Reading, 'Riting, and Ramblings

When I decided to turn my wuxia trilogy into a visual novel series, I immediately started on it the way I begin every creative endeavor: research. I found lists of recommended visual novels and read about them, surveyed all of the visual novels sold on Steam, and purchased a few to play through myself.

To my surprise, I found the visual novel industry is seriously disappointing.

The visual novel medium has MASSIVE potential to be awesome. But instead of capitalizing on that potential, developers put out mediocre games that are less innovative and engaging than static printed graphic and prose novels.

Disappointment #1: They're written as if they're plain old books.

The whole point of visual novels is that they're visual. They're supposed to use both pictures and words to convey a story more effectively than either can alone. Yet many visual novels are nothing more than plain, boring old books with some pretty pictures.

For example, the words describe scenes that pictures already show.

Or the words describe scenes that pictures should have shown.

Not only do these games fail to show their stories with pictures, they don't even show them with words. They tell, tell, tell.

In Hakuoki, the writers don't show a boy's changing feelings towards the heroine through his dialog and actions. Instead, the heroine helpfully informs the audience that he seems interested in her.

And instead of showing the audience the heroine is tense through her tone and nervous habits, the heroine simply says, "I found myself depressed and tense."

(Side note: Yes, this heroine "finds herself" doing things frequently, as if she wanders through life in a daze and realizes only during rare lucid moments, "Ah, I'm looking up at the sky!" I didn't make it very far into the game, but I like to think a twist at the end reveals the reason she's always "finding herself" in the middle of actions, instead of simply doing them, is that she was possessed by a mind-controlling demon the whole time.)

Disappointment #2: They suffer from Oprah Syndrome.

Sometimes the telling takes a different form. In Hotel Dusk, the script shows at the sentence and scene levels, but it tells at the structural level. The game itself doesn't have any plot to speak of, and all of the drama comes from characters literally standing still and telling their stories in the past tense.

In "dating sim" type visual novels, the player character chooses which hot guy or gal to pursue from a harem of potential love interests. Each romance typically ends with a climactic scene of the chosen partner delivering a teary-eyed confession about a difficult childhood, a tragic loss, and/or trauma-induced insecurities...and this is the full extent of the "story."

In other words, the stories in these visual novels play out like episodes of Oprah. The affable protagonist talks to the audience for a bit, then interviews some people who sit on a sound stage and bare their souls.

Why is Oprah Syndrome so common in visual novels? I have a few theories.

Most visual novels were made in Japan.

Most Americans have never heard of visual novels. The medium is much more popular in East Asia, particularly in Japan. If you Google "best visual novels," all of the results will be lists of exclusively Asian titles with art in a stereotypical anime style.

East Asian storytelling is different from Western storytelling in many ways. In American TV shows, scenes are zippy and full of motion. The most dramatic moments are short and exciting, with a lot of shouting, passionate kissing, and/or gun-waving.

In Japanese, Chinese, and Korean TV shows, there are few guns and very few kisses (maybe one or two per series). Instead, the characters do a lot of talking. The most dramatic scenes are often long emotional monologues by actors literally sitting still on a sound stage. When Sweetie and I watched Father Is Strange over the summer, we groaned whenever we saw Father and Mother sit down together, because we knew the next five minutes would be yet another discussion of their feelings.

Most visual novels were made by small teams with tiny budgets.

Big developers with money don't make visual novels. They make epic space operas, NFL simulators, deliberately addictive mobile games, and zombie apocalypse shoot 'em ups. Visual novels are made by quirky small studios, or even by lone hobbyists with big dreams.

Words are cheap and easy to type. Art is expensive and requires a lot of time and effort to create. So it's tempting for a small developer with a limited budget to write a ton of words illustrated by a few static pictures of characters with different facial expressions. Quality storytelling and fully illustrated scenes would require much more work, which costs money if you need to hire someone else to do it.

Visual novel protagonists are usually blank slates.

Because developers want players to immerse themselves in the games, protagonists often have little to no character. They're stock characters with genre-standard personalities, bare-bones life stories, and bland or outright customizeable facial features.

