The Stack

Oleari’s current guild in has suddenly started doing raids. There’s one scheduled for every Tuesday and Thursday until the end of the month. I think this is happening as a push to get guild XP and consequent perks, and, perhaps more importantly, to reach the guild level cap and get people to stop being concerned with guild leveling. (The whole system of guild levels is a recent addition, and there’s been some complaining on the guild chat about it, how Guild Experience distorts the guild experience.)

Now, to the extent that I’m playing this game to understand the WoW phenomenon, going on a raid or two seems essential. Raids are a big part of the WoW image. Even if you only have a vague understanding of what a raid is (and my own understanding is kind of vague; I gather they’re like dungeons, but with multiple parties acting together), you’ve probably at least encountered jokes about raids as the dedicated nerd’s one unshakable commitment. So I definitely want to experience that firsthand. Also, raids done as a guild activity help the participants’ guild Reputation, which is one area where I’m sorely lacking: I’m still only about 1/6 of the way to achieving Friendly status, which locks me out of most of the guild perks. Which is fair, I suppose, considering how seldom I have anything to do with the guild beyond the chat.

Raids seem to be rare these days, so this is an opportunity not to be missed. Except for a couple of problems: the raids scheduled for my guild all require the Cataclysm expansion, and they’re calibrated for level-85 characters (the current maximum). Oleari, by far my most advanced character, is not quite 60.

It seems like there’s a bit of a newbie lock-out problem here. There’s been a little bit of guild chatter about the newer members’ lack of activity in the guild, but how can we participate? There are other guild activities, often spontaneous, but they’re mainly about doing “heroic” versions of dungeons, similarly too high-level for me. It seems like people are just expected to be at or close to the level cap with at least one of their characters, with the bulk of the game being just a hurdle you have to clear to achieve this normal status. Once such an attitude is entrenched, it may become self-reinforcing, with people power-leveling who otherwise wouldn’t. Or maybe it’s just that the non-power-levelers drop out after a while. There are guilds specifically described as “leveling” guilds, but I don’t see any “stop and smell the roses” guilds.

Have I mentioned my goblin turbo-trike? No? I’ve had it for a while now, and it’s easily my most prized possession in World of Warcraft.

I described goblin trikes in a previous post as three-wheeled go-karts. The turbo-trike is similar, but goes faster, and has a raccoon tail on an antenna and flames painted on the engine housing, clearly souped-up but still as ungainly-looking as the original, half hot rod and half Big Wheel. Like all mounts in this game, it vanishes when not in use; obtaining a mount means learning a spell you can use to summon it. I have several mounts, some in both their slow and fast versions, and, aside from the fact that some are fast and some are slow, they’re basically all equivalent in terms of gameplay. But the feel of the trikes is superior in two respects. First, the ride feels very smooth. With other mounts, you get hoofbeats and the rocking motion of galloping. Goblin trikes just go forward, without any fuss. You can move and steer (both in and out of vehicles) with the mouse by holding both left and right buttons down, and doing so in a trike feels very simple and direct in a way that a more complicated animation would spoil.

Secondly, trikes are pleasingly incongruous. Now, Azeroth is a technologically diverse place. Chainmail and rifles are both commonplace, and robots and rocketships are not unheard of. So internal combustion engines have a place here, even if they’re magically summoned. Nonetheless, many of the settings — elfin glades, deep jungles, trackless wastelands — have dominant moods that jar a little with puttering around in a little car. (It helps that the design of the trike kind of jars with itself. The trike is automatically scaled to fit its owner, but “fit” here means “appears to be a little too small for”. Oleari really needs a fez.) I won’t say it spoils the mood exactly — but it does help to keep things from feeling too serious.

The best part is that trikes have all the abilities that all the other mounts do, but the mere fact that it’s a little car doing them makes it all much jollier. What abilities are these?

• It can jump. With a horse, you’d take that for granted. With a car, it becomes like something out of an old videogame. Sometimes when I’m going over the top of a hill, I’ll jump at the end, knowing that I’ll take damage when I hit the ground, just because it seems somehow appropriate. Other steeds do not inspire this behavior.
• It can go up stairs, on ramps, and into some buildings. Most interiors automatically unmount you, but some of the larger, more monumental enclosed spaces are treated like outdoors, so you can send the trike zooming up and down corridors like it’s a child’s toy.
• It can swim. It can swim underwater, just driving upward and downward like a little open-air submarine. I recall James Bond had a car that could do this in one film, but his was at least airtight, and went through a little transformation sequence to shift between ground mode and underwater mode. Also, although it doesn’t involve swimming per se, driving along the bottom of a lake and emerging on the other side is fun.
• Shamans have a spell for walking on water. It applies to your mount as well. I’ve come to really like driving around on the surface of the ocean. It’s often the easiest way to get from point A to point B, because there are no obstacles, not even any wandering monsters. (The ocean has monsters, but they’re all underwater.) Again, you can do this with any mount, but the trike’s smoother ride brings out the smoothness of the surface.

