Sunday, December 10, 2023
The Enemy Within
Sometimes
we just need a little danger to add some excitement to our lives, but
do not want to actually put ourselves in harms way so we turn to the
Thriller. This genre has had a long history of fiction covering
everything from spies to crime in order to keep the reader on their
toes. In many ways it is similar to another genre visual novels
thrive in, Horror, since both rely on invoking feelings of tension in
the player although the Thriller is more interested in the thrill than outright fear as an end result. Tension on an intimate level is by far the medium’s
greatest strength so the Thriller fits nicely into what it has to
offer and gives a sense of animated humanity to scenes where the
tension is at its thickest. Thrillers are a flexible design space for
games since they can easily assimilate aspects of other genres making
it especially appealing to developer’s who want to add some spice
to an otherwise simple experience. However, just like with anything
it has to be handled properly or it can overwhelm all other flavours
and turn people off completing the meal. So let’s uncover a
conspiracy and discover how visual novels have utilised the Thriller.
Tension In The Smallest Movements
The
threat of danger is often more effective at holding a player in suspense than open displays of violence. A simple everyday
conversation takes on new life when we know one of the people
involved could kill the other if they feel like it. This dance of
masks and intentions is the main hallmark of the Thriller and requires
a subtlety and deftness that visual novels find easy to accommodate.
Their limited means of presenting narratives leads to them
making the most out of every movement and turn of phrase which is exactly
how a tense scene gets much of its mileage. When the player knows
something violent might be about to happen they tend to start to comb
every twitch of the eyebrow or the way something is described in
order to avoid the potential negative outcome. Thrillers take
advantage of this inherent fear of the consequences of conflict to
generate excitement, obviously the player knows they are not really
in danger but they are willing to put that aside and be pulled into
the space of play established through the visual novel.
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| Gonzou owns any scene he is in |
For a good
example of how this works in practice we can look to The Devil On
G-String and any scene where Azai Gonzou is present. This yakuza boss
is a constant source of danger for the protagonist, but it is never
entirely clear if that is immediate or if he is just playing with them. Gonzou has a large presence any time he is on screen
despite not being a man of many words and instead he makes his
position of power clear through a no-nonsense approach where the
violence of his occupation is implied in his every action. The player
is made to jump at his subtle changes in expression and the way his
words are presented on screen through the developer’s constant
quiet shifting of how these elements come across. Sometimes
the player does no need a single clear person to feel in danger
and instead the idea that anybody the characters talk to could be a
murder is often more powerful. Kara No Shoujo has a series of
horrific killings and places a number of characters in front of the
player who are just as likely to be responsible as they are to be
next victim in order to make every interaction with them hold an
underlying tension. While this is nowhere near as directly potent as
the single person conversation, it does have a more continued
presence in the mind of the player and subtly pulls on their
thoughts. It also means the visual novel can provide a paced and even
rising tension that overflows into a more direct type of thrill at
the climax. This makes it the preferred type for games intending to
have a longer duration or include mystery elements where relying on
direct conflict may not be a reasonable narrative option.
Paranoia Is A Man’s Best Friend
Having
an easy to pinpoint source of danger is not a requirement to create a
sense of thrill, after all we can conjure up monster where none
exist. Employing the sense that someone or something is out to get
the characters but providing enough room to doubt the truth of those
feelings and not giving the player anything too solid to grasp onto makes for an abstract sense of danger.
The mind has a tendency of reaching the most negative conclusions
from the information it is given and for the Thriller this is shaped
into a palpable paranoia. Once in place the grasp it has on the
player’s thoughts helps build a tension in every activity the
characters perform. Is this going to be the moment when the shadows
come for them? Questions like this circle the mind and the developer
can use cues to get their desired reaction while guiding the story
forward. An extension of this approach is the unreliable narrator who
the player has no other choice but to work with as the point of view
they have been given. This leads to an uneasy and distrustful relationship
with a narrative force which is normally on the player’s side
leading to another layer of paranoia. It also gives a good sense of
catharsis when the truth about the protagonist lies comes out and the
player is on the same level as them again.
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| Is she a good person or something sinister? |
Take Chaos Head, this game
employs a clearly unreliable point of view character in the form of
Nishijou Takumi and a nebulous threat that lacks a single face to
identify them by. It treads close to the domain of Horror with it
attempting to instil in the player the same maddening fear Takumi finds himself
infected with, but avoids stepping all the way into that genre through
the way it frames this fear as a type of excitement.
There is always a sense of forward momentum even when it is not clear to
the player where they will end up and it imitates the trilling
feeling of being thrown about by a roller-coaster while you have your
eyes closed. This is mostly achieved through the initial contrast
between Takumi’s instability and the normality of the rest of the
cast, only to have this slow stripped away and for the player to
begin to see things with the same unreliability as he does. Shifting
roles and allies are key to preventing a firm grasp on the situation
from being developed over the long term until the time is right for
the big reveal.
Excitement In A Static Medium
Generating
a sense of action and climax at the end of a Thriller when everything
come together to pay off a game’s worth of setup is a sizeable
challenge for the predominantly static medium of visual novels. In
order to create these heart pumping moments they must instead look to
what is at stake in this conflict and make sure it is brought to the
front at every possible moment. This way each game can lean into
their strengths and utilise other forms of climax that are more a
battle of wits than a fist fight. Being focused around the thoughts
in the characters heads as they try to outwit one another acts as a
better source of resolution to a subtle tension or paranoia style of
Thriller discussed above and this forms a more complete experience
than any form of direct action scenes could hope to achieve. Despite
visual novel’s static nature, they do have some tool for dynamic
feeling actions through shifting character portraits, CG’s and
backgrounds which allow them to fine-tune the work done by the
narrative and sell this as the moment where everything is up for
grabs.
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| Truth is a tricky thing in Umineko |
Umineko provides us with an example of how a visual novel can
achieve a thrilling finale even with its static nature. Mysteries and
the examination of them is a the core of Umineko and as you would
expect this means the climax of each episode is an exercise in
problem solving and a battle of wits. In practice this is just two or
more people standing opposite each other and debating the issue and
on the surface this seems like it might not be exciting, but when
placed in context it is one of the most trilling things in any game.
This is achieved through a mixing of the high stakes riding on every word
spoken and the interesting mysteries that appear to have two distinctly
different but incompatible answer to them. The player is kept in
suspense about the fate of the character they have grown to like and
by their lack of knowledge about which truth is the correct one as
all sides make some extremely compelling arguments. Umineko wrings
every drop out this dynamic in order to compensate for its lack of
visual quality and it worked wonders as the passionate playerbase has
shown.
Conclusion
There
is an undeniable parallel between the natural intensity and intimacy
present in visual novels and a Thriller’s aim of creating an
exciting and tense narrative. Crafting a feeling of danger from the
tiny details of a scene is something visual novels have the ability
to lean into due to the limited design space available to them and
this gives the Thriller fertile ground to keep the heart racing even
in what should be low stakes moments. The feeling of paranoia brought
on by an unclear antagonistic force or an unreliable narrator provide
the medium a means of forming a continuous tension within
a Thriller. Through playing off the strong sense of high stakes and
more battle of wits centric stories a text heavy game tends towards, a
visual novel can lead its Thriller to an appropriate climax.
Alongside Horror, the Thriller is perhaps the most compatible genre
with the strengths of the medium.
