Netto first got me think­ing when he reported the eroge indus­try to be in a state of peril, but I’ve been put­ing it off until this past week­end, when I (finally) fin­ished Per­sona 4 and got started on my UK ver­sion of Agarest Wars. As one might guess, those two games are very much on the topic here.

Tears to Tiara Visual Novel on the PS3 (those graph­ics aren’t bad at all)

The bound­aries between JRPGs and Visual Nov­els has always been blurred. After all, IGN recently iden­ti­fied the JRPG “talk­ing card­board cutout” tra­di­tion in their Top 10 Ways to Fix JRPGs, and the most rec­og­niz­able image of Visual Nov­els has got to be that win­dowed screen­shot of bishoujo char­ac­ter CGs atop a class­room back­ground with dia­logue box beneath it. Not to men­tion, there are Vis­nov pro­duc­ers like Alice-soft (Rance) and that branch of Leaf/Aquaplus (Tears to Tiara, Utaware­ru­mono) who seems to spe­cial­ize in import­ing RPG ele­ments into their Vis­novs. But com­bin­ing JRPG and Vis­nov ele­ments goes far deeper than just the graph­ics corner-cutting of pre­sen­ta­tion or the addi­tion of a basic com­bat system.

IGN’s list might be overly biased in my opin­ion, hand­ing out crit­i­cism against many aspects of JRPGs that fans specif­i­cally play and love the genre for. Two come­backs that reached my mind right away are: (to #7) if I wanted a full-scale world for escapism explo­ration, I’d go play a freak­ing MMO, and (to #4) Tales of Ves­pe­ria actu­ally reminds us that we have real, live friends sit­ting besides us rather than rely­ing on net­friends on the other side of the World. But they do address a num­ber of good points, such as:

• JRPGs are filled with stu­pid fillers like block puz­zles that have no real enjoy­ment value other than con­tribut­ing to the num­ber of head­walls in frus­tra­tion game­play hours.
• Overuse of cliched story con­cepts and archtyp­i­cal char­ac­ter designs, many of which lack cre­ative detail­ing and thus remains flat and stale through­out the game.

Would it be pre­sump­tu­ous of me to say that the game indus­try can ben­e­fit from import­ing some vis­nov con­cepts here? Take Shin Megami Tensei’s Per­sona 4 for exam­ple. With the premise of you are a high-schooler who recently moved to a back­wa­ter local town where mys­te­ri­ous mur­ders have began occur­ring, it sounds very much like the begin­ning of Hig­urashi. But while P4’s sto­ry­line is inter­est­ing, it’s nowhere as remark­able as that of Hig­urashi, and the antag­o­nists are some­what cliche in a mod­ern Japan­ese way. At the same time, its com­bat sys­tem is as out­dated as that of Final Fan­tasy X. How­ever, the flaw­less inte­gra­tion of its social link sys­tem, com­bined with a few hilar­i­ous school trip events stuck into the main story, shows just how much extra value and enjoy­ment a game stands to gain by absorb­ing some visual novel ele­ments. In my opin­ion, the char­ac­ters really are the most appeal­ing aspect of P4, which also explains why it took me under a month to play 90% of the game and fin­ish all social links, then three more just to grind through the last dun­geons and beat that final boss.

P4’s cast on a school trip…

P4’s Social Links are pretty much a glo­ri­fied way of pre­sent­ing char­ac­ter routes. In Per­sona 4, the main char­ac­ter can ini­ti­ate a social link very much the same way you trig­ger that first flag in dat­ing sims. As you pro­ceed down each social link, you learn about the character’s cir­cum­stances, their com­plex­i­ties and prob­lems, and helps them solve their issues. This all sounds pretty famil­iar, after all it’s pretty much the same deal as most hero­ine arcs in visual nov­els. The only dif­fer­ence is that it’s an optional fea­ture stuck into a fully inter­ac­tive RPG game. It’s not a required fea­ture, so you can still beat the game with­out read­ing pages upon pages of text if the action and main story is all that you’re look­ing for. But for those of us seek­ing detailed char­ac­ter devel­op­ment, it allows play­ers to choose the routes they care about while avoid­ing those they don’t, and at the same time gain some bonuses that will make the game­play eas­ier. P4 also allows you to simul­ta­ne­ously go through mul­ti­ple social links, so you don’t have to play through that long com­mon route over and over again (although hav­ing mul­ti­ple lovers may trig­ger… consequences).

The Per­sona series are hardly the only ones that take advan­tage of these ele­ments. The Tales of series have skits and chardev-related back­track­ing mea­sured in the tons. The Star Ocean series have their pri­vate actions and alter­nate end­ings. But… there’s still a lot to gain by kick­ing it up a notch. Yes, the eroge indus­try has their own faults in bland sto­ry­telling, cliched char­ac­ters, and exces­sive use of moe appeal. But the use of detailed writ­ing, the depic­tion of day to day events (amidst an epic story to save the world), the rela­tion­ship branch­ing, and the con­cen­trated dose of humor injec­tion scenes goes a long way in get­ting the game’s play­ers in touch with their characters.