Combining these, sometimes the game presents an opportunity to jump into a body of water, be carried under the surface by your momentum, and then surface and drive away.

Soon, Oleari will be advanced enough to be permitted flying mounts. We’ll see if the turbo trike is still my favorite mount or not when that happens, but at the moment, it seems to me that flying has the danger of making the terrain irrelevant. Half the fun of the trike is how it interacts with the terrain.

Questing in low-level areas helps to satisfy my sense of completism: as I’ve mentioned before, each zone of Azeroth has an Achievement for completing a certain number of quests (generally several short of what’s attainable), and at the rate I’m going, it looks like getting all of the quest Achievements for one or both continents is a reasonable goal. But that isn’t my only motivation. When I started doing it, it had more to do with herbalism. Early on, when I was questing in the Northern Barrens (which were appropriately-leveled for me at the time), I found that the place was riddled with a plant called “mageroyal”, which, at the time, I didn’t have enough Herbalism skill to gather. This was frustrating enough that I eventually departed for a zone with herbs I could pick, and didn’t come back until I’d had enough practice to gather mageroyal to my heart’s content. By this point I was too advanced for the quests to be challenging, but I did them anyway, because just picking herbs without any other simultaneous goals is kind of boring.

Mageroyal was plentiful enough in the places that I was going through repeatedly that I accumulated a glut of the stuff, which I stuffed into a satchel in my bank vault. The same later happened on a different continent with kingsblood. ¹Pretty much all the herb names follow this pattern of two-word compounds. In fact, the game as a whole is inordinately fond of this formation, starting with the title. I hoarded these things because I had potential future needs for them: Oleari is also a student of alchemy.

My alchemy skill has long lagged behind my herbalism: most potions have two components, and although I have a surplus of some herbs, I have a shortage of others. In fact, that’s more or less inevitable. Practicing alchemy generally means making the most advanced potion you can until you run out of one of the ingredients. But I had something of a breakthrough lately, in that I started finding just the right herbs to let me advance. Partly this can be credited to my finally discovering how to find herbs. An earlier comment mentioned that pickable herbs call attention to themselves by sparkling, which hadn’t been my experience at all. It turns out that they only do this if you have the mini-map set to plot herb locations. (Probably I hadn’t noticed this because the last time I right-clicked on the mini-map was with a different character who didn’t have herbalism and thus didn’t have the option.) And making them sparkle is crucial for some types of herb. Mageroyal and kingsblood are colorful enough to stand out, but fadeleaf, which is used in invisibility potions, is, appropriately, really hard to spot. But I don’t want to overstate the effect this had on my gathering. Mainly I was just exploring new territories, with different distributions of flora.

Now, I’ve spent quite some time speculatively picking herbs that I had no immediate use for. And this means that suddenly being able to practice alchemy had a slingshot effect. Raising my skill a little gave me access to a new potion recipe, one that I could make using herbs that had been languishing in my vault for some time. Making as much of that potion as I could, I gained enough alchemy skill to learn another potion, and so on. For a while I was running back and forth and back and forth between the bank and the alchemy trainer, until came to my senses and just cleared the vault of herbs. (Well, not quite cleared. I’ve still got more mageroyal in there than I know what to do with.) So now I’m considerably more advanced at alchemy and have a great deal more vault space than previously, both good things.

It strikes me that a sufficiently wealthy character could just buy a bunch of herbs at auction and zoom all the way to maximum alchemy skill from nothing in a single day. One could conceivably sell alchemy kits — and tailoring kits, armorcrafting kits, etc. — that contain everything you need for such a purpose. And if I can think of this, there are probably people already doing it.

Some years back, a gnomish rogue called Noor the Pacifist attracted some attention by attempting to advance as far as possible in World of Warcraft without killing anything — not even indirectly, by joining in a party and sharing experience from kills. This endeavor seems to have been done in the same spirit as conduct challenges in Nethack, only much more visibly. People make attempts at memorable characters all the time, and some become well-known within their communities, but Noor is the only player character who’s ever really stood out for me. The simple act of resistance, of refusing to go where the rules of the game lead, is a lot more striking here than it would be in most games, because the story of WoW is so very much a story of war — moreso even than most combat-based CRPGs, possibly even moreso than some wargames.

