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TheBroadcast Club: VN Podcast Episode 14 - Endings in Visual Novels


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For episode 14, we talked about Endings in Visual Novels with well known community member and Umineko Fanatic, /u/ctom42 from /r/visualnovels! 

YouTube link:

Blog Link:

http://thebroadcast.club/2019/05/27/episode-14-endings/

We did our best through this episode to avoid spoilers, despite the spoiler heavy nature of the topic at hand. We don't mention any explicit details about the endings of any VNs on the discussed list. That said, depending on where you personally draw the spoiler line, I don't think everyone will consider it 100% spoiler free, but anything we mention is something that I've seen talked about openly in other venues of discussion about VNs.

We are also pleased to say that future episodes should have much less time between them! Real life got in the way more than a little bit for the last few episodes we put out, but now that we are all located in the same country once again, our scheduling should be much less painful, so look for more episodes to come in the future, sooner rather than later!

As always, comments are very welcome!

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Also, if you're interested in being featured in our shill segment, my bank of shills is currently empty, so if you would like to have your shill in a future episode, please record a 2-3 minute segment promoting a VN you're excited about. It should be something we haven't had featured before, so ask if you're unsure what that might be! Feel free to contact me via DMs or Discord if interested.

Make sure to follow us on Twitter!

https://twitter.com/VNBroadcastClub

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Some discussion questions:

  • Do you think an ending can make or break a visual novel?
  • What sorts of endings do you want to see more of in visual novels?
  • If you could rewrite an ending to a specific visual novel, how would you change it? (Don't forget the spoiler tags please!)
Edited by NowItsAngeTime
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1 hour ago, NowItsAngeTime said:

Do you think an ending can make or break a visual novel?

Definitely. It doesn't matter how good the rest of the VN is; if the ending sucks, it'll leave a bitter taste in my mouth that affects my overall impression of the VN. One of my more recent examples is in Rewrite.

Spoiler

Specifically, Lucia's and Akane's routes. I liked both of them at first, but by the time I finished their routes, my opinion of them had been permanently ruined due to them starting to act flat out insane for ridiculous reasons. I doubt I'll ever reread any of their routes.

 

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14 hours ago, NowItsAngeTime said:

Do you think an ending can make or break a visual novel?

Definitely! I looked through my visual novels and 3 stood out. In 2 of them the ending made the VN a lot better than I felt about it before. In the third VN it made everything worse.

  1. Dies Irae: That visual novel had awesome villains and scary hopeless moments, but somehow all the routes felt the same and it seemed to drag on and on. Then the ending or rather even the after story made it clear to me why the main story was as it was. It made my ranking of the VN a lot better than it would have been without that after story.
  2. I/O: As I wrote in another thread this VN was way too confusing for me. Although I like twists and turns in stories there is only so much brain power I am willing to put into it. The ending routes in I/O did not really help in understanding much about the story and the 'true ending' was completely strange in my eyes, but still - I cannot describe it any better - you could somehow feel the love in the endings and it made me rank that VN quite a bit higher than I had intended (or thought) before.
  3. Tsukihime: I really had troubles getting to the end of that VN, the story simply couldn't get me hooked. But since I had seen so many positive reviews about this VN I hoped until the end that there would be something really eye-opening and awesome at the end. But there simply wasn't and that was a big disappointment.
14 hours ago, NowItsAngeTime said:

What sorts of endings do you want to see more of in visual novels?

I would like to see more endings like in Grisaia no Kajitsu where you have more heroines and no matter which one you pick you will get an interesting and satisfying ending. Meaning you can feel that effort was put into each heroines route, not being forced towards a certain main heroine that you possibly don't like but you realize that it is the one that is MEANT for you.

I do understand however that this is pretty difficult if you have a sequel planned for a VN.

14 hours ago, NowItsAngeTime said:

If you could rewrite an ending to a specific visual novel, how would you change it? (Don't forget the spoiler tags please!)

Well, I didn't like Tsukihime enough to want to write a different ending for it so my choice would probably be Tomoya After - It's a wonderful life? Somehow - although I don't usually dislike sad endings, this one was for some reason too sad for me.

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2 hours ago, AustriaVNFan said:

my choice would probably be Tomoya After - It's a wonderful life

Man, I had almost managed to push that one to the back of my mind. My main issue with the ending in Tomoyo After is that it felt rushed. They were spending a lot of time building up to it, and then, after a certain event, it was over before you knew it. Several major characters that were a big part of the story were just dropped all of a sudden with barely any explanation, and we're never told what happens to them later on. By the time the credits started rolling, I was thinking to myself "Okay, let's get the true ending now", but then I found out that was it and there was nothing more for me to see. It's like the developers just realized one day that they had gone over budget and decided to wrap it all up in as swift a manner as possible.
This is definitely one of the top candidates for an ending I would change if I could.

Edited by Seraphim88
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Yeah, it was open in terms of

Spoiler

you getting to speculate about whether Tomoya died from the operation or if it was successful and he had to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair with permanent brain damage (but his memory not resetting anymore). Either way, it's pretty sad. I don't really mind the tone of the ending (although I prefer happy ones) and the amnesia twist was pretty interesting, but I would like to know more about what Tomoyo's life was like through it all, as well as the other characters. I don't like how they just completely dropped characters that we'd spent hours getting to know. They're not even mentioned in Clannad Side Stories, which was released several years later and would have been an excellent opportunity to follow up.

 

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