The choice to make an "everyman" protagonist makes sense for fighting and adventure games, but it hobbles visual novels. Good stories need active protagonists with goals to chase and flaws to overcome. If you create a totally blank protagonist, all of the drama has to come from the other characters. Then you end up with Oprah episodes.

Disappointment #3: The stories are purely "on rails."

In theory, visual novels offer players the opportunity to explore story worlds and shape them through their choices. But in reality, many visual novels out there are very linear and don't allow players to play.

"Find the Trigger" Rails

In some games, player choice is a halfhearted illusion. You can run around the map all you want, but nothing meaningful will happen until you stumble onto the one and only story path.

For example, in Hotel Dusk you can roam freely through the hotel in every chapter, but the plot will progress only if you move to certain places, pick up certain items, and/or find certain people to talk to. I wasted a lot of time skulking up and down empty halls, knocking on all the doors, trying to figure out what the game wanted me to do to progress. Eventually I gave up playing in earnest and found a walk-through that would tell me where I had to go to trigger the next scripted conversation.

"Branch of No Return" Rails

In "branching storyline" type games, players are often sent down rigid paths based on one or two choices. For a hypothetical example, if the player chooses to bake cookies with Vampire A instead of planting flowers with Vampire B, she is then destined to marry Vampire A and can't even get to know Vampire B for the rest of that play-through.

In the most frustrating games, innocuous choices force players onto dead-end branches, and there's nothing they can do about it. E.g., merely choosing to go to the kitchen instead of the garden will seal the unwitting player's fate with Vampire A. I will be forever sour about the time I innocently agreed with the school nurse's suggestion to get more exercise in Katawa Shoujo, unaware that I was committing myself to a branch of no return.

My Ideal Visual Novel

My ideal visual novel is fun, emotionally engaging, and frustration-free, without any of the disappointments above.

The protagonist should participate actively in the story.

The logic for having a blank, mute protagonist doesn't apply to visual novels. In most types of games, mechanics are more important than story; players will tolerate laughable dialog and nonsensical plots as long as they have fun.

But in visual novels, the story is the fun. And to craft a fun story, you must have a protagonist who protags.

The player should be able to explore the entire story in one play-through.

I don't know why visual novel developers think "one bazillion unique endings!" is a strong marketing point. There's nothing fun about fast-forwarding through a game a bazillion times. It's fun to play a game once...maybe twice. After that, most people get bored and move on to something new.

The standard "branching" structure of visual novels today is so stale, players don't even play them for real. They consult charts that show "How to get all bazillion endings" and abuse save files to navigate the known branches. After the first playthrough, they're probably not even reading the story. They're just collecting the endings for 100% completion.

The branching formula also means players who attempt to play without a chart will most likely trigger a disappointing ending. They'll like Vampire B best, but they'll somehow end up marrying that jerk Vampire C or leaping off a cliff with that idiot Vampire F instead. If every story were accessible in one playthrough, and a player could hand a Kleenex tissue to Vampire F without consenting to leap off a cliff with him, this wouldn't be a problem.

The player should be able to go anywhere and find a story waiting.

Writers are accustomed to thinking of stories linearly. Plot Point A at Setting X causes Plot Point B at Setting Y, which leads inevitably to Plot Point C at Setting Z. After all, causal relationships between plot points make the difference between a story vs. stuff that happens.

This poses a problem for writing visual novels, because players might want to zip straight to Setting Y instead of visiting Setting X first. That's why visual novel developers tend to force players onto frustrating "Find the Trigger Rails"—because Plot Point B at Setting Y wouldn't make any sense if Plot Point A didn't happen first.

However, there are solutions other than very obvious rails. The key to creating a game that feels open, but still has a great story with a proper plot, is to write more than one story.

Examples:

• In MMOs like Final Fantasy XI, there are many epic adventures to choose from. Once you start a storyline you do have to accomplish tasks in a certain order to progress, but you can always run off and do something else too.
• In modern RPGs like Xenoblade Chronicles, the main story is linear, but the experience of playing through it is very open. The player can run around to many places and find NPCs offering "side quests" that play out in mini-stories.