But Noor wasn’t the first attempt at pacifism by that player, nor the last. And in fact other people are trying it out now, because, as with many aspects of the game, the changes in Cataclysm have made it easier.

There have always been sources of combat-free XP. You get a certain amount just for exploring regions for the first time. There are various quests that don’t require combat: quests to fetch items, deliver messages, gather herbs, etc. (I suppose you could argue that a pacifist shouldn’t be doing espionage missions that lead directly to battles, but I don’t think this bothers the pacifist players much.) But there’s a finite number of regions to explore and quests to do — especially considering that a pacifist will be simply locked out of large sections of the quest tree.

As of Cataclysm, you can gain XP from ordinary, non-quest-based mining and herb-gathering. This drops with your character level, though, just like fighting monsters or doing quests below your level. But there’s an even bigger gain: the new daily cooking and fishing quests in Orgrimmar. These give a substantial wodge of XP, and, unless my eyes deceive me, it scales with your level. A pacifist couldn’t do both quests every day — at least one of the cooking quests involves killing pigs — but between them, they seem to get you about 10% of the way to the next level.

Of course, you’re going to level slower that way. But are you going to level slower than me? I’ve been taking the scenic route through the game for a while now, pursuing quests for the sake of pursuing quests, even when they yield no XP whatever. A limited-conduct run wouldn’t be significantly slower than this, and would yield a better story and bragging rights afterward. Maybe I should try to figure out some other obscure and difficult limitation. But I get the impression that people have pretty much already rung all the changes on that.

I’m still in that state where I don’t have time or attention to spare on starting (or even resuming) a major game. But I figured I should put in a little more time on WoW as long as I’m paying for it, and logged in for a couple of quick sessions, doing low-level quests over in the Hinterlands. (I’m very close to getting the Achievement for that region.) But even as I come back to the game, it seems that a lot of people are leaving it. At least, that was the constant refrain on the chat channels.

Partly, it seems, it’s the competition: people torn away by Rift, which has been very specifically advertising itself as a WoW-killer for the last month or two. Partly it’s just that a whole lot of people reopened their accounts just to see the effects of the Cataclysm expansion, and now that they’ve seen it, they’re losing interest again. Or so it’s said. I honestly don’t have any direct evidence that people actually are leaving in droves. If I were to go to Orgrimmar, a place that I think of as the Times Square of Azeroth, and find it deserted, that would be something. But I haven’t been back there yet at all. Like I said, I’ve been in the Hinterlands. Not encountering anyone in the Hinterlands comes as no surprise.

Of course, even if most of the players are suddenly leaving, it doesn’t strongly affect my mostly-solo play experience. It might even be beneficial, by reducing the competition in auctions or something like that. But even so, the idea that the game is on the wane just as I’m getting into it is disheartening, like I’ve cast my lot in with a losing cause. Which is a completely irrational reaction for someone who used to play and enjoy A Tale in the Desert. I’m pretty sure that ATitD‘s user base on its most popular day ever was still multiple orders of magnitude below WoW‘s today. But that means that ATitD has always been the scrappy underdog, while WoW has to play the role of the empire in decline.

And when I say it “has to”, I mean that it’s inevitable. If not today, then someday, and soon enough that most current and former players will live to see it happen. This is the fundamental tragedy of MMOs: that they’re doomed to peter out. A single-player game can end in triumph, but a conventional ¹Note that A Tale in the Desert doesn’t qualify as “conventional”, and tries to deal with the problem by periodically bringing its story to a conclusion and starting over. But since it does in fact start over, with mainly the same players, it’s not all that different for our purposes here. MMO can only end in lack of interest. Oh, sure, in theory Blizzard could decide to end it while it’s still on top, as various TV shows have managed to do, but while this might be right thing to do artistically, it’s unfeasible financially. They’re not going to kill their cash cow until it stops being milkable.

I spoke before about how WoW‘s popularity is self-supporting. And this isn’t just based on the perception of popularity; actual raw numbers of people give the game certain advantages, regardless of whether people are aware of them or not. But the perception of popularity is undeniably a factor. I mean, heck, my own perception of the game’s popularity, of its ubiquity in game culture, is what convinced me to start playing. So I start to wonder if this advantage might be double-edged. Will a perception of people leaving in droves induce people to actually leave in droves? I don’t know. Very likely not; the old-timers have probably heard it all before.

