The Ace: Was considered one of the top pilots back at his old school, NYCU, and can rise through the ranks along with his team as the best team ACE Academy has to offer.An aspiring Mech Pilot, he discovers a mysterious upgrade within his mech that could be the secret to what happened to his parents. An exchange student from the United States who applies to ACE Academy after the death of his parents. I mean, only meaningful choices are great as an idea, but implementing them is so hard it's never really been done in any game, to the best of my knowledge.The protagonist. That's probably the best way to handle it, unless you're some hypothetical gazillionaire who can afford to hire scores of people and put them to work for years fleshing out multiple highly divergent plots, then welding the plots together in one work. Probably the most reactive game I remember playing is Alpha Protocol, and even that had a number of fixed encounters and plot points that your choices could just change the context of. Even AAA games that promise large amounts of player agency like Mass Effect end up not being able to truly deliver, simply because of how rapidly the plot tentacles grow out of control, and those are games with hundreds of staff and millions of dollars supporting them. I've put some level of thought into how to structure a VN story over the years as a writing/thought experiment, and the plot charts I come up with for a hypothetical "every choice truly matters" VN end up looking like they escaped from the nightmare corpse-city of Ry'leh, and are about as difficult to make sense of unless I seriously cut them down. But being realistic, I don't think it's possible unless you severely limit the number of choices. I think the high school setting in Japan might be an artifact of their culture what I've read about Japanese high school sounds intense and unpleasant, so there feels like a real sense of missed opportunity for fun there that VN writers in Japan cater to.īut anyway, yeah, I would like a VN where every choice matters too. I mean, when I think of school days I miss, I sure don't think wistfully about High School, but I do on ocassion think about college. Yeah, setting it in college was a breath of fresh air compared to typical Japanese offerings. Katawa Shoujo and the WinterWolves guys are the only ones that come to mind insofar as Western VNs are concerned. There was all this buildup but not a huge amount of emotional payoff at the end. It felt like the whole "foul play" plotline fizzled out right at the end. I didn't understand why the main character did that. Destroying the core also seemed arbitrary. It felt a little too open ended, a little too abrupt, with not quite enough being resolved to really satisfy me. The ending was the main blemish for me on an otherwise great game. Originally posted by Cpl.Facehugger:I agree. The characters here were all likeable and their concerns and feelings felt genuine to me, which is something that I don't say about many VNs in general and even fewer western VNs. It's sad because otherwise I was very impressed with this game and will definitely give strong consideration to future offerings from these devs. Obviously there's a huge sequel hook here, but I'd have liked a little more closure. I think the game would have benefitted greatly from an epilogue of some sort, one that gives at least a little explanation about what happened to the various characters afterwords. I grew to like these characters over the course of the game, and I was disappointed that I didn't get to see what happened to them in the ending though.
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