Writing Analysis (in Marx's understanding) on Liberation Day
Apr 4, 2016 15:46:10 GMT -8
Drath, vaendryl, and 3 more like this
Post by Marx-93 on Apr 4, 2016 15:46:10 GMT -8
So, today it's been a month since the release! And after that, and Samu-kun protesting about lack of feedback, I promised a writing analysis that would make Drath gameplay writeups look small! And here it is, the first part at least. Yeah, I think I'll need another part like this one to finish or maybe even a third. As a foreword: this an extensive analysis on the more technical parts of the writing. While complete objectivity is impossible, the objective of this writeup is to mark the parts where even according to technical standards something went wrong. I'll thus try to avoid the problems with false expectations like lack of routes and choices, being short by its price, or problems with the ending. I also plead for people to avoid that; we've beaten the dead horse to the afterlife already (and if you feel like you have to do it again, create another thread to it). Due to wanting to be expansive, I'll also try to tackle a lot of issues, so you may feel a certain point maybe isn't emphasized enough; that's not my intention in any way.
Also, as some people know me, I'll be blunt and a tad ironic, like always.
So, I promised it, and here it is. A (very) big wall of text just focused on Liberation’s Day writing; both the problems and its curiosities. I’ll try to focus mostly on the writing, but as Liberation Day is a game, and not a book, I’ll probably also go over the gameplay itself, even if only due to overall nuances they add to final work.
General:
One of the better things about the original Sunrider was how all the mechanics were linked in a fairly clear way. Being moralist or prince affected your decisions, and those could affect the missions you did. At the same time, those battles gave you money and Command Points, supposed to be used to upgrade your units out of battle and be used in choices too out of battle. Yes, the latter never really panned out and you used them mostly in orders, but during all of MoA you were always waiting the “big moment” in which your CP will pay off, and even the few times it was used it was satisfying in a way. Out of battle you had agency to upgrade and visit your pilots and comrades, and even to do side-missions to increase the 2 resources above. One of the side missions even gave you an item to affect only the story with no real effect on battle. Overall, the game felt like a cohesive whole; one part affected the other naturally in a cycle. Blowing up the Legion not only was a personal choice, but it also meant the Sunrider was unavailable during the next mission. You couldn’t restock and upgrade between continuous battles. Saving the diplomats and children meant facing a tougher situation.
Even in waifu mode, the gameplay was still there, because in a way it was significant. Unlike with SA, mods without gameplay were harder to implement, and arguably made the game weaker.
Now, Liberation Day sought to streamline a lot of things, but the way it was done meant that (until 2.00) instead of maintaining this cohesive whole, the game was kinda divided in 2. In one hand you had the prettier VN parts, now fully lineal without any agency. In the other you had the more massive battles. However, without meaningful choices and CP not affecting anything outside battle, it developed into the 2 parts having close to no relation to each other. You had the choice the upgrade whenever you wanted out of battle, but when do you naturally gravitated to do it? Well, just before the battle when you’re given the nice choices and Renpy doesn’t do strange things with it, of course.
This is a very stark contrast with MoA, where upgrades were almost always one of the earliest things you did after the battle; you were asking yourself “When will be the next battle?! It will be a double one?!”. You basically change from having interactions everywhere to only doing it in one of the 2 parts of the game. Not only that, this division on the 2 parts mostly meant that instead of a coherent storytelling, the game’s narrative seemed to simply grind to a halt for most battles (with 2 marked exceptions). The Battle of Far Port for example worked both narratively and in gameplay. You were fighting the fleet you saw in the CG and narration before, and you fought them in a way that was coherent with the strategy formulated at the beginning of the same mission; both gameplay and story joined to make the best together, and that was something noticeable even in Waifu mode. Wedding Crash was running against insurmountable odds and needing to fight 2 Battleships to escape. Ongess showed you the power of Assault Carriers through gameplay despite introducing them in a full blown CGI.
Now, for example, battle 6 in Lib Day? Supposed to be a thousand Ryders march? You have a handful of Ryders… as a frontal screen, after it there are 6 BBS. Oh, and the reinforcements on the second turn are precisely a group of Fast Cruisers against an Alliance Carrier; you’ll thought that would be precisely an event worthy of a little battle epicness, a way to explain why Fast Cruisers (explicitly associated with Fontana’s modern Fleet) had somehow managed to sneak by, and , you know, introducing the Alliance Carrier? Nope, have fun fighting! And of course, the following reinforcements are as far as you can get from the “march of thousands of Elites and Mooks”.
This is the most blatant example, but Lib Day was full of things like this. In MoA you had the occasional side-mission with close to 0 narrative, but even that was only for side-missions.
This stark divide is also probably what caused a lot of the communication issues and problems with the ending. You had basically only agency during the battles, so the beta-testers were naturally drawn and focused on that part. At the same time, this meant that the focus on battles shifted from “forming a coherent narrative and being balanced” more towards being “balanced” as the beta testers simply gave feedback related to the battles. The frustration at the ending itself build of the natural frustration on the lack of agency; you had the power during battles, and were good at it! But that means sh*t for the rest of the game. Darth’s favourite review actually perfectly shows it; the wishall was an item that you won in a battle of all things, a reflection of your skill and agency. Yet it was utterly useless when the player felt it mattered the most. That’s breaking the agency of the player, making feel like he simply doesn’t matter and the story will follow on his own ignoring him. That’s the point where what you’re playing stops really being a game and more 2 different things (a Book and a battle system) slapped together.
To be honest, I reached this conclusion while asking myself about why I found some parts of Liberation Day so repetitive sometimes(as you could see in my previous thoughts of the gameplay). The balance was actually pretty close to perfect, and while most battles weren’t really interesting per se, I had eaten things far worse in a far greater quantity. At first I thought that it was that all the battles were too big, but actually, only 4 really took me very long. But then I realized that when I play the 20th mission on a Fire Emblem I don’t really care only about the system or what was the optimum plan. Rather, I care about the way to make character X do the final hit on character Y so that he\she can take revenge on Z, or that A and B are pretty close to get a new support so I must put them together, or even wondering if the stats on NPCs meant that country J is a lot more powerful than Empire H. Of course a game that doesn’t make that part a total snoozefest is appreciated, but you’re really past the point of playing only for that gameplay.
It’s pretty normal to get a little bored no matter how good the system is after 5 similar battles, but most games have something to push you beyond that, be it the story, some gimmick or simply the fulfilling satisfaction of pounding into oblivion someone you hate (or wish to defeat). And that feeling of “the battle as part of the narrative” kinda disappears in Lib Day. The division between battles and plot is bigger than ever and the fact that you’re pounding into the dirt the same enemies you destroyed the previous game ( and that without Fontana never feel interesting or threatening) combine to mean that the only enjoyment you’ll pull out of battles is basically the one coming from the battle system itself.
The new units only help with that feeling: “here, have new units that have cool skills and are fun to use!”, hum, Ceran gunboats? ! We’re actually going to recapture Cera, perhaps we will have some small scene with nameless soldiers telling us about the situation, or about the remnants of the Ceran fleet, or about the planet?! Nope, have fun with the battles!
The same with the Union BBs and the Ryuvian Falcon (it was piloted by a ghost! By a ghost of all things! Who the heck pilots them now, unknown pilot-kun?!... Actually, that’s a good idea, welcome my new headcanon). They don’t really felt like they are there for anything. I mean, I don’t think merc units really need too much of a justification, but there are probably reasons why Ceran Gunboats joined you or the Union trusts you with a Battleship (instead of selling them before).
This just makes the whole bridge between battles and plot even bigger. Battles feel meaningless, while the Plot grinds to a halt for entire battles, tremendously disrupting the pacing and the flow. Overall however, perhaps the worse of this is that this divide put in full view some of the biggest weakness Sunrider’s writing had, but that in MoA had managed to appear mostly hidden.
And from this point on I’ll try to focus on only the writing itself, with different sections for different things. In general however, Lib Day’s problems tend to be focused on a very barebones prose, poor narrative flow and an oversized story arc (with oversized I mean long but with very little “meat”).
Narrative flow:
One important part in story is how to connect the scenes and events that compose the story in a way that feels smooth and consistent. That’s what a narrative flow is; in good cases you’ll barely notice the changes in scenes and the whole story will feel smoother and more immersive. A good flow also improves the pacing by its own nature. A bad flow however makes it seem more like instead of a story we’re watching a series of scenes in a particular order for arbitrary reasons. Animes and movies live through that, but narrative and gamimg mediums that require immersion are particularly worsened by it; in the former the reader is an observer, but in the later the whole point of it is the immersion of the reader in the characters, and for him to feel like an observer is particularly disadvantageous. Now, there are some exception for both cases (aSoIaF for example takes a very “television series” approach to its narrative, but it requires a series of tricks), but Sunrider is a pretty standard VN\game, so in this case it applies.
The problem is that narrative flow in Sunrider is all over the place. Now, that’s actually not a problem only in Liberation Day; even the original MoA felt a lot of times more like a series of ideas, scenes and side plots joined together than a completely coherent story. However, MoA used an old trick that videogames have always used to compensate for their lack of writing; let the player fill the gaps. Instead of simply jumping scenes, let the player on a map and chance naturally on the events. Then, instead of thinking something like “Why are this people here?, what they were doing?, why this particular time?, shouldn't they be doing their work?, do they even have something to do?, etc”, the player will realize he has stepped into something and automatically fill the gaps instead; the main character stops needing a reason to just be there and the progression is smooth (in the player’s mind). Instead of seeing a scene because of a forced plot, the player is seeing a scene he has chanced upon by their own agency, even if it was only because there was close to nothing else to do.
In contrast, Lib Day scenes feel arbitrary, jumping from one perspective to another without any seeming reason and moving from one scene to another “because the plots wills it”, not because of any actual in character reason or previous connection with an earlier scene. This, again, makes the player feel like an observer and thus lose their feeling of agency even more.
Now, this problem was kinda solved in 2.0, though in general I feel it’s still a bit in there. The writing simply has to get smoother, and there’s no easy way out of it, just working hard to improve as a writer. Instead of thinking the game like an anime with scenes, try to think of how each scene leads to another and try to plant “seeds” of future scenes in those earlier ones. Also, sometimes feeling like an spectator is the intended result (for example, in the Alpha and Fontana scenes), but other times is not even if there’s a change of perspective (Asaga for example; a big problem of the love triangle is that instead of feeling it most players simply saw it happen).
Pacing and Arcs:
Pacing is very important; the basis of it is to build up the stakes and the scale of the conflict in the climax, so that those events don’t throw the reader off. While surprising twists to up the scales are frequent, they never make for good climaxes; rather, almost always the are there to build up the climax of the story itself. When you simply up the scale and stakes of the conflict out of nowhere without no indication, you break the immersion of the reader and bewilder him.
Pacing the plot was something both MoA and First Arrival did reasonably well. There was a crescendo of events leading up to a series of climax. Sometimes the climax were just “stepping stones” (Ongess, Wedding crash) to a larger climax. Now, one important thing related with my initial main point is that in almost all of these climaxes there was a rule of 1 battle=1 climax (Far port, Wedding crash), or of 1climax=2 battles (Ongess and Helion). Even in those later cases the battles never felt like they “stopped” and a single event was divided in two, but more of a continuation once a significant change happened on the battlefield (arrival of Assault Carriers in one case, either destroying or slipping by the Legion in the second). Now, one of the biggest problems the abrupt separation of plot and battles brings can be fully appreciated here.