This has been a very busy time for me, as you might have guessed from my lack of posts. It isn’t really the case that I haven’t had time to play games, but I haven’t had time to play games and blog about them. And so I’ve got about a third of the new achievements in Half-Life 2, which I got off the Stack three years ago when it didn’t have achievements yet, and I’ve gotten maybe a quarter of the way into the latest Gemcraft sequel, Gemcraft Labyrinth, which isn’t on the Stack because I haven’t paid for it. Gemcraft Labyrinth is a game you can play it for free on the web, but certain optional features are locked until you pony up some dough, and the UI pointedly reminds you of this every time you begin or end a level, so it’s likely that I’ll break down and pay at some point.

Still, I can’t ignore the Stack completely, can I? And so I spent a little time this weekend polishing off the game I was closest to completing, Faerie Solitaire. There are still two Challenge levels that I’d like to complete at some point, and I’m missing enough of the fairy pets that I doubt I’ll ever bother to catch ’em all. ¹Update: See the icon for the “collect each pet’s adult form” achievement (it’s at the very bottom). That does not describe me right now. (It’s still not clear to me if the eggs that the pets hatch from are granted at random, or if they’re under specific spots in specific levels. The latter would make hunting the last ones down more appealing.)

I don’t really have a lot to say about the game that I haven’t already said. The final levels didn’t reveal anything new or transform gameplay in any unexpected ways, especially considering that I had already purchased all the power-ups. When you finish the last level, you get to passively listen to the hero describe confronting an evil wizard, and then there’s a sequel hook. Which has got me speculating: what would I put in a sequel if it were up to me?

I’d want to elaborate on the game mechanics, obviously. I felt that the gameplay didn’t even really support a game of this length, so definitely I wouldn’t want to keep things the same in a sequel. Probably I’d try to figure out some way to make the layouts more relevant, less prone to devolving into a bunch of independent columns.

I’d want to do more with the pets. At the very least, I’d give them spot animations to make it seem more like you’re collecting creatures rather than portraits of creatures. Also, they’d be more interesting if your choice of current pet had some kind of effect on the game beyond bringing it closer to its adult form. Certain pets could give you bonus gold, for example, or turn additional cards face-up. Even if it’s undesirable for pets to affect the main game this way, they could at least affect the pet system: pets could make it more likely to find specific resources. There’s all sorts of unused potential here.

Finally, I’d want to give the fairies more of a voice in the story. Now, the story of Faerie Solitaire isn’t the most relevant part of the game. It’s pretty much just tacked on. But it’s tacked on poorly. We have all these fairy pets, we have constructions in Fairyland, we have cards with pictures on them, we have fairies as an ostensible unifying theme. I’d want to see this stuff become relevant in the story. In what we have, the story is instead about a journey to defeat an evil wizard, with fairies as a mere MacGuffin, not as characters. Fairies have the potential to guide the hero or trick him, to set quests, give hints, keep secrets, misunderstand your intentions, cast spells that help or hinder the player. Zanzarah, still the best fairy-themed videogame I’ve played, felt a lot more like a story about fairies, even though it didn’t do much more with them than Faerie Solitaire does — the fairies there are mainly treated as tools, not characters, and never really have agendas of their own. But at least it has wild fairies that attack you spontaneously, which makes them seem self-willed.

It’s easy to tell when you’ve entered the endgame in Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble, because time stops advancing. The last chapter is played in a perpetual midnight, which is plainly symbolic: it’s by far the darkest chapter. Ironic, then, that it’s also the point at which so much comes to light.

For Brigiton is a town with a secret, a guilt shared by the entire adult population. In fact, it has several, and they all come tumbling out one after another towards the end. One fairly big one involving the town’s finances was already revealed in a previous chapter, and in the process explained quite a lot of the townfolks’ seemingly irrational behavior, and their willingness to accept and even defend blatant lies — to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it is difficult to persuade a man of the truth when his salary depends on his not believing it. The girls’ response to this is to deliberately sabotage the town’s economy, by far the most obviously ill-advised plan in a game full of ill-advised plans. But the dirtier secrets are kept for the end, and dirty indeed they are. One in particular stands out as the dirtiest. I’m going to get spoilery here.

