So i was on Kickstarter and found this

[Oddball]

And the second point - I think that the power of KS comes from the fact that the fable is written by people who have already gotten through their HS (and even college) years and could 'look back' at things with a mature flavour. It is no wonder that they think the 'high school drama' stories are completely drawn out, because, frankly, they are. High school certainly isn't the most interesting part of your life. It is overromanticised by the (usually) lonely and detached people that read VNs. In fact, high school is mostly about hormones and trying to act independent. Our worldview is really narrow at that time.

I agree. I wonder if Marcus Fuck is going be a colossal Mary Sue.

Even with the benefit of 4LS' hindsight, there were still a few moments where we shouted at the conspicuously blank-slate that was Hisao for being a total dimwit. I worry that a younger and less experienced writer(s) won't have the experience to provide a believable story or sympathetic protagonist.

I thought Hisao came across as a pretty good protagonist. His occasional idiot moments made sense and helped him from coming across as too perfect.

I'm worried the new guy might not be able to pull that off.

[Xanatos]

why this was my first, and highly likely, only vn ill ever like

Why?

[pandaphil]

We've already got a group working on a game with girls with mental/emotional problems. That's pretty much got the genre covered for me.

[BlackWaltzTheThird]

His occasional idiot moments made sense and helped him from coming across as too perfect.

While Hisao is a teenager, and often teenagers have idiotic moments, there is a big difference between "having idiotic moments" and "being so idiotic that he couldn't figure out Emi's dad had died" or "being so idiotic that he couldn't tell Rin didn't want to do the exhibition etc". I'm all for characters having flaws, but they should be sensible flaws, not flaws-that-are-flaws-only-to-make-the-plot-work flaws. They could have been handled better and KS, and undoubtedly they are going to be disastrous in Driftwood.

[Oddball]

His occasional idiot moments made sense and helped him from coming across as too perfect.

While Hisao is a teenager, and often teenagers have idiotic moments, there is a big difference between "having idiotic moments" and "being so idiotic that he couldn't figure out Emi's dad had died" or "being so idiotic that he couldn't tell Rin didn't want to do the exhibition etc". I'm all for characters having flaws, but they should be sensible flaws, not flaws-that-are-flaws-only-to-make-the-plot-work flaws. They could have been handled better and KS, and undoubtedly they are going to be disastrous in Driftwood.

There are some pretty big hints that Hisao did know what happened with Emi's dad but just didn't want to say anything about it.

As for Rin, hell, right up until the point where she collapses during exhibit it seems like something she did want to do. She just expected something different out of it than what she got.

[pandaphil]

I agree with Oddball. There's also a bit of plot convenience stupidity. Some things just needed to be kept a mystery in order for the story to have a decent climax.

[Xanatos]

We've already got a group working on a game with girls with mental/emotional problems. That's pretty much got the genre covered for me.

Is "a bunch of fucked up people in a school" a genre now?

@BlackWaltz: Hisao 's stupidity goes beyond realistic thresholds quite often but that's simply a a necessary catalyst to create tension or otherwise drive the plot. It's often unavoidable in any fiction. Even the smart people are damn idiots sometimes.

[metalangel]

I thought Hisao came across as a pretty good protagonist. His occasional idiot moments made sense and helped him from coming across as too perfect.

I'm worried the new guy might not be able to pull that off.

That's exactly what I meant, except by idiot moments I meant crossing the line from 'he's not perfect' to 'dense as a rock'.

I'm also worried that the new guy will have prescience. Okay, so we figured stuff out way before Hisao did... I'm talking about the new guy somehow figuring stuff out before any tangible clues have been dropped.

[Loonie]

why this was my first, and highly likely, only vn ill ever like

I suspect the same goes for me. That's the thing about KS really - that it could attract so many like us, who have never read a single VN before, and have us really like it. I honestly think you're up against an expectation where you cannot win, especially if you name KS as your main inspiration and draw too heavily upon its nostalgia factor.

As to being 18 and not having original ideas...yeah, that's BS frankly in my experience at least. It is more than possible to be that young and have pretty nifty ideas - I should know, because it was a little earlier than then that I met other teenagers across the web. I wouldn't call our ideas anything grand or awesome, but I certainly wouldn't have called us unoriginal either. So I doubt that age is necessarily that big of a hurdle, although indeed - one's worldview tends to be far narrower during that time (even if quite significant in its own right).

The main problem really is, as was already mentioned, the lack of outsider perspective, ESPECIALLY during that age (around 18 years old). You can proofread your work a million times, but you'll still always miss those blindspots that could be very quickly discovered if you had someone else creatively criticize you during the process. Having read the sheer frustration during the development of KS over how often heads butted, and remembering something similar from back when I was 17 - 19 years old, I'm pretty sure that the lack of this factor will prove to be the biggest problem with this project. It's also a big part of why I was skeptical they could pull it off that quickly with a core team half the size of 4LS.

