Qaenyin wrote:Also Teclo I think the real problem with plots like that imo, isn't that they pull out these random off the wall backgrounds. I think what's awful about it is that they do that, and don't even make the backgrounds relevant to the character's personality and their development. It's kinda why I can't stand Key VNs at all. Every single damn character is some moe blob with a background that has no actual relevance to their character in any way, and doesn't actually get any development or resolution before the end. It feels like you could just ad-lib their background and get much the same result.
Yes, that's exactly it. To go one further, it's not just that it has no general relevance to their personality, it's that it's not a normal developmental thing - it's some random cod-philosophy/existentialism bullshit. The writer isn't very good, has no actual talent, so her backstory can't be something intelligently written, ambiguous and well-realised - no, it's that she's a vending machine AI program from a cola machine on Mars, and she gained self-awareness.
Ever 17 had that in spades. After reading it for about a month, the entire plot seemed to be "Teenagers get stuck in facility, talk about random crap in a totally unconvincing way and play hide-and-seek. Oh, and one's an AI, one's a ghost or whatever the fuck - who even cares any more?" and that's what passes for story. It's like
F/SN - the whole "WHAT A TWEEST!" nature of that wasn't based on drama, writing skill or things the author has observed from human behaviour; no, it was "She's really King Arthur, he's really Herakles" and so on. Bolted on random comic book wankery.
So yeah, they write literally tens of thousands of words about fuck all, no observational merit or artistic merit, and then say "and actually Akira-san is actually a cup of coffee from 1932!" Not to be so cliché to use a Shakespeare example. but it's like the twist at the end of
Romeo and Juliet not being that one of them was only feigning death, but that actually all the other characters are just NPCs in a VR program that Romeo and Juliet are playing in some Tokyo mall's arcade. It's more about writing a bucketful of nonsense with the promise that "all will be made clear" and then taking a huge technicolour dump into the bucket at the very end. It's sadder still that some fans then reach into the shit-filled bucket and try to mould a decent shape out of the enormous turd within. Umineko, I'm mainly looking at you.
gekiganwing wrote: "One Billion Rupiah Girl", "999, "LovePlus", "Canvas 2"
I'll check out those recommendations, though I've played 999. I thought it did human interaction a lot better than the usual VN, but still sadly seemed to boil down to some "he's a ghost, I'm a psychic reverberation" type ending. Still, it's something I've recommended myself despite that. I've also played Love Plus quite a lot. It's as you say - unoriginal and predictable but somehow compelling to play through. For one thing, and I'm not trying to use this to explain its success away so simply, but it's oddly novel to have the girl look at you, react to you directly, rather than just hundreds of preset sentences spoken into a void before you get to click "Go Home" or "Walk Around The School" or something. The other two I will certainly check out. I also played through The Stanley Parable, the game that delta recommended, and that's very good, very funny and very clever. It's not remotely anime-ish at all, it's just a very smart look at narrative in gaming. It'll take about 20 minutes to try it all out, so give it a shot.