There are several points in the game where the topic of the girls’ eventual marriage comes up. (Looking back, I think they might correlate with the points where it’s possible to recruit boyfriends.) I recall some early NPC comments along the lines of “You’ll understand on your wedding night”. It seemed fairly sinister, in context, and became no less so when other grown-ups found it necessary to remind the girls that marriage is an honorable institution and suchlike. I couldn’t help but speculate about the wedding night secret. Some approximation of the Stepford Wives? A cult of some manner, either Satanic or Lovecraftian? The truth turned out to be not nearly so fanciful, but all the more shocking because of it. Brigiton, it turns out, is the one town in America to have imported the ancient (and probably fictitious) custom of the droit de siegnur. When people in Brigiton marry, the mayor has the legal right to have his way with the bride.

Much has been made of the sequence that starts the final chapter, a scenario involving the attempted rape of one of the girls in your gang by one of the anonymous boys (a potential boyfriend from earlier), and his death at the player’s hands. It’s a shock when it happens, even if you’re anticipating it, because the sudden change in mood from unbridled silliness to raw horror and desperation makes it seem out-of-place. But once you have the full context, it isn’t out of place at all. The boy is just emulating his role model, Mayor Stogie, who has basically raped the entire town. (Worse, in a couple of cases it’s my fault: the game contains some opportunities to bring couples together. I had wondered why they were so angry at me afterward.) You can argue that it’s not that cut-and-dried: as one NPC points out, the wedding night law is easily circumvented by just not getting married in Brigiton, and at least some of the people who have gone along with it have done so in exchange for benefits of some kind. So, not so much rape as socially-approved prostitution? But then, that’s not exactly an either/or proposition. In one case, the “benefit” consisted of letting the groom out of prison, with the implied threat that he wasn’t ever getting out any other way, so there’s definitely coercion. The mayor is a master of taking advantage of situations, especially situations where people are desperate. And he’s willing to manufacture the desperation.

For most of the game, the mayor comes off as a mere caricature of an old-fashioned American politician, all bombast and petty corruption, and dimwitted enough for a bunch of high school girls to pose a serious challenge to him. (The scene where you “debate” him via the game’s usual insult minigame makes him seem particularly silly.) Here at the end, he becomes more like a personification of unquestioned privilege. Even when he was in high school himself, we learn, he was a bully, beating people up in the secure knowledge that no one would ever challenge his right to do so. The most distressing part of this kind of injustice is the cooperation of the victims, and that’s continued into his political career. The wedding-night law was adopted as part of a political compromise that also gave the women of Brigiton the vote, years before women’s suffrage was adopted nationwide. The woman who came up with this compromise figured that she had outsmarted the mayor, because the part she wanted would render the part the mayor wanted moot: given the power, the women of the town would replace the mayor with someone who’d repeal the wedding-night law. But no, to her shock, everyone kept on voting for him, proving his more cynical view of humanity correct, that people will rally behind those who mistreat them, will try to compensate for their weakness by taking the side of the (apparently) strong. This is what’s at stake at the end: human nature, whether people possess the will to rise up against the kind of entrenched power that exists only because it’s entrenched. Well, at least the dangerous high school girls do. They remind me a little of Veronica Mars, another fictional high-school girl with a penchant for uncovering secrets and a relentless crusade against privilege.

Having seen the final chapter, I kind of see Big Fish’s point about the sexual content, which isn’t at all limited to what I’ve mentioned above. The game gets raunchier as it goes along — the ending I got involved the mayor receiving implied oral sex from a donkey. There’s nothing explicit, but that’s because it always stops just barely short of saying what it obviously means. A young child playing the game would be severely confused about what’s going on a large portion of the time, and, more importantly, would completely miss the point of the story.

My one biggest dissatisfaction with the game remains the amount of content I missed without intending to. While it’s true that, as I said before, important stuff waits for you, there are a lot of optional sub-quests bound to specific chapters, and it isn’t always obvious which of the goals you’re pursuing in parallel is the one that makes the others go away uncompleted. I’ll try to be more thorough if I play again. And this is a game that more or less demands to be played a second time, if only to see all the hints and foreshadowing in full knowledge of that they mean. Plus, I’m a little curious about what happens if you manage to successfully flirt with the detective in your final encounter with him, and that would require some serious min-maxing.

Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble is set in America in the 1920s. This much is clear from the mentions of Prohibition, which becomes a prominent part of the plot at one point. But there are some apparent anachronisms. There’s an occasional bit of music that sounds out-of-place to me, too boogie-woogie for the period. But apparently, even though boogie didn’t hit its peak of popularity until the late 1930s, it existed as a distinct form as early as the 19th century. How likely you’d be to hear it in a well-to-do suburb is another question.