If you offer parallel threads like this, the game won't feel like a tedious exercise in "finding the right door to knock on." Players can follow the story that starts in Setting X and ends in Setting Z, but they can also discover a story that starts in Setting Y and ends in Setting X. Going to the settings "out of order" won't be a complete waste of time.

The player's choices should influence the story in a logical way.

This one should be obvious, right? If a player makes a choice in a game, it should have a logical outcome. There's no reason why anyone would create a game in which actions and their effects would be totally arbitrary and nonsensical.

And yet they do.

I think writers of visual novels get so caught up in the weeds of building branches and defining "flags," they lose sight of what players will logically expect to happen when they make choices. The writers think, "We need a flag that puts the player down the Emi path. Oh, this part where the school nurse asks the hero to exercise more works, because Emi is the Sporty Spice." They don't think, "What choice would players make if they want to go down the Emi path?"

To conclude, here is a short excerpt from chapter 127 of the Chinese webtoon Wo Jia Dashi Xiong Naozi You Keng, by an artist who shares my sentiments.

Last month I watched The Miles of Peach Blossoms, an epic and very expensive xianxia drama.

While the story of the main couple was interesting, in my mind the Best Couple Award goes to two side characters: Bai Fengjiu and Donghua Dijun*.

* Dijun is an honorific title for an imperial lord.

Fengjiu is the young princess of the kingdom of Qing Qiu, a mischievous nine-tailed fox merely 30,000 years old. Donghua Dijun is the former emperor of the heavens, one of the ancient deities born from nothingness when the world was chaos. Heartless and unfathomable, Donghua fought for hundreds of thousands of years to bring peace to the Nine Kingdoms under the rule of the Celestial Tribe.

One day, Donghua rescues Fengjiu from a rampaging tiger demon.

Lovestruck, Fengjiu chases him back to the Celestial Kingdom. She does all sorts of crazy things to catch his attention, from sneaking into his palace disguised as a maid to shapeshifting into a baby fox to become his literal pet. Amused, Donghua eventually thaws and learns how to express his emotions.

Their relationship is adorable and, in many ways, stronger than the convoluted one between the main couple.

But though the main couple gets a happy ending, Fengjiu and Donghua do not. Their melancholy ending, and the heartbreaking events leading up to it, were responsible for at least one dozen of the sopping wet Kleenex tissues that ended up in my trash can during that show.

In the comments on DramaFever, I read that Ten Miles of Peach Blossoms is based on a series of novels by Tang Qi, and that Fengjiu and Donghua star in one of them! The commenters hinted that the conclusion of story in the drama is very different from the ending of the novel.

I tracked this book down and read it within a couple of days. To my surprise, at the end Donghua and Fengjiu get married and live happily ever after! I've seen many Hollywood adaptations turn tragic endings into pat ones, but never before had I seen a movie or show trade an original happy ending for a sad one.

However, though you'd think I'd squeal with delight to see my favorite couple in blissful matrimony, I didn't feel much of anything. In fact, I preferred the tragic ending in the drama.

Though the ending of the book was technically happy, it didn't make me happy because the story leading up to it was a mess. While the drama versions of Donghua and Fengjiu made me giggle and bawl, the book versions were bodice-ripper stock characters who spent all two volumes misunderstanding and hurting each other. The ending wasn't truly happy because the "tragic" romance leading up to it wasn't tragic at all.

1. For a story to be tragic, the protagonists must lose something precious.

I didn't root for Book Fengjiu and Book Donghua because they weren't very happy together. Fengjiu spent most of her time crying that Donghua hurt her so much and she should give up on him. Donghua spent most of his time lying to Fengjiu and feeling guilty about it. I didn't care much whether they could save their relationship because it really wasn't worth saving.

But the drama successfully showed the happiness these two characters lost when they were forced to separate. Both demonstrate how much they care for each other through their actions. Fengjiu works earnestly to make Donghua comfortable (though she usually makes a comic mess of it), and Donghua breaks his stone-cold character to help Fengjiu when she's in trouble.

When Donghua descends to the mortal realm to experience the trials of human life, Fengjiu follows. Then we get a taste of the sweet and simple life they could have had if they were normal people.

But they're not normal people, they're royalty. Immortal royalty at that. And so they must make heartbreaking choices.