The final battle in cera takes 4 (5 if you count the last) battles, the problem being basically that of them, 2 are completely superfluous; if you continued from battle 6 to 7, or from 8 to 9 would really change anything besides the rebalance? There’s any important plot point intrinsic to the battle? Here, instead of magnifying the climax, the numerous battles effectively dilutes it, lowering the impact of basically everything as the battles mostly bring the plot to a halt as you destroy 10 BBs and Assault Carriers for the 5th time in the game with almost no difference to the times before. A boss can be fun, joining forces with PACT is fun, and battle 7 has some cool stuff, but they together with the plot are simply far too sparse to hold up what can be up to 4 hours of playing, and effectively are half of the game. You can go to enjoy the gameplay, but this only strengthens the feeling of “separation” the story and battle system have; instead of fighting for Cera you feel like playing a fun round at skirmish mode.
If the previous buildup was satisfying, this overly long climax could be forgiven, but the build up is absolutely horrible, mostly because there is practically 0.
You start the game in what is basically a leftover climax from the previous part. Now, this isn’t necessarily bad; FA also started with a pseudoclimax on the invasion of Cera and starting the game in high gear is pretty normal.However, after that it requires a windown. This part is actually done surprisingly well. While mission 2 feels a tad too harsh and intense for what is basically an excuse to have Chigara shine and doesn’t have any real repercussion (divide between gameplay and story strikes again!), there’s plenty of scenes both before and after to effectively lower the intensity. It’s also does a good job setting the new goals and preparing the player for the path to those goals. Now, a crescendo with a climatic battle at Cera can start!
Okay, need to get money. Hello guys at versta that are in no way different that the ones we beat just before, hello ghosts that have fewer lines explaining you than talking about Chigara’s virginity, hello Tydaria again nice to see you have no distinctive feature beside us having Union battleships.
And then, directly to the final battle at Cera! Hum, however, I don’t feel particularly pumped out, almost as if instead of a the final goal in a long travel full of arduous moments we just went through a 1 hour and half walk and then reached it…
Side mission never effectively work as a crescendo; that requires progressively heightening the stakes as the plot progresses and starts revealing itself. Side missions have none of that (few plot and fewer stakes), that’s why they’re most of the times normally regarded as a wind-down moment, which is actually what they were used as in MoA (after Far Port and Ongess). Once we arrive at Cera the first battle could be argued as trying to increase the intensity a little, but is overall far too superfluous and far too close to the main battle to be effective. The game really would have benefited from picking one of the side missions (the one of Tydaria for example) and make it a real plot event with serious stakes (the Mining Union), plot reveals (would have been a perfect place to put more politics too) and simply a bit of development. This can not only be achieved with “battles” in a gameplay sense; Ongess is a very good example of how to “build up” the conflict and its seriousness through plot alone. First seeing the bad situation of the planet, later increasing the tension through Cosette’s resistance and its involvement of civilians, and finally making the last punch by the arrival of PACT together with a new kind of vessel.
So, overall, the pacing of Liberation Day is a total wreck; we go from silly love triangles, some briefings (which include ghosts) and petty scheming to fight for our true homeland. The raise in the stakes is simply not felt, there’s no special feelings of “we’re ending this now”, and the plot reveals, are, well, inexistent? The final boss is a clear example; from the gameplay standpoint is one of the most exciting missions, but plot-wise it feels extremely rushed and forced. Basically “here’s the boss”. It doesn’t feel like a natural development coming from the increasing enemy force as the stakes start to rise and everything is going down to a final fight; it’s not that it isn’t a “fated fight” like the Legion, but that it barely feels like it happened at all. Of course, half of the problems are due to the villains (they get their own section later), but half of it is that the threat level goes from 0 to infinite in basically seconds, and you just can’t take it seriously.
The battle of Cera simply never feels like a proper climax (it has some rough gems, but nothing more). The problem of the pacing also however reveals another problem in itself, Cera. I’ll dedicate an entire section to that later.
To finish this, the ending… is actually probably the best pacing-wise of the game. While the previous events just before can be too overwhelming (try to rein in the cheap drama, Samu-kun), the battle finally feels like a proper climax, to the point the previous Battle of Cera almost seems like a crescendo to this. The threat and stakes rises accordingly in the scenes before in a decent (if not very smooth) rise. It’s also probably the only battle which really feels connected to what’s happening plot-wise; half your units are gone, your position is set up, you have an unique objective and the main enemies have changed and are completely different. All of them are “tricks” that can’t be overused, but in this case they are pretty damn effective. The epilogue also acts nicely on it, though due to it’s nature as an add-on it feels like it goes on a tad too much, but, eh, more content is always good.
So, overall, Liberation Day has a big problem with the pacing; the use of only one “story arc” means that there’s no crescendo to a big climax and so the game suffers a lot for it, only regaining some momentum in its ending. It feels like it really could have used another story arc; of course we all would want another Ongess, but it would have worked even if it was relatively small (like the Versta one in FA). The main story arc itself is also oversized; spanning lost of dialogue and battles for what it’s in the end very little plot development (until the epilogue itself, which I count outside the arc). This only dilutes it even further and makes the work lose focus.
Character Development
Another of the bigger problems, is an almost utter lack of character development in the whole plot; only the Captain and Asaga really have some time. Kryska and Icari have some nice moments, but until the ending it’s far too unstated and secondary to really have some effect. Even in the ending, the character development is almost sorely on Kryska’s side with Icari being mostly a catalyst.
But for now, let’s enumerate it for each character:
-Captain: Kayto has a big problem, and it’s that he’s supposed to be the player character. Now, while his issues are important, in Lib Day it feels less as him having issues and more as he’s running away from everything. Of course, in the ending we can see some character development as he finally overcomes his regret with Maray, but the other 90% of the game all the players have to basically shake his head thinking “please, can you stop being stupid?”. Furthermore, I don’t know if because he’s supposed to be the player character, but all of his feelings, issues, and even his love for Chigara, all feel extremely undeveloped; you don’t know them until the captain goes and says them. The flashback at MoA and the captain’s subsequent breakdown (or even the nightmares after Ongess) showed more of his thoughts, feelings and character than the whole of Liberation Day, including the ending and the epilogue. If you furthermore add that even with that he is still fairly bland, then having problems with him is fairly normal.
-Chigara: Chigara for me is a missed opportunity. She basically has 0 character development. Not only that, all of his personality besides being super-dere and cute seems to disappear during the game; she only thinks of the captain and their bakery magically forgetting her engineering skills (brought up a humongous total of once in the whole game) and even friends (“uh… Asaga has been acting weird during this whole month… heh, I've got a date with the captain, let’s totally forget about her!”). Even the ending is a huge loss. Instead of adding character depth by making her betrayal more ambiguous, maybe hinting at some dark part or anything, she simply gets possessed. That’s incredibly cheap, especially when you kill her afterwards just when she is recovering control; that’s not drama, that’s a purity sue of enormous proportions. Humans are flawed, they have some darker and unseen parts that together with their visible ones make their overall character. That’s called character depth and it’s what allows us to empathize with fictional characters. The moment you throw that out to have a 100% loving waifuing machine with no other purpose, you don’t care about her even if you like her; she’s a 2D waifu thought to appeal to you the most and that is clearly seen through. The worst is that Chigara seemed to have some character depth (superficial, but it was there) in MoA (and even in Lib Day, the fight with Asaga could have been used to show that). Even the end, forcing a change in her character through fusing with Alice more than anything on her own is also incredibly cheap; I would like a yandere Chigara, but I would like a yandere Chigara developing on her own and not through a plot device of all things. She already had the makings there, was it really necessary for it to be through that…? (a darker influence being the final hit that makes her into that is fine, but it being the sole reason it is not).
-Asaga: Now, Asaga actually has some character development. It continues nicely from the one in MoA, and while the story itself ends being a little taxing due to overuse of repetition (the captain does something showing he likes Chigara, Asaga feels hurt, maybe talks or says something to Sola, nothing happens; rinse and repeat at least thrice) the character development feels decent. I think that’s also the reason Asaga has changed from having no chance at the polls to fighting with the top 2 waifus toe to toe; her character feels a lot more complete. I also want to thank Samu-kun for finally casting aside the “Evil Sharr personality” things it felt she was going to have; doing that would have meant doing the same mistake that with Chigara and stealing Asaga of the precious depth she needed. Now she shows she can have darker emotions like any normal human, can even fall to them and furthermore can try to improve that. While the end of Liberation Day can throw a little wrench into that (she being actually right about her paranoia), I think it can be reworked into more complexity and character development for future parts.
-Ava: Ava is complex because she never really had a lot of character development, but it was more like actually eroding her barrier with time. In Liberation Day she has a small subplot about trust and her own feelings starting to resurface on their own. Pretty nice, but it goes slow and gets too few time to really shine or carry anything. The final break on the dam on the epilogue feels correct and significant, but it’s a shame that the culmination of basically the entire Helion and Legion subplot ends so small and disconnected. The main fault of the later is mainly on the Captain’s muddled feelings in the transition between the Helion/Legion and the Chigara (I refuse to call it Cera) arcs (which, you probably are already getting the pattern, will have its own section later). Overall, not bad though.
-Sola: Sola continues taking it slowly. Liberation Day basically shows her standard attitude, but now we can actually connect it a little more to her origins. She has some subtle points of character growth (for example, I found actually fairly important how she was ready to kill Asaga herself when she went berserk; her loyalty to the Captain is now arguably higher than the one she has to Ryuvia), but all very unstated. The epilogue leaves a lot of room for the future though. Can’t help but feel though that a tad more in Liberation Day itself would have been a welcome addition.
-Claude: Hahahaha. 0. I hope we get to see new parts of her; not necessarily her being serious, but even her joking but with a “I can kill you in 0.5 seconds without even moving my pinky finger~~~” can be nice.
-Kryska: Kryska continues in her usual way. She has always been one of the most optimistic and naive of the group (I really don’t know how she could be a spec ops…), and here continues like that, getting even more buddy-buddy with Icari. Her main development was she finally putting more importance in her comrades than her nation, to the point she was even ready to fight the Solar Alliance for the Sunrider. It’s not much, but her scene with her and Icari and gunpoint is very decent and very in-character for our hot-blooded pilot. Her final idea of returning to the Solar Alliance to denounce the Paradox Core Warhead is also very Kryska, even if irredeemably stupid. I would say her defecting simply without even trying to return would be out of Character, so it’s good for me. Overall though she suffers the side-character sindrome, so it’s not like she can do much for Lib Day as a whole.
-Icari: Icari’s main development is her growing trust of Kryska, to the points she’s finally able to be more honest with her, and finally bring her to the Sunrider’s side. A similar but a lot more subdued development happens with the Captain; her trust of the captain in battle (specially in the final battle) is actually quite touching when you think about it. Similar to Sola it’s a shame it’s so very unstated, because there’s a lot of juice there. Definitely missed opportunities there.
So, overall, the big problem is that despite the focus on Chigara there’s close to 0 character development with her. Asaga’s has some, but the execution is lacking and the Captain is really mixed. With some of the favourite characters (Ava, Sola and Icari) basically having little screentime and meaningful development, this further muddles the issue.
