March 4, 2024 ; Catergory: unlisted
This is an extra essay to my main essay on Needy Streamer Overload! If you haven’t read that already this won’t make any sense. You can find it here: You Cannot Fix Her: An Analysis of Needy Streamer Overload
All this talk about how the true ending totally recontextualises the rest of the game is great… if you reach the true ending that is. Or, if you read up on it like I did. Yes, my first playthrough was, in fact my only playthrough. Looking at the steam achievement statistics, only 5% of players have actually seen the true ending for themselves. Even if you consider people like myself who simply read up on the contents of other endings, I’d still assume that the number of people aware of how the game concludes is in the minority of players. This is especially tragic especially given how easy it is otherwise to read NSO in the complete opposite light when taken in an incomplete form.
It makes me wonder, as a game designer how much of you game should you expect a player to play? And if you have a message you want to convey, how should it be spread out across the gameplay experience? Undertale (UT) is a good case study in this regard to contrast against NSO. In the average player’s run of UT, they’ll end up more or less completing a ‘Pacifist’ run of the game, having not killed any monsters in the game. Giving a person a choice between killing monsters and well, not doing that isn’t exactly the most difficult moral choice. The pacifist run ends up being a complete narrative and gameplay experience - one meant to leave the player satisfied and tying the themes of UT together. There is another route however, the ‘No Mercy’ run. Here, you end up killing all possible monsters - eschewing the obviously correct moral decision in lieu of seeing more of what the game has to offer. And what it offers is an experience that in my view holds very different themes and ideas to the pacifist run. The important thing to note here is that unlike NSO, in UT if you miss out on the ‘No Mercy’ route, the message of the ‘Pacifist’ run isn’t diminished significantly - the extra ending only adds new narrative strands. In contrast, NSO all bad endings are tarnished if you miss out on the true ending.
You might expect me then to think that the way in which NSO delivers its story is bad, but I actually believe the opposite; it could only have been as impactful as it was by separating out its content this way. For the final ending to have the impact it does, it needs the strong contrast with all of your failed attempts. If you could see this ending from the get-go, you wouldn’t be incentivised to see the world through the lens of P-chan, and therefore couldn’t get the messaging on male saviour complexes. If you could see the ending partway through all the possible attempts there could still be a wonder if you, the player, could achieve that for her (which in itself is a misogynistic mindset - that her happiness is not legitimate unless brought about by you) and hence ruin the messaging. The messaging only works if laid out this way and I’d be sitting here complaining about how the messaging could have been stronger if they had chosen a format that made it more accessible to all possible players.
In the end, as with most things, there really isn’t some definitive answer as to what is best for a game in terms of delivering its narrative. Personally I think I would air on the side of making the best version of an art piece possible over widespread accessibility. Mediocre art that resonates with many people to me is less desirable than amazing art that resonates with few. Not all art needs to be for everyone - there’s enough art out there to satiate the needs of everyone after all. It’s not essential for your product to be for people its not for.
…that’s what I would have said but NSO has another aspect we need to talk about. In order to get the true ending, you’re forced to do some pretty immoral things like force Ame to self harm, overdose, have breakdowns in front of a public audience and more. It’s viscerally unnerving to have to even think of doing any of this but is necessary to see the totality of the art piece. This type of requirement is a staple of the visual novel genre, which similarly will ask you to see all other routes before seeing the final one - often leading to similarly grotesque outcomes. Is it ok to ask a player to have to do all this just to get the full experience of a game?
Here I am much more mixed. On the one hand from a narrative perspective it can make sense. In desperation to make anything work for Ame, P-chan tries literally anything and everything just to see if it could do something else, something better even if it backfires spectacularly. I don’t believe the immorality is pointless. However, it is still a lot to ask of a player, and I think art does have at least some duty to respect their viewers if they wish to be received appropriately in the first place - and asking so much of a player may be breaching this contract. In the end I’m torn - though I suppose I’ve implicitly made my decision in the fact that I haven’t actually gone through with the task to begin with. What do you think?