And as for Hisao being an idiot...ugh...yeah, I guess it's real easy to label someone else as an idiot when you are unburdened by their hormones/perspective/the physicality of the person you are trying to understand getting in the way of your thoughts and such. We sit comfortably behind our computers and impassionately declare from on high what is idiotic and what is not, whereas if we actually met someone like Rin IRL I'm 100% certain we'd make more mistakes than Hisao ever did, not less.

[Xanatos]

I'm 100% certain...

You almost had a point before you turned it into bullshit...

[Loonie]

I honestly don't think so in this case. Okay sure - 100% is a bit absolutist to say (and I really was unclear as all hell too), but it's always far easier to say "Oh I would've done so much better." in the eye of your own mind and then completely mess up or forget that plan when you're actually standing in front of the person you were planning around. People love to assume that everything will always go according to plan for them, when in fact nothing ever does - especially around the people for which they hold emotions of any kind.

It's just one of those inescapeable differences between a reader and a protagonist. It's why so many of us picked Emi's 'go for it' option at the track, whereas IRL most of us would probably have collapsed far earlier than that point rather than slow down gracefully with the other option. Much like why most people, at least from what I gather, saw Hisao exploding at Rin as being idiotic rather than merely being emotional and stupid. And though I agree it was certainly not a smart move it was, for me, very relatable of a hormonal teenager trying to keep his feelings in check and failing. That stupidity of his didn't take away from the experience from me, it added to it. Not to mention that most teenagers in his position would've exploded like that far sooner. I dunno...going way off point now.

[Xanatos]

So basically your point is people are calling Hisao an idiot for the things he did when they'd probably have made the same if not worse mistakes in his place?

Congratulations. You've just learned that hindsight's 20/20. Even setting aside the obvious separation of player and character, people can look back and call him out on this stuff exactly because it's in the past and they've seen the outcome.

And I picked 'Go For It' because I've played enough of these to know that was the choice to steer me into Emi's route. I dunno what compulsion the rest of these guys felt.

What exactly is the difference between "idiotic" and "merely stupid"?

[pandaphil]

Honestly I've never thought of Hisao as stupid (well, maybe a little in Rin and Hanako's bad endings) . Naive maybe. Inexperienced, introverted and maybe even a little shy. But really I don't think I would have done as well in his shoes. Hell, I think he got lucky just meeting a group of girls who'd even pay attention to him.

[Loonie]

What exactly is the difference between "idiotic" and "merely stupid"?

Every one of us is stupid every once in awhile. Humans are not perfect beings (hard to remember this when the reader is reading a fictional story and might want it to read perfectly, even moreso if they are drawn to consider the chosen girl/waifu as perfect and the protagonist as their 'competition'). But an idiot doesn't even realize that they are stupid to begin with. Thus an idiot never learns from their mistakes and remains stupid. Or to put it in a moreso succinct saying: "A stupid person might be wrong at a time. But an idiot is wrong all the time."

And I don't see Hisao like that at all. Well, maybe within some of the bad or neutral endings, but even there he suspects that he was the one who had messed up. And not even in Lilly's arc (where, for me personally, he reaches the heights of his stupidity) do I see him as idiotic. Because even there he does realize, by the end, in what manner he had failed Lilly. Just like within the very scene that he shouts at Rin, he actually concludes it by punishing himself with two heavy thumps with his head against the wall. An idiot would not have even realized that they messed up, especially not that soon. But most average people who suffer a lapse of stupidity do. In fact, I might be a bit cynical here, but even most average people don't and keep believing that they're still in the right.

So Hisao might wind up looking idiotic to someone who wants perfection, but in the context of the average human being he would still come off as a downright superhuman teenager most of the time, if still quite flawed. I don't think many teenagers would be able to resist the drunk Hanako scene the way he did (even if it was just part of his white knight complex at the time). Nor that many of them would be able to put up with Rin's confusing signals for so long and not explode sooner. Nor that they'd wind up as full of hearth as in Emi's or Shizune's route at such a young age already.

[russianspy1234]

And I picked 'Go For It' because I've played enough of these to know that was the choice to steer me into Emi's route. I dunno what compulsion the rest of these guys felt.

thats the thing. not only do we have the benefit of hindsight, multiple playthroughs, and save scumming, we have the benefit of knowing the tropes of the genre. it is easy to know that rin doesnt REALLY want to do the art exhibition, but who amongst us hasnt made a misstep when dealing with an awkward person irl? ive found that in any work of fiction, it helps to pretent that OTHER works of fiction of the same genere dont exist in that universe (assuming different generes do) ergo horror movie protagonists havent seen a dozen movies where the hero thinks they have killed the monster and dropped their weapon right near them only to find out they are wrong. romance movie protagonists dont know that the reason their love interest is suddenly acting hostile is because they accidently overheard the middle part of a conversation between them and someone else that made it sound like something really bad was going on.