Cera
So, now we’re going to Cera! Our home planet, the one we’ve been waiting more than a year to liberate. Oh, boy, I hope we finally get to see how the occupation has affected it, how our Ceran comrades have fought or accepted PACT, maybe a little more of it! And after we win a Liberation parade when the government is reformed and everyone congratulates Shields for his victory including survivor from the occupations, maybe old politicians or former members of the Ceran space force!
…
…
…
…
So yeah. We basically know nothing (nor see nothing) of Cera. In flashbacks and Academy we saw some of Cera City and Maray, but there’s a problem. Both are dead. It’s very hard to get pumped to free a planet when you know nothing of it and have 0 attachment to it. Specially when you also don’t give even a tiny bit of information about it (in 1.0 we don’t even have the summary of the star map!). You could have effectively changed Cera for any other planet in the Galaxy and it would have been the same. Wait, no, that’s wrong; Ongess was fleshed out a lot more than Cera has ever been, and at least we’ve been to Versta a lot of times.
I mean, when we know that we will basically have to free it again I can see leaving some things for after; however, doing absolutely nothing? I’m sorry, but that’s a writing sin on par with the pacing.
Villains:
Another big problem in Lib Day is the villains. PACT never felt that threatening, but they did get close. Cullen was a fat bastard, but a fat bastard with lots of ships; he gets you once and has you running away more times. When you get him at Far port you feel like “now that it’s a fair match I can finally show just how incompetent you are!”; some satisfaction at finally taking him out. Fontana likewise seems more competent from the beginning, and in his first battle he already check matches you and the Alliance. Only Grey’s dirty tactics allows your fleet to survive, showing him both as the better field commander and better man. Ongess also upgrades Cosette, as her previous comical relief character gets more depth and shows a ruthlessness that seems more serious and dangerous than before.
And then you have Arcadius. Arcadius was always the weak link, always shouting cliched lines about his superiority while at the same time appearing as incompetent as Cullen. And to be honest, having both is a real dealbreaker; you can have a villain spout cliche lines about killing everyone and him/her being above all if he/she’s awesome enough. You can have a villain be an incompetent dump if you make him interesting. However Arcadius just looks like someone with a Napoleon complex and with a “list of villainous cliché lines” he just reads non-stop.
While I was looking forward to Lib Day showing a different Arcadius, it simply made everything worse. It gave him super-intelligence, I suppose to show how low the average intelligence is if that’s supposed to be smart? It gave him hundreds of clones; basically admitting that everything before was bullshit and that they’re just expendable and they will simply throw them at something until it work. And it gave them 2 leaders; one that was just an even higher expression of how ridiculously bad they can be at their job and another that was actually interesting but never appeared “face to face”.
In general, the problems of the Arcadius and Alice continue being the same as the problem of the original one:
-They simply never feel like a threat. There’s really something they have accomplished during all the game? They fail at killing you despite having hundreds of clones, they fail at killing you with a fleet twice your size even with kamikaze tactics, they fail at killing you with them taking control of your allies, they let a single prototype with no previous knowledge of her skills infiltrate and override such control, and even with a holy piece of Ryuvian Ryder capable of destroying fleets they fail again. Even when Alice’s backup plan works, she’s overridden and absorbed by such a prototype: a failure to the end. You could think that serie of innumerable super clones with a hivemind and pseudo-immortality would be a tad more effective than that, geez. They started the game dominating PACT and in less than 2 months of in-game time they’ve been basically exterminated as a faction. Even the gameplay reflects that, with the Arcadius units being decent but nowhere near threatening.
-It’s impossible to take anything they spout seriously. From the Arcadius B-movie speeches about being superior to mankind and ruling the galaxy, to Alice’s B-movie speeches about humans cruelty and how she’s going to exterminate you all. Of course, point 1 helps here; a terrifying villain could make it work somewhat decently, but in this case you can’t help but laugh at them.
A big problem of that is Alice’s lack of depth. While I like how what happened is hinted in a way that makes it clear while also leaving a lot for Veniczar, it simply doesn’t work when that character is your main villain; the main villain is a character as important as the main hero, and as such requires a similar amount of development. Alice has nothing, so instead of seeing how a love-struck Alice changed to a psychopath (you could even make a dark parallelism with Chigara and the captain), we simply get generic psychopath villain n. 59.
Heck, in comparison, Grey and Fontana got a lot more near of actually being the villain by virtue of being competent at their job (the first one at nuking planets and the second one at shooting prototypes).
Prose:
Liberation Day’s prose has always been extremely barebones and to the point. That’s something in common with the original, and it’s not something intrinsically bad or wrong, but more kind of like a style.
Such prose normally allows for a fast pacing and quick action. In Visual Novels furthermore the art and music can create the immersion and mood your prose is unable to make, so it can be quite effective even in more relaxed scenarios or ones with a lot of casual dialogue.
There is however a fairly big flaw, and that such prose normally falls flat when it tries anything abstract or to confront a great idea. It’s normal after all; barebone prose is basically made for quick action and constant movement, or casual dialogue. Scenes in which “what is happening” is a lot more important than the ideas of the characters or the mood of the scene.
However, the moment the feelings of one character are more important to the scene than the action, or the moment when a speech is more a declaration of ideals or of goals than of facts, is the moment when such style tends to struggle the most. It isn’t enough to say “he loved her”, or “she felt deep hate”; “show, don’t tell” has been the most crucial rule in anything with a script since the birth of modern media. You need to describe the scene, set the mood, and allow your prose to make the reader feel what is happening and not simply read it. Of course, art, sound, etcetera can also help a lot and make the job much more easier. However, when the feelings grows more complex or nuanced, a lot of times it’s not enough.
In MoA, the biggest emotional moment relied mainly in a flashback. Even then, though, the actual romance there is very simple and innocent. I in fact think the later is actually the point; showing the simplicity and innocence of days far gone. Even the promise of the Captain, arguably the “climax” of that emotional moment, is meant to come as childish and naive.
His feelings after Ongess are also connected to this flashback and his sister; basically redirecting a very complex issue into a far more simple guilt issue over failing to rescue his sister. Now, a lot of times simple is best; more straightforward feelings also tend to be the stronger ones after all, and are by nature far easier to sympathize with.
In Academy in general the character’s feeling also tend to be rather straightforward. After all, unlike in the main series, here they are high-school students and there’s no fate of the world at stake. There are some routes more dramatic than the others, and one even has some fairly important issues for the lore, but nothing much complicated. I would even argue that when the routes tried to go for a more nuanced storyline or feelings, they actually quite failed at it (*cough*Chigara route*cough*).
Now, Liberation Day. The main theme of the game is betrayal. However, the problem is that betrayal is very complex and ambiguous issue. The main thing about betrayal is not the fact itself, but rather the ambient of doubt that permeates everyone. The one that must make the player start doubting everyone, force him to think a lot on who trusts and why, make him paranoid about even silly things, etc. And that’s something you can’t get with only facts.
You can’t simply make one doubt on facts because then the facts itself point to that betrayal and there’s no tension; there’s simply a betrayer. What you have to do is create a scenario in which unconsciously the player starts doubting the other characters, not by simple facts, but rather the way those facts are presented. When you know there’s a betrayer, you may start doubting someone for silly things: Icari going to a bar may make you suspect she’s contacting people outside the Sunrider, Kryska reuniting with old comrades makes you think of her as an spy, even Ava’s obsession with paperwork can be transformed to a way to have all the information on the Sunrider at any moment.
But there’s basically 0 of that. It’s not even that it falls flat, is that there’s completely 0 of that. The betrayal theme is mostly presented through the love triangle, which basically transforms a complex and nuanced theme into a high-school romance. There’s actually a lot of potential in the original theme; after reading 2.0 and thinking a little, the conclusion some of us reached is that technically almost everyone betrayed someone in some way. That can be incredibly powerful, but it just isn't because there’s never really a feeling of betrayal, a tension or anything. The prose simply fails to make any of that; while I’m not proposing a change to a more purple prose or anything like that (Sunrider is simply not that), there’s the need to set a mood and filter what can be perfectly normal actions with a shade of suspicion. Some games are able to convey their theme through pure ambience (i.e. Dark Souls only tells its story and Lore through item descriptions, yet its theme is extremely clear through a combination of graphics, music and gameplay), and others do it through narrative. In the later however, you simply need a better prose if you want to make the player feel it and not simply see it. There’s a reason why horror games and thrillers are so hard to pull off nicely; more than plot you need execution. And execution in a Visual Novel means graphics, sound and, specially, prose. The former 2 aren’t bad, but don’t help a lot in this particular case, and Sunrider’s prose simply can’t create the mood or tension needed for a proper betrayal.
The theme of betrayal is more on there because it’s hammered by the trailer and the characters than by anything else. And that’s a big failure that cheapens it, and so overall cheapens the game.
Now, does that mean Sunrider simply can’t into more nuanced themes? That’s not exactly right either. Even with the current prose, Sunrider works with its more simpler themes; as said before, MoA effectively did manage to effectively redirect some more nuanced issues in a simpler way that made them more powerful. The characters (every one of them) lacked complexity, but still got development.
Another thing to note though is that this simply extends to scenes in which the ideas or feelings of the characters are a lot more important than the “what is happening”. Politics and battles are precisely the opposite, so through a very simple prose describing what is happening, you can actually inject a great amount of nuance and complexity; case in point being of course the situation at Ongess.
Another great example would be the book version of the “Legend of Galactic Heroes”. To put it simple, despite being a novel of 300 pages, the book is very, very sparse with its actual prose. While not as barebones, being a book after all, it could be said that its prose is to books what Sunrider’s prose is to VNs.
However, Legend of Galactic Heroes continues being a classic revered by its very nuanced depiction of politics, wars, and even history. The reason is that all of them are themes in which you can speak through facts, rather than feelings. Showing political machinations and its results, how entire wars and millions of casualties are engineered, how some cling to profit and power while arguing they do it for justice, etc. All of this are things in which the facts are the “show, don’t tell” part. In fact, a very barebones prose may even enhance the effect, adding a “historical documentary effect” in some parts, and making speeches sound empty no matter the argument.
So, in my opinion, Samu-kun should stick with his strengths; his prose simply isn’t good enough (as of now) to really makes us feel much complexity in an emotional sense, however fits well with more straightforward feelings. And he can add complexity on the political/economic/military/technical side, because that suits his strengths too.
As a final note, I would be cautious too when it comes to expressing ideas: while some can be very simple and straightforward, it’s very easy to get muddled up with the “higher” ideals and themes. Just like a story needs a crescendo to a climax, you also need to prepare these things; you don’t jump from holding hands to a declaration of eternal love, so you can’t jump from speaking of the weather to suddenly revealing your most inner ideals and philosophy, or speaking of theology. In the later case it will often sound either cheap or stupid regardless of the actual validity of what is said.
Example: I think Claude’s revelation showed that very well. The too simplistic way it was done simply didn't suit the idea of a higher being at all, and just makes the clash between that and the world more obvious (thus breaking immersion). Just making Sola make a small prelude would make everything a tad more palatable:
Sola: I believe she’s my kin, in a way. Yet she’s more far apart from me than I am from my age. She’s what every Ryuvian Emperor, from the first, to my father, to the ones that saw their empire ruined, dreamed to be. Someone to whom time is but a friend, in which she can freely come and go. Someone who sees the entire Universe as but a toy to play with…. In short, she is what I would call a god.