2. The protagonists' choices should cause the tragedy, and these choices should be understandable and preferably unavoidable.

In tearjerker movies, brooding heartthrobs fall in love with delicate beauties, and then one of them dies unexpectedly from a fatal disease or a sudden encounter with the hypnotic Truck of Doom.

While these movies are sad, I personally don't consider them "tragic." They're just stories in which Bad Things Happen. To be properly tragic, the Bad Things should be caused directly or indirectly by the protagonists' choices. E.g., if the hero must die from a fatal disease, it should be because he chose to delay treatment to live happily instead of simply longer, as in the YA novel The Fault in Our Stars. If the heroine must succumb to the Truck of Doom, it should be because she plowed into it on purpose to save a group of preschoolers, as in the Korean fantasy Goblin.

Of course, the choices must be relateable to work. Characters who make nonsensical or purely selfish choices don't elicit sympathy from the audience. For maximum impact, the choices should also be inevitable. In the most enduring tragedies, the characters couldn't possibly make different choices to dodge cruel fate—either because every choice available to them would also end in tragedy, or because choosing the one path to a happy ending would compromise their morals.

Book Donghua and Book Fengjiu do make choices that cause tragedies, but those choices are neither understandable nor inevitable. For example, near the end Donghua fails to show up for their wedding feast. Fengjiu leaps to the conclusion that he ran off with a princess from the Demon Kingdom, decides their love was a lie, and descends to the mortal realm to hide for 300 years. Unbeknownst to her, Donghua missed the feast because he was saving the universe (again). Fengjiu comes back to the Celestial Kingdom to find him wasting away from a mystical poison, preparing to sacrifice his life for the greater good, etc. Oh, if only she'd known! If only they could have had those few short centuries of happiness together!

I was supposed to cry for them at this point, but instead I rolled my eyes. Book Fengjiu's decision to hide in the mortal realm was idiotic.

• Donghua had an established track record of suddenly loping off to save the universe, and no track record of showing interest in any woman—any person, even—other than Fengjiu.
• Fengjiu and Donghua were already officially married and living together, so they should have been long past the stage of petty jealousies and misunderstandings.
• Fengjiu was pregnant. Why would she choose to raise her infant son in poverty and isolation, instead of staying in Qing Qiu with her doting parents and grandparents?

The only reason Book Fengjiu would make the choice she did is to manufacture last-minute "tragic" circumstances to squeeze out some tears from the readers.

In contrast, Drama Donghua's ultimate decision to break up with Fengjiu is completely understandable. After fighting for tens of thousands of years to bring the Nine Kingdoms to a fragile state of peace, Donghua believes his marriage to Fengjiu would cause political turmoil.

In the end, Drama Fengjiu must accept his decision and resign herself to a lonely life on the throne.

Disappointed fans complain the ending is "stupid," but to me it's painfully sensible. Though Donghua Dijun has unparalleled power, he doesn't have unlimited freedom, and it would have been grossly out of character for him to choose his personal feelings over the stability of the heavens.

3. The seeds of tragedy should be sewn at the beginning.

To be honest, the drama version of Fengjiu and Donghua's story had flaws, too. The biggest is that Donghua didn't explain why he couldn't be with Fengjiu until very late in the game. Very, very late in the game. We're talking episode 52 of 58.

Characters who refuse to explain themselves are very common in East Asian dramas, so I'm used to it. I've learned that when characters push their loved ones away, they usually have Noble Reasons that will be revealed eventually. So when Donghua looked at Fengjiu tenderly but treated her coldly, I trusted he too had Noble Reasons and rooted for the couple to the end.

But most Western viewers aren't that patient. Because Donghua spent most of the drama running hot and cold—one minute giving up half of his life force to heal Fengjiu's injuries, the next throwing her out of his palace and claiming he never wants to see her again—many fans of the show hated their romance line. They'd say Fengjiu is "so annoying" for chasing after Donghua when he obviously doesn't want her. Or they'd ask, "When is Donghua going to get over himself and admit he likes her?" I believe these viewers would have had a different reaction if they'd known from the start that Donghua could never marry Fengjiu, but he couldn't stop himself from acting on his feelings and giving her false hope.

