Monday, January 13, 2025
Shedding Tears
Playing
on the heart strings is a tricky technique to make the centre piece
of genre, yet that is exactly what Nakige set out to achieve. At their
heart all visual novels aim for some kind of emotional resonance while
Nakige make it their only sole source of engagement. Other genres
choose to mix in their own distinctive elements in order to add
additional flavour to the player’s experience. Nakige does not have
this luxury and instead leverages the intensity behind the emotions of
its characters to their full effect. It aims for big and hard hitting
moments where the game lands a gut punch on the player in either a
surprising way or one built up through a tragic dread. Core to this
approach is the idea of a memorable scene crafted in such a way
as to stick in the mind long after the game is over. An important
drawback to the Nakige is the way it tends towards a formulaic
construction to its narratives causing it to potential lose its
intended effect when repeated for multiple over the course of a game
or a developer’s portfolio. Let’s have a good cry and examine how
this genre comes together in practice.
Emotional Impact
In
order to create those powerful emotional moments, a visual novel has
to go through a lot of complicated hoops. Just
slapping some vague empathetic characters in a tragic situation is
not good enough and can feel hollow or lacking in sincerity. People
generally do not like to be openly emotional manipulated so tend to
resist it leading to a weaker overall experience. As
such a Nakige has to take the slow path to its big moments with a lot
of time dedicated to naturally helping the player get to know the
characters. The emotional scenes are often proceeded by a long period
of build up or foreshadowing structured
in a way where the scenes do not come out of nowhere. Yet the build
up never provides enough information to spoil the exact way events
will play out and instead leaning into a loose feeling of dread about
the outcome. This
is always present in the background and only comes to the front when
the climatic moment needs its impact. Through the careful
choreographing of the overall experience, a Nakige can avoid the
pitfalls of open emotional manipulation to carve a personal and
cohesive tale.
 |
| Crying transcends mediums |
Key
are perhaps the masters of the Nakige genre and so looking at one of
their titles, Clannad, is a good way to see this method in
action. Nagisa’s
illness quietly
hangs over her story with
her gentle and positive nature carrying a greater weight through what
she has had to endure in her life. When it finally does come to the
front and threatens to harm the happiness Nagisa has built, there is
an understanding of what this means for all the characters involved and
it feels like a natural climax to the established emotions.
By
keeping the illness
as an organic part of the
ongoing
narrative, it can give the heightened emotional scenes a
feeling of belonging to Nagisa’s character arc rather than a
contrivance to increase the stakes.
The
principles of Nakige are not unique to visual novels, Plastic
Memories is an anime which uses similar key emotional moments and
build up to
great effect.
What
is interesting about this anime is the fact it received a visual
novel adaptation which expanded upon the original’s story and makes
for good comparison case-study. Both
versions follow what is essentially a story about terminal illness
and
they focus in on this as their central dramatic element. Where the
visual novel separates itself from the anime is in the time given to
how secondary characters are dealing with events. This allows the
game to make more effective use of its longer time frame to enhance
the tragedy which the narrative is utilising as its main pillar and
show a more complete picture of the realities of its subject matter.
Setting the story up in this way furthers the sense of natural lead
into the dramatic climax in a way the anime could never achieve in
its shorter runtime and demonstrates the way visual novels can push
this technique into territory unique to its structure.
Remaining In The Memory
All
these emotional moments are ultimately in service to making the title a
memorable experience in both the short and long term. For a Nakige
not only wants the player to keep progressing it also aims to leave
such a strong impression that they come back time and time again. The
framing and intensity of these key scenes is important and allows for
the player’s impressions of a scene to be directed to ignore any
possible inconsistencies needed to make it powerful. What this means
in practice is all elements of the visual novel are solely focused on
that one moment. The music swells and the visuals jump out at the
player, nothing else seems to matter except the drama on screen. It
is absolutely critical for a Nakige to get this memorable quality
right since they often have nothing else to fall back on. These
scenes are inherently contrived for dramatic effect so there is
always a delicate balance to be maintained so the game does not push
to far into the absurd while still presenting something compelling.