There, while the main idea is still kept, you’ve slowly introduced the reader to it instead of slapping him to the face with it. When you start thinking, the idea on the main plot it’s the same, but in context at least it sounds far less stupid. Sometimes a little dressing can help to express ideas (or hide its flaws) better; the important point is avoiding a clash so big it breaks immersion.
Captain’s feelings:
I believe the captain’s is one of the great victims to this overall lack of nuance; there’s basically no doubt nor grey area with his feelings. He goes from loving Ava enough to dedicate 10 years of his life to fulfilling a silly promise (and maybe even sparing the Legion) to drool when thinking of Chigara within a month.
There’s no reflection, no slow shift over time. Chigara had already established herself at the end of MoA as the Captain’s emotional support; the position was, in a way, perfect to slowly develop how, after Ava’s final rejection, Chigara slowly gains the captain’s heart. The problem is however that this process is seemingly skipped: there’s a time skip of one month so this happens entirely off-screen. Instead of an evolution we see a jump. This makes the romance seem more forced, as not only it feels like that from a “gameplay” point of view, but also from a purely narrative point of view. Yeah, all the pieces are there, but even if you have them you haven’t solved the puzzle. If you jump from showing all the pieces to the final result you aren’t solving it, you’re simply skipping steps.
Now, this doesn’t only handicaps the entire relationship and the Captain’s character, but also has even effect on the love triangle. As the most difficult part is already set in stone (the Captain liking Chigara) this basically condemns all development on that part as simply Asaga struggling against something against which she can’t do anything. There’s no dynamical relations nor any actual movement or action; she’s simply struggling against a series of feelings that are presented as facts after a time skip. Not only that, the earlier issue also creates a disconnect from the player to the love triangle itself: the player not only hasn’t decided it, but it can’t even understand the captain feelings. We can’t even feel guilty or that much sad for Asaga because we ourselves don’t understand what the captain is thinking. As I said before, the player feels like a spectator and not like one of the participants, and as nothing actually happens until Asaga’s betrayal there’s not even much to actually see.
Just development for Asaga and the development itself is fine (if a tad cliché), but it can’t carry all the sections dedicated to it.
So, in summary, not only we have a problem with Chigara the waifuing machine but also in the captain feelings being completely underdeveloped and pushed along through jumps. This strains the narrative making the reader unattached to the romance itself, but also severely weakening the love triangle subplot as a collateral.
On the plus side: Ava’s feelings are fairly well depicted, though she definitely benefits from an overall slow arc instead of jumping around. Her small jealousy as her armour finally starts to melt is good, though overall it makes the Chigara romance feel even more forced. For example, if you sink the Legion, she and the captain have a fairly emotional talk that only makes the emotional jump from Ava to Chigara feel even weirder (specially as Ava’s armour starts to crack). I think perhaps a bigger “Ice Queen” time would have overall benefited the game: making her reject the captain again or something similar enough would have helped the “Chigara route” make more sense. This would also make the final resolution more meaningful and cathartic; right now it seems like a very simple “you don’t know what you have until you lose it”, and the little time dedicated to it makes it seem more like a small subplot than the resolution of half of MoA.
Voices:
Overall, I rather liked the Japanese voices. While I felt Chigara’s VA had to deal with 2 of the worst characters in the game (Chigara and Alice), how she voiced them while making them similar yet different was very nice. She also fit both very well. Asaga’s VA struggled a lot at the beginning, making what should be a dramatic moment seem like a joke (this is probably due to being her first lines, when the only thing she had of Asaga was her bio and her general character). As she keep going she improved, and by the end I had nothing but love for her. Ava’s VA also did a very fine job. Icari and Kryska were both good, though there were also a pair or two of silly mistakes (like some of Kryska’s shouts, which felt very weird, and Icari felt even more silly in her crying scene). The rest were fine, but nothing that enhanced the writing much (I did fanboy at some of Fontana’s lines, but that was more due to a combination of cheese, fabulousness and cool factor).
As a note, it also felt strange that some of the lines were rewritten in Japanese. A lot of times they were expanded for seemingly no reason (I suppose the line was too brief? As the Japanese VAs are paid by lines, there’s probably a thought there to maximize the voice per what’s paid?), the winner being Chigara’s line of reconstructing the Captain’s tea set. It like, changed from 3 lines to an extensive technobabble explanation. Also, Claude had like all of her lines filled with even more innuendos (if that was possible); it was a bit ridiculous.
Overall, nothing much of substance (but a bit of style). It did felt like some of it was just for the kick of it though.
In the end, the voices enhanced what they could, though it may detract from it if someone is not used to Japanese voice-overs. They are after all pretty typical, nothing groundbreaking or particularly impressive in either direction: not a huge factor in any way. Personally, I think a lot of the problems of Liberation Day would have been slightly lessened if Kayto had been voiced (thus, changing a lot of things to “Kayto is his own person” instead of simply “stealing agency and breaking immersion”), but I know some people hate MCs being voiced.
Misc:
In general, the text tends to feel a tad unpolished (this applies to all the Sunrider series in general; some typos, awkward expressions, overuse of infodumping and “as you already know”, etc). It’s not something I tend to emphasize, because I realize LiS is still basically a very indie dev in a very niche market and sadly it’s a standard in the VN marker (Sakura games this side, bad translations this other), but I feel it should at least be recognized. Normally numerous editing passes (and by someone different than the original write) are considered the minimum for any written work . While not reaching the standard for a while can be understood, it shouldn't be the modus operandi here. Typos that are only corrected just before the release even if they were spotted 5 months earlier, 0 rewriting on any scene, etc. If we’re focusing on the narrative again then I think it should be more of a priority; nobody publishes a book without at least an editor and dozens of rewritings and editing passes. A more polished writing softens the whole experience and makes the bad easier to manage and the good even better.
Twists:
I didn’t really plan to talk about this, but some people argued (fairly well) about the idea that Lib Day is a result of placing its “twist” as the center of its narrative. Now, while I can certainly agree that the idea has merit, I don’t think any of the writing flaws I’ve talked about should be affected by this. To see why, let’s talk a bit about twists in general (could go on and on, but will make it short).
Twists are at their core a sudden change of “genre” in any media (basically, game changers that can affect the whole narrative). It can be minor changes (from “story with a happy ending” to “story with a bittersweet ending”) to more major ones (“love comedy” to “military drama”). However, and that’s something important, the twist quality depends less on the change of genre itself and more on the execution of the genres both before and after. When you have a silly super-typical sitcom and in the last episode you suddenly kill the whole cast to a nuclear attack you have a shitty twist, because not only were the genres unbalanced (you basically had 99,9% of one and 0,1% of the other) but also because you’ve introduced the twist (genre shift) out of nowhere. If you for example put “the gang is transported to another world and then killed” then it’s already a tad better, but if the sitcom was bad and silly then their deaths would lose importance and accomplish nothing. No matter how good a subversion or twist you have, if your original is garbage then after it will continue to be. You need a proper execution of both “genres” and for there to be a balance between them in order for the twist to work
The twist also must be sufficiently surprising and shocking for people to not see it coming, but as said above you can’t pull it off your ass. Some knack for it is needed, and that’s why writing twists is pretty hard in the first place. With dimensional and time travels you can make use of some general conventions or Deus Ex Machina more easily, but then you need to develop 2 worlds and their differences convincingly.
That’s also why normally having grand twists for an ending is normally a very bad idea, because you basically force a small genre shift but have close to no space to show it, justify it or execute it well. You can pull it off in more minor cases, but it’s hard. The only 2 cases I can think of right now are Trails in the Sky (FC) and Trails of Cold Steel, both of which relied on extensive foreshadowing and even “fake endings”. The result is that they properly “finished” the first part, giving it a pseudo-ending and then pulled out to the new “genre” (in both cases it was a minor change from an “optimistic and formulaic JRPG” to a “darker, harsher JRPG”).
So, in summary, you need two well executed “genres”, a convincing but still surprising reason to cause the genre shift in the first place and finally a proper execution of it.
Now, Liberation Day has a supposed twist at its penultimate chapter. It takes the form of the previously commented “pseudo-ending”; it carries you to the ending of the first “genre” introduced before unleashing the twist and showing that there’s a big enemy/plot point/whatever that you didn’t realize until that moment. Now, this kind of technique has some pros and cons, like all things do.
One of the cons of “pseudo-ending” is that it doesn’t magically cure the first genre of any flaw it may have; no matter how good the overall series are, people still give bad reviews to MuvLuv Extra simply because as a harem comedy it’s not that good (it’s not bad, because then reader wouldn't love the characters and the twist wouldn’t work at all, but it’s clearly not a masterpiece). If a game changes from an RPG to a shooter, even if it’s shooter part is magnificent if the RPG part is horrible it won’t be considered as good as it could have been if it was a shooter. While this can be extended to all twists in genera, In the case of the pseudoending is worse because you’re forced to take the first genre to its narrative conclusion, so if it’s bad you’re forced to go through all of it to reach the “good part”. While narrative is more complex, and you can use for example a more cliché scenario to contrast with a more nuanced and ambiguous revelation, that itself doesn’t justify a badly executed first scenario (and yes, you can make hundred of clichés work if you execute them well). You’re simply better working directly with the second scenario.
And the second problem this “pseudoending” has is that if the “twist” is completely predictable, then it loses all the power. As said before, this “pseudoending” works by “finishing” one “genre” and then smoothly showing something else you hadn’t realized; it’s major advantage is that it gives a sense of closure and safety before pulling out the twist and hitting the player when he is waiting for the credits to roll. If you see it coming and are waiting for it expectantly then it only makes the ending of that “part” cheaper and meaningless; of course you won’t feel anything at a goodbye if you know he/she will be back before the hour ends, neither any happiness nor closure when the hero finally gets his happy life if you know it won’t last 10 minutes, etc.
As the main point of doing it’s smoothly finish “one genre” and then move to another in one swift surprise, if the twist is predicted then, well, it would have the same effect as pulling the twist at any other moment without any kind of special effect nor contrast or shock. And simply pulling a twist in itself does not contribute positively or negatively to the writing; it’s simple a change on the genre, but it doesn’t affect directly to the prose, pacing and character development (the “2nd genre” will of course affect all of them, but the twist itself won’t). If you don’t manage to pull off the twist in a special way, this only makes the fact of pulling it at the ending have only disadvantages, as you don’t have time to “balance” the genres or justify the twist.
One of the greatest problems of the original release in fact comes from that: having the twist so near the ending made the genre shift come as one that changed the genre from “Star Wars/normal Space Opera” to “Kill them all”, instead of from “Star Wars/Normal Space Opera” to “Code Geass/Weird and harsh Space Opera” like it was supposed to be.
So, in summary, while the idea that a big part of the script from Liberation Day comes from its supposed twist is very interesting from a meta perspective, it doesn’t absolve nor worsen any of the writing itself: as the twist is previsible it simply doesn’t have any shock or surprise value, nor manages to give any sense of closure, thus being relegated to a “simple” plot development.
