I finished my first ever visual novel!

Will O’ Wisp is about a girl named Hanna who finds a life-sized doll in her basement after her dollmaker grandfather dies. She winds him up and he introduces himself as Will, an elemental doll. That basically means he’s alive and he belongs to her. As the game goes on, Hanna will discover more about the other elemental dolls, her own special powers, and the role she is destined to fulfill. You know, the usual twaddle. It’s cliched, but short enough to stay interesting.

Will O’ Wisp DS comes with a sequel of sorts called “The Miracle of Easter”, but I was sick of the game by the time I finished the main story so I passed on that. Plus it retcons the ending of the original game. In the ending I got, Gyl turned human, Hanna lost her powers and they lived happily ever after together. In “The Miracle of Easter”, all the dolls were rendered lifeless at the end. Work done = 0.

I’m pretty chuffed that I actually managed to finish Will O’ Wisp. I’ve tried many visual novels, but I’ve never made it all the way to the end of one before. To be honest I don’t even recognize visual novels as “games”, but on the other hand they’re often substandard as far as reading material goes, so it’s no-win situation any way I look at it.

Will O’ Wisp was a little better, since the story was okay-ish, and things moved at a cracking pace – at first. By Chapter 3, though, every scene started dragging on, Hanna’s internal monologues grew longer and longer, and the characters went over the same things ad nauseam: “Alvin is crazy, Alvin is crazy, Alvin is crazy, do you want to be released, do you want to be released, do you want to be released” again and again and again. To tell the truth, I used the Skip option to fast-forward from middle of Chapter 3 all the way to the final showdown with Ignis, then read from there. But a finish is a finish, and I did watch the ending credits, so I count that as “completed.”

If I had to hazard a few guesses as to why I was able to finish Will O’ Wisp in particular, it would be:

1. The art is nice. I’m a sucker for nice character designs. The CGs were fine to look at as well, though I wouldn’t have minded a few more. There were relatively few backgrounds, but the story moved fast enough that you were always shuffling between them, so it wasn’t so bad.

2. The scenes moved fast. This is the biggest reason why I can’t play VNs. Each trivial scene drags on interminably. Up till chapter 3 Will o’ Wisp kept things flowing: make a point and move on. Make a point and move on. Then it fell apart, but that’s what the “Skip” option was for.

3. The story’s pretty interesting, for a Rozen Maiden rip-off. Dolls and owners and they were all made by the same person and they’ve been alive for hundreds of years and they’re dressed Victorian-style and they fight, etc. But stories about dolls coming to life are much older than Rozen Maiden, so I’ll give them a pass. And they’ve got nice bishies, that’s gotta count for something.

4. The story develops quickly. Something’s happening at almost every stage, and it all leads to a logical conclusion. Not much time is wasted on petty arguments or comic scenes. Until chapter 3 and onwards, of course.

5. It’s not that long. There’s no timer in the game, but I don’t think it would take more than 4 or 5 hours to finish a route, even without skipping all the dialogue. I don’t have a lot of patience for reading endlessly, so that’s about my limit anyway.

6. Feedback is almost instantaneous. Accidentally selecting the wrong option and dooming yourself to a bad end/locking yourself out of a certain route is another thing I hate about visual novels. “What do you want on your bread?” A: Butter B: Jam C: Nothing. YOU PICKED BUTTER? Welcome to BAD END. Yaahh… Will o’ Wisp has none of that. If you select the right thing, you get a blue glow. Wrong thing, no blue glow. And you can check the affection level of your chosen doll any time you want, so you know you’re on the right track. There’s no way to fail. Heck, even if you don’t speak Japanese you can play this pretty easily.

7. Gyl is hot, in a girly kind of way. I did his route, and he wasn’t exactly hard on the eyes. I liked it best when he stopped wearing drag at the end.

8. Ignis is voiced by Takehito Koyasu. Actually I keep mixing up Koyasu and Kenyuu Horiuchi, so I didn’t know which one of them it was until I read the credits at the end. It wasn’t a very passionate performance either, Mr. Koyasu was clearly phoning it in this time. But I knew it was a voice I liked, so that counted for something. Come to think of it, the only voice actors I can recognize without fail are Norio Wakamoto and Shuichi Ikeda (mitometakunai mono da na). They should do more games.

So you see, so it’s not that hard to make a visual novel even I will like. Just keep the story moving fast, make the bishies hot and tell me when I’m going wrong so I don’t need a FAQ to find my way around. If you do that, I’ll even ignore stuff like 60% of the cast being obnoxious and the main character being a weak-willed lily and the story getting bogged down in the middle and the music grating on the ears. I’m a generous soul, after all.

Now that I’m rapidly running out of actual games to play on my PSP and DS, I might be forced to try more of these in the future, so I hope I can find more stuff that meets these simple requirements.