Katawa Shoujo Forums

LordDarknus wrote:This made me curious, what do you think is actually good then? What was/is your idea of a perfect VN?

In fact, what is your unbiased criteria for defining something/anything as; 'Suck' ; 'Does not suck' ; and 'Perfection'?

What I think is good? For visual novels, I've said this before but there are two good ones: Narcissu and True Remembrance. Then there are plenty of okay and decent ones and a whole lot of bad ones. Sturgeon's law. A perfect visual novel is like a perfect anything, can't be described by anything else then "perfect". Visual novels and most works of art are so complex that there is and never will be one. Things approximating perfection are more easily found in minimalistic, simple things, so maybe a haiku-sized visual novel could potentially be it?

As for judging things, it's not just a linear spectrum from "terrible" to "good". There are two aspects: 1) Whether I like it or not (which is intangible and often hard to explain why) and 2) whether I think it's competently done or not (which is the more easily analyzable part). I've liked some really trashy crap and hated some incredibly well done works of art. That sentence already belies that the latter aspect is the traditional "good vs bad" axis. I think the criteria for defining something as good or bad is how it compares to other works we have experienced and how we have analyzed them. The more you read or watch or listen and the more thought you put into it, the better your understanding becomes and along with that the qualifications shift. I think my bar for "good" is pretty high, maybe unnecessarily so, but I really can't say something is good if it doesn't titillate the creative spirit in me and make me think something like "wow, so you can do stuff like THIS too!". I want to be awestruck by the imagination of someone else, and their skill at translating it to their medium.

I know this has probably been asked but im tired to read through all the questions i just came off playing the game for about 8 hours.
Have any of the members of four leaf studio's started a new project yet and why are you opposed to fan's possibly making a sequel if FLS dont plan too

Liminaut wrote:I've got a question about doing KS. It took 5 years, and I'm guessing that there were times when individually or as a group the devs felt like just hanging it up and doing something else.

Were there times like that? What kept you going?

1. Yes.
2. Not wanting to let everyone else down.

ArcadiaM wrote:I know this has probably been asked but im tired to read through all the questions i just came off playing the game for about 8 hours.
Have any of the members of four leaf studio's started a new project yet and why are you opposed to fan's possibly making a sequel if FLS dont plan too

When we tell about our projects publically it won't be as a reply to a question in this thread. But hey, here's Hivemind's new project "Harrison Tripp": https://twitter.com/Harrison_Tripp

Has to be us. Someone else might get it wrong.

Aura wrote: When we tell about our projects publically it won't be as a reply to a question in this thread.

Has to be us. Someone else might get it wrong.

That last line...is it me or that's Mordin from Mass effect ?:D

ArcadiaM wrote:I know this has probably been asked but im tired to read through all the questions i just came off playing the game for about 8 hours.
Have any of the members of four leaf studio's started a new project yet and why are you opposed to fan's possibly making a sequel if FLS dont plan too

As Aura pointed out, our new projects are generally announced in places that aren't Ask threads--somewhere (which I do not recall) you can find a great list of our respective twitters, tumblrs, and other forms of communication where new projects are announced (and yes, Harrison Tripp can be found on twitter and on libsyn, as well as any other podcasting deal (podbay, iTunes, etc.).

As to the second question, we're against fans making a sequel because a fan's mentality is usually to want more of the same and to treat existing material as holy scripture--that's just the way fandom works. A good sequel to KS would need to be made by someone without that sort of intense respect for the material (that would be us, if we were to choose to do so). Furthermore, the story is over and done, and needs no officially sanctioned continuation--there's a whole forum full of folk writing sequels for you to check out, if you so desire.

Finally, and on a cynical note, if a fan-made sequel sucked, that damages the whole KS "brand," so to speak. They may wish to charge money, which is not something we would do, and reflect poorly upon our whole enterprise. Frankly, we're against a fan-made sequel because it would not be done to our standards.

just a quick question out of curiosity, is there any reason for the route with lily be the only one with an epilogue ? Also you devs must hear this a lot, but I need to compliment your great work in this visual novel, really well made.
cheers

Suriko is the only one who doesn't think that epilogues suck ass.

Conversely from my previous question: have there been any outside criticisms of the game that have gotten under the skins of any of the devs? If so, what were they?

Aura wrote:Suriko is the only one who doesn't think that epilogues suck ass.

What do you think is wrong about epilogues?

Atario wrote:Conversely from my previous question: have there been any outside criticisms of the game that have gotten under the skins of any of the devs? If so, what were they?

Not really. A lot of the criticism leveled at the game is criticism we ourselves leveled at the game--Hisao is kind of a fucking idiot, the writing is super-amateruish in spots etc. etc. Occasionally someone will point out a repeated phrase or description that I leaned on heavily (sweat apparently shows up a lot in Emi's route) and I'll stare in disbelief for a few minutes before realizing that yeah, that's absolutely right. Then I shrug my shoulders, add something else to my "avoid doing this so goddamn much in the future" list, and move on. Even at launch, I at least was pretty willing to admit that the writing could have been better--but at the time that was about the best I could do, and thinking endlessly about what could have been better is a road upon which I prefer not to travel.

ArcCain wrote:

Aura wrote:Suriko is the only one who doesn't think that epilogues suck ass.

What do you think is wrong about epilogues?

An epilogue, especially one after the credits roll, is just an arbitrary way to lengthen a story, or I guess a way to ensure folks see all the credits. If you wanted to end your story somewhere else, just fucking end it somewhere else. You don't need to pick up after we've seen the end of the narrative arc. Like that god-awful Harry Potter ending. Good lord, what a sour note to end things on--"and then they all had babies and named them after their dead parents and friends" is lame as hell. It's the sort of thing that you'd see on fanfiction.net, not in a goddamn published novel. Childish shit.

Time skips are kind of lazy too, especially when combined with epilogues. A time skip in the middle of a narrative is fine, and can shake things up and get a lot done (see the...third season(I think?) of Battlestar Galactica for a good example) while giving your characters new things to do, but they will always feel a bit rushed to me. Time skipping in an epilogue is even worse, because it is literally just saying "and they lived happily ever after," except instead of just coming out and saying that you self-indulgently take a sort of victory lap with the characters.

That said, Emi's bad end used to feature a fairly large time skip, but I was talked out of it. It was probably the right decision.

Suriko, obviously, does not share my antipathy towards epilogues, and that is of course absolutely fine. The path was his to write, and he wrote it in the way he wanted to, and people seem to like it so that all worked out for the best, don't you think?

Speaking of overused phrases, how did A22's abuse of "pistoning" in H-scenes ever get past the editors?

bhtooefr wrote:Speaking of overused phrases, how did A22's abuse of "pistoning" in H-scenes ever get past the editors?

This made me blink and check. The word or its derivatives crop up exactly twice, in two separate acts of Shizune's path.

If you think using that twice is abuse, I don't know what to tell you.

Did you expect to be answering questions in this thread in 2014?