We can even argue about if there really ever was a genre shift or if some parts of Liberation Day were only a decoy, which would put in doubt if it can even be called a twist. I personally think that would be fighting over semantics, but some may think differently.
And finally; writing is hard. It's also not something you can make a list of "things to do" and make a great result. Writing always requires a bit of inspiration, and there are a ton of great works out there that don't fulfill a lot of the things pointed here as "right". However, is fairly undeniable that this tidbits make the final work worse. Thus, with this write ups I don't pretend to teach anyone how to write. However, I think it's a good compilation of things that if you have, you should at least think carefully about.
Also, as some people know me, I'll be blunt and a tad ironic, like always.
So, I promised it, and here it is. A (very) big wall of text just focused on Liberation’s Day writing; both the problems and its curiosities. I’ll try to focus mostly on the writing, but as Liberation Day is a game, and not a book, I’ll probably also go over the gameplay itself, even if only due to overall nuances they add to final work.
General:
One of the better things about the original Sunrider was how all the mechanics were linked in a fairly clear way. Being moralist or prince affected your decisions, and those could affect the missions you did. At the same time, those battles gave you money and Command Points, supposed to be used to upgrade your units out of battle and be used in choices too out of battle. Yes, the latter never really panned out and you used them mostly in orders, but during all of MoA you were always waiting the “big moment” in which your CP will pay off, and even the few times it was used it was satisfying in a way. Out of battle you had agency to upgrade and visit your pilots and comrades, and even to do side-missions to increase the 2 resources above. One of the side missions even gave you an item to affect only the story with no real effect on battle. Overall, the game felt like a cohesive whole; one part affected the other naturally in a cycle. Blowing up the Legion not only was a personal choice, but it also meant the Sunrider was unavailable during the next mission. You couldn’t restock and upgrade between continuous battles. Saving the diplomats and children meant facing a tougher situation.
Even in waifu mode, the gameplay was still there, because in a way it was significant. Unlike with SA, mods without gameplay were harder to implement, and arguably made the game weaker.
Now, Liberation Day sought to streamline a lot of things, but the way it was done meant that (until 2.00) instead of maintaining this cohesive whole, the game was kinda divided in 2. In one hand you had the prettier VN parts, now fully lineal without any agency. In the other you had the more massive battles. However, without meaningful choices and CP not affecting anything outside battle, it developed into the 2 parts having close to no relation to each other. You had the choice the upgrade whenever you wanted out of battle, but when do you naturally gravitated to do it? Well, just before the battle when you’re given the nice choices and Renpy doesn’t do strange things with it, of course.
This is a very stark contrast with MoA, where upgrades were almost always one of the earliest things you did after the battle; you were asking yourself “When will be the next battle?! It will be a double one?!”. You basically change from having interactions everywhere to only doing it in one of the 2 parts of the game. Not only that, this division on the 2 parts mostly meant that instead of a coherent storytelling, the game’s narrative seemed to simply grind to a halt for most battles (with 2 marked exceptions). The Battle of Far Port for example worked both narratively and in gameplay. You were fighting the fleet you saw in the CG and narration before, and you fought them in a way that was coherent with the strategy formulated at the beginning of the same mission; both gameplay and story joined to make the best together, and that was something noticeable even in Waifu mode. Wedding Crash was running against insurmountable odds and needing to fight 2 Battleships to escape. Ongess showed you the power of Assault Carriers through gameplay despite introducing them in a full blown CGI.
Now, for example, battle 6 in Lib Day? Supposed to be a thousand Ryders march? You have a handful of Ryders… as a frontal screen, after it there are 6 BBS. Oh, and the reinforcements on the second turn are precisely a group of Fast Cruisers against an Alliance Carrier; you’ll thought that would be precisely an event worthy of a little battle epicness, a way to explain why Fast Cruisers (explicitly associated with Fontana’s modern Fleet) had somehow managed to sneak by, and , you know, introducing the Alliance Carrier? Nope, have fun fighting! And of course, the following reinforcements are as far as you can get from the “march of thousands of Elites and Mooks”.
This is the most blatant example, but Lib Day was full of things like this. In MoA you had the occasional side-mission with close to 0 narrative, but even that was only for side-missions.
This stark divide is also probably what caused a lot of the communication issues and problems with the ending. You had basically only agency during the battles, so the beta-testers were naturally drawn and focused on that part. At the same time, this meant that the focus on battles shifted from “forming a coherent narrative and being balanced” more towards being “balanced” as the beta testers simply gave feedback related to the battles. The frustration at the ending itself build of the natural frustration on the lack of agency; you had the power during battles, and were good at it! But that means sh*t for the rest of the game. Darth’s favourite review actually perfectly shows it; the wishall was an item that you won in a battle of all things, a reflection of your skill and agency. Yet it was utterly useless when the player felt it mattered the most. That’s breaking the agency of the player, making feel like he simply doesn’t matter and the story will follow on his own ignoring him. That’s the point where what you’re playing stops really being a game and more 2 different things (a Book and a battle system) slapped together.
To be honest, I reached this conclusion while asking myself about why I found some parts of Liberation Day so repetitive sometimes(as you could see in my previous thoughts of the gameplay). The balance was actually pretty close to perfect, and while most battles weren’t really interesting per se, I had eaten things far worse in a far greater quantity. At first I thought that it was that all the battles were too big, but actually, only 4 really took me very long. But then I realized that when I play the 20th mission on a Fire Emblem I don’t really care only about the system or what was the optimum plan. Rather, I care about the way to make character X do the final hit on character Y so that he\she can take revenge on Z, or that A and B are pretty close to get a new support so I must put them together, or even wondering if the stats on NPCs meant that country J is a lot more powerful than Empire H. Of course a game that doesn’t make that part a total snoozefest is appreciated, but you’re really past the point of playing only for that gameplay.
It’s pretty normal to get a little bored no matter how good the system is after 5 similar battles, but most games have something to push you beyond that, be it the story, some gimmick or simply the fulfilling satisfaction of pounding into oblivion someone you hate (or wish to defeat). And that feeling of “the battle as part of the narrative” kinda disappears in Lib Day. The division between battles and plot is bigger than ever and the fact that you’re pounding into the dirt the same enemies you destroyed the previous game ( and that without Fontana never feel interesting or threatening) combine to mean that the only enjoyment you’ll pull out of battles is basically the one coming from the battle system itself.
The new units only help with that feeling: “here, have new units that have cool skills and are fun to use!”, hum, Ceran gunboats? ! We’re actually going to recapture Cera, perhaps we will have some small scene with nameless soldiers telling us about the situation, or about the remnants of the Ceran fleet, or about the planet?! Nope, have fun with the battles!
The same with the Union BBs and the Ryuvian Falcon (it was piloted by a ghost! By a ghost of all things! Who the heck pilots them now, unknown pilot-kun?!... Actually, that’s a good idea, welcome my new headcanon). They don’t really felt like they are there for anything. I mean, I don’t think merc units really need too much of a justification, but there are probably reasons why Ceran Gunboats joined you or the Union trusts you with a Battleship (instead of selling them before).
This just makes the whole bridge between battles and plot even bigger. Battles feel meaningless, while the Plot grinds to a halt for entire battles, tremendously disrupting the pacing and the flow. Overall however, perhaps the worse of this is that this divide put in full view some of the biggest weakness Sunrider’s writing had, but that in MoA had managed to appear mostly hidden.
And from this point on I’ll try to focus on only the writing itself, with different sections for different things. In general however, Lib Day’s problems tend to be focused on a very barebones prose, poor narrative flow and an oversized story arc (with oversized I mean long but with very little “meat”).
Narrative flow:
One important part in story is how to connect the scenes and events that compose the story in a way that feels smooth and consistent. That’s what a narrative flow is; in good cases you’ll barely notice the changes in scenes and the whole story will feel smoother and more immersive. A good flow also improves the pacing by its own nature. A bad flow however makes it seem more like instead of a story we’re watching a series of scenes in a particular order for arbitrary reasons. Animes and movies live through that, but narrative and gamimg mediums that require immersion are particularly worsened by it; in the former the reader is an observer, but in the later the whole point of it is the immersion of the reader in the characters, and for him to feel like an observer is particularly disadvantageous. Now, there are some exception for both cases (aSoIaF for example takes a very “television series” approach to its narrative, but it requires a series of tricks), but Sunrider is a pretty standard VN\game, so in this case it applies.
The problem is that narrative flow in Sunrider is all over the place. Now, that’s actually not a problem only in Liberation Day; even the original MoA felt a lot of times more like a series of ideas, scenes and side plots joined together than a completely coherent story. However, MoA used an old trick that videogames have always used to compensate for their lack of writing; let the player fill the gaps. Instead of simply jumping scenes, let the player on a map and chance naturally on the events. Then, instead of thinking something like “Why are this people here?, what they were doing?, why this particular time?, shouldn't they be doing their work?, do they even have something to do?, etc”, the player will realize he has stepped into something and automatically fill the gaps instead; the main character stops needing a reason to just be there and the progression is smooth (in the player’s mind). Instead of seeing a scene because of a forced plot, the player is seeing a scene he has chanced upon by their own agency, even if it was only because there was close to nothing else to do.
In contrast, Lib Day scenes feel arbitrary, jumping from one perspective to another without any seeming reason and moving from one scene to another “because the plots wills it”, not because of any actual in character reason or previous connection with an earlier scene. This, again, makes the player feel like an observer and thus lose their feeling of agency even more.
Now, this problem was kinda solved in 2.0, though in general I feel it’s still a bit in there. The writing simply has to get smoother, and there’s no easy way out of it, just working hard to improve as a writer. Instead of thinking the game like an anime with scenes, try to think of how each scene leads to another and try to plant “seeds” of future scenes in those earlier ones. Also, sometimes feeling like an spectator is the intended result (for example, in the Alpha and Fontana scenes), but other times is not even if there’s a change of perspective (Asaga for example; a big problem of the love triangle is that instead of feeling it most players simply saw it happen).
Pacing and Arcs:
Pacing is very important; the basis of it is to build up the stakes and the scale of the conflict in the climax, so that those events don’t throw the reader off. While surprising twists to up the scales are frequent, they never make for good climaxes; rather, almost always the are there to build up the climax of the story itself. When you simply up the scale and stakes of the conflict out of nowhere without no indication, you break the immersion of the reader and bewilder him.
Pacing the plot was something both MoA and First Arrival did reasonably well. There was a crescendo of events leading up to a series of climax. Sometimes the climax were just “stepping stones” (Ongess, Wedding crash) to a larger climax. Now, one important thing related with my initial main point is that in almost all of these climaxes there was a rule of 1 battle=1 climax (Far port, Wedding crash), or of 1climax=2 battles (Ongess and Helion). Even in those later cases the battles never felt like they “stopped” and a single event was divided in two, but more of a continuation once a significant change happened on the battlefield (arrival of Assault Carriers in one case, either destroying or slipping by the Legion in the second). Now, one of the biggest problems the abrupt separation of plot and battles brings can be fully appreciated here.
