This might sound like exaggerated hyperbole unless you’ve played the game (and even then), but when Still released it outright felt like a completely different game. Especially if you’ve played a lot of mobile games, you know that their tools remain effectively the same from launch and format is really hard to change (to the point that many games start to feel their age when they run long enough), so to have closeups where there were none before and a bunch of screen effects that weren’t anywhere else either felt crazy (HAH).
And this isn’t exclusive to Still, just like how I personally feel like there’s a pre-Machan and post-Machan Uma Musume, there is MOST DEFINITELY a pre-Still and post-Still Uma Musume. All of those new in-engine tricks listed above? They started using them for everyone implemented since and it’s to the point where it feels like a shame that they’re not retroactively added.
Orfevre’s story with closeups would go outright insane, lemme tell you.
Now something interesting that some of you might be thinking is that compared to some of the stuff that the Main Story pulls, this doesn’t sound so crazy but the thing is that the Main Story to me never read like a VN for some reason. By which I mean that they use so many angle changes and whatnot that the format feels more like they’re just doing the most cinematic thing they can with the least amount of pre-rendered cinematics possible.
Basically you get the sense that if they could do a high budget, purely-cinematic CGI anime like the Guilty Gear story mode they would.
This isn’t a complaint by any stretch of the imagination mind you, but the point is that I can’t see the Main Story rendered in a 2D VN but I can most definitely FEEL Still’s Kizuna episodes and main story being the exact same without 3D models.
A big thing at play is that the scenario is written like a VN. What I mean is that it uses a LOT of old tricks like adding short inner thoughts via furigana, it plays with the position of the letters, there’s one moment in training where the trainer had like 6 options about stopping training but if you select one it corrupts into some corrupted variant of “keep running” until there’s no more options. They also make very VERY liberal use of ellipses in a way where the varying lengths actually give you a sense of different scales of time.
The best VNs know their pace and flow, they also know the visual physicality of the words themselves in their medium and take advantage of them.
Another big element of it is audio. In fact, I feel like most people don’t understand or even know how important audio and soundscapes are to the genre. There’s a whole subset called “Sound Novels” because the whole point is that the audio is extra immersive.
If I had to pick a single scene to sell you on the merits of audio AND the quality of the audio on display it would be this one without a doubt. And the main thing is that it’s not doing anything you couldn’t see in a purely 2D environment without the same ease to randomly close up and change angles.
I think I’ve set up enough context to convey what the thesis of this specific post is.
As some of you know, I’m a game developer. I wrote and programmed that one Cyberpunk Bartender game that… if you’re reading this right now, there’s a 90% chance that you either played it or know someone that played it.
That’s not me bragging by the way, just me celebrating the fact that so many cool people like our stuff. I’ve learned that there’s a point where modesty makes less of those around you too and I’ve been trying to fix that.
Videogames used to be my hobby, then they became a hobby I took seriously, then they became my job. Through all of this Visual Novels and text-heavy games were always my focus because I am first and foremost a writer and I love to find all the different ways one can convey story.
However, there’s something that gets lost once you become a professional. Even putting aside the fact that I suffered burnout so severe it took me about two years to recover (and that’s not even counting the two-and-change years I was burned out in), you approach things differently, have different concerns.
I’ve been trying to recover that spark, to find the parts of myself lost as I rushed to become a professional. For example, I’ve been trying to draw more this year because I used to love drawing as a teen, and while I can’t say I’ve kept up as loyally with the practical element of it all, I’ve been having fun reading a lot on the theory, like I used to do before college kinda sapped that love out of me.
Likewise, I’ve mentioned plenty in the past how Uma Musume has motivated me. Researching how the franchise was before release and also keeping tabs on the evolutions, subtle or otherwise, has reassured me that the time I’ve spent healing and figuring things out will be worth it in the end.
But Still’s scenario is special in a slightly different way.
Still In Love reignited my love for VNs.
It’s not like I hated them before, mind you, but in the shuffle of different options, bigger productions, what can you do now that you have money to do more and so on and so forth, that super simple super basic visual novel format with emphasis on crisp audio was just something I forgot.
And playing her scenario, but ESPECIALLY revisiting it for these posts and needing to put into words why it’s so special to me, added fuel to what had become an unassuming white-hot coal covered in ash in my heart.
I went “HELL YEAH THIS IS WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT, THEY GET IT!”.
So I’ll assume that if it can reignite a dormant love in someone like me who has plenty of reason (and then some extra) to be jaded about videogames, then maybe it will excite those that are fresh and new to the medium and this genre in particular.
It made me go “videogames are so cool!!!” out loud. That basically never happens anymore.