- Dec 22, 2017
- 216
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That's a good point. I know I've seen at least one choice-based VN recently where it didn't take that into account, so it was easy to sequence break and have characters talk earnestly about an event that hadn't happened yet.It's hard to write meaningful main character development in a sandbox game. You can do it reasonably well with secondary characters, as their sidequests form natural character arcs, but the MC is stuck, because the player can do these quests in almost any order. You can structure the sidequests into acts, forcing the play to complete all sidequests in act 1 before act 2 starts, and I think PL does that kind of thing, but that still means that the MC will behave the same during all of act 1 (and act 1 in PL is huge).
Yes, the MC is a nice guy and not a fuckboy, he starts out as a slacker that lacks initiative. He is easily browbeaten by not-Branson and the Indian guy. It's frustrating to watch him agree to the sex chip economy in act 1. It's frustrating to watch him scrounge for chips to build a bungalow *after* he shows some spine in act 2. There aren't even that many pageant girls that still care about the pageant. In a more linear VN I would expect the MC to start a rebellion against not-Branson by that stage of the game.
With a game that's set up like this, it would probably make more sense if the first act had less options, which is to say, less love interests with their own story arcs, so the MC's character development carried over more uniformly. That's not really a criticism of PL--it is what it is, and what it is isn't bad--but it's interesting to talk about story structure as it relates to an adventure game/visual novel.
It would be nice if there are more opportunities to get one over on the Capitalist Gang, though. Obviously the MC in PL wouldn't do any shady shit towards that end--have you noticed how many H-game protagonists are total fucking sociopaths?--but you could at least gradually work towards getting people out of the resort.