The final battle in cera takes 4 (5 if you count the last) battles, the problem being basically that of them, 2 are completely superfluous; if you continued from battle 6 to 7, or from 8 to 9 would really change anything besides the rebalance? There’s any important plot point intrinsic to the battle? Here, instead of magnifying the climax, the numerous battles effectively dilutes it, lowering the impact of basically everything as the battles mostly bring the plot to a halt as you destroy 10 BBs and Assault Carriers for the 5th time in the game with almost no difference to the times before. A boss can be fun, joining forces with PACT is fun, and battle 7 has some cool stuff, but they together with the plot are simply far too sparse to hold up what can be up to 4 hours of playing, and effectively are half of the game. You can go to enjoy the gameplay, but this only strengthens the feeling of “separation” the story and battle system have; instead of fighting for Cera you feel like playing a fun round at skirmish mode.
If the previous buildup was satisfying, this overly long climax could be forgiven, but the build up is absolutely horrible, mostly because there is practically 0.
You start the game in what is basically a leftover climax from the previous part. Now, this isn’t necessarily bad; FA also started with a pseudoclimax on the invasion of Cera and starting the game in high gear is pretty normal.However, after that it requires a windown. This part is actually done surprisingly well. While mission 2 feels a tad too harsh and intense for what is basically an excuse to have Chigara shine and doesn’t have any real repercussion (divide between gameplay and story strikes again!), there’s plenty of scenes both before and after to effectively lower the intensity. It’s also does a good job setting the new goals and preparing the player for the path to those goals. Now, a crescendo with a climatic battle at Cera can start!
Okay, need to get money. Hello guys at versta that are in no way different that the ones we beat just before, hello ghosts that have fewer lines explaining you than talking about Chigara’s virginity, hello Tydaria again nice to see you have no distinctive feature beside us having Union battleships.
And then, directly to the final battle at Cera! Hum, however, I don’t feel particularly pumped out, almost as if instead of a the final goal in a long travel full of arduous moments we just went through a 1 hour and half walk and then reached it…
Side mission never effectively work as a crescendo; that requires progressively heightening the stakes as the plot progresses and starts revealing itself. Side missions have none of that (few plot and fewer stakes), that’s why they’re most of the times normally regarded as a wind-down moment, which is actually what they were used as in MoA (after Far Port and Ongess). Once we arrive at Cera the first battle could be argued as trying to increase the intensity a little, but is overall far too superfluous and far too close to the main battle to be effective. The game really would have benefited from picking one of the side missions (the one of Tydaria for example) and make it a real plot event with serious stakes (the Mining Union), plot reveals (would have been a perfect place to put more politics too) and simply a bit of development. This can not only be achieved with “battles” in a gameplay sense; Ongess is a very good example of how to “build up” the conflict and its seriousness through plot alone. First seeing the bad situation of the planet, later increasing the tension through Cosette’s resistance and its involvement of civilians, and finally making the last punch by the arrival of PACT together with a new kind of vessel.
So, overall, the pacing of Liberation Day is a total wreck; we go from silly love triangles, some briefings (which include ghosts) and petty scheming to fight for our true homeland. The raise in the stakes is simply not felt, there’s no special feelings of “we’re ending this now”, and the plot reveals, are, well, inexistent? The final boss is a clear example; from the gameplay standpoint is one of the most exciting missions, but plot-wise it feels extremely rushed and forced. Basically “here’s the boss”. It doesn’t feel like a natural development coming from the increasing enemy force as the stakes start to rise and everything is going down to a final fight; it’s not that it isn’t a “fated fight” like the Legion, but that it barely feels like it happened at all. Of course, half of the problems are due to the villains (they get their own section later), but half of it is that the threat level goes from 0 to infinite in basically seconds, and you just can’t take it seriously.
The battle of Cera simply never feels like a proper climax (it has some rough gems, but nothing more). The problem of the pacing also however reveals another problem in itself, Cera. I’ll dedicate an entire section to that later.
To finish this, the ending… is actually probably the best pacing-wise of the game. While the previous events just before can be too overwhelming (try to rein in the cheap drama, Samu-kun), the battle finally feels like a proper climax, to the point the previous Battle of Cera almost seems like a crescendo to this. The threat and stakes rises accordingly in the scenes before in a decent (if not very smooth) rise. It’s also probably the only battle which really feels connected to what’s happening plot-wise; half your units are gone, your position is set up, you have an unique objective and the main enemies have changed and are completely different. All of them are “tricks” that can’t be overused, but in this case they are pretty damn effective. The epilogue also acts nicely on it, though due to it’s nature as an add-on it feels like it goes on a tad too much, but, eh, more content is always good.
So, overall, Liberation Day has a big problem with the pacing; the use of only one “story arc” means that there’s no crescendo to a big climax and so the game suffers a lot for it, only regaining some momentum in its ending. It feels like it really could have used another story arc; of course we all would want another Ongess, but it would have worked even if it was relatively small (like the Versta one in FA). The main story arc itself is also oversized; spanning lost of dialogue and battles for what it’s in the end very little plot development (until the epilogue itself, which I count outside the arc). This only dilutes it even further and makes the work lose focus.
Character Development
Another of the bigger problems, is an almost utter lack of character development in the whole plot; only the Captain and Asaga really have some time. Kryska and Icari have some nice moments, but until the ending it’s far too unstated and secondary to really have some effect. Even in the ending, the character development is almost sorely on Kryska’s side with Icari being mostly a catalyst.
But for now, let’s enumerate it for each character:
-Captain: Kayto has a big problem, and it’s that he’s supposed to be the player character. Now, while his issues are important, in Lib Day it feels less as him having issues and more as he’s running away from everything. Of course, in the ending we can see some character development as he finally overcomes his regret with Maray, but the other 90% of the game all the players have to basically shake his head thinking “please, can you stop being stupid?”. Furthermore, I don’t know if because he’s supposed to be the player character, but all of his feelings, issues, and even his love for Chigara, all feel extremely undeveloped; you don’t know them until the captain goes and says them. The flashback at MoA and the captain’s subsequent breakdown (or even the nightmares after Ongess) showed more of his thoughts, feelings and character than the whole of Liberation Day, including the ending and the epilogue. If you furthermore add that even with that he is still fairly bland, then having problems with him is fairly normal.
-Chigara: Chigara for me is a missed opportunity. She basically has 0 character development. Not only that, all of his personality besides being super-dere and cute seems to disappear during the game; she only thinks of the captain and their bakery magically forgetting her engineering skills (brought up a humongous total of once in the whole game) and even friends (“uh… Asaga has been acting weird during this whole month… heh, I've got a date with the captain, let’s totally forget about her!”). Even the ending is a huge loss. Instead of adding character depth by making her betrayal more ambiguous, maybe hinting at some dark part or anything, she simply gets possessed. That’s incredibly cheap, especially when you kill her afterwards just when she is recovering control; that’s not drama, that’s a purity sue of enormous proportions. Humans are flawed, they have some darker and unseen parts that together with their visible ones make their overall character. That’s called character depth and it’s what allows us to empathize with fictional characters. The moment you throw that out to have a 100% loving waifuing machine with no other purpose, you don’t care about her even if you like her; she’s a 2D waifu thought to appeal to you the most and that is clearly seen through. The worst is that Chigara seemed to have some character depth (superficial, but it was there) in MoA (and even in Lib Day, the fight with Asaga could have been used to show that). Even the end, forcing a change in her character through fusing with Alice more than anything on her own is also incredibly cheap; I would like a yandere Chigara, but I would like a yandere Chigara developing on her own and not through a plot device of all things. She already had the makings there, was it really necessary for it to be through that…? (a darker influence being the final hit that makes her into that is fine, but it being the sole reason it is not).
-Asaga: Now, Asaga actually has some character development. It continues nicely from the one in MoA, and while the story itself ends being a little taxing due to overuse of repetition (the captain does something showing he likes Chigara, Asaga feels hurt, maybe talks or says something to Sola, nothing happens; rinse and repeat at least thrice) the character development feels decent. I think that’s also the reason Asaga has changed from having no chance at the polls to fighting with the top 2 waifus toe to toe; her character feels a lot more complete. I also want to thank Samu-kun for finally casting aside the “Evil Sharr personality” things it felt she was going to have; doing that would have meant doing the same mistake that with Chigara and stealing Asaga of the precious depth she needed. Now she shows she can have darker emotions like any normal human, can even fall to them and furthermore can try to improve that. While the end of Liberation Day can throw a little wrench into that (she being actually right about her paranoia), I think it can be reworked into more complexity and character development for future parts.
-Ava: Ava is complex because she never really had a lot of character development, but it was more like actually eroding her barrier with time. In Liberation Day she has a small subplot about trust and her own feelings starting to resurface on their own. Pretty nice, but it goes slow and gets too few time to really shine or carry anything. The final break on the dam on the epilogue feels correct and significant, but it’s a shame that the culmination of basically the entire Helion and Legion subplot ends so small and disconnected. The main fault of the later is mainly on the Captain’s muddled feelings in the transition between the Helion/Legion and the Chigara (I refuse to call it Cera) arcs (which, you probably are already getting the pattern, will have its own section later). Overall, not bad though.
-Sola: Sola continues taking it slowly. Liberation Day basically shows her standard attitude, but now we can actually connect it a little more to her origins. She has some subtle points of character growth (for example, I found actually fairly important how she was ready to kill Asaga herself when she went berserk; her loyalty to the Captain is now arguably higher than the one she has to Ryuvia), but all very unstated. The epilogue leaves a lot of room for the future though. Can’t help but feel though that a tad more in Liberation Day itself would have been a welcome addition.
-Claude: Hahahaha. 0. I hope we get to see new parts of her; not necessarily her being serious, but even her joking but with a “I can kill you in 0.5 seconds without even moving my pinky finger~~~” can be nice.
-Kryska: Kryska continues in her usual way. She has always been one of the most optimistic and naive of the group (I really don’t know how she could be a spec ops…), and here continues like that, getting even more buddy-buddy with Icari. Her main development was she finally putting more importance in her comrades than her nation, to the point she was even ready to fight the Solar Alliance for the Sunrider. It’s not much, but her scene with her and Icari and gunpoint is very decent and very in-character for our hot-blooded pilot. Her final idea of returning to the Solar Alliance to denounce the Paradox Core Warhead is also very Kryska, even if irredeemably stupid. I would say her defecting simply without even trying to return would be out of Character, so it’s good for me. Overall though she suffers the side-character sindrome, so it’s not like she can do much for Lib Day as a whole.
-Icari: Icari’s main development is her growing trust of Kryska, to the points she’s finally able to be more honest with her, and finally bring her to the Sunrider’s side. A similar but a lot more subdued development happens with the Captain; her trust of the captain in battle (specially in the final battle) is actually quite touching when you think about it. Similar to Sola it’s a shame it’s so very unstated, because there’s a lot of juice there. Definitely missed opportunities there.
So, overall, the big problem is that despite the focus on Chigara there’s close to 0 character development with her. Asaga’s has some, but the execution is lacking and the Captain is really mixed. With some of the favourite characters (Ava, Sola and Icari) basically having little screentime and meaningful development, this further muddles the issue.
Cera
So, now we’re going to Cera! Our home planet, the one we’ve been waiting more than a year to liberate. Oh, boy, I hope we finally get to see how the occupation has affected it, how our Ceran comrades have fought or accepted PACT, maybe a little more of it! And after we win a Liberation parade when the government is reformed and everyone congratulates Shields for his victory including survivor from the occupations, maybe old politicians or former members of the Ceran space force!