Here are a few obvi­ous advantages:

• Detailed sto­ry­telling in the main route adds more enjoy­able game­play time with­out dri­ving the user nuts with use­less puz­zles whose only pur­pose is to ‘get in the way’. The sto­ry­telling scenes of Metal Gear and Xenosaga series may be quite exces­sive, but they’re a lot more mem­o­rable than *that dun­geon* in any Final Fan­tasy. Using ‘card­board cutout’ sto­ry­telling also means that you don’t have to break cin­e­matic bud­gets to insert a proper story. Not to men­tion that by detail­ing out the story, the main plot also gains more oppor­tu­ni­ties to break out of that cliche shell.
• Detailed sto­ry­telling in the side routes sculpt a far more rounded view of the char­ac­ters and their world to play­ers who are inter­ested. In a sense it’s just like an optional sid­e­quest, except it also con­tributes greatly to char­ac­ter and set­ting devel­op­ment, an accom­plish­ment few sid­e­quests can claim. This is the one advan­tage games can eas­ily use but ‘nov­els’ can’t: optional sup­port­ing mate­ri­als inte­grated along­side the story that con­tribute, but doesn’t force­fully slow down the pace. It’s an advan­tage they really ought to be using. One good exam­ple of this in JRPGs are the spe­cial mis­sion chap­ters in Valkyria Chron­i­cles, although they could have used a lot more of those.
• Rela­tion­ships pathing grants the player more con­trol over the story, even if it’s merely the under­ly­ing details. West­ern RPGs, such as any­thing made by Bioware (e.g. Knights of the Old Repub­lic, Mass Effect) are par­tic­u­larly good at let­ting the play­ers choose the direc­tion they wish to pro­ceed in and which poten­tial love inter­est the main char­ac­ter gets together with; I don’t get what’s tak­ing Japan, with their fame in inter­ac­tive choose-your-heroine visual nov­els, to catch up on in most of their own RPGs.

So yes, I’m one who would def­i­nitely sup­port some joint-projects and merg­ing between the games and visual novel indus­tries. The vis­nov peo­ple excel more in 2D graph­ics, detailed char­ac­ter inter­ac­tion, and drama sto­ry­board­ing, while the game devel­op­ers’ skill obvi­ously lay in pre­sen­ta­tion inter­face, pro­gram­ming, and mechan­ics. It would be a sym­bi­otic rela­tion­ship for them to work together: get the vis­nov appeal to fur­ther into the inter­na­tional mar­ket, while allow­ing the gamers to appre­ci­ate more intrigu­ing sto­ries and char­ac­ters with bet­ter buildup and detailed development.

In an ideal world…

Valkyria’s cropped 3D char­ac­ter graph­ics in dia­logue (I had trou­ble find­ing Eng­lish ver. for some reason)

Of course, there are sec­tors of the JRPG indus­try that are already incor­po­rat­ing these aspects, be in on a large or small scale. One of the notable ‘recent’ com­bi­na­tion between the two gen­res would be Records of Agarest War, which came out in Japan in 2007 but is still await­ing its Spring 2010 US release. Bet­ter known as “that soul-breeding game” to Kotaku, Agarest War is a quin­tes­sen­tial off­spring between a hard­core strat­egy RPG and a dating-sim. It’s the merge I’ve been hop­ing for, yet at the same time com­pletely not what I wanted. Why? Because just like how sec­tors of the vis­nov indus­try lives off solely moe appeal, Agarest War seems to be mar­ket­ing only on its sex appeal. It’s pre­cisely how not to merge vis­nov ele­ments into a video game. Okay, it has a very inter­est­ing bat­tle sys­tem that seri­ously tick­les my brain as far as com­bat posi­tion­ing, the core of TRPGs, go; but at the same time it’s flooded with flaws:

• The crit­ics aren’t kid­ding when they claim that the bat­tle graph­ics of this game could be han­dled on a PS1, but I guess they’re going for that Dis­gea look.
• Com­pared to a mod­ern visual novel, the char­ac­ter CGs and event CGs are rather bland, lack­ing in vari­a­tions and any emo­tional por­trayal. I swear there’s like only 1 pose for each.
• The dia­logue is just stu­pid: “Don’t get too far ahead so I can pro­tect you.” / “I don’t need your pro­tec­tion.” / “I want to pro­tect you so stay close.” (facepalm). Well, I guess at least it’s not out­right annoy­ing to the point of mak­ing my ears bleed like the char­ac­ters of Star Ocean 4.
• Hope­fully the US release will put more money into Qual­ity Assur­ance after the trans­la­tions, cause cur­rently I can’t even upgrade my dag­gers because they typed the black­smithing recipe wrong, and they’re not the only case…

Basi­cally, Agarest Wars is decent as a TRPG, it might be close enough to a dating-sim (don’t know enough about them), but call­ing it a visual novel would be… an insult to visual novels.

Now if only Valkyria Chron­i­cles had more of their spe­cial report chap­ters with either goofy or melo­dra­matic scenes, chained together to pro­vide fully told sub­arcs for each major char­ac­ter, then that would have been so much better.

What­ever, at least I have Per­sona 3 Portable com­ing out this sum­mer to hype about, where I can play the hero­ine this time yay~!

Pos­si­bly Related Posts

• Fam­ily Project [Kazoku Keikaku] Review
• Toradora Expos­ing a Weak­ness in Visual Novel Adaptation?
• Aoi Shiro Final Thoughts

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 19:45 and is filed under "Novels", Crossvision, Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.