Visual novel reader 2020 download4/3/2024 ![]() The games that aim to provide complex and involving plots often use bad endings as motivation for players to more closely pay attention. Despite being a genre that, by definition, is focused on the narrative, it’s easy for players to skip past dialogue and exposition with convenient autoplay features in most modern VNs. People often complain about how much reading is involved with the visual novel genre, and so developers have made it easy for players. These scenes flesh out the world of the game and teach the player to make wiser decisions going forward and break the tension of the otherwise deadly serious tone of the bad endings. But the Tiger Dojo scenes themselves teeter between reality-TV-show style mockery, and helpful advice to avoid a grisly death on the next run. For a story the length of one of the Nasuverse games, bad endings remind players that the stakes are always high, and there’s no time for complacency. The same idea is used to comedic effect in Fate/Stay Night, where the protagonist can be graphically killed only to be sent to the Tiger Dojo where NPCs berate the player for their terrible decision making. These gruesome situations teach the player how to navigate the challenges of the Nonary Games, and push them forward to deduce the path to the “true ending” on their own. Each bad ending reveals a little more information – what each character’s true motivations are, and what they might do if they snap. The game is built around the premise that no one has to die, so each death that does occur in a playthrough becomes blood directly on the player’s hands. At various points in the story, the player must choose different ways to split up nine characters, unknowing of which ones are trustworthy and which ones might seek to betray the party. In the “death game” Zero Escape series, the protagonists find themselves in a locked-room mystery, forced to complete a series of esoteric puzzles with the threat of explosives planted inside them. Upon starting any VN, players are dumped into the game’s world innocent and unaware of the consequences of their actions, which allows developers to use bad endings as an opportunity to world-build and teach players about the stakes that they’re dealing with. ![]() In many visual novels, the player is given a bad end early on, to trickle down clues about the wider narrative. It holds the player responsible for the way that they play and makes the golden ending feel like a culmination of their efforts. It allows the developer to explore multiple dimensions of a character, rewarding the player’s curiosity and delivering a story that holds up to scrutiny for multiple angles. From a storytelling perspective, this becomes a highly useful technique. Many visual novels even include elements of time travel or parallel universes, to justify protagonists that remember everything from past bad endings. They make sense in the world of the story, as a “what if” scenario if the protagonist just happened to make the worst possible decisions at every juncture. Even more rarely, the ending the developers intended to be the bad end is instead embraced by the game’s audience, seen as equally or more valid than the canonical good ending.īad ends often do function as legitimate, if deliberately unsatisfying, resolutions to a game’s narrative. Other times, players might receive an ending that’s bittersweet, with the hint of a possible better resolution on the horizon. Sometimes the game will simply plaster “bad end” onto the screen and kick the player out. ![]() Meanwhile, a bad end is a definitive conclusion of a game’s narrative brought about by long-term poor decision making – the expectation is that the player upon reaching a bad end shuts the game down and starts anew (or at least, reloads back a few saves to address their hubris). A game over is not synonymous with the game being “finished”, and does not provide any narrative closure. A “game over” is the player, or character, making too many short-term mistakes, which results in the game locking the player out of pushing forward the narrative. The bad end is differentiated from a standard “game over” screen by the feeling of fatalistic finality. ![]() These ideas would be later fleshed out most prominently through the visual novel genre, which uses the potential of these endings to increase player engagement in the narrative, leading to a stronger emotional connection than a standard, linear story. In games such as Double Dragon or Dragon Quest for the NES, the player is provided with the end-game choice to join the villain, resulting in an ending where the protagonist is miserable and the world falls into ruin. It appears across various genres as an early example of player choice. Bad endings are an interesting example of convergent evolution in the history of the game narrative.
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