…
…
…
…
So yeah. We basically know nothing (nor see nothing) of Cera. In flashbacks and Academy we saw some of Cera City and Maray, but there’s a problem. Both are dead. It’s very hard to get pumped to free a planet when you know nothing of it and have 0 attachment to it. Specially when you also don’t give even a tiny bit of information about it (in 1.0 we don’t even have the summary of the star map!). You could have effectively changed Cera for any other planet in the Galaxy and it would have been the same. Wait, no, that’s wrong; Ongess was fleshed out a lot more than Cera has ever been, and at least we’ve been to Versta a lot of times.
I mean, when we know that we will basically have to free it again I can see leaving some things for after; however, doing absolutely nothing? I’m sorry, but that’s a writing sin on par with the pacing.
Villains:
Another big problem in Lib Day is the villains. PACT never felt that threatening, but they did get close. Cullen was a fat bastard, but a fat bastard with lots of ships; he gets you once and has you running away more times. When you get him at Far port you feel like “now that it’s a fair match I can finally show just how incompetent you are!”; some satisfaction at finally taking him out. Fontana likewise seems more competent from the beginning, and in his first battle he already check matches you and the Alliance. Only Grey’s dirty tactics allows your fleet to survive, showing him both as the better field commander and better man. Ongess also upgrades Cosette, as her previous comical relief character gets more depth and shows a ruthlessness that seems more serious and dangerous than before.
And then you have Arcadius. Arcadius was always the weak link, always shouting cliched lines about his superiority while at the same time appearing as incompetent as Cullen. And to be honest, having both is a real dealbreaker; you can have a villain spout cliche lines about killing everyone and him/her being above all if he/she’s awesome enough. You can have a villain be an incompetent dump if you make him interesting. However Arcadius just looks like someone with a Napoleon complex and with a “list of villainous cliché lines” he just reads non-stop.
While I was looking forward to Lib Day showing a different Arcadius, it simply made everything worse. It gave him super-intelligence, I suppose to show how low the average intelligence is if that’s supposed to be smart? It gave him hundreds of clones; basically admitting that everything before was bullshit and that they’re just expendable and they will simply throw them at something until it work. And it gave them 2 leaders; one that was just an even higher expression of how ridiculously bad they can be at their job and another that was actually interesting but never appeared “face to face”.
In general, the problems of the Arcadius and Alice continue being the same as the problem of the original one:
-They simply never feel like a threat. There’s really something they have accomplished during all the game? They fail at killing you despite having hundreds of clones, they fail at killing you with a fleet twice your size even with kamikaze tactics, they fail at killing you with them taking control of your allies, they let a single prototype with no previous knowledge of her skills infiltrate and override such control, and even with a holy piece of Ryuvian Ryder capable of destroying fleets they fail again. Even when Alice’s backup plan works, she’s overridden and absorbed by such a prototype: a failure to the end. You could think that serie of innumerable super clones with a hivemind and pseudo-immortality would be a tad more effective than that, geez. They started the game dominating PACT and in less than 2 months of in-game time they’ve been basically exterminated as a faction. Even the gameplay reflects that, with the Arcadius units being decent but nowhere near threatening.
-It’s impossible to take anything they spout seriously. From the Arcadius B-movie speeches about being superior to mankind and ruling the galaxy, to Alice’s B-movie speeches about humans cruelty and how she’s going to exterminate you all. Of course, point 1 helps here; a terrifying villain could make it work somewhat decently, but in this case you can’t help but laugh at them.
A big problem of that is Alice’s lack of depth. While I like how what happened is hinted in a way that makes it clear while also leaving a lot for Veniczar, it simply doesn’t work when that character is your main villain; the main villain is a character as important as the main hero, and as such requires a similar amount of development. Alice has nothing, so instead of seeing how a love-struck Alice changed to a psychopath (you could even make a dark parallelism with Chigara and the captain), we simply get generic psychopath villain n. 59.
Heck, in comparison, Grey and Fontana got a lot more near of actually being the villain by virtue of being competent at their job (
Prose:
Liberation Day’s prose has always been extremely barebones and to the point. That’s something in common with the original, and it’s not something intrinsically bad or wrong, but more kind of like a style.
Such prose normally allows for a fast pacing and quick action. In Visual Novels furthermore the art and music can create the immersion and mood your prose is unable to make, so it can be quite effective even in more relaxed scenarios or ones with a lot of casual dialogue.
There is however a fairly big flaw, and that such prose normally falls flat when it tries anything abstract or to confront a great idea. It’s normal after all; barebone prose is basically made for quick action and constant movement, or casual dialogue. Scenes in which “what is happening” is a lot more important than the ideas of the characters or the mood of the scene.
However, the moment the feelings of one character are more important to the scene than the action, or the moment when a speech is more a declaration of ideals or of goals than of facts, is the moment when such style tends to struggle the most. It isn’t enough to say “he loved her”, or “she felt deep hate”; “show, don’t tell” has been the most crucial rule in anything with a script since the birth of modern media. You need to describe the scene, set the mood, and allow your prose to make the reader feel what is happening and not simply read it. Of course, art, sound, etcetera can also help a lot and make the job much more easier. However, when the feelings grows more complex or nuanced, a lot of times it’s not enough.
In MoA, the biggest emotional moment relied mainly in a flashback. Even then, though, the actual romance there is very simple and innocent. I in fact think the later is actually the point; showing the simplicity and innocence of days far gone. Even the promise of the Captain, arguably the “climax” of that emotional moment, is meant to come as childish and naive.
His feelings after Ongess are also connected to this flashback and his sister; basically redirecting a very complex issue into a far more simple guilt issue over failing to rescue his sister. Now, a lot of times simple is best; more straightforward feelings also tend to be the stronger ones after all, and are by nature far easier to sympathize with.
In Academy in general the character’s feeling also tend to be rather straightforward. After all, unlike in the main series, here they are high-school students and there’s no fate of the world at stake. There are some routes more dramatic than the others, and one even has some fairly important issues for the lore, but nothing much complicated. I would even argue that when the routes tried to go for a more nuanced storyline or feelings, they actually quite failed at it (*cough*Chigara route*cough*).
Now, Liberation Day. The main theme of the game is betrayal. However, the problem is that betrayal is very complex and ambiguous issue. The main thing about betrayal is not the fact itself, but rather the ambient of doubt that permeates everyone. The one that must make the player start doubting everyone, force him to think a lot on who trusts and why, make him paranoid about even silly things, etc. And that’s something you can’t get with only facts.
You can’t simply make one doubt on facts because then the facts itself point to that betrayal and there’s no tension; there’s simply a betrayer. What you have to do is create a scenario in which unconsciously the player starts doubting the other characters, not by simple facts, but rather the way those facts are presented. When you know there’s a betrayer, you may start doubting someone for silly things: Icari going to a bar may make you suspect she’s contacting people outside the Sunrider, Kryska reuniting with old comrades makes you think of her as an spy, even Ava’s obsession with paperwork can be transformed to a way to have all the information on the Sunrider at any moment.
But there’s basically 0 of that. It’s not even that it falls flat, is that there’s completely 0 of that. The betrayal theme is mostly presented through the love triangle, which basically transforms a complex and nuanced theme into a high-school romance. There’s actually a lot of potential in the original theme; after reading 2.0 and thinking a little, the conclusion some of us reached is that technically almost everyone betrayed someone in some way. That can be incredibly powerful, but it just isn't because there’s never really a feeling of betrayal, a tension or anything. The prose simply fails to make any of that; while I’m not proposing a change to a more purple prose or anything like that (Sunrider is simply not that), there’s the need to set a mood and filter what can be perfectly normal actions with a shade of suspicion. Some games are able to convey their theme through pure ambience (i.e. Dark Souls only tells its story and Lore through item descriptions, yet its theme is extremely clear through a combination of graphics, music and gameplay), and others do it through narrative. In the later however, you simply need a better prose if you want to make the player feel it and not simply see it. There’s a reason why horror games and thrillers are so hard to pull off nicely; more than plot you need execution. And execution in a Visual Novel means graphics, sound and, specially, prose. The former 2 aren’t bad, but don’t help a lot in this particular case, and Sunrider’s prose simply can’t create the mood or tension needed for a proper betrayal.
The theme of betrayal is more on there because it’s hammered by the trailer and the characters than by anything else. And that’s a big failure that cheapens it, and so overall cheapens the game.
Now, does that mean Sunrider simply can’t into more nuanced themes? That’s not exactly right either. Even with the current prose, Sunrider works with its more simpler themes; as said before, MoA effectively did manage to effectively redirect some more nuanced issues in a simpler way that made them more powerful. The characters (every one of them) lacked complexity, but still got development.
Another thing to note though is that this simply extends to scenes in which the ideas or feelings of the characters are a lot more important than the “what is happening”. Politics and battles are precisely the opposite, so through a very simple prose describing what is happening, you can actually inject a great amount of nuance and complexity; case in point being of course the situation at Ongess.
Another great example would be the book version of the “Legend of Galactic Heroes”. To put it simple, despite being a novel of 300 pages, the book is very, very sparse with its actual prose. While not as barebones, being a book after all, it could be said that its prose is to books what Sunrider’s prose is to VNs.
However, Legend of Galactic Heroes continues being a classic revered by its very nuanced depiction of politics, wars, and even history. The reason is that all of them are themes in which you can speak through facts, rather than feelings. Showing political machinations and its results, how entire wars and millions of casualties are engineered, how some cling to profit and power while arguing they do it for justice, etc. All of this are things in which the facts are the “show, don’t tell” part. In fact, a very barebones prose may even enhance the effect, adding a “historical documentary effect” in some parts, and making speeches sound empty no matter the argument.
So, in my opinion, Samu-kun should stick with his strengths; his prose simply isn’t good enough (as of now) to really makes us feel much complexity in an emotional sense, however fits well with more straightforward feelings. And he can add complexity on the political/economic/military/technical side, because that suits his strengths too.
As a final note, I would be cautious too when it comes to expressing ideas: while some can be very simple and straightforward, it’s very easy to get muddled up with the “higher” ideals and themes. Just like a story needs a crescendo to a climax, you also need to prepare these things; you don’t jump from holding hands to a declaration of eternal love, so you can’t jump from speaking of the weather to suddenly revealing your most inner ideals and philosophy, or speaking of theology. In the later case it will often sound either cheap or stupid regardless of the actual validity of what is said.
Example: I think Claude’s revelation showed that very well. The too simplistic way it was done simply didn't suit the idea of a higher being at all, and just makes the clash between that and the world more obvious (thus breaking immersion). Just making Sola make a small prelude would make everything a tad more palatable:
Sola: I believe she’s my kin, in a way. Yet she’s more far apart from me than I am from my age. She’s what every Ryuvian Emperor, from the first, to my father, to the ones that saw their empire ruined, dreamed to be. Someone to whom time is but a friend, in which she can freely come and go. Someone who sees the entire Universe as but a toy to play with…. In short, she is what I would call a god.
There, while the main idea is still kept, you’ve slowly introduced the reader to it instead of slapping him to the face with it. When you start thinking, the idea on the main plot it’s the same, but in context at least it sounds far less stupid. Sometimes a little dressing can help to express ideas (or hide its flaws) better; the important point is avoiding a clash so big it breaks immersion.
