Marshall McLuhan coined the famous phrase “the medium is the message” deliberately as an exaggerated extreme, to illustrate the importance of the medium in storytelling. In reality, the medium does not encapsulates the whole “message”, but it certainly does exert a substantial influence on the narrative. Literature, using words, relies heavily on the reader’s vivid imagination. Film and television, with their explicit visuals, are much more capable of conveying specific scenes and imageries that the creator had in mind. Video games, a fairly new medium in comparison, have the unique property of being interactive, enabling bi-directional communication between the “message” and the player.

Sadly, this specialty is rarely used to effectively tell stories in practice. Most video games, including some of the most critically acclaimed (for their stories) ones, are still resorting to the spliced-form of storytelling. The player essentially goes through separate phases of “game” and “movie” stitched together. The game phase is almost purely interactive, and the movie phase (i.e. cutscenes) is almost entirely devoid of any player input. Some attempts have been made to meld the two phases a bit better, such as adding some dialog between characters during gameplay, or adding scripted button-pressing reaction tests during the movie phase. But such changes are still fairly superficial, and do not contribute much to the narrative style.

One can hardly blame the game creators for this. Allowing the audience to interact with the medium creates a plethora of unpredictable possibilities, making it infeasible to plan for all the corresponding narratives at design time. Unlike the behavior of the game world, such as physics, which can be relatively easily programmed to react realistically to the player’s actions, dynamically generating high quality stories in real time is far beyond our reach for now. However, there are easier things we can do today along this line of thinking that still captures some of the benefits of the interactivity. One of them which I want to examine here, is the narrative style relying on pre-determined branching storylines. Even more specifically, I will take a closer look at its usage in the role-playing game (RPG) and visual novel (VN) genres.

Branching storylines in games are not new, and have been used to varying degrees for decades. The Japanese, in my opinion, have been the best at using this narrative style to the fullest, and deserve to be set apart here. Many western games with branching narratives will provide the players with various small choices throughout the game, usually morality based (i.e. good vs. evil), and split the story only near the end. This is a very surface level usage of branching storylines, and for the most part, one only needs to play through the game using one set of choices (termed the “good or evil playthroughs”), then briefly watch or read about how the other endings differ, to get a complete picture of everything. Some Japanese RPGs¹ and VNs, on the other hand, take it much further, and fully integrate the branching nature of the narrative into the core story. They manage to do this by making re-playthroughs, i.e. the act of resetting the game to some earlier point and starting over, mandatory.

I’ll use Nier: Automata (an RPG by Yoko Taro) and AI: Somnium Files (a VN by Kotaro Uchikoshi) as examples to illustrate the idea. Minor spoiler warning: I’ll explain the narrative structures of these two games in the next section, and will do my best to stay away from the actual story elements.

In Nier: Automata, multiple playthroughs are required to advance the story. In the first playthrough, you assume the role of an android named 2B, who teams up with another android, 9S, to do some stuff. At the conclusion of this arc of the story, the story seemingly ends, the credits roll, and you are back in the beginning of the game. You can quit at this point, after all the story does end with some level of closure. But if you start the game again, you realize that you begin to play as 9S instead. You have to play through the same game, go through the same story arc as before, but from a different character’s perspective. After this second playthrough, the story again ends at the same point in time as the first playthrough. But this time the next story arc opens up, where you assume the role of a different character, one whom you met along the way in the first two playthroughs. The storyline then fully advances, and after more back and forth character switches, including more endings and resets, eventually concludes with the “true” (full narrative closure) ending.

In AI: Somnium Files, full exploration of all branches (usually referred to as “routes” by the VN community) of the narrative is required to advance the story. You play as a detective, trying to solve the mystery of a murder. The story is broken up into days, each containing multiple events. At certain key points of each day, your actions will cause the story to diverge in different directions, creating branches in the narrative. For example, depending on some player action on “Day 2”, you could get two completely different versions of “Day 3"s, where different events happen. The narrative is represented as a tree, and every branch can be navigated to its own end, with its own conclusion. The player can literally find different sets of suspects for the same crime in different branches, and the crime is “solved” in different ways in the different endings. Some branches may become blocked, until another branch has been concluded. The “true” ending, with the true solution to the crime, is only reachable after all other branches have been exhausted.

This style of narrative allows for an entirely different kind of story to be told, one that other forms and mediums are unable to tell effectively. By forcing the player to go back in time and replay portions of the game, it allows the game designer to properly explore the “what ifs”, the world of the counterfactual. Alternative history fiction tries to explore this in contrast to real history, but it is rare for stories to examine counterfactual worlds within its own universe. Imagine an alternative version of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, where after The Two Towers, instead of moving forward, we reset and look at how things would’ve unfolded had the Battle of the Hornburg been lost. In AI: Somnium Files, this is essentially what we get. Had the player done something differently on “Day 2”, the story would’ve unfolded in an entirely different way. Granted, the major narrative branching points are few in number, and the counterfactual worlds that we get to explore are all pre-determined. But even with these limitations, the story told still felt unique, and I don’t think it could’ve been told in other mediums to the same effect².

The branching narrative style also has a substantial impact on how the story was perceived and understood, in ways that are qualitatively different from other styles and mediums. In Nier: Automata for example, the same story events are told multiple times, through different characters’ perspectives. The subsequent playthroughs feel very different, because the player is already familiar with the characters, and already knows what will happen. This in itself is not unique to video games. In other mediums, such as books and movies, we can get a similar feeling by re-reading or re-watching something. We often pick up on clues or subtle details that we missed on the initial experience. What is unique about the game version of this, is the fact that the medium is interactive. Because of the new knowledge that the player now has, the actions to take on the following playthroughs can be different. New relationships can be forged, character dynamics can be shifted. Of course, due to the limitations of what is possible, the planned overall narrative cannot be changed too much. But many smaller events can come out very differently, which can actually influence the tone and themes of the story as a whole.

One thing I find quite interesting is the fact that this type of narrative technique is almost exclusively used by Japanese game designers. It is particularly prevalent in the visual novels, and in fact is one of the defining characteristics of the genre. Since it requires forced repeated playthroughs to work, maybe western designers shy away from it for fear of too much redundancy. But the unique power of this storytelling style lies precisely in the repetition. I wish that more story tellers would consider using this or similar techniques.