The most effective tragedies set up the insurmountable obstacles at the beginning. The first lines of Romeo and Juliet tell the audience about the feud between the Capulets and the Montagues. The first paragraphs of The Fault in Our Stars establish that the seventeen-year-old heroine is dying from cancer. When she meets her first love at a support group, young readers know there can't possibly be a happy ending to the relationship, but they desperately hope for one anyway.

***

Tragedy is the essence of every genre. The efficacy of the central tragedy makes the difference between a shallow romance and a touching one, a boring mystery and a captivating one, or a cliché fantasy and a memorable one. Even in comedy, adding solid tragic elements can transform the work from a farce into a classic (like Annie Hall, Dr. Strangelove, and The Producers).

Speaking of comedy, here's a funny behind-the-scenes clip of Vengo Gau (Donghua) and Dilrama Dilmurat (Fengjiu) filming a "difficult" scene.

After weeks of preparation, Sweetie and I were officially married on June 20, 2017, the tenth anniversary of the day we became "Facebook official." Though Facebook is dying away, we're still going strong!

My coworker Pat volunteered to take pictures of the ceremony for us, using our trusty Fujifilm Finepix S700. My mother gifted us this camera in May 2010, and it has recorded many big events since: a two-week vacation in Japan, a car trip to historic Philadelphia, a snowy New Year's Eve in Times Square...and now our wedding at Mirror Pond!

Our officiant, Judge Peter A. Werner, kindly brought along a second witness for us named Annemarie. He read us our vows from a piece of paper tucked inside a very religious-looking copy of The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide.

Since we hadn't reviewed the vows before the ceremony (whoops!) we didn't know exactly when we were supposed to say, "I do." Sweetie said it three times during pauses between questions. I forgot to say it at all, and Judge Werner had to remind me!

While Judge Werner prepared the legal paperwork, Sweetie and I posed for glamour shots of our rings. Sweetie's is a plain 10K gold band from Kohl's. Mine is also 10K gold, custom-made with the help of Laurie at Cascade Jewelers in Bend. It has two cubic zirconias and one lab-created aquamarine in the center. Since Sweetie and I were both born in March, aquamarine is "our" birthstone.

We signed the marriage certificate at a picnic table on Mirror Pond Plaza. Technically these are pictures of us signing a ceremonial certificate, and the state will mail us the "legal" ones later.

It was a hot and sunny day, so Pat treated us to refreshments in the coffeehouse by the Plaza, Crow's Feet Commons. The decor and menu of the Commons is pure Bend: one part rugged country, two parts urban hipster. For our "wedding snack" we had one of Sparrow Bakery's famous Ocean Rolls with sparkling orange juice in fancy glasses.

Of course I forced Sweetie to pose for a K-drama style love shot.

Finally we headed back to the water for more pictures. The photo shoot started out respectably...

But then Pat headed back to work, and the camera fell into Sweetie's hands. And when Sweetie gets a camera in his hands, he starts climbing on things to find interesting angles, heedless of his formal suit and dress shoes.

He sent me to the other side of the pond for a landscape shot of the water, trees, and mountains. The photo will make a cool large print to hang up, but it's hard to spot me in the 400px version below. I'm the mint-colored speck in the bottom left.

When we arrived home in Redmond, Luna inspected my ring and deemed it acceptable.

After a nap and an early dinner at Shari's Cafe & Pies, I cut into the cake. This week we're playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild together, so I naturally took my first bite from the Triforce.

In the evening we drove down to Oregon Observatory at Sunriver. On our first date ten years ago, we went to Olive Garden and then sprawled out on the grass of a sports field at Indiana University to look at the stars. (This "date date" is not to be confused with our first "not date date" at a Mather's Museum special exhibit of chairs from around the world. That was merely a meeting to gauge each other's long-term relationship potential under the guise of exploring a common interest in international furniture.)

Our wedding-day version of looking at the stars was much more sophisticated. I don't have pictures because it was much too dark to take them, but we looked through many telescopes to see Jupiter, Saturn, a couple of binary stars, and some impressive star clusters.

Now we have been married for over twenty-four hours, and neither of us has asked for an divorce yet. Fingers crossed that it stays that way for the next fifty years!