"Equivalent Side-Character" Syndrome

((Spoilers for YU-NO, Air, and Steins;Gate ahead!))

A well-written side-character really excites me. It's often refreshing to see interactions between these kinds of characters because they tend to have larger flexibility in the story with respect to personality and actions. Sometimes they can even steal the scene they're in (for me personally? Rohan Kishibe from Diamond is Unbreakable, Mettaton from Undertale, to name a few).

Visual novels have it kind of hard in this area, though. It's not so much that VNs don't have well-written characters, but more that the conventions of the medium force these characters to be treated by the narrative in certain ways.

A large portion of visual novels with routes belong to the harem genre, or at least follow conventions of the harem genre (namely that the protagonist has multiple love interests and that each route focuses on a single love interest in some form).

Traditionally, these kinds of games offered up multiple female love interests so that each player would be able to develop a romantic relationship with characters they were actually interested in. Players are more likely to be interested in at least one character if their selection is large, after all. A consequence of this is that they tend to get "equal attention" by the narrative; after all, eroge players tend to get mad when their favorite character is framed as "equivalent" to other female leads but is actually given significantly less attention than the others ("why don't we get a 'Kyou After'? Nagisa is boring!"). This can make the narrative fairly predictable at times, since you know that the stories involving the girls are going to be "balanced" to make sure no one heroine gets more attention than the others. Additionally, there isn't a whole lot of room for one character to steal the spotlight, which can be disappointing.

An interesting example to bring in is Elf's 1996 classic YU-NO: A girl who chants love at the bound of this world. The majority of the female leads exhibit an equal amount of agency over the events in the game, which leads us to assume that they are going to be treated equally towards the end of the game. In the game's final act, the protagonist is sent to an entirely new location and encounters an identical counterpart to one of the game's main heroines. Because the heroines thus far have been "equivalent", I expected to see ALL of them have some appearance, but this never happens. In this last act, one heroine is given more attention to the story, and it was actually slightly disappointing for me. The pretense of equivalency was dropped at the end of the game, violating my expectations in a negative way.

VN's have changed since then, especially since KEY's Air, which features a "true" route. This route occurs after all of the other routes are completed and usually focuses on one (or a few) heroines over the others. Air initially frames one heroine, Misuzu, as "more important" than the others, and the true route focuses exclusively on her. This allows for more narrative focus, since the story is no longer forced to equally accommodate to each heroine. I personally prefer this format since it allows certain characters to really shine, but also because the concept of a single "canon" ending allows the writers of the VN to actually construct a coherent thesis. For example, each of the original routes in KEY's CLANNAD focuses on some aspect of "family", and the true route unifies each of the thematic threads in those routes and presents a final message about family as a catalyst for personal change.

Many of these games don't escape the "Equivalent Side-Character Syndrome", though. Nitroplus's Steins;Gate, while a fantastic game, is a good example to study. There are a variety of female characters, but only two of them actually matter. The others each are only important in that they get a single character arc. The structure of the game makes this aspect especially tedious. We know that since only two characters matter, the rest are going to be treated roughly the same way by the narrative. Once one of those characters gets a story arc, all of them must get a story arc. We are thus given a sizable portion of game that is spent on character arcs that don't entirely matter to the plot, but occur so that each of the minor female leads gets attention.

All in all, this trope isn't all that bad, but it definitely can frame our expectations about the game. If the game goes out of its way to let us know that all of the characters are "equal", then we know that we can have fulfilling experiences no matter which route we take. If the game attempts to elevate certain characters as more important, we can expect a more cohesive, focused narrative. There are great (and also bad) examples of both styles.

ErogeQuest 2016

I'm getting kind of interested in visual novel history, so I'm going to embark on a journey into the deepest depths of hentai hell. I'm not entirely sure how this is going to work, but I'll probably just perform analysis on games within one eroge company at a time, perhaps leading to some masterpiece of the studio.

Everyone knows about KEY and Type-Moon so I might do those later. I think I'll start by looking at C's Ware, the creator of Divi-Dead, and whose author and composer went to Elf to work on YU-NO: A girl who chants love at the bound of this world. A lot of their earlier stuff is reaaaaally bad, so that'll be fun.

Hentai へ！

((And I have like 5 posts that are half-finished, so I guess I'll do those too...))