 |
| I'm sure you won't just to whatever the plot demands right? |
Kunado Chronicles plays heavily into these big moments throughout
each of its routes and can sometimes go to somewhat silly lengths to
make them happen. This ranges for the convenient presence or absence
of enemies beyond where they logically should be to another character
taking control of the protagonist to have them say something designed
to create conflict. As things are occurring the atmosphere and drama
prevent the player from spending too much time thinking about these
flaws and it keeps moving forward to try and prevent them sticking in
the memory. Kunado Chronicles might well overuse this trick and
the more contrivances it brings to the table, the more likely it is
the player is going to lose patience with the way the game has to
bend over backwards for its drama. However, the game appears
comfortable in this construction and takes the bet that more people
will be okay with letting this distraction go for the sake of
enjoyment.
A Rigid Formula?
By
far the greatest problem Nakige have to contend with is the
predictable nature of their standard narrative formula. Of course all
stories rub up against this to some extent due to expectation for
certain structural traits in good storytelling, but Nakige has to
rely on its rigid nature more due to its reliance on big
moments to carry the game. This formula can be boiled down to
following basics: an opening first half focused around comedy between
the cast, a romantic tone when moving into the individual routes and
finally an emotionally intense climax where the previous happiness is
threatened. Each individual title might have its own slight quirks
yet all will weave in and around this common outline. In particular
the output of a single developer can suffer from this issue since not
only do their works have the formulaic nature from Nakige, but
they also have repeated quirks from their own specific narrative
style. The way many of them attempt to circumvent the problem is
through constantly shifting the setting and themes in order to try
and keep things fresh. For many players these changes are enough so
the formula does not become overly apparent and yet it is always a
spectre developers have to keep in the back of their minds when
dealing with this genre.
 |
| Is something sad going to happen to you by any chance? |
To properly see this formula in action, it is
time to once again look at Key. Their primary output is almost
exclusively Nakige to the point it is what players have come to
expect out of a new game from them and it is something they have
completely embraced. For our first example lets consider Little
Busters for it is in many ways an attempt to embrace the
formulaic nature of Nakige as part of a game’s intentional
structure. It treats its routes in a modular fashion with none of
them being particularly important for overall plot outside of some
small nod to it and they are instead formed of a self contained
romantic build up followed by the expected emotional climax. Outside
of the final true route, there is practically no division from rigid
outline which does lead to a feeling of repetition and making the
plot of each route easy to predict. On the other hand, it allowed for
new routes to be introduced seamlessly into the existing game with
each new version of the game and they not feel out of place since they
are just as self contained as the existing ones. These additions
where made multiple times and could theoretically be continued should
Key have chosen to do so without needed to rearrange anything
substantial.
For a less extreme example of the issues with this
formula in Key’s work we can take a look at Summer Pockets. As an
isolated visual novel there is nothing wrong with Summer Pockets, it
follows the expected formula of a Nakige but not the point of being
distracting or weakening its emotional impact. Instead the issues
with it stem from how it fits into the portfolio of Key’s other
works. It follows the pattern set up by so many of their other
titles, such as Kanon, Clannad and Little Busters, where it is a predomiently modern day setting for a slice of life story with a vague and
narratively flexible supernatural force which is more interested in
being dramatic than in making sense. This outline has proven to be
strong for Key and it has been present in some of their most
successful titles. However, it is the overuse of the outline in
combination with the already rigid and predictable nature of Nakige
which causes a sense of deja vu as the player is constantly bomarded
by the feeling that they have seen all the game has to offer
somewhere else before. The less Key games you have played, the
stronger Summer Pockets is as a Nakige making it prime example of how
this issue can harm a developer in the long term.
Conclusion
There
is a lot of set up involved in creating a compelling Nakige and
developers who follow this genre have to carefully think about how
all the moving parts fit together. The emotional impact of the key
scenes any Nakige is remembered for have to be foreshadowed and
constructed to avoid the feeling of the player’s emotions being
cheaply manipulated. A rigid formula can emerge from this need to
balance the sentiments of the player and if not mitigated through
distractions such as engaging themes can make the game feel
predictable. It also relies on these emotional moments to create
short and long term engagement and will often focus every part of its
resources to make it as all consuming as possible. Overall this is a
genre that does one thing and does it very well and if it is what you
want out of your visual novel then it is worth considering.