Which brings us to the matter of racial issues. “What racial issues?” you might ask, especially if you’ve played the game. To which I respond: Exactly. The people of Brigiton, blinkered and hypocritical though they are in many respects, are remarkably enlightened when it comes to race. The high school itself is integrated; there are at least two black playable characters, and they’re simply accepted as dangerous high school girls, no different from the rest. One of the teachers is black — a woman, in fact, who teaches science and math. Not only that, she has a romance subplot with a white man, and, while there’s quite a lot of worry and hesitation on both sides there, there’s no suggestion that this would in itself be scandalous.

Of course, this isn’t a realistic game. It’s comically distorted — I’d call it cartoonish, but the style makes it more reminiscent of a slapstick silent film. This game is to the real 1920s as the more usual CRPG setting is to medieval Europe. It takes the setting as a flavor, not as a binding contract.

Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble turns out to be an excellent game to play on a laptop on the bus — much moreso than the last game I tried playing that way. There’s nothing realtime about it, and nothing requiring precision. The necessary context is minimal, in terms of both gameplay and plot — like in Chrono Trigger, the story all happens in the moment, and builds in unpredictable directions rather than bending toward an inevitable climax. And somehow, the game just makes the bus ride go faster. I settle in to play a few mini games, and all of the sudden I’m home.

It seems like the main complaint about the game in other reviews was that it got monotonous after a while. The mini-games don’t provide a lot of variety — far less than a typical modern combat-based RPG, because those are always full of special-case monsters that require you to vary your tactics (until you become powerful enough to just brute-force your way through them, anyway). This is something that would be good to address in any future game inspired by DHSGiT‘s mechanics. But even here, it’s really only an issue if you’re trying to play it in long sessions, like you would a normal CRPG. My first two sessions, back in January, were like that. Playing on the bus means shorter sessions, and that seems to be the way to play this game for maximal enjoyment — as well as being just plain healthier than obsessive marathon play.

It all makes me think that this game, or some development of it, would be a good match for cell phones. The UI seems pretty touchscreen-friendly already. I wonder if the developers have even considered this possibility? I wouldn’t be surprised if they had already given up on the idea of getting it into the iTunes App Store, considering their experiences with Big Fish, which removed the game from their catalog on the basis of “some strong sexual content towards the end of the game”. I haven’t got that far yet — I still only have access to three of the game’s four gameboards — but fans of the game insist that it’s PG-13 at most. Still, I can imagine Apple looking askance just on the basis of precedent. There’s always Android, but is it a big enough market to justify the effort of porting by itself? I don’t know.

So, I’m getting back into Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble a little bit. Like most modern CRPGs, it keeps track of your current goals and has a handy recap feature, so it didn’t take long for me to remember where I was in the ongoing story of Brigiton School for Girls and environs. The latest scandal: pogo sticks. The mayor has banned them, but his reasons are specious, and seem to be mainly an excuse to send a gang of toughs around to look for contraband pogo sticks and intimidate people. Meanwhile, the thrill of the illicit has brought pogoing to a clandestine new popularity. Most of the story is at this level of silliness, and this level of lightly-veiled sociopolitical commentary.

In fact, the one thing I dislike about the story the most is the fear of missing bits of it. To some extent, this is inevitable — the game features multiple endings, and I’ve already been through some scenes that can come to multiple conclusions, where failure to meet a particular goal doesn’t impede the plot. But you can also cut yourself off from opportunities — implicitly including opportunities for character advancement through mini-games — by concluding sections of the plot before you intend to. I’ve done a certain amount of backtracking to older saves just to check out what I’ve missed. Arguably this is the wrong way to play the game, and one is better served by playing it through straight multiple times.

The thing that’s really upsetting is when I’m cut out of a plot branch by nothing more than bad timing. This is essentially a turn-based game: time in the gameworld goes in discrete lumps of at least an hour, and sometimes more. The school buildings are only open at certain times of day, as are the buildings in town. There was one sub-plot where I encouraged two shy lovebirds to go to the town library at the same time. Rushing over there afterward to help things along, I was dismayed to discover that I had done this too late in the afternoon, and the library was now closed. This sort of restriction strikes me as a weakness in the game, liable to engender frustration.

On the other hand, the two of them were still in the library when I stopped by the next day. Really important plot events wait for you. But then, isn’t this just another kind of weakness in a timekeeping system?