Pic vaguely related. When playing persona 3/4/5 it slowly dawned on me how it's kind of fucked up that the game incentivizes you to always tell people what they want to hear and change your personality constantly to match the situation (swapping personas). It further encourages this by granting gameplay benefits for ranking relationships up, and at least in the case of 4, locking the true ending behind being the most efficient at getting people to like you.

I haven't played many visual novels/dating sims, but from my limited experience the interesting ones tend to acknowledge this in some way. Doki Doki gets kind of close with it's meta fuckery but the focus is more on how being a visual novel character would suck than about player manipulation. Echo nods in this direction in some scenes where people notice how off the player character is acting, but it's mainly about gay trauma and some other stuff I think I don't get because a) I'm not from a decaying american small town and b) I'm not a furry. Not in the genre, but I thought that was where Deltarune was going with the weird route, but the recent lore dump points more in the direction of commenting on sequence breaking/glitching the game for some as of now unknown purpose.

I feel like the premise of a game calling you out for acting creepy as fuck is obvious enough that something like this must already exist. Does it ?(reccs for good VNs in general are also appreciated)

  • MolotovHalfEmpty [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I haven't played many games with visual novel / dating sim elements (Persona 5, Dream Daddy, a bit of AI: Somnium Files) but you're right that they seem to lean into the video-game logic rather than humanity to varying degrees.

    I played Life Is Strange True Colours last year and despite not liking the previous ones really enjoyed it. There was a distinct character moment where I told someone what they wanted to hear in the moment to spare them some embaressment and avoid potential conflict. When that choice caused tension later and eventually backfired dramatically for me I was impressed. I had assumed I had chosen the 'best option' by playing it like a videogame choice, when actually everything would have worked out much better all round if I'd gone with my gut and treated it as an actual conversation.