I forgot to write up thoughts this whole week because of too much work, so I’d better do so now before I forget about it forever.
Also I read the whole topic now and Rudie and I are basically in big picture agreement. I didn’t read the Hinge Problem thing because it might spoil the follow-up, sorry Rudie I’ll get around to reading it sometime within the next five years.
Main thoughts:
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All the characters are bad for over a dozen hours and that is probably a disqualifying problem for most. The lead Okabe is the worst of the bunch as his mad scientist shtick as previously noted is just wretched. The revelation reading this thread that there are actually people like this in Japan was a near November of 2016 level “what is wrong with humanity?” hit.
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At some point approaching twenty or so hours in the characters either for the most part become less bad or a kind of videogame Stockholm Syndrome starts to kick in (my money is on both) in that one no longer is rooting against them and even kinda hope things don’t go too bad for them. It made me question how much of sympathy for fictional characters is due to just being around them for a solid stretch of time as opposed to anything else, so at the very minimum I got that thought out of this experience.
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The story itself is… a complicated matter. There is a very solid narrative notion in there, and for stretches of time it does manage to do an okay job with it. The thing is, after thinking about it over the past few weeks I think if I had to describe how it is flawed I would say that what we got feels like a middle draft. Comparing it to a first draft would be too dismissive, but too much is too sloppily tossed together for me to say that it feels like the final draft for a professional product. It needs at the very least a full re-write, and possibly a couple.
Time travel stories are tricky. You either have to Bill & Ted it where you admit that the details of it all are nothing to worry about in the least and to just go along for a ride, or the details do matter to a degree and you have to keep them straight. This isn’t saying that it has to be scientifically rigorous, this is the story of a bunch of teens accidentally creating a time machine out of a microwave after all, but you really should keep how deep you want to go into whatever details you decide upon rather consistent and make sure that whatever rules you come up with are somewhat sensible and followed.
Steins;Gate has some real struggles in these areas. The first half of the game has no real conflict or stakes and is just following these characters as they try to figure out exactly what it is they are doing, it is paced glacially and they go surprisingly deep into the pseudoscientific theory behind it. While the characters are roughest here the underlying theories they establish are solid enough, there are gradual discoveries that are generally established in too much detail with strict limits put into place. You may try to get around restrictive data size limits by compressing files through one black hole before making use of another which is clearly insane, but it is perfectly acceptable within how this universe is set up.
You know, let’s just say spoiler from this point forward. Also lots of time travel ramblings as I get things off my chest, feel free to skip past this until I exhale.
When the game kicks into its second half and peoples lives are at risk and time leaping becomes commonplace, the story is both better due to the characters being much easier to root for yet still faltering due to the rules of it all from this point forward becoming a poorly justified mess. I believe my first post in this topic was about the protagonist’s baffling decision to try and save his best friend’s life with the time machine by only using it to go back a couple hours. This was justified later after several failures by the girl genius saying that it can only go back 48 hours at a time and hence only to around when the machine was completed, except that said justification was “I don’t know why I barely understand how it works in the first place, if I had more resources it could be more” which is a pure “it is just because it is!” moment at odds with how everything had been established up until that point.
This is a game that spent several minutes pointing out how there happened to be an internet cable leading directly from their apartment in Japan to the large hadron collider in Europe presumably just to explain how the data transmission speeds between the two could be so fast (this never tying into anything else still baffles me). I’m not saying that everything needs to be that over-explained (again, the pacing in the first half of the game is bad in part due to stuff like this) but it makes it hard to overlook when it is suddenly tossed aside. Also explaining the time limit afterwards as opposed to beforehand when it would have explained his limited usage is a single example of the whole “could have really used another draft” thing.
That is a minor level thing, but the thing that lost me the most in the game’s back half (which again is better than the first and not outright bad) is how it handles people’s deaths. The main deal is that the universe/worldline has certain things that basically have to occur unless you deviate things dramatically, and for whatever reasons in this one it appears to be the death of your childhood friend. This is odd but fine. The problem is the potential deaths of every other person in the world where the rules are…
…I have no idea what the rules are. At a certain point the protagonist gets it into his head that within a given worldline if you die on that day it is impossible to avoid, and if you don’t you are functionally immortal for said day. By this I mean not just the special case of his childhood friend which occurs across multiple worldlines, but in a given worldline life and death is more or less carved in stone. I could chalk this up to him clearly suffering a bit of a breakdown but a couple other characters seem to echo the belief as well.
Many hours earlier a message was sent into the past to try and save a side character’s father’s life, and it does. This does result in the worldline changing (which is fair, although how it changed is still… problematic) but there was really no pushback from the world itself. Maybe the rules are that emails you send to the past can change the world and people’s fates but sending knowledge back into your previous self’s head can change your actions but not fate? Like you can send an email back to someone to tell them not to cross a road so they won’t get hit by a car, they listen and the worldline changes, but if you time leap your thoughts back and stop them from crossing directly the world will then have a satellite land on their head.
I believe this eventually extends to “this event will always occur of object will always be here in this worldline” type occurrences, but it has been a busy week so maybe not.
Then you get to the true ending route and the big deal is that in this worldline the girl genius has a 50% chance of dying given your actions (your interference is being done by actual physical time travel now and seems to require certain loops to be formed) yet you basically force someone to stab you and you then rip your wound further open with your bare hands because you know you don’t die on this worldline, but when it changes and you end up on a different worldline you might so LOL on you… it basically became impossible to do anything but just follow along on a very superficial “this is what is happening now and these are the rules that are in place now” level.
And that’s a big shame as the basic story they were telling at that point was fine and still clearly better than what came before. The basic “I must undo all the careless changes to the timeline I made before I realized how dangerous it could be, but doing so means hurting all those around me in ways they won’t recall but I always will” premise is a rather good hook, and for the most part the character notes are hit right during this. The life and death bit doesn’t even come up for solid stretches of it.
*exhales
As a point of comparison the other “big” VN-type series I’ve played is the first two 999/VLR games and they are notably crazier in terms of how things work, but they are also very tight in terms of everything having an explanation and everything being internally consistent. I think they are both flawed games and stories, but personally I think I am better equipped to deal with “utterly insane but internally explained tightly” than “a bit goofy but internally inconsistent”.
I am now very tired and terrified to go back and see exactly how rambling that all was, but don’t feel like potentially scrapping it and starting from scratch another day so it’ll have to do. Maybe don’t play the game, there is worth in the back half but suggesting another human go through the first half to get there feels mean.
Man I didn’t even get to yell about the game constantly flipping back and forth between “the butterfly effect means the smallest changes can have dramatic effects in the future” and how stubborn to change it often appears to be.
I feel better now.