Captain’s feelings:
I believe the captain’s is one of the great victims to this overall lack of nuance; there’s basically no doubt nor grey area with his feelings. He goes from loving Ava enough to dedicate 10 years of his life to fulfilling a silly promise (and maybe even sparing the Legion) to drool when thinking of Chigara within a month.
There’s no reflection, no slow shift over time. Chigara had already established herself at the end of MoA as the Captain’s emotional support; the position was, in a way, perfect to slowly develop how, after Ava’s final rejection, Chigara slowly gains the captain’s heart. The problem is however that this process is seemingly skipped: there’s a time skip of one month so this happens entirely off-screen. Instead of an evolution we see a jump. This makes the romance seem more forced, as not only it feels like that from a “gameplay” point of view, but also from a purely narrative point of view. Yeah, all the pieces are there, but even if you have them you haven’t solved the puzzle. If you jump from showing all the pieces to the final result you aren’t solving it, you’re simply skipping steps.
Now, this doesn’t only handicaps the entire relationship and the Captain’s character, but also has even effect on the love triangle. As the most difficult part is already set in stone (the Captain liking Chigara) this basically condemns all development on that part as simply Asaga struggling against something against which she can’t do anything. There’s no dynamical relations nor any actual movement or action; she’s simply struggling against a series of feelings that are presented as facts after a time skip. Not only that, the earlier issue also creates a disconnect from the player to the love triangle itself: the player not only hasn’t decided it, but it can’t even understand the captain feelings. We can’t even feel guilty or that much sad for Asaga because we ourselves don’t understand what the captain is thinking. As I said before, the player feels like a spectator and not like one of the participants, and as nothing actually happens until Asaga’s betrayal there’s not even much to actually see.
Just development for Asaga and the development itself is fine (if a tad cliché), but it can’t carry all the sections dedicated to it.
So, in summary, not only we have a problem with Chigara the waifuing machine but also in the captain feelings being completely underdeveloped and pushed along through jumps. This strains the narrative making the reader unattached to the romance itself, but also severely weakening the love triangle subplot as a collateral.
On the plus side: Ava’s feelings are fairly well depicted, though she definitely benefits from an overall slow arc instead of jumping around. Her small jealousy as her armour finally starts to melt is good, though overall it makes the Chigara romance feel even more forced. For example, if you sink the Legion, she and the captain have a fairly emotional talk that only makes the emotional jump from Ava to Chigara feel even weirder (specially as Ava’s armour starts to crack). I think perhaps a bigger “Ice Queen” time would have overall benefited the game: making her reject the captain again or something similar enough would have helped the “Chigara route” make more sense. This would also make the final resolution more meaningful and cathartic; right now it seems like a very simple “you don’t know what you have until you lose it”, and the little time dedicated to it makes it seem more like a small subplot than the resolution of half of MoA.
Voices:
Overall, I rather liked the Japanese voices. While I felt Chigara’s VA had to deal with 2 of the worst characters in the game (Chigara and Alice), how she voiced them while making them similar yet different was very nice. She also fit both very well. Asaga’s VA struggled a lot at the beginning, making what should be a dramatic moment seem like a joke (this is probably due to being her first lines, when the only thing she had of Asaga was her bio and her general character). As she keep going she improved, and by the end I had nothing but love for her. Ava’s VA also did a very fine job. Icari and Kryska were both good, though there were also a pair or two of silly mistakes (like some of Kryska’s shouts, which felt very weird, and Icari felt even more silly in her crying scene). The rest were fine, but nothing that enhanced the writing much (I did fanboy at some of Fontana’s lines, but that was more due to a combination of cheese, fabulousness and cool factor).
As a note, it also felt strange that some of the lines were rewritten in Japanese. A lot of times they were expanded for seemingly no reason (I suppose the line was too brief? As the Japanese VAs are paid by lines, there’s probably a thought there to maximize the voice per what’s paid?), the winner being Chigara’s line of reconstructing the Captain’s tea set. It like, changed from 3 lines to an extensive technobabble explanation. Also, Claude had like all of her lines filled with even more innuendos (if that was possible); it was a bit ridiculous.
Overall, nothing much of substance (but a bit of style). It did felt like some of it was just for the kick of it though.
In the end, the voices enhanced what they could, though it may detract from it if someone is not used to Japanese voice-overs. They are after all pretty typical, nothing groundbreaking or particularly impressive in either direction: not a huge factor in any way. Personally, I think a lot of the problems of Liberation Day would have been slightly lessened if Kayto had been voiced (thus, changing a lot of things to “Kayto is his own person” instead of simply “stealing agency and breaking immersion”), but I know some people hate MCs being voiced.
Misc:
In general, the text tends to feel a tad unpolished (this applies to all the Sunrider series in general; some typos, awkward expressions, overuse of infodumping and “as you already know”, etc). It’s not something I tend to emphasize, because I realize LiS is still basically a very indie dev in a very niche market and sadly it’s a standard in the VN marker (Sakura games this side, bad translations this other), but I feel it should at least be recognized. Normally numerous editing passes (and by someone different than the original write) are considered the minimum for any written work . While not reaching the standard for a while can be understood, it shouldn't be the modus operandi here. Typos that are only corrected just before the release even if they were spotted 5 months earlier, 0 rewriting on any scene, etc. If we’re focusing on the narrative again then I think it should be more of a priority; nobody publishes a book without at least an editor and dozens of rewritings and editing passes. A more polished writing softens the whole experience and makes the bad easier to manage and the good even better.
Twists:
I didn’t really plan to talk about this, but some people argued (fairly well) about the idea that Lib Day is a result of placing its “twist” as the center of its narrative. Now, while I can certainly agree that the idea has merit, I don’t think any of the writing flaws I’ve talked about should be affected by this. To see why, let’s talk a bit about twists in general (could go on and on, but will make it short).
Twists are at their core a sudden change of “genre” in any media (basically, game changers that can affect the whole narrative). It can be minor changes (from “story with a happy ending” to “story with a bittersweet ending”) to more major ones (“love comedy” to “military drama”). However, and that’s something important, the twist quality depends less on the change of genre itself and more on the execution of the genres both before and after. When you have a silly super-typical sitcom and in the last episode you suddenly kill the whole cast to a nuclear attack you have a shitty twist, because not only were the genres unbalanced (you basically had 99,9% of one and 0,1% of the other) but also because you’ve introduced the twist (genre shift) out of nowhere. If you for example put “the gang is transported to another world and then killed” then it’s already a tad better, but if the sitcom was bad and silly then their deaths would lose importance and accomplish nothing. No matter how good a subversion or twist you have, if your original is garbage then after it will continue to be. You need a proper execution of both “genres” and for there to be a balance between them in order for the twist to work
The twist also must be sufficiently surprising and shocking for people to not see it coming, but as said above you can’t pull it off your ass. Some knack for it is needed, and that’s why writing twists is pretty hard in the first place. With dimensional and time travels you can make use of some general conventions or Deus Ex Machina more easily, but then you need to develop 2 worlds and their differences convincingly.
That’s also why normally having grand twists for an ending is normally a very bad idea, because you basically force a small genre shift but have close to no space to show it, justify it or execute it well. You can pull it off in more minor cases, but it’s hard. The only 2 cases I can think of right now are Trails in the Sky (FC) and Trails of Cold Steel, both of which relied on extensive foreshadowing and even “fake endings”. The result is that they properly “finished” the first part, giving it a pseudo-ending and then pulled out to the new “genre” (in both cases it was a minor change from an “optimistic and formulaic JRPG” to a “darker, harsher JRPG”).
So, in summary, you need two well executed “genres”, a convincing but still surprising reason to cause the genre shift in the first place and finally a proper execution of it.
Now, Liberation Day has a supposed twist at its penultimate chapter. It takes the form of the previously commented “pseudo-ending”; it carries you to the ending of the first “genre” introduced before unleashing the twist and showing that there’s a big enemy/plot point/whatever that you didn’t realize until that moment. Now, this kind of technique has some pros and cons, like all things do.
One of the cons of “pseudo-ending” is that it doesn’t magically cure the first genre of any flaw it may have; no matter how good the overall series are, people still give bad reviews to MuvLuv Extra simply because as a harem comedy it’s not that good (it’s not bad, because then reader wouldn't love the characters and the twist wouldn’t work at all, but it’s clearly not a masterpiece). If a game changes from an RPG to a shooter, even if it’s shooter part is magnificent if the RPG part is horrible it won’t be considered as good as it could have been if it was a shooter. While this can be extended to all twists in genera, In the case of the pseudoending is worse because you’re forced to take the first genre to its narrative conclusion, so if it’s bad you’re forced to go through all of it to reach the “good part”. While narrative is more complex, and you can use for example a more cliché scenario to contrast with a more nuanced and ambiguous revelation, that itself doesn’t justify a badly executed first scenario (and yes, you can make hundred of clichés work if you execute them well). You’re simply better working directly with the second scenario.
And the second problem this “pseudoending” has is that if the “twist” is completely predictable, then it loses all the power. As said before, this “pseudoending” works by “finishing” one “genre” and then smoothly showing something else you hadn’t realized; it’s major advantage is that it gives a sense of closure and safety before pulling out the twist and hitting the player when he is waiting for the credits to roll. If you see it coming and are waiting for it expectantly then it only makes the ending of that “part” cheaper and meaningless; of course you won’t feel anything at a goodbye if you know he/she will be back before the hour ends, neither any happiness nor closure when the hero finally gets his happy life if you know it won’t last 10 minutes, etc.
As the main point of doing it’s smoothly finish “one genre” and then move to another in one swift surprise, if the twist is predicted then, well, it would have the same effect as pulling the twist at any other moment without any kind of special effect nor contrast or shock. And simply pulling a twist in itself does not contribute positively or negatively to the writing; it’s simple a change on the genre, but it doesn’t affect directly to the prose, pacing and character development (the “2nd genre” will of course affect all of them, but the twist itself won’t). If you don’t manage to pull off the twist in a special way, this only makes the fact of pulling it at the ending have only disadvantages, as you don’t have time to “balance” the genres or justify the twist.
One of the greatest problems of the original release in fact comes from that: having the twist so near the ending made the genre shift come as one that changed the genre from “Star Wars/normal Space Opera” to “Kill them all”, instead of from “Star Wars/Normal Space Opera” to “Code Geass/Weird and harsh Space Opera” like it was supposed to be.
So, in summary, while the idea that a big part of the script from Liberation Day comes from its supposed twist is very interesting from a meta perspective, it doesn’t absolve nor worsen any of the writing itself: as the twist is previsible it simply doesn’t have any shock or surprise value, nor manages to give any sense of closure, thus being relegated to a “simple” plot development.
We can even argue about if there really ever was a genre shift or if some parts of Liberation Day were only a decoy, which would put in doubt if it can even be called a twist. I personally think that would be fighting over semantics, but some may think differently.
And finally; writing is hard. It's also not something you can make a list of "things to do" and make a great result. Writing always requires a bit of inspiration, and there are a ton of great works out there that don't fulfill a lot of the things pointed here as "right". However, is fairly undeniable that this tidbits make the final work worse. Thus, with this write ups I don't pretend to teach anyone how to write. However, I think it's a good compilation of things that if you have, you should at least think carefully about.